[ He watched with fascination, pressed his thumb along the edge of the skin of his palm to stretch the skin of it, just trying to see what affected the course of the spell, how it changed his body. Weird.

And then looked up, shaking his head. ]

Are you kidding? They're... only alike a little. An animal like this one, right, it's never been... I dunno, taught fucking morals, or good and evil. It doesn't know sin, or appreciate beauty. It just... is. Like a storm. Eats when its hungry, has young, learns and suffers and sleeps and dies.

People, though, people know the difference. People, tons of them, all the fucking time, choose to be... cruel, or evil, or assholes. And that's part of what makes being a person hard, right? Is that we've got a duty to, um.... be more than a beast, but the instincts to be even worse than one. Not just to get justice but to get revenge, shit like that.

And that's why... I don't know. It's one thing to be cruel to another person, right? A man in the world expects other people to be fucks, knows the rules of being in a society. But being cruel to an animal is... something worse, kinda. Like like being cruel to children. They don't get the rules, don't understand the stakes or the way things are. They're... innocent, I guess?

In a way.

[ He dug in his pocket for the weird communicator they'd been given, flipped it open and started to laboriously type a message. ]

I'm gonna see if that magic shop pays a bounty for any parts of this animal. And while I wait to hear back, we're gonna talk about this bond shit.