"Hrm," I said. "Okay, so, bit of an odd request: I know you said you'd quit the familiar business, and also I am not even remotely interested in becoming a magical girl myself, but, all the same, Silas said that explaining how magical girls work and answering beginner questions was a major part of what a familiar did. Given as I know nearly nothing about magical girls despite living with two of them... you mind if I ask you beginner questions about magical girls?"

"You know you can ask us, right?" Akane said.

"And you know that I can't," I said. "I would literally die of shame and embarrassment."

"What makes me different from her?" Lisa groused.

"Well, for one, the fact that you aren't yourself a magical girl, retired or otherwise, and instead someone for whom answering questions about magical girls was once a vocational skill," I said. "That's... y'know, a pretty big difference."

"Mm. Point." Lisa gulped down the last of Nicky's steak. "So, what, you want me to be your pseudo-familiar? What am I getting out of this, hm?"

"We are a household of three with a four-bedroom house," I said. "Also, I do a lot of cooking, I take requests, and there's another potential benefit that depends on how you feel about belly rubs."

Lisa considered this carefully.

"...You drive a hard bargain," she said, her tail wagging treacherously.

"Roxy," Akane began.

"Oh, right," I said. "It does occur to me, belatedly, that if we're operating under the very reasonable assumption that familiars are, socially, interchangeable with humans, I should probably consult with my girlfriend before I promise what may well be the four-legged-familiar's version of second base as part of salary negotiations."

"...Honestly I was just going to mess with you," Akane admitted. "Familiars generally don't consider that sort of thing to be any more intimate than humans consider hugging."

"Because familiars aren't socially interchangeable with humans," Lisa complained. "We ought to be, but people infantilize us because, you know, small, cute, fuzzy. If I got baby-talked one more time I was going to bite somebody."

"How old are you, exactly?" I asked.

"Twenty."

"Mentally, or—"

"Twenty," Lisa repeated. "I came into existence twenty revolutions around the sun ago, thank you very much."

I sighed and rolled my eyes to the heavens. "See, this is the kind of 'ignorantly offensive question' I do not under any circumstances want to drop on my girlfriend or our roommate made of muscles."

"But Nicky's a softie," Akane whined.

"I beg your pardon," Nicky said.

"A big, gentle, fluffy teddy bear—"

"Akane, I swear to God."

"See?" Akane asked me. "If Nicky wasn't such a kind, gentle soul, she'd have shot put me across state lines by now."

----------------------------------------

My claim on the basement was now in dispute. Lisa, you see, was a fox. Foxes lived in dens. Dens were underground. Therefore, Lisa was most comfortable tucked away in the basement. Specifically, in a pillow fort I'd spent the last couple days building for her because I can't very well pass up an opportunity for a Project, especially on a friend's behalf.

Unfortunately for me, sharing space meant I had to do quite a bit more 'hiding stuff' than I'd hoped back when I hadn't expected Akane or Nicky to ever venture into the basement for anything other than 'retrieving Roxy after she's spent too long in the basement'. I also had to be 'ready to hide stuff' on much shorter notice than I'd get from the basement door.

I'd had an ulterior motive for putting a bead curtain over the entrance/exit of Lisa's pillow fort and then angling that entrance away from my workbench.

Speak of the devil, its telltale rattling had me stuffing a very obviously Mad Science scanner and its ominously blinking radar dish under a cardboard box ahead of Lisa poking her nose around the perimeter of her den.

"Hey, Roxy?" she called.

"Yes?" I answered.

The beads rattled some more as Lisa left her den entirely to cross the room and hop onto my workbench. "I have kind of a big ask," she said.

"Okay," I said. "Lay it on me."

"I'm sick of being a fox," she said. "I want hands. I want to look people in the eye when I talk to them without needing to sit on a desk. I want to be a human. And I need your help."

"What do you need me to do?"

"Magic can do a lot of things with transformation. Turn people into animals, turn people into people in shiny costumes, turn people into the people they want to be. The thing is, familiars don't have that kind of magic. We're catalysts, not reactants. So I need someone else's magic to do the dirty work."

"Why me?" I asked. "I mean, this might be a stupid question, but if it's that simple, why didn't you do that before you wandered into the woods?"

"Simple," Lisa said. "Because it won't work."

"It… won't… work?"

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

"Nope. Magic doesn't work like that. That's just the explanation I'm going to give our housemates for how you managed to turn me into a human."

"Wouldn't they know it wouldn't work, then?" I asked.

"Nope," Lisa chirped. "Magical girls might do all the heavy lifting, but familiars are the experts. If I say magic works like that, they're not going to question it."

"Next question," I said. "How am I supposed to turn you into a human?"

"With one of your weird mad scientist gadgets, hopefully," Lisa said.

"My… what?" I asked, trying to play it cool.

"You know, like that weird satellite dish thing you were working on yesterday," Lisa said. "I saw what you were playing at with the bead curtain, by the way."

"Clever like a fox," I grumbled, resting my head on one hand. "So now I figure out a device to turn you into a human or you turn me in to the magic police?"

"Don't be so negative," Lisa chided me. "I'm not blackmailing you. You're going to do this because you know how much it sucks to resent your body, and because displaying care for others through the medium of overly elaborate projects is your 'thing'."

"Excuse me?" I asked.

Lisa pointed a paw at the pillow fort, which wasn't really anything of the sort. We only called a pillow fort because Nicky had called my overambitious carpentry-and-upholstery project a glorified pillow fort when I'd unveiled the sketch. For all our shared pedantry, I was unable to get Lisa or Akane to disagree with that assessment, so the name stuck. The thing had more in common with cat towers and the like than anything else, with allowances made for a less nimble arboreal quadruped who also deserved high-quality sleeping accommodations and a measure of privacy. I'd even thrown in a completely useless little cloth awning—useless because it was indoors—over the entrance the bead curtain covered.

"You have me there," I admitted. "Uh, you are going to keep this between us, yes?"

"I'm not a narc," Lisa said. "Does this mean you can do it?"

"Transformation isn't one of my specialties, unfortunately. The best way to use what I do have would be an automaton body that you could pilot telepathically while sitting in the chest cavity."

"...As tempting as it is to have my own mecha, I do feel the need to point out that I'm a tutelary spirit. The fact you're not a magical girl doesn't mean I can't teach you some new tricks." Lisa's enthusiasm dimmed, and she added, "Just, uh, don't expect me to teach you very often, because your magic gives me a headache to think about."

"Color me unsurprised."

----------------------------------------

"I'm happy for you, Lisa, really," Akane said, "and I understand how excited you are to have opposable thumbs, but there are some foods that are not meant to be eaten with a knife and fork."

"Well excuse me for finally achieving a physical form I'm happy with on burrito night," Lisa grumbled.

Given the cover story Lisa had insisted on, this was allegedly all her doing; the device I'd made to enable it was a small implant not unlike a pet identification chip in form and placement, and so should pass without notice. Not that we'd needed her story yet: thus far, neither Akane nor Nicky had bat an eye at her appearance, much less asked how or why it had come about. I suppose Lisa had been right about how much 'It's magic, I don't have to explain shit' could cover, even in a community of magic users.

Normally, I'd have been more than a little nervous about implanting any of my 'technology' in a (no longer serving) familiar. The compatibility issues that prevented us from having to deal with vampire werewolves also meant that cyborg werewolves were a dicy prospect. I was only willing to do so here because Lisa's magic intuition had proven effective on demiurgic foibles enough times that I was, eventually, willing to trust her assessment of the safety and effectiveness of my gadget.

I had, perhaps uncharitably, made the thing in such a way that it would do absolutely nothing about adjusting her strictly linear age, just in case she was trying to pull a fast on by lying about how old she was. I needn't have been so suspicious—Lisa did, in fact, appear to be twenty, inasmuch as I could judge another's age by looks alone. The fact that she was struggling to eat a burrito with a knife and fork rather than taking the simple, expedient option of either 'eating a burrito like a burrito' or 'rendering her burrito into a burrito bowl and eating it that way' meant she wasn't acting her age tonight, but excitement gets the better of all of us at times.

"If you'd done it a couple days earlier, you would've landed on pizza night," Nicky pointed out, "and then we'd have a problem."

"Excuse you," I said. "Eating pizza with a knife and fork is a nonstandard and much-maligned choice that is nevertheless no less effective than the traditional method. Eating a burrito with a knife and fork is actively detrimental to the process of getting food from the plate to your mouth without a pitstop on your lap."

"Or in your cleavage," Lisa added. "Not that I have much of that..."

"Oh no, your boobs are actually smaller than your head, what a debilitating deficiency," I said dryly. "Listen, hon, I know you live in this house, but I assure you, you are well above average, statistically speaking."

"And how exactly do you know this, dear?" Akane asked sweetly.

I rolled my eyes, well inured to Akane's facetious jealousy. "I was the one to take her clothes shopping while you two were busy with school and work, respectively."

"Also, we have eyes and she's right there," Nicky said.

"Obviously," I said, "but if we take Akane's teasing at face value, 'I am sizing up our roommate's chest with my eyes' would only dig me deeper."

"Unless she wants to add me to the polycule," Lisa said.

"We don't have a polycule," I said.

"We didn't have a polycule," Akane said. "And on that note—thank you for the segue, Lisa—Roxy, Nicky. I've spoken with you both privately on the topic, and unless either of you have changed your mind in the last day or two, in which case this conversation is about to get very awkward, we are, in fact, now a polycule."

"Huh," I said. "No offense, Nicky—because I'm happy to have you join us—but when I gave my permission, I kind of figured your whole 'not liking being touched' thing would be an obstacle to be overcome first."

"Consent is important," Nicky said. "I don't like people touching me when I'm not expecting it, and I really don't like being grabbed or manhandled, but do you really think I spent years as Akane's roommate without learning to appreciate the healing power of hugs?"

"What about the power of recreational Judo?" I asked.

"I can see we're going to need to talk at length about boundaries."

"That was a joke."

"And I was doing it the service of taking it at face value for further comedic effect," Nicky said. "That said, if you try to fold my clothes with me in them, I cannot guarantee I will pull my punches."

"I'm sure Roxy or I would be happy to remove your clothes ahead of any recreational exertion," Akane said.

"Now I feel left out all over again," Lisa complained. "I can't believe all three of my roommates are hooking up without me."

"Lisa," Nicky groaned. "Need I remind you that, as of the time we were working this out, you were still a fox?"

"I am well aware of the many things being fox-shaped excluded me from," Lisa said.

"How about the things being fox-shaped permitted you to do?" I asked. "Like how you've sat in all three of our laps multiple times?"

"That was just cuddling, though," Lisa said.

"You want to join the polycule without cuddling?" Akane asked.

"I don't want my membership in this household to stop at cuddling."

Akane and Nicky exchanged a glance, then looked at me.

"She's been here nearly two weeks," I said. "Akane propositioned me after three days, and that worked out fine. I trust you people have your shit figured out."

"So, cuddle pile in Akane's room after dinner?" Lisa suggested.

"That depends on what 'after dinner' means," I said. "Are you going to pick up your burrito and eat it like a normal person, or keep struggling with a knife and fork for another twenty minutes?"

"Let me have this, damn you."