In terms of folklore, lycanthropy took a variety of forms. Yes, that was a pun, but wordplay didn't make my point less valid.

According to some myths, being turned into a werewolf was a matter of taking a contract with an evil spirit. Or getting cursed by a god for fucking up the laws of hospitality so badly that, while Tantalus was probably still the exemplar, punishment was necessary. Maybe the moon was, or wasn't, involved. Getting nibbled on by Canis lupus lupus came about later, because for whatever reason rabies transmission and werewolves didn't get together until pulp fiction. Some werewolves got their curse from picking flowers from graveyards. Not all were-whatever creatures were wolves, were evil, or even changed shape at all. Hell, maybe the stories were just coverups for serial killers in the age of witch trials.

The trouble started once the moon rose.

I'd never especially paid attention to lunar cycles beyond what was necessary. Plenty of Konoha traditions ran on a Western calendar pulled out of a different universe, and so bright moons existed for Tsukimi festivals and ruining stealth missions the world over. After the fact, I recalled that the moon had been there, but that was it.

To the point, mind.

At the time things went weird, Rin and I were out and about. The autumn evening was nippy, not truly cold. Between my circus-given coat and Rin's sudden acquisition of a winter Konoha cloak, we were all right. The town was quieter at night, with the closest thing to a true nightlife taking up the fairgrounds and the circus's attention. With any luck, we'd have a nice, quiet night and raid the closest thing this town had to a library. Even without electric lighting, there had to be something we could find.

"While we're away from the circus, I have a question I don't think was answered," said Rin, as we headed to the lakeshore. The moon's reflection was bright silver in the water, which almost made up for the smell of fish and muck.

Both of us sat down on an empty dock. I could see quite a ways, and Rin cocked her head to one side as she thought.

"Go ahead," I said, turning my flat yellow eyes to her.

"I've had a while to come up with a hypothesis," Rin began, pressing her fingertips together as she thought. "Now that I've met Yasha,and Molly, and also your new form, I think I have enough data. Do you think everyone has been modified somehow?"

"We're kind of a small sample size," I muttered, but that was as solid as my objections went. "Your changes are cosmetic, right?"

"I don't think they are. I mean, yes, my eyes and my hair are different, but there are so many other things." She held a hand out in front of her and pointed at the moon, frowning. "It may just be a trick my brain is playing on me, but I'm sure my night vision wasn't this good before we got here. I can see fifteen meters farther than I should be able to right now, even with full moonlight. Did something similar happen to you?"

I nodded. "It's just…not dark where it should be."

"Exactly! And then when I met Molly, I felt my skin crawling even though he hadn't done anything. It was a totally irrational feeling." Rin threw her hands up in frustration. Her multicolored eyes seemed to flash in the dark, catching the moonlight strangely in my modified vision. "There was some little itchy part of me that was just as upset with Yashafor something. It was completely at odds with my first impressions of almost everyone I've ever met, including Orochimaru."

"I haven't felt anything like that," I said. If I tried, I could probably find something deep in the factoid-centric part of my brain to explain it, but I didn't know for sure. But if Yasha and Molly gave off the same feeling, maybe they both weren't human? "But I've kind of been distracted by…y'know." I tried to wave my tail to catch Rin's attention and accidentally smacked her in the leg instead.

"I do know!" Rin said good-naturedly, waving off my attempted apology. "And I also discovered I can heal without using chakra. I don't understand it, but there's plenty in this world I don't understand." She nodded firmly and clenched her fists as though her determination alone would wrestle truth from the air. "I will, though. Every magic is just insufficiently understood until testing begins!"

I missed her. Isobu stretched out with all of his tails and both forelegs, draping himself over Rin's lap. "Your excessive scientific enthusiasm is a relief, you know."

"Aw, you're making me blush." Rin pressed her hands to her cheeks theatrically, then settled into tweaking the tips of Isobu's tails. "I'm glad you've been here for Kei. It's awful to be alone."

"You were."

"And that's how I know it's awful."

All three of us sighed at the same time. Even the turtle. We were a long way from home with no way to go back immediately. It sucked no matter how many times it happened.

Which was about when I felt a faint ping at the far end of my chakra sensing range. Instantly, my head jerked in the relevant direction and every muscle on me tensed up, which Rin couldn't miss on her worst day.

"I think we just found a friend," I heard myself say.

"Who is it?" Rin asked, following me eagerly as we got to our feet and started striding toward the edge of town. It felt like the right direction.

Except for the lake.

The lightning I was following wasn't a part of a storm, a spell, or anything else conveniently explainable by this world's phenomena. Not at all. I'd know that walking live wire anywhere, and I started to pick up the pace toward the signature even as it took me toward the water.

"Oh, I know who this is!" Rin chirped, and darted after me as we hurried across the waves. Isobu was still clamped tight in her arms.

What kind of shinobi would we be if we let a little water stop us from checking in?

The Ustaloch was a kidney bean-shaped body of water that seemed to be a focal point of local superstition. Rin had encountered giant water snakes here during her week's stay, which seemed to be native. After tying them in a knot, there wasn't much else to prove to the out-of-place fauna. Rin knew it, I knew it, and anything that survived a Rin-rampage was probably going to live long enough to learn it.

Thus, we didn't run into any threats for a while.

The lakeshore butted up against forest, but not true woods as we'd come to understand in Konoha. There, the trees were wider around than any human arm-span at a dead minimum. Here, I got the impression that the logging industry was less of an organized affair and more just because people around here didn't have any other way to heat their houses in the winter. Coming to a world without basic amenities felt like such a step back it wasn't on the same continent.

And we weren't.

My feet hit sand again a little before Rin's did, and we clambered up onto the shore and into tree cover.

"Wait… Is that…?" Rin murmured behind me, just as the source of Kakashi's chakra signature padded into view.

My first thought was, Holy fuckhe's a werewolf.

My second was, Oh fucking hellhe's big.

Hanging around summoned animals a lot had a way of messing with one's sense of scale, but I was still sure the white wolf in front of me had to be well over three times as big as a normal one. At least. The heavy snow-white coat was interrupted only by a black muzzle split by two rows of white-and-red teeth and a dark spot over his left eye, like someone copy-pasted the coat of a sweet mutt over a dire wolf's frame. All of his teeth were bared and his breath formed thick fog in the moonlit cold air.

That rumble definitely wasn't thunder. Instead, it sounded like a growl.

You know, I think I could keep him from biting anyone.

Well, I thought as I felt Rin grip my arm, shit.

Rin and I started moving parallel to the massive wolf, along the lakeshore and through cattails. Neither of us took our eyes off him.

Sure, Kakashi's long strides mirrored my movements exactly like a large predator would, but hell. I was at least as vicious as a wolf of any size. And he didn't seem to want to head into the water. Instead, those mismatched eyes stayed on us, glittering in the dark. If I had to guess, neither Rin nor I came up to his shoulder. Rin in particular.

He can bite me.

There were, apparently, some concrete benefits to having an invulnerable companion. Same principle as a crocodile, I theorized. My thoughts weren't too frantic, though seeing a Sharingan in a wolf's face was fairly unsettling. There wasn't any recognition in that gaze that I could detect. Wolves have more muscles to close their jaws than they do to open them. Or at least the muscles are stronger.

I felt Rin's chakra pulse as she activated the first stage of her Strength of a Hundred seal, just in case. Well, there went the threat level of this little encounter. On his best day, Kakashi couldn't hope to beat Rin at arm wrestling. On Rin's best day, Gamabunta would lose.

"Let me know if you want me to keep him busy," Rin said softly.

Out of the corner of my mouth, I said, "Maybe once I have a plan. Isobu's talking."

Speaking of, I meant "he can bite me" more in the manner of a dog trying to pick up a ball too big for its mouth. You know the look.

…Isobu.

If it works, I doubt either of us will care how silly it looks. And Rin would hardly mention it.

Isobu, please don't break his teeth. We have no idea how any of this shit works.

Having not seen a competent dentist… Fine.

I picked Isobu up by his shell. In my hands, he curled into a spiked medicine ball of doom. Tossing him up and down a few times to get a sense of his weight, I nodded to Rin. Then I held him one-handed and eyed Kakashi's growling form.

"Chew on this," I suggested cheerfully, and pitched Isobu right at his face.

Once upon a time, a version of me with her nose constantly in a book read an awful lot about strange beasts and magical principles. I'd never lived those rules, of course, because there was one such system in my life and it was already bullshit enough for two. But in those books had been stories of how all sorts of animal minds worked.

Per the works of one Sir Terry Pratchett, werewolves kept one foot in the human world and a paw in the world of wolves. Made them a bit of both. And what did you call a wolf with human influence spanning back generations uncounted?

Maybe, just a bit, there was a bit of dog in there.

I probably should have predicted what happened next.

Kakashi whipped his huge head around and snatched Isobu neatly out of the air. He fumbled for a split second, teeth or tongue catching Isobu's spikes the wrong way, but stubbornly refused to let the little monster drop. The head jerk motion was nearly the same as a natural wolf's, but it'd been designed for prey the equivalent size of a mouse. Isobu was a little too round and tough.

Isobu hadn't discussed his next move with me, but in theory he was capable of keeping Kakashi's entire head restrained with just his tails. He started to uncoil, gripping fur with his little hands.

And then Kakashi shook his head exactly like the signature back-breaking swing I'd only observed in terriers before. Also in Pakkun, but Pakkun hunted about as often as pigs flew. Isobu made a noise like a pissed-off cat and two of his tails looped around Kakashi's lower jaw, but that didn't seem to stop him. He just adjusted his grip on Isobu and half-closed his eyes, shaking my combat buddy so hard I heard Isobu swear inside my head from frustration.

"That's not hurting him, is it?" Rin asked worriedly.

Isobu's cursing was definitely the angry kind.

"I don't think—Kakashi, is that fun?" I asked before I could stop myself.

At the sound of my voice, his mismatched eyes locked on me again. I wasn't sure he recognized my voice, because both of our bodies were kinda fucked up and our faces were…intact. Hell if I knew what we smelled like.

Rin at least looked like herself, even if she was glowing a bit from her jutsu.

Then he dropped his chest and forelegs to the bank, his straight tail up and wagging. His non-Sharingan eye angled up, toward us, and one of his ears almost flopped as he let out a noise not unlike a growl. But higher.

"Oh no." I fought valiantly to keep my hand from hitting my face. I had horns now. It'd probably hurt. "No."

Rin started to snicker.

I take back what I said about my brilliant plan.

You made that bed, and now you get to lie in it, I told him, but I stepped toward the bank anyway.

Kakashi skittered back at least a meter.

I stepped forward twice.

Kakashi retreated two meters.

Aw, dammit. I facepalmed anyway, and damn the consequences. "Hey, Kakashi. Drop him, please."

Kakashi's response was something like "Awuf."

"Kakashi." I crouched just a bit, my tail lashing. "Come on, drop the turtle."

Though her hands covered her mouth, Rin managed to say, "I don't think he's listening."

He did not drop the turtle. In fact, he turned tail and booked it when I darted for Isobu's loose tail. The only saving grace was that the island wasn't that big. He couldn't run forever.

"I DON'T CARE IF YOU'RE A HUNDRED KILOS BIGGER, GET BACK HERE!"

Rin was too doubled over with laughter to help.

Like I said. Probably should have seen that coming.

It took five hours for Kakashi to finally keel over for a nap. Still giant and wolfy and with Isobu trapped between his dinner plate paws, but at least he stopped running. The night's festivities were like playing keep away if the ball kept shrieking out of injured pride, chasing away nesting birds and generally making a racket. Had I actually been able to sleep, it probably would have pissed me off something fierce. Otherwise, the screaming mostly marked Kakashi's location and helped me keep a bead on them while the chase was on.

As a direct result of these shenanigans, I was dead on my feet by morning. Plenty of chakra left, but not perhaps the best control. Also, crabbier than Isobu. In my experience, no amount of foreign caffeine made up for just never getting to sleep, even if I knew where to get any.

Rin patted my head when I mentioned this problem. "I'm sure Kakashi had fun."

At least I could lean against Kakashi's white flank to rest once he settled. Rin was sitting on his other side, humming as she did a medical scan. All the data was coming up Dog. I supposed he could be a dire wolf, albeit one with strange markings. I had a vague notion that real dire wolves were supposed to have spikes like Isobu, though. And be a lot more aggressive than Kakashi was, once the ice was broken.

While dawn's first light touched the treetops and the sky turned orange and clouds became pink, Kakashi raised his huge head with his tongue lolling out of his mouth. He nosed at the world's most dangerous tennis ball, and Isobu roused.

Isobu, still trapped between his paws, grumbled like an annoyed alligator and poked his head out of the mountain of fur. He tolerated the prodding with bad grace, then said, "I cannot help but notice that he is still huge and fluffy."

"That's been bothering me, too. I mean, he's a perfectly healthy giant animal at the moment, but he has Kakashi's chakra signature." When I leaned my head back to look askance at her, Rin could only shrug. "Really. I don't know what's going on! This is magic, and that's both intriguing and incredibly frustrating." She patted Kakashi's fur. "We'll get you back to normal somehow, all right?"

Kakashi made a "whuf" noise and twisted until his snout could nearly rest in my lap. Then he sighed, as though content.

Unfortunately, I couldn't wait forever. I lifted his head off me about five minutes later, letting him make sad puppy eyes at me as I got to my feet. Next on my to-do list was tearing into my emergency supplies.

Yes, I still had them in a storage seal in my foot. It was harder to replace than conventionally stored bags.

At some point during life as a member of any shinobi corps, people learned to pack efficiently whether they wanted to or not. Setting aside the perennial issue of folding versus rolling and how putting storage scrolls inside of each other tended to result in explosions, I retrieved three full sets of clothes that didn't compensate for the tail I sported now. Fortunately, one of them turned out to be Izo's Whitebeard-emblazoned T-shirt and the bright red jacket (designed for people who were over two meters tall). Uniform pants were a little harder to be sure of, but I had a pair cut for Obito since he was still in the "throw it all in" school of keeping shit organized and needed a bit of help. Instead, I got to be pack mule.

By the time the sun rose, I expected Kakashi to turn back into a person. At least then I could yell at him properly for scaring me.

Instead, he shook his head with so much force that he sent a ripple through his entire body, his ears pricking to attention. Rin's grip in his fur was thankfully strong enough to keep her from being tossed to the ground, but it was a close thing. He rolled to his feet all at once, with Rin still on his back, and looked around frantically until his mismatched eyes landed on me.

"...You all right?" I asked, even as I raised my hand.

He pushed his nose into my hand. It was wet and his breath was hot, coming in quick pants. His normal eye was dark with the whites showing around the edges, and his Sharingan spun slowly as fear set in.

I grabbed onto his fur with both hands. He lowered his head until I could press my forehead to his, planting a kiss in the middle of his fur. While the whine in his throat echoed up through me, too, I stroked the sides of his head and tried to soothe the fear. I could feel the panic trying to control him and the growl starting to build, but I hung on anyway. I wasn't any better, now that I knew for sure he was really in there and not just his chakra.

"Shh, shh," I murmured. Above my head, I felt Rin's hand briefly brush mine as she, too, tried her best to let Kakashi know we were both here for him. "I've got you now, all right? Everything's going to be okay."

Rin slid down his back until she could touch ground again "You look totally different, but you only just realized it now, didn't you?"

Kakashi made a mournful noise, his ears flat against his skull.

It took us a while to convince him, but eventually Kakashi laid miserably on the ground next to me. With my backpack wide open so Rin could use it, we all curled up together on that bleak little shore as Rin scanned his chakra again.

Kakashi leaned into my side and my arm clung to his thick fur ruff. Though I couldn't claim to be a mind reader, I was pretty good at moods if people around me had chakra to read. Kakashi did believe us, to a point, but the rest of his signature rattled with undirected, unfamiliar fear.

Rin started slowly going through her medical checks. Her chakra was clamped down hard as her training took over, hands glowing faintly green in my mind's eye. Even from my comparatively amateur understanding of animal transformations, Kakashi's stamina was shot to hell and his confidence had taken a beating, so it was no wonder why Rin was so serious. At least no one had hurt him before found him. That was something.

It had to be.

"I'm here. We'll get through this."

Kakashi whined with his muzzle in his paws. In that tone, I heard, What happened?

While Rin scanned Kakashi for abnormalities, I explained what I knew about werewolves—infections and moon cycles, mostly—and the knot of worry in my stomach kept tightening alongside Kakashi's lightning chakra. It didn't mean anything to him. It was all empty words.

I didn't know what the fuck I was talking about in this world, and that scared all of us.

"Do you remember how you ended up this way?" I asked him, barely keeping my voice steady.

Kakashi shook his huge head just enough to get his point across, terrified of dislodging me.

Getting occasionally knocked unconscious or fainting were facts of life as shinobi. Kakashi, with the drain from the Sharingan, viewed the latter as an old and irritating friend. But losing control? Losing his body? Never. In his entire life, Kakashi lost a grand total of maybe an hour to altered states of consciousness from genjutsu tricks or getting drunk. His discipline allowed no more.

Losing control wasn't something he did. This was a whole new frontier of impossible to deal with.

He did his best to keep his eyes both locked on Rin as she took his pulse and listened to his breathing, trying to figure out where it had all gone wrong. She wasn't a vet. She'd practiced on humans. We were so screwed.

"As far as I can tell, you're perfectly healthy," Rin said finally, running her fingers over one of his dinner plate-sized paws. "Just a giant wolf. This has to be another magic thing. It might also explain why it took you until now to remember you're supposed to be human. You really didn't remember anything?"

Lowering his head onto his paws again, he sighed deeply. Perhaps in direct response, Isobu started carding his much smaller hands through Kakashi's fur. Maybe he just wanted to see what it felt like. It wasn't like real animals often let him close.

"From one perspective,"Isobu said thoughtfully, "it is very like being an inexperienced jinchūriki." Bobbing in the lake, Isobu wiggled all of his tails as Kakashi jerked his head toward him. "I think Kei remembers her early experiences well because she did not reach V2 before learning some self-control. But I recall instances where other jinchūriki have not been so lucky."

Utakata came to mind immediately, though he'd hit his berserker threshold early due to severe injury. All of his usual surgical precision careened out the window. Then Blue B and the time Gyūki's seal split wide open. And then there was our very own Naruto…

"Though there is one big exception," I said, when Kakashi made a little acknowledging noise. His feelings on the matter were still fairly negative, but he'd dealt with worse. "I don't think you can exactly 'befriend' the wolf mind. At least, not like Isobu."

"I, for example, am a person. Your affliction seems to have superimposed the mind of a dog on top of yours. Temporarily."Isobu eyed Kakashi carefully as he thought about what to say next. He tucked his little hands under his belly. "Without a proper tongue, can you use that eye of yours to speak to us?"

"Huh." I glanced down at the top of Kakashi's head. "That might work?" I was mostly surprised that suggestion came from Isobu, because he'd never been fond of Kakashi's use of the Sharingan. Tolerated? Sure. Occasionally been grateful for in desperate circumstances? Fine. But he generally didn't volunteer to have anything to do with the Sharingan if at all possible.

"If that would work, I think you're in the right place to try it." Rin's eyes were a little glazed over as she went over the data her scan gave her, but she was clearly listening.

Kakashi made a curious noise in the back of his throat, ears twitching. He nosed at Isobu again, then met the little beastie's eye with his Sharingan. As though now was the perfect time to test it. I kept my hands in his fur for the length of the staring contest, feeling my nerves tremble in anticipation of whatever other curveballs this place could throw our way. We didn't need any more.

A second later, Isobu said as though in response to a question, "No. There was a threat display"—which had been terrifying in the moment because I hadn't known what to do—"but once you had me in your teeth, it was all a game. You did not hurt anyone."

I sagged in relief. Thank fuck it worked.

"And then we had a nice nap. Or you did," Rin added, as Kakashi deflated slightly from sheer relief. His tail thumped the ground once while she spoke, "With Isobu tucked between your huge paws, after playing Keep Away with him."

Kakashi managed a mortified expression, even as near-unrecognizable as he was. His chakra burned with shame. He whined uncomfortably.

"You absolutely did." Rin smiled for the first time since Kakashi had realized the situation. She scratched his ears. "It was worse than when Pakkun tried teaching a stray dog how Fetch worked."

Kakashi twisted his head over so he could rub at his Sharingan against his foreleg. Then he sighed up at both of us. Those eyes seemed to ask, What now?

I had no idea. All I could think of was going back to the circus and telling them I'd have to leave for the foreseeable future, because my fiancé had been magically transformed into an animal and everything was terrible. I couldn't stick around. Rin and I needed to find a way to fix this.

Kakashi sighed deeply.

"Body modifications seem to be all the rage, now," Isobu griped while we all tried to absorb what kind of situation we'd been dropped into. He curled his tails around Rin's wrist and mine, then sat squarely on Kakashi's right front paw. "We cannot just sit idle and hope for a solution to fall onto our heads. You are a dog, I am small, Kei has a limb she cannot use, and Rin has also been changed on some spiritual level. These things are unfortunate, but we are alive. We are capable. And we will find a way to get our bodies back."

Kakashi snorted, but he accepted the ear rubs when Rin offered.

For normal people, the phrase "hiked the lake back to town" probably needed to be modified by the word "around." Not so for us. Even Kakashi-turned-Suicune. Or whatever he was.

At least something went right today.

This feeling did not last once the morning mist burned off, because it never did. Town was different overnight.

Trekking back to the circus, only to find that everyone was under house arrest and the place was on lockdown thanks to the Crownsguard, was a bit of a shock. Learning about a minor zombie outbreak followed in that vein, because of course it did. Since I couldn't waltz into camp without a disguise and daylight guards were almost always more alert than graveyard-shifters, the three of us moved on to poking the periphery.

"Sorry if this is...rude, but, uh." Without the brightly colored costumes the circus folks wore, I at least couldn't be instantly picked out as one of the crew. It was pragmatic, but not particularly nice for the ones who'd been arrested. "If I could just get past…?"

"Move along already, you nosy devil." The Crownsguard spat to the side even as all of us watched him. "Everyone here is under suspicion of murder."

Kakashi, with his fur held tight by Rin's hands, didn't quite manage to avoid growling as the guard got in my face.

"Keep your damn dog on a leash," was the guard's suggestion before he really got sick of us.

In some worlds, dogs wore collars. Or service vests. Or both. To get Kakashi's way-too-damn-big wolf form into town, Rin and I puzzled over the problem until we remembered the vests and headbands Kakashi made for all of his dogs back when he had proper thumbs instead of dewclaws. So, after digging through our emergency supplies and scrubbing what seemed to be deer blood from around Kakashi's dark muzzle, we'd collaborated.

The Whitebeard jacket was tied around his thick neck like a cheery little scarf, the sleeves arranged into a bow. Somehow combining that with a leash made of rope—attached to the jacket, not his neck—made him a "dog" in human brains.

A very, very big dog that smelled like the forest.

Isobu might've messed with the guards' heads a bit to make it work, but it worked no matter how much we cheated. Therefore, it was victory through technicality.

Kakashi was very patient through the entire process and even let a different guard shake his paw, which was more than I would have offered at the time. Then again, I probably would have been turned into a turtle if I wasn't already a demon-blooded person. Apparently.

In the end, we ditched the crime scene and went looking around for help.

"It could have been more humiliating if we tried, yes," Isobu said to Kakashi's apparently Sharingan-transferred question. "I have already pretended to be a ventriloquist dummy. Most people do not realize I am a person, either."

Kakashi sighed, and both Rin and I patted his hulking shoulders.

And, because Kakashi's nose was more useful than my inherent radar in a world where only the four of us had chakra, we managed to track down the only member of the circus who wasn't trapped either in the stockade or the campground. It took a few minutes, and we scared more than a few people while trotting through town in our search, but we did it. I could tell that the second Kakashi turned up his nose and refused to even think of walking into a building, because he was too busy sneezing.

It turned out that only so many people smelled like a combination of patchouli, road dust, and stale alcohol, even in a town with a decent-sized population. Really, the patchouli was the defining factor when it came to Mollymauk Tealeaf. And not tea.

I'd noticed strange things in the performers' boxes while helping out at the circus, but I couldn't track a drop of perfume across a country. Kakashi could. Even if he still hated the smell.

There was a comparison to be made to Prince Humperdinck, but that was a different story.

Anyway, we found the world's most colorful fortune teller in an inn off the side of the street.

Kakashi and Isobu stayed outside, with Isobu sitting on the end of his lead as though he was responsible in the slightest. Kakashi, for his part, settled on the ground with his muzzle on his paws and made a miserable noise. The smell of alcohol didn't agree with him, but bacon probably did. There was a hindbrain-level instinct for meat rattling around in there.

I needed to find some way to feed him, and it couldn't involve setting him loose on wildlife. Unless he wanted to do that.

Molly wasn't terribly colorful when I walked in, or at least hadn't been for a bit. Instead, Molly sat at a table and carefully wiped off enough makeup to disguise a clown. His solid red gaze darted to me and then Rin when he noticed us entering the Nestled Nook Inn, and he waved with his free hand. "Good to see you, Carey. Rin, too. Rough night?"

"I…" Okay, where did I start? "I guess. I think yours might've been worse."

"Oh, I don't know." Molly eyed me as the last of the peach-colored makeup was wiped away. "What's an unjust arrest and unfriendly small town, in the grand scheme of things? Sure, the Crownsguard are probably going to kill us all if they can't find whoever turned the old man into a monster, but…" Molly paused. "You know, I don't think there's really a bright side to that. How about you?"

I glanced at Rin, who shrugged. Ought I tell Molly about Kakashi's rather fuzzy problem? Or Rin's super strength?

"Did your friend just keep you up all night?" Molly flashed a sharp-toothed grin, but his heart wasn't in it. While the grin didn't waver, my stone-faced response didn't seem to be encouraging. "Trouble in paradise?" he tried again.

Was that supposed to be an innuendo?

Yeah, nope. Not telling him shit. I ignored the comment and sat down at the table, followed almost immediately by Rin and then Isobu as he rolled into the bar area, the latter of whom couldn't see over the edge of the table.

He did send me an awful image of the underside of said table, just to be an ass. Or to repay my comment, perhaps.

I shook the picture from my mind's eye and asked Molly, "What exactly happened last night?"

Molly did lay his cards out on the table, once I proved unwilling to play along with any teasing. He explained, likely not for the first time, that the show had gone on exactly as it always had for the majority of the time last night. Right up until an old man turned into an undead monster and killed someone else, who then also turned into an undead monster. Running with the theory that the circus wasn't in the business of murdering customers, Molly and his new co-conspirators—coincidentally the same motley crew he'd charmed into attending just yesterday morning—had spent most of today investigating the old man's usual haunts.

"And we found basically nothing," said a new voice.

I leaned back a bit and spotted a woman in blue robes stomping down the stairs. Now that I had better light and more inclination to give a shit, the blue fabric of her outfit reminded me quite a lot of some of the more coastal towns in the Land of Fire and perhaps even what I'd seen in the Fire Temple I'd visited once. Though the specific pattern was unfamiliar, there were some similarities to the cloth used in the Land of Water as well. Her features were more like mine than, say, any human I'd met so far.

Actually, she kind of looked like Sokka.

I do not see how that helps us.

That woman was followed almost immediately by a blue tiefling with dark, backward-curling, silver-capped horns more like Molly's than mine. She was probably a hand's span shorter than I was, wearing a dark blue slit skirt peppered with peach and pink tones. Her sleeves almost reached the floor, but in a Western style instead of a furisode, and she wore both a half-length green cape and a sickle in a sheath on her belt.

And then there was the half-orc behind her, dressed head to toe in dark leather armor. The two-tone green on him looked a little odd when I thought back to the only other half-orc I knew, but I was literally dull, dark pink all over and two of the other people at the table were blue and lavender. At this point, the time for pointing fingers was past. A scar bisected his eyebrow and formed an X further up his face, and his hair was dark, half-shaved, and sported a sharp gray streak. If I had to guess, he might've been older than I was, and he was definitely around Kakashi's height.

Well, before he got turned into a giant wolf.

I cleared my throat as our table got a bit more crowded, thanks to the woman in blue, the blue tiefling, and the half-orc from the last inn incursion. I cleared my throat. "Okay. Well, then, it's about time for introductions."

"Seems like we're all in the same boat," agreed the half-orc as he dragged a chair over to the table. "I figure Molly might've introduced us, but again from the top, just so we're all clear. The name's Fjord, with a J."

"I am Jester!" Jester beamed as she followed suit, sliding into place next to Fjord. "I didn't get any of your names before, but it is very nice to meet you!"

"Beau, short for Beauregard," was the monk's terse response. Though I certainly couldn't make judgement calls on what parents named their kids, Beau still added, "My parents wanted a boy."

"I see," I said, while Isobu clambered up onto the edge of the table and folded his forelegs like some kind of mob boss. He didn't quite have the shoulder rotation range, however. "By the way, Molly, I wanted to apologize for something else."

"Well, we can get that out of the way first."

"I lied when I told all of you my name, before." I picked Gustav's fake identification paperwork out of a pocket and set it flat on the table. Beauregard just picked it up to stare at it, scrutinizing me. "If you all like, you can call me Keisuke. Or Kei. These two do."

Isobu nodded firmly. "The fake name was useful for deflecting attention, but there does not seem to be much point. There is no one here to recognize us. Thus, you may call me Isobu." His eye narrowed to a glowing red slit that made him look like a monster from the depths, if the depths were floor height. "And if any of you call me anything but my name, I will douse you in ice water until you learn better."

"Oh, I wish I spoke this language," Rin said after a second, waiting for an Isobu translation that didn't seem to be forthcoming. "I miss so many more jokes this way. Even more than normal."

"Okay, okay, O Kei." And so it began. Molly's tail lashed as he sat back, though the grin quickly slipped off his face. What had happened to the circus must've really rattled him. I wasn't nearly as close to anyone there as Molly was, but spontaneous zombies weren't reassuring either. "I didn't quite get that, Rin, but don't worry. I don't think you got what I said earlier."

This time, Isobu did translate, and Rin's reply amounted to, "Thanks for your patience!"

"Are you doing some kind of ventriloquist thing?" Beau asked Rin.

After Isobu repeated the question—and finally explained what a ventriloquist was—Rin said, "Isobu speaks two languages. I don't. I like the idea of having Isobu as our translator." Rin added, after a moment's thought, "He's really quite clever about it."

This didn't seem to work out for Beau, but it wasn't like she could interrogate her.

"You say that now." I sighed, then I looked squarely to Beauregard and had a sudden flash of Yugito, who was one of the few people I knew who played devil's advocate because she had a chip on her shoulder the size of Matatabi. "Nonetheless. If you need any help with this, count us in."

Rin nudged me once Isobu had translated.

"Uh," I corrected myself, "mostly. If I skip sleeping any more, I'll be useless for an investigation." What with the whole giant wolf problem, I could probably help with the investigation as long as Rin kept an eye on Kakashi. Kakashi could clearly still recognize us while huge and fluffy and taken over by dog-instincts, but we didn't know what the exact catalyst for his transformation was and couldn't predict much about it.

Molly didn't even blink as the opportunity for innuendo passed. Maybe he really was distracted.

"That is good for now. Now we are just waiting for the stinky wizard and the little one to join us finally." Jester glanced up at the door. Per Molly, they'd branched off to search the town on their own because they were the only ones not slapped with "person of interest" status.

"Rin? Do you know anything?" I asked.

Rin shook her head even before I finished asking the question. "I'm sorry, I don't know who those people might be."

And I hadn't been in town back then. Oh well. To the others, I said, "So, what do we do for now?"

Unfortunately, we were in a tavern. There was an obvious option. Molly checked his coin purse and clearly thought of ordering everything. He leaned back a bit in his seat to get the barkeep's attention.

Oh dear.

"You know, O Kei, I haven't seen you drink in all the time I've known you. Teetotaler?" Molly asked.

"I found out four years ago I'm literally incapable of getting drunk," I said, though the entirely unfair contest with the Whitebeard Pirates had been kind of funny. It'd turned into more of a bladder endurance match than anything after about the fifteenth drink. "And before that, it wasn't to my taste."

Molly and Beau were both looking at me like I'd told them I had a terminal disease. I could feel the goblin's eyes on the side of my head, too.

"Oh, you poor dear," Molly began.

Rin laughed as I debated flipping Molly off for being a condescending prick. "It really doesn't mean much in a society that has safe drinking water. Maybe it means more here?"

"Ah, but we can make safe water. Therefore, there is no need to drink whatever that terrible stuff is."

Rin and Isobu exchanged a very silly low-five as I sighed.

"Nice to see you have my back," I griped.

"Hey," said Beau, snapping her fingers to get my attention. I felt Isobu's hackles rise and had to silently shush him, or else he'd have crunched through the table with all the restraint of, well, him. "What's your story?"

"I had some bad luck, and the circus helped me out with the papers and so on," I said, meeting her gaze without changing my expression at all. I'd been eyeballed by tougher customers before, and most of them had been two seconds leaping over obstacles to murder me. This was nothing. "And helped me reunite with Rin, even if they didn't know I'd find her in Trostenwald. So, here we are."

Beau scowled. "Then what was that about not moving at night? You're not wanted by the Crownsguard. You didn't get arrested. What's the story there?"

I thought about making a sexually suggestive quip solely to get Beau to stop bothering me, then dismissed the option. Instead, I looked to Rin for confirmation and got another bored shrug in response. Rin was too busy trying to decide if she was going to be in the throes of her curiosity to bother with me. Rin was just having fun with Science, and Jester seemed patient enough to tolerate the prodding.

"Call it luck," I suggested. "I had the night off. And for better or for worse, the Crownsguard hasn't assumed all tieflings know each other."

Molly flipped me off with his free hand, not even bothering to put his drink down. Entirely in line with circus communication as I'd seen it.

"But I didn't know you until today." Jester tilted her head to one side, like a dog hearing a new sound.

Speaking of, was that shouting coming from outside? And growling.

Um.

"Be right back!"