This morsel of information would not sit well with me. I started to feel a bit queasy and when I took my seat on the bed, I was overcome with strong emotion. Emotion I still can't classify but on the whole I felt at odds with my situation and reality. Shock and confusion soon followed but soon after I began to feel better. And then came a feeling I can only describe as the heart being caressed by wet fingers. My emotions were in disarray and the wooziness would not let up. Any piece of dialogue lacking even a word of consolation would go unnoticed and I began to shiver.

Mansel noticed this and gave me a concoction that helped pacify the nerves. For now the restlessness and stress incapacitated and he motioned over to the jug and the glasses and began to explain:

"Listen, what you've just gone through, I can never hope to understand and I don't think you'll find many in a situation such as yourself but you have to listen. I am an amateur and my skill-set regarding this process is next to non-existent. Someone came before me but for some reason didn't follow through with the whole process. If we find him or her we can get you back to how you were before."

"What if I don't want to change."

"What?"

"I said, what if I don't want to change. I am fine now, what happened before was an overreaction."

"It was an appropriate reaction you little shit. What I gave you just now was to help calm you down, it'll stop working in a few hours. Don't you wanna go back to your family? Do you even remember your family? Answer the second one first."

"No, I don't remember anything which only tells me that what I forgot wasn't worth remembering in the first place. I wouldn't be outside my natural habitat if I didn't do something wrong."

"You're in shock but you have a point. Trouble is, the place you're in- this town, you can't really expect anything normal. See this place is a subsidiary to the city of Morlinmaymer, which is all things crime and crime. I suspect you were a victim of wildlife smuggling. Your bones would've been used for medicine, your fur for a warm coat or maybe you'd be used to instruct future vets. The possibilities are endless but what my answer doesn't really tell us is how you ended up in this place-"

"Wait doesn't this mean I have no one to go back too?. We usually live in coalitions and I doubt they took only me-"

"We don't know that, now is not the time to jump to conclusions. We'll work with what we know and speculate later. Look I don't want you think I don't care. You being here with me is dangerous because whoever left you will want you back. There is a strong possibility that the person that prepped you for the transfer and smuggled you from your home is the same or belongs to the same clan. I didn't see anyone following me but they'll figure out where you are soon enough. Difficult to hide someone whose always covered and your height doesn't help."

"So what do I do now?"

"Listen. Look, I have these two glasses and I pour water from the jug into the first one. The jug is your original body, the glass your new one and the water the soul. Now as you can see the glass was filled but the jug was not emptied. Same goes for you, your soul is incomplete and this process is not permanent. Your original body still holds most of your memories, what you have now is just a portion. Normally the person that conducts this procedure puts a part of him or herself into you. I suspect the people that smuggled you in did the same, they gave you their foundation, how they process ideas, how they understand things and if your mind gets too comfortable with this development, it will start to conflict with your memories. Its like learning the same subject from different masters but instead of actually finishing your study you consistently move onto something new. You enter into this weird statis in which you don't really learn anything, just waste your time. So you have to make the decision, do I want to get back my old memories back or try to carve a new path for myself?. You can't have both so don't be impulsive. You have a month before the original body decomposes completely. I don't mean to pressure you but whatever decision you take, you stick with it. There's no going back."

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

And with that he stood up and went back to his study where he was stiching some garments. He said they were for me and that I should try to learn knitting so that we don't have to go out to get clothes, restricting the suspicions of anyone on the lookout. I tried my best to piece this information in pieces, if I tackled all of it at once, I knew I would have a strong effect so I just sat and thought about what was to be done. In the meantime Mansel came to me with a small book on grammar and asked me if I could make sense of it. I couldn't and I could see his eyes glow for a second before they faded back into the dour look that I first saw. Over the week he would pester me with some small questions on what I knew and to what extent I knew and I wasn't able to give him a response that wasn't just simply, "Yes sometimes I feel like doing x and sometimes I prefer y" but I saw Mansel was content with what I gave him and that made me content.