Of course, we didn’t just say “go do your job” to Pale Moon Lake and leave her to figure it out. No, we stuck around for a little and eased her into it, teaching her how it was done. But above all… we got to know her. And so too did Pale Moon get to know herself. Suddenly waking up with thousands of years of impressions of what you were believed to be was obviously a bit disorienting. She was confident and determined. Proud, but not too arrogant. She acted like a regal empress one minute, calm and serene—then would break out into excited gesticulations. She would shout at the top of her lungs, and flail about with her spear and fan. She was getting steadily more competent with her weapons, without herself even really noticing, as she got more and more used to being herself in every sense of the word. Meimei in particular delighted in getting to know an honest-to-goodness mermaid—she had a full tail in place of legs, and silver scales trailed from the sides of her eyes down her cheeks. Her hair was… well, it was both hair and not. It was more fluid than that, more cloud and foam than keratin, though it acted like hair. It was so curly it looked like sheep’s wool, and it was barely restrained in a poofy ponytail. Pale Moon Lake was quite proud of her appearance and “graciously allowed” Meiling to “attend” to her. Pale Moon quickly found out she liked being pampered and obviously really enjoyed it when Meimei started gushing over her scales and hair. She started sidling up to Meimei whenever we finished training for the day, and would start playing with and combing Meiling’s hair so that my wife would be “obligated to return the favour”. It became a quite common scene to see Pale Moon reduced to a near-drooling (...)