The upcoming dinner had Kazue giddy with excitement, but it was also going to make for a long day and be a little stressful, and she really did not want to make a bad impression. While they were in the carriage was probably the best opportunity she would have to be discreet, so she nudged Moriko with her knee as she fetched the roll with her medication.

Kazue's wife took the hint and engaged Paltira in conversation while blatantly ignoring Kazue, and that was more than enough to let Paltira know to do the same. Kazue fetched a pill out of the pocket designated for supplemental doses and made a quick note of the date and time before closing the roll back up and stowing it in their gear again.

She rather hated having to do this, and she kind of wished she had been able to alter her avatar. Kazue was fairly certain that Mordecai could have guided her into making the appropriate alteration, but she also knew her husband well enough to figure out why he hadn't offered. As a person, she should know herself well before she did anything to make a drastic change to who she was. And as a core, she needed to learn how to do it herself when the time came, not have it spoon-fed to her. Mordecai had been very careful to step back more and more with how much he guided, and even before Kazue's avatar had left the dungeon he rarely did anything other than hint or point the way and let her figure out the rest.

Kazue shook those thoughts away and joined back in the conversation, trusting that Paltira would mention this to no one but Orchid and that Orchid would not mention it to anyone else without need. She had no desire to talk about her medical situation with anyone she didn't need to, and neither of them needed to know why she was taking medicine.

Everything continued smoothly from there, and Kazue quickly learned that their schedule for the evening was going to be different than what Moriko experienced. To begin with, Orchid had already settled on exactly what jewelry Kazue was going to be gifted with. The starring piece was going to be a gold circlet with a large aubergine pearl in the center and decorated with several small amethysts and diamonds.

A close second was the amethyst studded bib necklace that covered up some of her, ah, prominently displayed assets even as it helped draw the eye there. Kazue had to do her best to avoid thinking about that, and Moriko's smirking leer did not help. She did not want to be blushing through the entire dinner!

Smaller rings, earrings, and earcuffs with aubergine pearls or amethyst completed the look, making her quite presentable for court. Kazue had been uncertain about getting the piercings, but Moriko had encouraged her with the promise that it would look really cute, and in the end, Kazue had to agree as she examined herself in the mirror. Her long fox ears did display the jewels nicely.

"Remind me to find some pieces appropriate for traveling," she told Moriko with a smile, "I think I like them and I want to try out a few options." Oh, what would her mother say!

Though come to think of it, there were a few spots along her mother's ears where the fur had grown a bit more thinly. Hmm. Kazue was now suspicious and had some more questions she wanted to ask her mom.

"Gladly," Moriko said with a mischievous glint in her eyes, "I think something with tiny bells would be fun, my pet."

Kazue managed to growl and blush at the same time, but their flirtation was quickly interrupted by the woman attending them. "I think her Highness will be very pleased with how you've turned out, but it may be best to not keep her or the others waiting, my ladies."

They took the hint and double-checked their dresses before allowing themselves to be escorted to the main hall. The introduction to the court went much as it had for Moriko, though as the newcomer Kazue received the most attention. Furthermore, as their relationship with the kingdom was well established, they were encouraged to spend time meeting with some of the other nobility present rather than getting to immediately retreat to the private dining room.

The meet and greet with nobles was a lot easier than it would have been without Moriko at her side, but as her initial nervousness wore off she found the situation exciting. She was being treated like a princess!

Okay, so technically she was a sovereign and as such was more equivalent to a queen of a very small nation, but the three of them had agreed they didn't really want to deal with such titles and were satisfied with 'lord' and 'lady' as appropriate.

Still, she was happy when the court day ended and they were escorted to the private dining hall. With no official business to be dealt with, the royal children were all in attendance with their parents, though Princess Tiriana was visiting her elven fiance, and Princess Kitiara and her wife Catherine were at their home in the northern territories, attending to their duties there.

The dinner was a lot of fun, even if Moriko and Orchid worked together to monitor how much she had to drink. That was another thing she was going to fix in her next avatar, she wanted to not be such a lightweight! But she didn't want to pass out or make a fool of herself either, so she didn't mind having her drinks being kept light and interspersed with juice too much.

Of course, before they started double-teaming Kazue, Orchid had made sure to 'corner' Moriko, and listening in on that had been fun. Well, until Moriko managed to work in how Paltira's gaze had dipped briefly at the clothier's. Kazue hadn't even noticed, but it worked as Moriko intended, getting the tiny woman to direct her faux ire elsewhere.

It was pretty obvious to anyone who knew her that Orchid wasn't truly upset at Moriko or Paltira, it was part of the game she played with her sisters. Kazue hadn't seen this game before, but seeing it now made her feel included and trusted to see this part of their private lives. She wondered if it had something to do with large families; Moriko seemed to be adapting to the game perfectly like she already knew the rules.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The dinner wasn't quite chaotic, but with the children involved it had a certain level of energy that Kazue didn't think Moriko's previous dinner with the royal family had. And Kazue loved it, there was always someone to talk to and a constant whirl of getting to know new people.

Once the younger children were sent to bed, the dinner became much more sedate. Not that it was really about just eating a meal by now, this was a social event to get to know the royal family. Which they would have plenty of time to do, along with meeting other nobility; they were being given guest quarters during their stay in Ekuilance. Moriko and Kazue had both tried to protest that they could find their own way, but even the argument that Kazue was supposed to be experiencing the world failed to budge the royal family.

"It would not look good to let you stay in a standard hostel or the like, and you don't have the right sort of finances to rent a manor or something, so you get to be our guests," Orchid said, "and being royal guests is certainly a new experience. As for experiencing the rest of the city," Orchid flashed a grin, "trust me, I know how to slip you out of the castle discreetly if you want to run about incognito. Moriko and I could compete in telling tales of the sort of trouble we got into."

Eventually, they retired and were shown the way to their guest suite, where Moriko proceeded to 'help' Kazue with her dress. Kazue slept in late the next morning, only waking up groggily when her wife started toying with the rings in her ear. "It's a good thing the piercings came with a fast heal potion," Kazue muttered. An instant curative might have sealed up the holes around the metal or rejected the metal, but a simple fast healing potion only accelerated the natural process.

"Mm," Moriko replied absentmindedly as she teased another earring, "Mordecai says he has a bit of easy training for you that you might want to try out right now. Start by simply shifting to your tailless form."

Kazue frowned at the sudden request, but she knew her husband well enough to guess that whatever he had in mind was going to work best if she didn't know what was going on. Otherwise, he would have told her first. So she did as requested, "Now what?"

"Now a question: where are your earrings?"

"Huh, wha-?" Kazue reached up to touch her human ears, to find them bare and unpierced. She knew her clothes went away when she turned into a fox, but she hadn't really thought about it. It happened for everyone, so it had never been a mystery, but now she found herself curious.

"Mordecai says that they count as different 'parts', you can actually manifest both at the same time now that you can fine-tune your form. He's willing to answer questions whenever you want, though you might want to experiment more first." Moriko grinned, "However, I am not willing to spend the rest of the day talking, we can do that later. I want to show you the city first! So you'll have to hold your questions until later."

While the two of them got bathed and dressed for the day, Kazue spent a little of her time experimenting with her shape-changing. Previously she hadn't really been aware of the presence of items that had been shifted away during her shape change, but now she was very conscious of them. They were sort of there, only there was no 'there' for them to be, and she could only access them by retaking a compatible form. The piercings would be in her fox ears, whether those ears were attached to her fox form or her bipedal forms, but would not appear in not-fox ears unless she was very careful and slow in her shape-changing and made the fox ears migrate while they changed shape. It was awkward and uncomfortable to do it that way too.

They went out in the clothes Mordecai had commissioned for them; they were pretty and comfortable, allowing them to look good without being overdressed for the role they wanted to play. Neither one of them was terribly comfortable with being ladies yet, and as much as Kazue loved the new dresses, she didn't want to wear them out in the city or anything like that.

Their shopping was limited today as they only had so much cash on them, and they didn't want to exchange their special opal if they didn't have to. But it did allow them to take some notes and begin creating a list for later.

While they were out and about, Moriko also dragged Kazue to meet a lot of her friends, with a promise to take her out to the monastery tomorrow to meet Moriko's master. More than a few of said friends looked some combination of regretful or speculative, but most of them got over their loss quickly enough. Only one had to get a verbal smacking for trying to press the idea of a hookup despite their married status, and she looked emotionally singed as well as chagrined. At least she apologized after that and behaved herself from there.

Their day out also let Kazue start meeting entirely new types of spirits. A city had its own life and its own needs, even if that life was far different from the biomes of a forest or field. It also had a strange vibrancy that resonated differently from more primal areas, and Kazue had a feeling that a 'dead' city would be very different from a 'dead' forest. Dead wild lands were passing affairs, part of the natural cycle, and would soon be filled in with new life as it recovered from whatever disaster had passed.

A dead city was something that would stick. Oh, there would be life, and nature would make its way in, but a city would resist the change. And depending on how the city died, well, she had her first insight into how undead things could come into existence without willful action. That was not an insight she particularly enjoyed, and she fervently hoped she'd never meet that sort of spirit.

When they were feeling done with socializing and meeting new types of spirits, they simply made their way into the same neighborhood that they had walked out of earlier, though not to the same house. They'd been shadowed the entire day and when they got into the right area one of their escorts made a brief showing, gesturing down a side street when no one else was around.

The path that they followed from there allowed the escorts to double-check that the pair were not being followed. Once Moriko and Kazue had been cleared, they were led to what appeared to be a side door to a servant's quarters but led into an underground tunnel instead.

When Orchid had told them to not expect the exits or entrances to this system to work twice, Kazue had to bite her lip to keep silent and just silently nodded. That earned her another suspicious look from the princess, but Kazue couldn't keep from reacting. She had a feeling she knew exactly how these tunnels worked, they felt an awful lot like her shortcuts, if more fleeting.

Soon they were ensconced once more at the castle, and it was time to change and begin a different type of socializing. They were to attend a more public dinner this time. Not that they actually had to, it was technically only a request, but Kazue and Moriko were advised that if they wanted to maintain good relations with the rest of the nobles, they needed to learn to play their part.