“Please tilt your head upward as far as you are able to.” A new series of soft taps on her back delivered the instructions, and Song dutifully followed them, though “as far as she was able to” ended up only being about twenty five degrees or so by her estimate. She was laying on the floor of the bathhouse, getting her injuries looked over by a Physician who had been sent to examine her. It was not a good time

“Everything look okay?” She asked by tapping her single front foot on the ground. Her nerves must have made the question feel quite impatient, because the response was swift and terse.

“I am not finished yet.” Another series of taps, followed by a gentle prodding of the top of her head, feeling over its contours and what remained of the head wound she had suffered upon waking up in this body. She couldn’t help but squirm at the touch, but not because it was painful. “Please hold still, I will be done soon.”

“Sorry…” The salamander took a deep breath, a somewhat awkward action for an animal that could often go for days without using its lungs. But at least the weirdness was distracting.

“It is almost completely healed, minimal scar tissue, likely owing to your regenerative capabilities. I am going to examine your leg next.”

Song couldn’t help but tense up as the Physician climbed off of her back. She knew that they were here to help her, but however much her mind had been scrambled in all of this, it had done nothing to curb her arachnophobia, and it turned out that the one Physician in this city best equipped to assess more exotic animals for the region was a tarantula with a leg-span about a fourth of the size of her entire body. She, or rather Stream-Drifter, remembered something about a handful of arachnid species being large enough on average to typically be Gifted. This did not make her feel any better.

For once, she was happy to be nearly blind. The blurry brown shape entering the periphery of her vision wasn’t as panic-inducing as it otherwise would have been. The sensation of their eight legs crawling and tapping all over her skin, on the other hand, was something out of her worst nightmares.

“Is something causing you discomfort?” the spider asked, gently nudging her side once they were back on the floor. “Please, I need to know about any problems you are experiencing.”

“You are.” Song shuffled away an inch or so, accidentally expressing her issue in the bluntest possible manner. “Not that it’s your fault!” she quickly clarified, swishing her tail across the floor nervously. “I just… have an irrational fear of spiders. Sorry.”

“Is this a recent development?” the Physician asked, taking to waving their front legs where she could see them instead.

“No. This is something I struggled with in my… previous life as well.”

“In that case, there is nothing irrational about it.” When Song simply stared blankly at them, they continued. “Such a fear is unthinking. It is neither rational nor irrational, because your reasoning does not perpetuate it. It simply is.” The salamander wasn’t sure she agreed with that statement, but she appreciated the sentiment.

“Still. You’re an actual person trying to help me, and I’m reacting with fear and disgust like you’re some kind of vermin. It’s wrong.”

“Is it? You assume that you are the only creature experiencing such things. I still have to suppress the urge to run and hide whenever I catch the shadow of a bird flying overhead, despite the fact that I have not encountered a predatory feral bird in years. This is not as uncommon as you seem to believe.”

“...Who are you, exactly?” Song hissed uneasily. Something was off. “You’re talking like a psychologist, not a physician. My injuries aren’t the only things you’re here to examine, are they?”

“You are certainly quick to realize that,” The spider’s movements remained kindly in outward expression, even as they confessed to duplicity. “I have found that it is difficult to accurately assess someone’s state of mind if it knows it is being assessed. You are clearly observant and lucid, though, so I can be more direct from now on.”

“Then I’d appreciate it if you could start by answering the question.” The salamander clenched her jaw. She would have grit her teeth if she actually had any. Few things made her angrier than someone simply pretending to be kind.

“I am Physician Many-Journeys, and I concern myself with psychosomatics. Surely you can see why the conditions of you and the others would be of keen interest to me.” The spider froze for a few moments, as if they were considering how to continue. “I know that you may find it difficult to trust me, but I do take my role seriously. What I learn here will be recorded and shared with Scholars and Physicians across the Known World, providing invaluable insight into how our minds and bodies interact. So if you can allow me to continue the examination, I will-”

“Get out.” Song’s tail thudded on the floor to make her point.

“Please be reasonable, you are not-”

“I told you to get out.” The salamander snapped her jaws in the spider’s direction, making it clear she would not tolerate any further arguments from them. She didn’t need teeth to make a threat.

“...If you insist.” The spider scuttled out the front door of the bathhouse, indignant at their treatment but knowing better than to push their luck. Finally, Song was alone.

It was necessary, she reassured herself, taking an inventory of her body to try and calm down. Every squishy, slimy part of her was where it was “supposed” to be. Even her severed leg seemed to have the beginnings of a replacement, though it would be some time before it was usable. She was starting to feel a little sticky, though, and decided to slide herself back into the bath before it became particularly unpleasant. As she submerged herself in the too-small tub, something about the interaction continued to eat at her.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Song busied herself with some simple maintenance of the space to take her mind off of things. The water in the tub needed to be changed regularly, both for sanitary reasons, and also because she would deplete the oxygen from it after long enough. It was a pretty simple process, thankfully. A sliding ceramic tile on the bottom of the tub covered the drain, and she was able to nudge it open with her snout with a bit of effort. Once it was emptied and re-plugged, a lever near the rim raised another cover, this one on the gravity-fed pipe that filled the basin. It was positioned such that she could push on it with her heavy tail without needing to climb out of the tub, the discovery of which had both made her feel like a genius and made the entire process way, way easier.

The cool, fresh water pouring over her from this spout was by far the most pleasant part of her day. As a human, it would have just been kinda nice or annoyingly cold, depending on the temperature. But as a salamander? It was downright euphoric, like she was being reinvigorated as the weight of the world was lifted from her. She supposed that on some level, it literally was. Still, even as she finally began to relax, a question kept repeating in the back of her mind. Should I have been more trusting of the spider?

The “kind” answer would have been “of course,” to give a stranger the benefit of the doubt because they could actually help, even if they seemed more concerned with research than actually helping. But there was nothing “kind” about treating her like some sort of laboratory specimen to be studied, nor lying about their motives. She refused to respond to deception with kindness. Her principles were one of the few things she had left, sullying them was not an option.

Whose principles are they, though? The question shattered her self-assurance the moment it occurred to her. Carol’s, or the salamander’s? She had tried to avoid thinking about her human name ever since Maggie had managed to guess it, but there was no avoiding it here. She needed to sort this conflict, or else she wouldn’t be able to stop worrying about it.

She had decided the day before that swift acceptance of her reality would be the simplest solution going forward, especially with how limited she was physically. She would hold onto whatever she could while embracing the new. Fighting it would only lead to pain. Thus, her identity solidified. “Song” was an amalgam. Still mostly human, but enough of her was Stream-Drifter rather than Carol that she couldn’t rightly think of herself that way. She was quickly learning, however, that “simplest” didn’t necessarily mean “actually simple.”

She strongly felt that she could not afford to trust anyone who wouldn’t be truthful with her, anyone who wouldn’t trust her in kind. But she also felt that she should give people a chance unless they display outright malice. The former had won out initially, but the latter was nagging at her about doing the “wrong” thing. Two sets of principles, from two sources. Obviously, she would just end up doing what she decided to be best at a given time, but that wasn’t the problem here. The problem was that she couldn’t tell which inclination came from which life. She could recall instances of her acting on both inclinations, but the details escaped her. All she could find were vibes and the knowledge that she believed both ideas, despite them obviously being contradictory. She’d hoped to have been better able to identify what came from where, but if she was already unable to be certain where these ideas came from, then things were worse than she thought. And then there was the potential Worst Case Scenario.

This conflict was mostly benign, but what if something more fundamental was split like that? What if multiple things were like that? How was she supposed to handle her psyche getting pulled apart by mutually exclusive morals and worldviews? Especially if she had trouble telling what even informed them or what picking one over the other would be sacrificing? Of course, that wasn’t anywhere close to happening yet. But it hadn’t even been a possibility until now.

A familiar set of vibrations in the water alerted Song to the bathhouse door scraping open a little, and she poked her head above the water, hoping whoever just arrived would provide a pleasant distraction to the nonsense in her head.

“Is that you, Swift-Paw? Took you long enough. Turns out that spider was-”

“Is Swift-Paw gone?” A tiny squeak that most certainly didn’t belong to the raccoon interrupted Song. It was Quiet-Dream’s kit, the one that had just started talking that morning.”Do you know when she’ll be back? We wanted to ask her a question.”

“Swift-Paw stepped out to get us some food. I don’t know when they’ll be back.” Song tapped out her message cautiously, unsure of how to interact with the child. “Wait, ‘we?’ Is your… mother with you?”

“No, Mother Quiet-Dream is with Ink-Talon. A porcupine wanted their help. My sibling is here with me.”

“Oh. Of course.” She didn’t know what to make of that, but everything was kinda crazy for all of them. It was probably fine, but just in case... “Well… come on in. I wouldn’t want you waiting outside all alone.”

“We weren’t alone. That angry lizard is watching us. I don’t want to wait outside with them either.”

Two blurry shapes entered the room, the darker of the two clearly in the lead, with the lighter gray one sticking close behind. They wandered over to drink some water from one of the nearby openings in the piping, and several minutes of awkward silence passed before the black one spoke up again.

“My name is Black-Leap! I keep forgetting to tell people that!” Black-Leap scampered over to Song, coming snout-to-snout with the salamander as they introduced themselves. “But now you know!”

“It’s a good name. Who picked it?” Song shifted a bit uncomfortably. She was making small talk with a being barely old enough to eat solid foods. Was this normal? Should she treat them like a human child? She’d have to just improvise.

“I named myself!” The kit posed proudly, their movement revealing the gray kit hovering behind them. It was hard to make out with her eyesight, but it seemed… annoyed? It certainly wasn’t happy, that’s for sure.

“Is your sibling okay?” Song asked, moving a little bit to get a better look, only for the young squirrel to likewise reposition to conceal itself.

“No. It’s why we wanted to see Swift-Paw. Mother wouldn’t know what to do. He would just worry.”

“True enough,” the salamander nodded. Quiet-Dream seemed to be an extremely anxious person, probably even before ending up in this situation if Song had to guess. The kit had a good read on him. “Is it something I could help with?”

“Maybe.” Black-Leap paused, as if waiting for confirmation on something. “My sibling has been able to Understand itself since two days ago, back on the wagon. It didn’t tell anyone, and only made itself known to me after Mother left today.”

“But that’s a good thing, right? Why the secrecy?”

“Because I don’t like being aware.” The gray kit peeped, its barely audible voice conveying a strange mix of anger and terror. “I want to go back to sleep.”

All Song could do was stare blankly and blink a few times, entirely stunned by the sentiment but on some level easily able to comprehend it. It struck her as familiar, but she couldn’t quite grasp what Stream-Drifter knew of it, if they even did. Eventually, though, she squeaked out a response.

“I’m sorry.”

Unfortunately, it wasn’t a very helpful one.