Shitpostest with the mostest

Things get a lot more complicated on the sea, even with Molly getting better with language, especially once things start up with the pirates. It's already hard enough for Fjord trying not to be seen in his animal form still, even though it's such a useful form out on the water--he manages, mostly by shifting midair while diving in--but on top of that, now he's gotta try and keep a bunch of pirates from trying to kidnap all that's left of what was once his roommate because he's some sort of weird creature no one's ever seen before. And Molly doesn't understand, more of a parrot imitating sounds than truly understanding them, no matter how hard Jester works with him on it, so it seems. They try, and he's more cooperative with Yasha back with them, at least, but still, it's rough work.

Things hit something of a boiling point for Fjord at the flooding temple, watching Molly trying desperately and mostly failing to swim. He'll drown (he can't drown like this, actually, but Fjord doesn't know this, and anyway, Molly also can't swim), they all might drown, Fjord needs to act fast. So--so fuck hiding the animal form, then, this is do or die and he's faster than anyone in the water, faster than even Beau, but only when he's the damn otter. He shifts, and lurches forward, and grabs Molly in his mouth, managing to choke out a "stop squirming I'm trying to save you" to the struggling creature in his mouth (in his real accent; part of Fjord hiding his animal form has been just that it's harder for him to fake an accent when he's using a voice that's already believed into existence) and swims as fast as he ever has. He doesn't quite notice that Molly has actually stopped struggling, just drops him off on the nearest bit of dry land and then turns back to help the others.

"Stay here," Fjord says, wishing not for the first time that he could just enunciate in animal form the way Caleb does, instead of just holding his mouth open and having the sound come out; controlling an accent like this is near impossible and mostly trying just makes him lose his ability to speak in animal form altogether until he stops thinking about it again. Molly coughs up a bit of water, and makes no indication that he plans to move.

(Beau gets out on her own just fine. She finds Molly trapped on the ground, unable to move; he may not be able to drown but he also isn't able to stop himself from swallowing a lot of water. Beau sort of...presses a finger down on his swollen belly, and he spits the water back out involuntarily like a water balloon. Beau says, "gross.")

Caleb, fortunately, noticed Fjord's rescue of Molly and thought quick enough to make the rest of Fjord's job easier:

There's a bit of screaming from Nott and Jester, but they quickly figure it out as well, and he's able to grab them in one go.

Even if Nott screams the entire way.

Caduceus and Yasha need more help, and it's a near thing, but they all manage to get out alive and make a mad dash for the ship.

Molly actually does wait, is the thing. Sure, Beau's there, but later, she tells Fjord he didn't show any signs of trying to run. It's weird. And Fjord is thinking about how weird it is over dinner that night, when Molly actually approaches him, for the first time since he destroyed his mind trying to save himself. He squints at Fjord, hard, meaningfully, and Fjord can't help but feel that it really does look like he's thinking.

Molly considers the few words he has managed to learn, and says, with great effort:

"Mouth...bad. But...Fjord....good."

And then he looks at Fjord, expectantly.

The table's gone quiet.

"Was that a fucking sentence?" Beau says.

Jester stands with an excited whoop, and says, "I told you guys! He's been trying to learn really hard!!"

"What?" Fjord says, still staring slack-jawed at the little creature.

"No mouth," Molly says, adamantly. "Fjord good."

"That's right! That's right, Molly, Fjord's a friend!" Jester beams, and Molly actually nods his head, albeit more like a bird than a person, but it's so deliberate that it's--

"You can understand us?!" Fjord shouts. "Wait, then--you haven't been listening to me at all, what the hell?! Molly--"

Molly tips his head, thinking again hard, frustrated at lacking the words he needs to convey what he wants to get across. Fjord wasn't very trustworthy, up until now, at least to Mollymauk's view. But even if being in a mouth was terrible, it was done to save him. He understands that much. He doesn't know how to say it.

"--If you can fuckin'--understand us, why do you keep biting Beau?"

Oh, THAT one he can answer just fine, though. "Funny!" Molly says, without a hint of hesitation.

"YOU LITTLE SHIT--" Beau dives across the table, and grabs him in her hand. Molly's face splits into a reptilian grin.

Fjord blinks, shocked, then looks at Caleb.

"I thought--you said---" Fjord stammers.

"I do not think..." Caleb swallows. "He is more sapient than I thought, that is something," he concedes. "I don't know that this is truly our Mollymauk returning, it may be some new personality emerging, but he is---"

"Fuck," Says Fjord, with feeling.

When Beau, Nott, and Caleb, all children of the Empire with its rigid, pragmatically-focused concept of what animal forms Mean about personal worth and morality, first meet Caduceus, a lot of things about him are jarring. The whole situation is jarring. They are traveling with two strangers, having lost three of their number to kidnapping slavers, and one to death or worse, without even a body left to mourn. Caduceus's calming presence is a balm, but much of his behavior is strange.

Case and point: with no preamble, as they all get ready to leave the graveyard he lives in, he turns into a great, fluffy bovine. "By the way," he said, "I plan on carrying my own supplies like this, since it's a bit easier. I'm not very strong as a firbolg, but yaks are sturdy. I can take more weight than this, too, so if you've got any heavy supplies you won't need too quickly, go ahead and load them on. Plenty of space left over."

"Wait, can you just do that?" Nott gapes. "Like, I know stuff only has to be on one form, but can you actually just carry a bunch of stuff and not even worry about it on the other form? That WORKS???"

"Well, your bag does not go away even when you shift, yeah?" Caleb says. "It's, eh, as long as you do not over-encumber one form, it is fine. Even so, ah...Caduceus, are you certain? That is very--You do not need to take on our..."

"It's fine," Caduceus says happily, "I'm made for carrying."

He is indeed, although it never stops being a bit humorous, watching Caduceus stand in only his armor and the single bag he uses for more common items, only to occasionally realize he has left something he needs on his other form. Turning into a yak in the same way one would search their other pair of pants for their house key is amusing in its own sense, but it is also very convenient to have someone who is so capable of acting as the party's beast of burden.

---

Sometime after dealing with Avantika, a conversation occurs, one night. It's after Fjord has finally let them all see his animal form, for the first time, after escaping the flooding temple. They are all huddled together, glad to be on dry land again after so long, gathered about a campfire. Caduceus, comfortably in animal form, speaks up, as Fjord admits that he does not want to know what it "means" to be an otter.

"It's not as restrictive as you might think," he says. "The Wildmother gives us these forms as a gift, a way to guide us, not something to force us into any one role."

Caleb twitches a bit, at that. He's heard Caduceus mention this a few times, now, and it's a very odd philosophy, but one that makes sense for a follower of the Wildmother, he supposes.

"For example, I actually didn't like my animal form at all the first time i shifted," Caduceus says, and Beau spittakes hard enough to nearly break her distance record on spitting. "No, really," he says with a laugh. "I was furious. I've never been much into physical activity, you know, so getting some big beast of burden felt like I was being punished. I thought I was expected to go into manual labor now, and I fought with my parents about it at one point."

"...Yeah?" Fjord says, voice soft and complicated.

"But then, I realized: Burdens don't have to be physical." Caduceus smiles, and shakes his head, nearly dislodging Molly where he's tangled himself up in thick pink-and-gray fur. "Being a yak like this doesn't mean I have to be a physical worker, it means I'm meant to carry things. But I get to choose what it is I'm carrying. And I like helping people carry things that weigh them down, so to speak. So like I said: it's a guide, it's not meant to restrict you, only advise you towards what you're meant to do."

Fjord looks....thoughtful, for a long time after that.

---

The next day, Caleb is also thinking about it, when Caduceus catches him in his thoughts.

"You look like you're feeling pretty heavy, Mr. Caleb," he says, giving him a gently prying look.

Caleb allows himself a wry smile. "Eh, thinking about what you said last night, I suppose," he admits.

"Good thoughts, I hope?"

Not really, in truth. Caleb has to think hard about the answer.

"It is a...a nice sentiment, I think, but not always true," Caleb says. "I do not know that the shape of one's soul indicates, ah, purpose so much as...inescapable truths. In your case, I think you are right, of course, but for others..."

For himself, at least, he knows it mustn't be quite right. He knows his own truth. Remembers his mentor, a man so alike Caleb himself that their souls are the same species, telling him what being a cat meant, and being so excited for that at the time.

"Oh?" Caduceus asks. "And what wouldn't it be true of?"

"Well, cats, for one thing," Caleb says. "Cats are made to kill rats, after all. Nothing more." It had been so exciting, then, to be told his sole purpose was to hunt and destroy traitors, but now it felt like shackles--comforting ones, at least; he deserved to be a creature built to torture and kill others.

Caleb Widogast is very wary about shadow magic. As someone whose mind has already broken once through perfectly mundane means, he does not want to risk letting magic finish the job. So when Mollymauk goes for an effective but stronger-than-usual shadow trick during a fight, Caleb decides he needs to talk to him. He is, after all, only two years old. Probably no one has talked to him about this, or if they have, not insistently enough.

It's not as productive as he would like. Mollymauk takes it in the usual flirty way he does, not really taking it seriously. And. It's. Caleb is not worried. He isn't. He barely knows these people. He just...does not want to travel with a person whose mind has been destroyed by overchanneling shadow, and somehow, this group has two people with an affinity for shadow magic. He has tried talking to Jester about it before, but her way of casting is so unusual, he doesn't know where to start, but Mollymauk--he's so new at everything, nevermind magic, and to in turn be most drawn to what Caleb personally considers the most dangerous magic there is....

"All I am saying," Caleb insists, "Is that--look, if I overchannel fire magic, I know immediately the moment I am putting my body through too much, because I will burn my own fingers, you understand? So I know what risks I am taking if I push it further. But with shadow magic, it is--it is subtle. You start to lose yourself in the illusions you are casting, until--"

"It's very sweet of you to care," Molly says, and Caleb doesn't, he just doesn't want to deal with the consequences of someone else making a bad decision here, "But my mind's already full of holes, so one or two more won't matter much. And as for Jester, if she's not already driven herself mad, she's likely got everything under control, don't you think?"

Caleb wants, in this moment, to tell Mollymauk about how his mentor put him through what overchanneling nearly every type of magic (lightning was too dangerous to risk, and life unavailable to them of course) felt like so that they would know immediately if they were overdoing it. How he'd had Bren read a report beforehand, then push the illusory spell as hard as he could, how nothing had felt wrong, only for him to check the paper afterward and find out that what it said no longer aligned with his memory.

He wanted to explain to Mollymauk about his time in Vergessen, about how at least a third of the patients there were people who had fallen for the sweet trap of shadow spells, who hadn't heeded the way that it slowly chipped away at you until you were someone entirely different.

But Mollymauk did not know about those things. Caleb had only told Beauregard and Nott about his past, and so he kept his mouth shut.

He would grow to regret it. Maybe it would not have mattered, but maybe things would have somehow gone differently, if he had managed to make his point more clear.

Later, things go very wrong very quickly. Three of their number are kidnapped by slavers, and desperately, the remainder attempt to save them. The fight goes incredibly wrong, and Molly goes down. But as the glaive falls toward his chest, time slows in his mind, and his animal half thrusts a survival instinct at him, and that instinct takes over. He shifts into his animal form, and casts the most complex spell he has ever thrown, of himself being stabbed, of dying, and he holds it.

Very powerful shadow magic requires the caster to believe that the illusion they are willing into existence is real, and so, quivering beneath a very powerful, all-sensory effect, he forces that belief to be true: Mollymauk Tealeaf is dead. And second by second, he tries to hold his mind against the storm that brings, but second by second, he is worn away and away and away and

at the core he holds on to: i am alive.

everything

else

goes

--And when the Iron Shepherds are gone, out of sight, no longer watching them, just as the survivors go despondently to check on his body, he vanishes. And Caleb realizes, after checking the scene, that his worst nightmare has come true. Mollymauk overchanneled shadow magic.

They search for him, desperately, even though there is no time. They cannot find him; the same instinct that told him to make this desperate ploy has told him that now is the time to retreat, to find somewhere dark and quiet and safe, where he can curl up and wait for rescue. There is no Mollymauk left in his head. He does not know who is coming to save him, only that others like him must exist, and they will know, and they will come.

Caleb doesn't know of Molly's instincts. He only knows that Mollymauk just threw everything he had into convincing all of them that he was dying, and whatever effect that may have had on his brain cannot be good. Their best hope is that he will quietly die of his wounds, rather than of exposure. It would have been kinder if he had simply died, Caleb thinks.

They move on. They meet Caduceus. They save their friends.

They return. Caleb has to explain what happens, and begs Jester, with all that he has, to please, please be careful. Fjord, too, since even though it's not his affinity, his patron has also given him access to this dangerous, cruel form of magic. Yasha leaves.

It would take a miracle to find Mollymauk. He is probably already dead, Caleb tells them. He is sorry about all of it. He should have done something, he thinks...

A few days later, though, a miracle comes anyway. Along the road one night, Caduceus feels...a sense. His patron is calling him. He follows the trail, and finds...a tiny creature, under a log. It is wounded, essentially comatose. Its blood does not flow properly from its wounds, coming out pitch black and floating up into shadows. Holding it feels like cradling air in his hands.

He brings it back to the Nein, and before he can even ask, they are gasping, and Jester runs over, and heals the creature, and it--reacts like a frightened animal.

(slightly outdated drawing but it gets the idea across lol)

he shrieks and bites and claws and tries to get away--

"Why didn't the wounds heal?!" Jester cries, and manages just barely to get him in hand. He bites her finger. She cries out to him, calls his name, but that is gone, he is nothing, he is just what he is, and what he is is frightened and alone and apart from its whole, where are the others--

"I was afraid something like that would happen," Caduceus says, frowning.

Caleb is devastated. Somehow, it seems, Mollymauk's overchannelling resulted in this: he does not remember being anything but whatever manner of beast his animal form is. One last time, he makes his case, to the rest of the party, hoping to really drive in that this is what it does to you. This time, it seems to sink in. But Jester asks, "Okay, but we can fix him, right? If we--we just need to take care of him, and he'll get better?"

Caleb...cannot bear to be completely honest, nor can he bring himself to lie. So he says: "I...have never heard of someone recovering from this."

Later, Fjord asks him on watch: "Be real with me. Is Molly gonna get better?"

Caleb grimaces, and says, "No." They do not talk for the rest of the watch.

They find out in time that things are very bad indeed. Mollymauk has to be first leashed, then eventually kept in the cage that once held Sprinkle; he keeps trying to flee from them, he bites any fingers near his face. He also will not eat or drink, no matter how they try. He does not seem to grow weaker from this, but it worries them. He seems less than real, now; tangible in that he can be touched, but there is no weight to him, no real mass, and there wasn't much of that to begin with-- whatever he is, they can only hope that he is not going to die anyway, from refusing all of this.

Caleb knows in his core that the person they all cared for (he can admit it now, after the fact, far too late) is gone. What they have is a shell. It might be kinder simply to end his suffering, but...Caleb cannot bring himself to break Jester's heart.

She keeps trying. At the very least, he stops snapping at them so much. He can be bribed, even, with small trinkets and soft fabrics to line his cage with. And when they run into Yasha again, he recognizes her, at least, calling out the only words they have heard him speak since the Shepherds: "Love" and, of course, "Empty." But there's no real growth, just...evolution, into something new, something that can never be a person again.

(For anyone else who did what Mollymauk did, that would be true. They might wander, ghostlike, until starvation and exposure finished them off and made the belief in their own death a reality. They might even fool themself so well that their cerebellum would simply stop instructing vital organs to function. A best case scenario might be something like what Mollymauk experiences, with all sapience permanently stripped away.)

"Oh, I know!" Jester pipes up over dinner, the campfire gently crackling. "We're all traveling together, we should do show and tell! I wanna know everyone's animal forms!"

"Seriously?" Beau says, grimacing. "That's, like, schoolkid nonsense."

"No it's not!" Jester declares, "It's like, a super fun icebreaker!"

"We have fought monsters together," says Caleb, "the ice is broken, I think."

"Not like we have to guess what yours is," Beau shoots back, and Caleb flicks a tattered ear at her in annoyance.

Jester, ignoring it all, puts her plate to the side, stands up boldly on the log she's been sitting on, and with a flourish and a spin, shifts from bright blue tiefling into an only slightly less bright-blue bundle of fur and ribbons. "Iiiii am a fox!" she declares, delighted. "A very unuUuUusual fox!"

(She struggled to find her animal form, as a small child. Always too excited, to full of ideas of what she might be, never able to simply sit and meditate on her own. But then, she'd made her first-ever friend, and the Traveler had sat her down, and taught her an ancient ritual to meditate on it. It had involved balancing a book on her head, and focusing so hard her nose wrinkled up, and then standing on one foot--and just when she had been focusing SO HARD, he had startled her with a silly noise and a burst of magical sparkles, and she had fallen over backwards and been fox-shaped by the time she hit the ground. She'd been mad for a moment, and then noticed her little freckled paws, and then she'd been so excited she nearly ran up the walls.

The Traveler had been delighted. He had picked her little fox-kit body up, and swung her about, and told her that a fox was one of the very best things to be, for only very clever and wonderful people have a soul shaped like something so sneaky and cunning. Nothing, he said, is quite so excellently mischievous as a vixen. And she had known it was true, and has loved her animal half dearly ever since.)

"Uh-oh," says Nott, "We got a fox, better watch out."

Jester sticks her tongue out. "Aw, you already know I'm a prankster, and I promise I would never use any really nasty tricks on you, Nott! Anyway, c'mon, who's next?"

"I can go!" Molly chimes, eager.

"We already saw yours, you did that whole trick thing," Beau complains.

Molly happily ignores her. It's true, though. He'd used his favorite bit of showmanship back when he first met them all in the tavern: Some chosen words to imply a bit of mystery, a little sprinkle of shadow magic to make the appearance of a cloud of smoke, a big, looming shape behind it...It gave the impression that he was something very dangerous--only for the dangerous one to be Yasha, as Molly poked his head out of her mane. It worked a charm; Jester, at least, had been delighted by the performance.

Molly turned into his second shape without a second thought, immediately clambering up onto Yasha's shoulder to compensate for his very tiny size. "No idea what I am," he said, brightly, "but I can do this!" He concentrates, and the red eyespots on his wings glow. Jester, a tiefling once more, claps in delight.

(No one here knows what he is. A drake of some sort, perhaps; certainly not a dragon--dragons are mostly spirits, after all, and the four which do count as animals and therefore animal forms are...well, none of them are roughly the size and weight of a bunch of grapes. All that Molly knows is that his animal form is very good at shadow magic, and tends to deflate like a balloon if you point out that he doesn't weigh as much as he should, or that his wings are too small to fly. Literally deflate. It's uncomfortable and weird and doesn't go away until enough time has passed that he stops thinking about it, so he usually just shifts back into his tiefling shape when that happens.

He shifted for the first time one day when he was still quite new, fresh from the grave and not fully able to speak yet, but so excited to see someone he hadn't in a while that he had simple popped into this strange second shape. No one in this group will figure out what he is until much later. He should not be able to be what he is, but Mollymauk is a very strange creature already. His animal form cannot help but break some rules.)

"Yasha, c'mon, you next," Molly urges.

"Oh, I don't know..." Yasha says. "I'm awfully big, and you've all seen already."

"There's plenty of room!" Jester says.

Beau hurriedly swallows the food she was eating, and says, "Yeah, you should. You should show us, again."

She looks sideways at Molly, who's still perched on her shoulder, leaned out as far as he can without falling over, looking up at her with pleading eyes. She sighs. "Oh, okay..." she says, and shakes out her wings and mane as she shifts.

(Yasha doesn't always know how to feel about her animal form. She found it in the usual way, simply sitting still and letting her mind lead her to the truest version of herself, nothing special there--but ever since she did, things have been complicated. Her tribe took great interest in her, a huge griffin the size of a warhorse. A real warrior's soul. Yasha didn't disagree with that, nor with what people say about how a griffin's loyalty is hard to earn but even harder to lose once you have it. But she worries, sometimes, ever since Zuala--the spots she has along her back legs and tail are said to be similar to the big cats that hunt in the tallest mountains of the world, she has learned, and they say that to have one of those as an animal form is to have a life marked by loneliness. She wonders if she is cursed. Cursed to kill everyone she loves, cursed to be only good for eating bones and drinking blood and staining the world in gore.

But when Molly dives into her mane, braids chunks of it, slips in flowers and ribbons and pretty things--When Beau looks at her like she's something magnificent--when she remembers Zuala's hand, running through her feathers--She thinks, just for a moment, that maybe there is something more to her. She hopes so.)

"You're soooo pretty, oh my GOSH, Yasha!" Jester chimes. Yasha is briefly very glad that she is in animal form, so that no one can see her blush.

"Why don't you go next, Beau?" She says, to distract the attention off of her. Molly is nestling into her mane, making himself comfortable, as he so often does.

Beau clicks her tongue. "Yeah, alright," she says, "Fair's fair." Privately, she thinks, shit, I shoulda gone before Yasha, she's way more impressive, but, oh well--

"Hawk," Beau says, ruffling out her feathers after shifting. "So I win, because except for Yasha, none of you bitches know how bad you're missing out on flying."

(Before Beauregard was born, her father sought the words of a fortune teller. A hag, in truth, but he did not know. He was told: Your young beau shall be a beast of wing and wind, and a beast of scale and earth. Dumb motherfucker took it to mean he was getting both a son and a dragon, so he was pretty pissed to instead get Beau. She'd spent so much of her childhood failing to find her animal form because of that expectation--she'd already failed to be a boy, she had to at LEAST be a dragon, nevermind that her magic affinity was wrong to be a dragon, nevermind that in her dreams she had feathers--that by the time she got hauled off to the Cobalt Soul and a sympathetic monk sat her down and helped her properly figure it out, well.

The Empire loved birds of prey. One of the best animal forms you could have, according to the general cultural beliefs. But Beau couldn't enjoy it. She was supposed to have been a dragon. It felt like one more round of failure, one more kick in the crotch in a life full of bruises.

But then someone had forced her to stop sulking and put in the effort to learn how to fly, and that had sucked too, but the moment she hit a thermal for the first time, truly felt the wind beneath her wings, saw the world far below--everything clicked into place. Being a hawk was rad as shit, actually. Even if old doubts crept in now and then, she wouldn't trade flying for anything.)

Jester cooed, delighted. "Ohhhh Beau you're so pretty too! Oh, and the little backpack?? That's SO cute!"

"It's for snacks," Beau said. "While I'm flying. It's hard work, gotta refuel." She stretched, and then shifted back into her human form. "And I'm serious, you all are missing out if you can't fly. It's sick."

She nudged Fjord with her foot. "You next, dude."

Fjord shook his head. "Pass," he said.

"Aw, what??? No," Jester booed. At the same moment, Nott called out, "Oh, you big baby!"

"It's not--I just don't feel like shifting forms right now," Fjord insisted.

Nott, standing up, declared, "Well, I'm not a complete killjoy loser," she declared, and immediately shrunk a good foot and a half, leaving herself an only slightly less green bundle of scruffy fur.

(The first time Veth Brenatto had shifted, she'd been running from her brothers. Normal stuff, but she really hadn't wanted to get caught that day, and there'd been a hole in the wall she was just slightly too big to fit through, and she'd closed her eyes, and prayed to nothing in particular, and in that moment, she'd seen it in her minds eye--the strange, brown, mask-faced creature, and had reached out for it, and then--pop! She'd slipped right into her animal form and then into the hole. There was nothing too special there, just a fun anecdote.

The first time Nott the Brave had shifted, she'd been a goblin for three months. She was miserable, and had been terrified to even attempt it. She was so different, now, unrecognizable--would the cruel spell on her have changed her so deep that even her soul's shape would have changed? But when she saw that same familiar animal face in her reflection, a little miscolored, a little worse for wear, but undeniably the same animal--she'd wept. It was the one bit of proof she had to herself, that somewhere, under it all, she was the same person.)

"No idea what I am, either, mind," she said. "Some traveling teacher-type at one point said I'm something called a, uh, a raccoon, I think? OOF--"

Jester scooped Nott up into her arms, absolutely charmed. "Nott!! Nott, you are SO CUTE! Look at your cute little face and your little stripey tail--"

"Alright, alright, that's--put me down, that's plenty, please," Nott squirmed.

"I can go next, then," Caleb said.

"We literally already know," Beau said. "You have--your ears and tail are sticking out, man."

"Even so," said Caleb. He liked his animal form. He didn't mind showing it, even if it was currently rather raggedy and malnourished. That was just as true of his human self.

(A long time ago, the Ermendrud parents had noticed that they had a rat problem. They had, as was typical, brought a cat home. The next day, they woke up to find there were two cats in the house. One of them was their then-toddler son.

It was known, of course, that people who learned to shift young and did so very often while they were still growing would often undergo very extreme changes, their humanoid form growing more and more similar to their animal form until they could wind up, as Caleb had, with animal parts visible even while not in animal shape. The ears and tail marked him as something of an eccentric, even as a teen. He did not mind. They were just parts of him. And being a human with a tail was certainly a fun thing to be, at times.

When he had left Vergessen, though, his animal form had been very ill--its colors faded to grayscale, its stripes impossible to see under smudges, its fur hopelessly patched and matted. It had been comforting, almost. A miserable shade of himself was exactly how he'd felt. The colors had come leaking back in, though, as he had started coming up with plans for his future. He was unsure what that meant, but had been almost annoyed about it, at the time. Still, his fur remained matted, and his ribs still showed clear despite his long fur, and in that way, this mangy, ragged alley cat felt fitting to him, in his current state. He was, after all, a very untrustworthy creature, perfect to be a cat.)

He settled into a loaf position, nestled up against Nott, who had been freed from Jester's grasp. "Do not pick me up, please," he said, quickly. "I am--I am comfortable here."

"Okay, but gosh, Caleb, you're so skinny," Jester fussed.

"Believe me, I've been working on it," said Nott, absentmindedly reaching her clever paws over to try and pull apart a clump of matted fur. "It's like pulling teeth, trying to get this guy to eat more."

"If you pull teeth, I will not be able to eat at all," Caleb said.

"Alright, for real though, what are you?" Beau said, kicking Fjord's leg. "Everyone else shared, come on!"

Fjord rolled his eyes, and said, "Otter. Big one."

"Ooh!"

"Like, real big. Bigger than you're thinking," he added as Jester's eyes lit up. "And it's not cute, either, I'm kinda like...freaky looking.

"Are you gonna show us?" Nott said, looking pointedly.

"No," Fjord said, flatly.

"Aw, why not?" said Jester.

(Fjord had taken a long time to shift. It had happened well after he'd started working for Vandren. For a long time, he'd felt it was one more sign that he was broken, worried that he'd be something that fit everyone's talk about him--a rat, or something worse; something useless at sea and dead weight in general. He feared it, and that fear made it impossible to find himself no matter how anyone tried to coach him through it, until he'd first dove into a river. He'd swum in the sea before, and always felt a sense of peace, but something about the fresh water, something about the current all around him--There had been no moment of seeing in his mind's eye, no meditation, just one moment he was plunging head first into the clear river, and the next, he was a big-ass otter, and filled with the euphoria that can only be achieved by an otter having a swim.

He didn't hide his animal form away out of shame; very much the opposite. He was wonderful as an otter; sure, his face was weird, but looking in a mirror in animal form was the first time he'd ever liked his own reflection. He was wonderful, all sleek and athletic and incredible while swimming, a perfect animal form for a sailor. No, he hid his animal form away because he couldn't stand the thought of anyone ruining that for him. He hated it when the other sailors joked about him frightening small children, and hated even more the idea of finding out what symbolism there was supposed to be, about having a soul shaped like a big otter. He worried that it meant something terrible, and he didn't want to know--he wanted to keep this wonderful, lovely safe space that was his animal form to himself, to protect it as much as he could. It was the best part of him.)