The group made their way down the mountainside. While at first they proceeded carefully, they soon found a carved, winding path that circled the mountain’s perimeter at a gentle but consistent downward slope, marked with waist-high tall rock carvings at regular intervals. The carvings were of humanoid figures with elaborate, swirling patterns covering their bodies. Grant had asked, but none of his companions seemed to know what creatures these statues were depictions of, though Fyodor did note that the fact that the statues even existed in the first place was a good sign, as it was a sign of a more advanced society that included crafters, which hopefully meant that they wouldn’t be attacked at first sight. The descent was almost a pleasant, relaxing journey, were it not for the oppressive level of humidity in the air, making their clothing stick to their bodies like a second skin. As they continued, the path remained clear, but the environment around them became increasingly unpleasant. Slick roots and sharp, moss-covered rocks began to appear, and Grant swore at multiple points he felt the presence of a gaze upon his back, only to spin around and find nothing but the muddy footprints of their party.

Still, despite this, there was a shared sense of relief and anticipation hanging over their heads. Finding signs of civilised life was too promising an omen for their spirits to dampen, and they were looking forward to learning more about how this world functioned, and if whoever lived here knew anything about the Final Door or the Forsaken. Fyodor tried to temper their expectations, but even he sometimes showed signs of his excitement.

At some point, Grant found himself walking alongside Tamiko, the two of them a few steps back from the other three. Grant glanced sideway at his silent companion, and couldn’t help but wonder more about his split-second decision to include her in his modification of Ed’s teleportation spell. While she was one of the people he had spent the most time with, as he usually ate meals with her, Lei and Kyra, it wasn’t as though they had really clicked during this time. In fact, he had spent an order of magnitude more time with her since the teleportation than beforehand, and while he did like her, it was odd that he had reached out and dragged her with him. He hadn’t really questioned it before, merely grateful for the company and support, but logically, there were better choices to bring with him. Ed wouldn’t have been an option, as he was so far away at the time, but Suriya or any of the other most powerful Forsaken would have been a far safer choice. Yes, any of the people he brought along could have been Muirenn in disguise, but at the time he hadn’t really known that, so why did he not reach for the most powerful people?

Tamiko seemed to sense his lingering glance, as she looked back at him and raised an eyebrow. “See something you like?” she asked flirtatiously.

Grant blinked and raised his hands defensively, sputtering a little. “No, no, nothing like that, sorry,” he said awkwardly. “I was just thinking… well, about everything. I know we’ve kind of avoided the subject the last few days we were hanging out, but a lot of it just hit me again. The attack, Bukola… it just hit me again, for some reason.”

She had smirked slightly at his opening words, no doubt forming a biting response to his rapid ‘no’ reply to her question, but as he spoke her expression dropped slightly, and a small frown began to form. When he mentioned Bukola, he glimpsed a brief flash of pain cross her face, and she turned away from him, looking back towards the rest of their group.

“Yeah, I know,” she said quietly. “I don’t think I’ve really processed it yet myself. I’m good at avoiding thinking too much. Several people have even told me my lack of thought is one of my greatest qualities. Several have also told me it’s one of my worst, but I prefer to ignore people that are so obviously just jealous of me, you know?”

Her tone grew markedly more upbeat as she spoke, and even though Grant didn’t know her too well, it was clear she was trying to redirect his attention.

“Yeah, good choice,” he nodded sagely. “I myself have experienced such jealousy from many people, usually about how skilled I am at tripping over things. Which… wow.” He looked down at his feet and chuckled slightly. “You know, it only just occurred to me that I legitimately had some clumsiness problems before coming here, but not once have I managed to trip over my own feet since. I know, it may not sound like much, but trust me, to many of my friends that would be an even more remarkable occurrence than being able to fling fireballs around.”

Tamiko laughed, and the discussion continued on the trend of lighter topics, Grant not daring to try and bring up their situation again. He thought back on Tamiko’s reaction to Bukola’s name.

Huh. I mean, I guess I didn’t know either of them well, but still… what an odd pairing. I wonder if the others knew about it?

Either way, he resolved not to mention it. He was still a newcomer to this dimension, after all, and whatever emotional entanglements there were between Tamiko and Bukola, they had developed over tens, if not hundreds of years. It wasn’t his place to dig into anyone’s life, especially given that he wasn’t exactly an open book about all of his experiences.

Still, despite the jokey tone of their conversation, Grant learnt a lot about Tamiko as they walked. She really was an expert at redirecting conversations, and more than once he was caught off guard at her rapid and usually at least semi-witty responses to anything he mentioned that could be remotely interpreted as flirtatious or complimentary. He thought back to their first encounter, when she had all but invited him to her place. He had never really considered her words as a serious invitation, but whatever her feelings for or the situation with Bukola, he realised now that she had been entirely serious when she said that he should contact her. It shouldn’t have surprised him too much, as it had been made clear several times that the Forsaken were a pretty sexually open community, but he regretted now that he hadn’t had the time to pursue anything with her. She was far funnier than he expected, and he had always liked someone who was capable of giving back as good as they got. His thoughts then began to drift to Kyra, for some reason, when their conversation was interrupted by Lei.

“Hey, sorry to butt in. Tamiko, do you think blonde or red hair suits me better now?”

Grant looked at Lei, confused by the question, only to do a double take. Whereas only minutes ago, Lei had been a rather tall, well-built, square-jawed Polynesian man, there now stood before them an even taller, but far softer woman with pale skin dotted with freckles, and bright, vibrant red hair. Grant was confused for a few moments before he remembered back to when he had first arrived in Sanctuary and noticed Lei wearing a dress, and Kyra had informed him that Lei had the ability to change their body at will. Grant had just not expected the change to be so quick and easy.

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Conditioned by all those body-morphing horror movies, I guess. You should know better by now, he reprimanded himself.

That said, the change was still so radical and sudden that Grant couldn’t help but stare at Lei, whose hair was flickering back and forth between the vibrant red and a blonde so light it almost looked white. The freckles also shifted position as they spoke, a few vanishing or appearing, becoming denser or lighter. Eventually, they seemed to settle on a fairly light spattering and the same red hair that she had had when she started speaking. Lei looked over at Grant, who was still staring, rather enthralled by the process, and giggled.

“Sorry,” she said, “I forgot you may not have known about this. It’s not a big deal, I just got bored of being a man for now.”

“No, no,” Grant protested, shaking his head, “it’s fine. I was surprised, but Kyra had told me before that you were originally a woman and could change your body, I just didn’t expect it to be like that. For some reason I expected it to be a long, painful, bone-breaking process, but the way you could just customise your hair like that was really cool to watch.”

Lei shrugged. “To be fair, you’re kind of right. Not about it being painful, but about it being long. I can change pretty much anything at any time, but for it to be a more permanent change, like when I sleep or something, I have to focus a lot on kind of locking down the new look. If I stop concentrating for too long any time in the next few hours, I’ll revert to the body I last had. Some complicated problem with how our minds shape our reality, or so Fyodor and Ed explained it back in the day.”

“Makes sense, I guess,” said Grant, before reconsidering. “Well… as much sense as anything related to magic can, I mean.”

Lei giggled again. The cognitive dissonance Grant was currently experiencing was palpable, hearing the high-pitched giggle coming from someone who moments ago had been one of the more physically imposing men that Grant had met, with a deep, rolling laugh.

“Also,” Tamiko added, looking at Grant seriously, “what you described is true for any of the rest of us who try to change bodies like that. It can be a useful skill, and some of us learnt how to do it, but it is painful. Every bone in your body gets reshaped, grinding down or stretching out to accommodate the changes, your skin tears, your muscles rip… it’s horrendous. Don’t ever do it without a lot of training.”

Lei was nodding along, and Grant shivered slightly. A memory rose to the surface of his mind, a scene from a movie he had watched as a kid, when he had wanted to prove how tough he was to himself and not be scared when watching a gory movie. It had featured a scene almost exactly like what Tamiko was describing, and though he wouldn’t call it a traumatic memory or anything like that, it had nevertheless made a mark on him, and he nodded back in agreement.

“Got it. So,” he said, changing subjects and looking back at the new Lei, “you really just change whenever you get bored? And, if you don’t mind me saying, you seem a bit different now too? Personality-wise, I mean,” he clarified.

“Yes and no,” she said, frowning in thought as she brushed her hair back. “I wouldn’t say it’s just boredom. It’s also a sense of… I don’t know. It’s hard to explain, but sometimes I just feel like it’s the right thing to do. I used to only change for specific reasons, when I was sent out on missions. It’s only been the last twenty years or so that I’ve begun to seriously feel like changing my day-to-day form. At first I experimented by myself, trying to figure out the limits of how long I could keep a form for, but I kept reverting back to a woman no matter what I did. But then, a few years ago, I just woke up one morning and thought “I feel like being a man for the next few months”, and bam. For some reason, I could finally get a form to stick. So I’ve alternated the last couple of years. It’s been nice, honestly. Very freeing. As for the personality changes, well… that’s harder to explain. Part of it is me just using my training to act the way that I’m expected to, for sure.”

“Training?” Grant inquired.

“Oh yeah, I guess we never really discussed this, did we? The short story is that, thanks to my aptitude in polymorphism - that’s the technical term, apparently - I was basically the spy of our little town. It’s not just human bodies I can change between, you see; I can change my species too. More precisely, I can become any kind of magical creature I want. A few people can change to animal forms - for some reason, taking an animal's shape is way easier than another human shape, we could never figure out why - but only I could make myself look like a centaur or a merman or a goblin. So, I was the spy, and I spent a long, long time ensuring that I could fit in anywhere I needed to and fulfil any role.” She glanced at Grant, and shivers ran down his spine as he met her eyes. The face that stared back at him was not a kind one. Barely restrained violence quivered in every fold of her face, and her eyes were filled with a bloodlust that made him want to run away screaming. “Get it?” she asked quietly, eyes boring into his own, locking his gaze in place and making his heart begin to beat so fast it threatened to break his rib cage. Then, the next second, something shifted, and Grant saw a smug, amused woman looking back at him, no more dangerous or murderous than a fluffy bunny.

Tamiko chuckled under her breath. “Damn, that was a good one. Even I almost peed my pants.”

Grant let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding, his instincts still screaming at him to flee and cower behind a tree. He put a hand on his chest, feeling the pounding rhythm, wondering what the hell had just happened. “What..” he said, taking a deep breath, “what the living fuck was that? How did you… that wasn’t just acting. That must have been some kind of mind-fuck magic power, right?”

“Nope,” Lei said cheerfully. “Just a few decades of life-or-death espionage skills. Well, kind of - I use a little bit of magic internally, to shift the muscles just the right way or change the way the light reflects off my eyes, stuff like that. But nothing that directly affects your mind, no.”

“God damn,” said Grant, as impressed as he was terrified.

“I know, right?” Tamiko said, shaking her head.

“Stop, guys, you’re gonna make me blush,” said Lei, putting a hand to her chest, “and I think blushing wouldn’t go very well with this new look, so stop it.”

The joke managed to drain the last of Grant’s remedial terror, and he laughed along with the others.

“But yeah,” Lei continued, brushing her hand along one of the statues they passed, “that’s part of the new me. It’s an instinct, now, to change the way that I act based on the body I take. I honestly don’t really know if I could not change, at least a little. The other side of things is more physical, though. Like, it’s not just that I change gender or size. I more or less rebuild my entire body, and as a result of that, my brain also changes. I don’t really have the skill or knowledge to decide which sections of my brain should stay the same or which should change, so it's more or less automated. Don’t worry,” she added, seeing the look on Grant’s face, “it’s not as drastic as it sounds. I’m still me, for sure, but… well, let's just say that the me whose brain fits into a goblin-sized body is different from the me that fits into a troll-sized body. But still me. The same kind of thing happens whenever I change my body too much. New brain, same me.”

“Don’t try and understand it too much,” Kyra advised Grant over her shoulder from a few metres ahead of them, where she’d apparently been able to hear everything. “You’ll understand the first time you take the form of a hawk and have the sudden urge to go hunting for mice.”

“The form can dictate behaviour, but it does not dictate the true self,” said Fyodor from next to her with a tone of finality.

“There you have it,” Lei said, smiling at Grant. “Now, how do you think I look?”

“Great,” he replied, glancing at her briefly. “I think this is definitely a better look than previously.”

Tamiko scoffed. “He’s just biased,” she muttered to Lei. “I definitely preferred the other you.”