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Eska has not had a good night. She's currently trying very hard no to think just quite how bad the night was. The hangover one can only get from far too much Scumble is only partly to blame here. Everythnig else... well she doesn't want to think about that.

So now she's downstairs, in robes of a slightly better fit, which she found in her wardrobe, a cup of something black and semi-solif sitting next to a large fired breakfast, which she's poking at.

Come and console her. Or stare at her manly form. Whichever.

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Pretty young fellow, Asar-Suti thinks, walking past.

"Are you from Unseen University? You are wearing the same sort of hat my friend Eska wears," he says, in greeting.

Why is it the people who change shape like normal people change hats are the people who aren't recognising her?

"Sooty," Eska says, looking up at him tiredly.

"Eska!!!"

Asar-Suti staaaaares.

"Gil is a faun, and you are a young man - is everybody shifting all of a sudden? This must be so disorienting for you; Gil is not as tired, but wild, and a stanger. You are..."

"I," Eska says, "am hungover. Scumble is good stuff, but it doesn't solve the problem of forced morphogenic shift."

Beat.

"Gil's a faun again?"

"He is," Asar-Suti says, his eyes deep and serious for a moment.

Only a very brief moment.

"Something is messing with those shape fields; Doctor Lecter was a talking plant the other morning. He said it was Delirium of the Endless..." he supplies.

Eska considers this.

"Endless... they're anthropomorphic personifications, right? Tim said it felt like something the Landlord had done. Narrative Causality.

"How's Gil?"

"Shy - he will be back. He is a wild thing now, and the only way is letting him come back all on his own," Asar-Suti says, somewhat pained, but not really frightened.

"Yes, that's what they are; they stand for forced valid on all worlds, and that way are valid here."

But hadn't Eska known what the Endless are? Well, she is due to forget a thing or two, if Gil forgets his lover, and Asar-Suti forgets what those cards were for...

Eska knows many anthropomorphic personaifications. She doens't use the word 'Endless'. And she has a very bad hangover.

"Well, If I see a talking plant I'll ask it, but I'm going to check the library. It's possible something's just hiding its origin from Tim, so I'm going to look into that, and check on ways to fix morphogenic fields like mine has been."

"Yoe're right - there might be books on that there," Asar-Suti says, a bit dismissively.

He hasn't thought of that, and it doesn't feel so very important.

"Gil does not seem to hurt, after the initial fright he took when the world came rushing in to his much finer faun senses; when I saw him in the might, he was - at peace. There is something for us to learn, in his new shape."

Matter of factly, Asar-Suti accepts things the way the are, instead of railing against fate or copiously weeping all over the place.

"Good," Eska says. "I'm glad he's not hurt."

She drinks some more coffee, and shakes her head to clear it.

"What kind of things will he learn? He's had that shape before, right?"

"If we knew beforehand, there would be no point in actually going through with it, would there? This isn't some sort of coursework where you get a list of subjects beforehand, this is life. You only ever know what you were supposed to learn after you learned it," Asar-Suti says.

The lesson might be for himself just as much, he suspects. How often had he sworn to Gil he'd love him just the same, whatever the shape...

"Why don't you take something efficient against your hangover? We have potions fro that, you know. Shaking your head will hardly dislodge it."

"Because I don't use magic for hangovers, Sooty," Eska points out. "It's against the Lore.

"I would have thought the pint of going through it would be because there doesn't appear to be a way of changing back," Eska points out.

"His god has changed him before, his god may have changed him again now, so who am I to question that? I'm just his lover," Asar-Suti says, not peevishly, just accepting.

Personal isn't the same as important, after all - who was it that said so?

"I have tried faun-shape before, and have no problem with using it again," he adds, shifting just for a moment to show Eska his own horned variation.

"Principles are nice, my dear young man, but incapacitate yourself out of bloodymindedness when there are things to be done? Not so good," faun-shaped 'Suti points out.

"I'm not your young man, Sooty," Eska informs him. "I'm not even your young woman.

"And if it's not his god? If it's some thing else? I don't even have a god, so that's not waht changed me."

Asar-Suti shapeshifts back.

"You are a young man at the moment, Eska," he points out. "Quite a nice specimen, if I may say so."

He eyes, for a moment quite liking what he sees, then moving on; there are more important things now.

"It's as if you reverted to what you were - you are a wizard, and he is a faun," he muses. "In a slightly silly and literal way. I am glad it didn't get me - I'd be a Dark God again, and that would not be good news. But perhaps it would just leave me stuck in grandiose black robes..."

"No, you may not say so," Eska says bluntly. "I'm still a wizard. And I've always been a wizard. I've not reverted to anything."

"You have reverted to a more conventional definition of 'wizard', I would say," Asar-Suti smiles, not pursuing the question what he may or may not say.

He could clearly feel how uncomfortable the idea that her current face or body might be attractive to anyone has made Eska feel, and he doesnot want to alienate his friend.

Who is quite alien as it is.

"Conventional by the standards of your world, maybe. Not by mine."

Eska's becoming irritated again. This all feels wrong.

Asar-Suti looks at her, sensing her growing confusion. The hangover is mixing up with her confusion and disorientation at her changed shape, and makes her irritable, and her thinking less than clear.

"This must feel ver wrong for you; I would offer to change you back, but if your own magic doesn't remember your female-shape any more, I can only change you forwards, like Trent, and might end up with something subtly wrong, like Trent again."

"Tiki's tried," Eska says bluntly. "Tim's tried. Something's blocking it. That's what I'm going to look up. Ways to block access to morphogenic fields."

"As if whatever happened to you had closed the door to your shape afterwards?" Asar-Suti muses. "Yes, you might be right, books might have been written about it. Getting people stuck in a shape - like Loki did with Lochiel. Like I did with Kellin, on our home world, near the end of our story. When I found what he was, I touched the place in him where the sul'harai is triggered, then sealed it when he'd changed without wanting to. But you do not normally change shape, you just change mode - between wizard and witch," Asar-Suti says.

"So how do you do it?" Eska asks. "The morphogenic field is notoriously elastic. The more you change shape the more you can switch.

"And how many times you I have to tell you? Being a witch or a wizard has nothing to do with sex."

"That was why I said mode, not shape," Asar-Suti answers, suppressing the urge of adding 'my dear young man' again.

It just feels like the right thing to say.

"I can't describe it; it was as if I reached inside him after I'd sprung the change, and then made a knot into the place of his soul where he could access his lir gift of sul'harai," he adds, freely piling in Cheysuli terms in italics without any explanation.

"Only I could undo the knot, and I did when my Ginevra asked me to, and that was my undoing," he adds, with a sigh.

Eska want to snap "there's no mode!", but she realises, of course, that she does switch.

"But that's got nothing to do with my current shape, has it?" she asks. "It's not like I'm a stronger wizard or anything."

"Are you not?" Asar-Suti asks, simply.

"I do not know how exactly it was done, as you weren't a shape-shifter before," he points out.

She glares at him. "You don't think I'd notice if there was more magic in me?

"Just because I didn't, didn't mean I couldn't. I've transfigured lots of things. I could have transfigured myself. I just didn't."

"So you don't have more magic, and you didn't have another shape, before, that would have been familiar in you, and your physical substance had not undergone what the Cheysuli call sul'harai, so I can see no reason why you should have been stuck in a shape that you did not previously have! So it is beyond what I did when I got Kellin stuck."

He looks at Eska with a bit of fanfare twinkling in his eyes.

"So we have a proper mystery," he says, not adding 'my dear young man' although he feels as if he should.

"Yes, we do. And there's no need to be so excited about it," Eska frowns. "Although I'm sure you're looking forward to helping out in the research."

She stands, awkwardly. "Are you coming to the library?"

Asar-Suti stands as well.

"Might as well give it a try," he says, not quite convinced, ready to follow Eska.

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