Found this scrap in an old black notebook—don’t think I’ve posted it anywhere before. Might just come into the story later.

On my third week studying body-modification formulas, I knew I was getting close to my second breakthrough. The first one was a warmup, really; just a basic modification of a regeneration potion to grow extra body parts. It takes a couple days to get used to an extra pair of arms, but once you do get the hang of it, working in the lab is so much easier.

I made a couple of other, intimate, changes as well, which I figured Toby would like. But this second project was for Toby himself.

I wanted to ask him to live with me.

But he’s human.

Humans don’t live in this world.

Traditional transformation formulas are kind of random. You can reliably change, say, into a fox, but it won’t be any fox in particular: fur and eye color, height and weight all may vary. Normally this is a feature—several people can use the same potion and not look like a clone army—but I wanted to make Toby an identity for this world, without taking umpteen different shapechanging drinks, which wouldn’t be healthy anyway.