{{wst>shyriath|It did not take someone with a deep insight into the takma mind to tell that Shyriath was having difficulty bearing up under his current circumstances.

While he found the experimentation of Einriss and Puugwol uncomfortable and sometimes painful, he rarely made efforts to resist it. And neither did he remain uncooperative in communication - indeed, he seemed increasingly inclined to talk, sometimes even civilly.

"At least your voices," he muttered, "are real, and I know they're real. Given the others I've started hearing, it's something to hold on to. I just don't understand the particulars of these amusements I've been invited to participate in." He lay still in his cage as Einriss prepared to attempt some biochemical alterations, the nature of which was not clear to him; it was clear that Shyriath had no idea what an "enzyme" was nor what altering the ones in his muscle fibers would do.}}

{{wst>pinkgothic|If it hadn't been for Puugwol's forays into esoteric uses of bilaak-tesh, Einriss might have not commented at all and simply ignored the conversation - not because he objected to conversing, but simply because it was a topic not adjacent to his interests. This way, there was at least a route back to his curiosities, and so he asked, as he worked: "How do they manifest and what are they saying?", a small thread in his mental landscape latching onto the different ways hallucinogenic drugs could affect a body.}}

{{wst>shyriath|"People I knew once, mostly," Shyriath replied morosely. "Old friends. Some of them speak as if they'd just met me on the street and are asking how I've been. Others are demanding to know why I'm not escaping and trying to kill Dlyss before she gets everyone else killed. One assumes," he added bitterly, "that they can't see the shackles."

"Is 'Evrith' one of those friends?" Puugwol interrupted. At Shyriath's sharp look, she added mildly, "you spoke her name in your sleep earlier."

The elderly green looked away, hesistating. "A... friend, yes. In a way. Or at least we found ourselves on the same side. She was an oracle, you see. That tends to give on an advantage in being persuasive."}}

{{wst>pinkgothic|At this, Einriss's interest naturally waned - Puugwol was certainly better-equipped to talk to people about imaginary voices, and if she was going to talk about it with Shyriath, all the better, and he could simply listen, instead, while focussing more on the task at hand. There was, it turned out, more to the issue of weakness in the Chosen than simple insufficient muscle mass - there was something subtly wrong about the structure of the fibres themselves, and Einriss was starting to think that, after a few false starts on prior days, he had it figured it out. A few more checks might just be all that was needed.}}

{{wst>shyriath|"You //knew// an oracle?" Puugwol exclaimed. She stood stock still for a moment, her color and texture shifting kaleidoscopically, and then burst out: "Did she ever any anything about species changing over time?"

Shyriath was clearly baffled at the question. "...yes?"

"And they do???"

"...apparently?"

Puugwol emitted a delighted shriek and pounced on Einriss. //"Einriss did you hear that!"// she bellowed into his face.}}

{{wst>pinkgothic|"Mmhmm," Einriss confirmed, lightly moving his head out of the way of the shouting to protect his ears - for all the marginal good it did. "I thought the existence of the Chosen already established that," he mused, absent-mindedly.}}

{{wst>shyriath|"Yes yes," Puugwol replied insistently, pulling back a bit, "but I don't mean like that. We're not a different species from other takmar and we've never seen any evidence that we //diverged//, as such. We know non-Chosen parents produce Chosen children even when they themselves have no Chosen ancestry. We didn't //diverge//. But it always seemed to me that such a thing must have happened-"

She stopped, and glanced over her shoulder at the bemused Shyriath. "That //is// what your Oracle was talking about, yes?"

"Yes," he replied absently, "I'm afraid so."

"That different species are related?"

"If not all of them, then at least many of them," he replied a bit sourly, "or so she said. I am under the impression that, given the spans of time involved, there was a limit to how far she could investigate things without devoting herself to it entirely."}}

{{wst>pinkgothic|Einriss seemed to consider the notion for a while. "I suppose it's plausible," he muttered, still mostly focussed on his task. "We do share an awful lot of biochemistry with everything else from Avishraa that moves, whereas the life local to this world seems quite different." He was not, apparently, taking this revelation with the necessary gravity.}}

{{wst>shyriath|Puugwol nodded thoughtfully. Something seemed to occur to her, and she asked Shyriath, "Did she cite any examples to support what she said?"

"Yes," he said, "and demonstrated it in practice. She took one of our xtauh companions as a mate, and eventually bore a daughter that was a, a hybrid."

"A xtauh-"

"A species that lives north of the mountains, in the desert. They're small, their antennae stick sideways..."

"Oh. The //ghiidan//." Puugwol considered this. She had never seen a ghiidan personally, but they were known to wander into Dunooma on occasion, usually after a bad encounter with the orghysh in the grasslands. She looked at Einriss. "I wonder if - if we only knew more about the relationships between species - it would help identify useful mechanisms that could be easily replicated in our own bodies."}}

{{wst>pinkgothic|"What are you thinking about?" Einriss probed. It wasn't as though he didn't know how to manipulate a zygote into having a different genetic mark-up, after all, so that part wasn't a bottleneck that needed solving. He couldn't immediately think of something that was not better done by continued takmar-specific investigations.}}