"Hey, Lisa," I said as the foxgirl slinked into my room. "What's up?"

"Yo soy... aprender, espanol," Lisa said, slowly and carefully. "Tu hablar?"

"Hablo con fluidez, y creo que eso es un poco mas de lo que tu," I said casually. "Tu espanol es malo."

Her ears drooped, and she sighed, as she sat down in my lap. "Okay, where the fuck did you learn Spanish?"

"In Texas," I said. "Now, to be perfectly fair, it's totally understandable how someone could live in Texas all their life without learning Spanish. They just have to stay in a position where they don't need to be able to talk to Mexicans. But, well, I stopped being in that position not too long after I dropped out of college and took up bounty hunting. Something like a quarter of the general Texan population speaks Spanish natively, and plenty of immigrants and visitors speak Spanish exclusively, and even though I mostly dealt with supernatural people, the supernatural demographics tend to reflect the mundane demographics pretty closely. And I was the sort of prideful who felt that I should know how to just speak Spanish naturally, and not have to rely on translators- either technological or in the shape of a bilingual person. So... I just buckled down and learned it. Which actually wasn't that hard, I just had to watch a bunch of Spanish-language media and do vocabulary flash cards so that I could understand what they were saying and then I really learned it. I'm guessing you'd like my help setting up a similar arrangement?"

"Yeah, probably," Lisa said. "Hopefully you can help me commit to this. I'm gonna be honest, I wasn't really thinking about the fact that knowing Spanish can be a practical skill for a Texan who has to talk to strangers. Mostly I was just trying to connect some more with my long-lost heritage. Buuut, if it means being able to talk to people like Antonio..."

"Antonio Sanchez doesn't speak any Spanish," I said.

"Wait, what?" Lisa asked.

"His grandparents didn't speak Spanish around his parents, and his parents never learned Spanish to teach it to their kids," I said with a shrug. "It's kinda like how my grandparents didn't speak French around my parents, and my parents never learned French to teach it to their own kids. That generally tends to happen with cultural minorities after enough generations surrounding a majority with a different language."

"Huh," Lisa said.

"Antonio is a lot more okay with it than I am, because we're different people who feel different ways about language," I continued. "He's of the opinion that, at his age, if he hasn't already learned Spanish, then it's just not happening, and he doesn't really feel the need to. Of course, he does think it's annoying that people who don't know him super well assume he can speak Spanish, because his name is Antonio Sanchez and he isn't particularly pale, but he hasn't let that convince him to learn Spanish."

"And what about you and French?" Lisa asked.

"I don't live in Louisiana or Quebec, so it's kind of useless," I said with a shrug. "I still made a go at it, when I was nineteen, but the fact I didn't have anyone to speak it with kinda scuttled the whole shebang. Same with Japanese... which, it occurs to me, I now do have someone to speak it with."

"Akane's not monolingual?" Lisa asked.

"Akane speaks four languages," I said. "English, Japanese, French- it turns out that the Donovan family is also Cajun French- and Hindi."

"...Oh, right, she was raised by a polycule," Lisa murmured.

"I think she's thought about learning Spanish before?" I added. "Because, y'know, she also grew up in Texas and has felt the frustration of not being able to talk to people who she's kinda always known were here, in her own city."

"Yeah, it does feel like her linguistic toolkit is a bit use-impaired for where she lives," Lisa said.

"Oh, it's not totally useless," I said with a shrug. "Austin has plenty of Indian immigrants, and Hindi is mutually-intelligible with a lot of other Indian languages. But, yeah, we should probably include her in a Spanish-learning study group."

"Should we invite Nicky too, just so she doesn't feel left out?" Lisa asked.

"I think we should invite her so that she can't keep egregiously mispronouncing tex-mex dishes as a joke," I said. "If I have to listen to her say juh-lap-in-oh one more time..."

"Personally, I think it's based when girls are annoying and cringe," Lisa said.

"It's good to see you practicing self-love."

"Fuck you."

I reached out and patted her head, rubbing her fuzzy ears between my fingers.

"Anyway," Lisa said, the performative outrage gone. "You think it'd be good to split our attention like that?"

"Honestly, I kinda do," I said. "At least, it'd be good to split my attention like that. Akane has guided me to the realization that I'm prone to freaking out about what-ifs and hypotheticals regarding Doctor Skinner and the threat she poses when I don't have anything productive to do, and aside from that freaking out being, generally, pretty unproductive, it's also pretty unpleasant to do. So... I kinda need distractions. Thankfully, I have three person-shaped stim toys that talk."

Stolen novel; please report.

"Hey now," Lisa said.

"Be honest with me: are you mad about the idea of sitting in my lap for a half hour while I treat your body like a stim toy, or are you mad that the idea has clearly occurred to me and I haven't already done so?"

"...The latter."

"Well, joke's on you, because I totally have in fact done that," I said. "You just don't realize it because playing with your ears is how I've typically stimmed with your assistance, and your filthy gutter-brain immediately latched onto the idea that I'd do that by playing with your tits instead. Which is a thing I could do, but honestly I do kinda prefer playing with your ears."

"How are you not a furry and yet somehow more headpat-addicted than me?" Lisa demanded.

"I like the texture of your fur, and last time I checked, you didn't have fur anywhere but your ears and tail," I said.

"I am a shapeshifter," Lisa pointed out.

"Are you really going to put fur on your boobs just so I'll touch them more often?" I asked.

"I want you to guess." Lisa hummed and tapped her chin. "Also, if I go full furry, then I can walk around the house naked."

"You can do that already if you're not a coward," I said.

She paused, and I blinked.

"I was joking," I said.

"You were being humorous," Lisa corrected me. "But you're not wrong, on account that everyone in this house has already seen me naked and liked it."

"Now that's just not true," I said. "You were always wearing a collar."

Lisa snorted, and then sighed, leaning against me and relaxing as I kept playing with her ears.

"I love moments like these," I said quietly, letting my eyes drift closed. "Just... the casual cuddling and closeness. The feel of your fur, and your hair... the warmth and weight of your body against mine... neither of us really doing much, just... sitting, and enjoying each other's existence."

"Gay," Lisa replied lazily.

"Damn straight."

She snorted again, and giggled a little.

"Hey, not to ruin the moment or anything," Lisa said, preparing to ruin the moment. "But do you think it'd be possible for me to use your interdimensional phone to call up some druids for training?"

"...Maybe," I said. "I mean, you're welcome to try, and I'll help you do it, but... I really, really do not know how druidic pedagogy usually works, and it may well be that you can't learn from other druids over the phone, even when it's a really good video phone."

"Mm, fair," Lisa said. "At the very least, I'll get a better idea of what druid culture is like, and how mad they'll be that I've redefined my spirit half from 'fox' to 'Roxy's pet foxgirl.'"

"Please do not provoke powerful spellcasters into testing whether or not they can curse people over the internet."

"But I want to."

"Brat."

"Well, yeah," Lisa said. "I'm a foxgirl. Don't you know anything about the challenges faced in trying to domesticate foxes?"

"Mostly a few anecdotes about piss, which you have, very thankfully, not lived down to."

"...Fair," Lisa allowed. "Still."

"Right, foxgirl implies brat," I said, nodding. "It's just that I've forgotten, because usually you're such a good girl."

"...You're evil," Lisa marveled.

"And you're a good girl," I said, emphasizing that with a particularly firm ear-rub. "Anyway. If you're not too set on just cuddling for another half-hour, I can place a call right now, and we can do the tutoring thing before my ADHD ass forgets about it and your submissive ass interprets that as a quiet 'no' and never brings it up again."

"Wow, you are going for the throat today," Lisa said.

"Mhm. Anyhow. Yes or no?"

"Yeah, go ahead," Lisa said. "Make the call."

My first port of call was the one druid whose phone number I knew and was on reasonably-friendly terms with, Jason Thronebreaker.

That went to voicemail, so next I tried Arachne.

"Hello, Doctor Updyke," Arachne said as she picked up the phone, a holographic projection of her appearing before us thanks to augmented reality via the Virtual Machine. "I've been thinking about a research project I'd like your help with, and I think I've found something."

"Oh, nice," I said. "You should probably plan to shift even more work onto me, though, because I do need to ask you for another druid-related favor."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, my usual druid contact isn't answering his phone, so I need you to ask around for a druid willing to take a swing at tutoring a new-ish druid in the use of her powers over an interdimensional telephone."

"...That... may prove tricky," Arachne said carefully. "Druids are somewhat reclusive and asocial, as you might be well aware."

"Yeah, unfortunately," I said. "Especially with people they consider to be outsiders. That's why I took that spirit-oath to give hospitality to druids, so that they'd be more willing to work with me. Whiiiiich might be a bit more of a commitment than you're willing to make."

"My apartment is not big enough to provide hospitality, no," Arachne said. "But... I might be able to find someone. It may just take a while."

"Yeah, that's fair. So, what research project were you looking to offload onto me?"

"Well, I was talking with Jonas the other day, and he mentioned a transforming ray gun he'd built a decade or so ago," Arachne said. "That led me into an interesting tangent that I want someone to independently test and verify, regarding the use of weapons science as a component of a primarily-transformative device."

"So, you want me to build a ray gun that makes things glow in the dark and then tell you what happens when I shoot some houseplants with it?" I asked.

"More or less, yes," Arachne said. "More than just that, admittedly, but that's the gist of it. I'll send you the specifications."

"Yeah, sure," I said, shrugging. "I'm only a beginner with weapons science, and not that much further with transformation, but I can give it a shot."

"Excellent. I'll send you the specifications. Take care."

"You too, Arachne," I said, before hanging up. I sighed.

"Ask for distractions, and you'll get them," Lisa said.

"Indeed I will," I said. "Indeed I will."