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Logically speaking, Raine knew there had to be a reason she was more embarrassed about her state of dress as a wolf, than as a human. A few days ago she had worn a bikini to the oasis beach party that covered nothing but the bare essentials as a human. Even if she had also worn a towel for most of the time out of the water, she had left it on the beach to swim. Now, as a wolf, she was barely comfortable being seen wearing a towel that covered almost all of her, and kept peeking around corners to see if anyone might see her.

The irony was not lost on her that her own feelings were inverted to social norms. She was surprisingly comfortable showing skin somewhere safe amongst friends, even with her newfound perspective on how cold it was compared to fur. Meanwhile she was embarrassed to show anything at all as a wolf when no one would have noticed her walking around totally naked.

Well, Sythe probably would have noticed, in a good way. He clearly had something for Maren, but Raine had noticed she caught his eye more as a wolf than as a human.

She tried not to dash along the corridor as she made her way through the manor down past the remains of the oasis room. There was a hole in the wall where Red had blasted through it with fire, not knowing he'd already succeeded because of the magic. Someone had put a chair where the doorway had been, with a handwritten note hanging over the back that said "Temporarily closed for maintenance." She giggled at it again as she read it, wondering who might have put it there.

In any case, she had been forced to put up with not wearing much during the last week of their trek across human lands. Her pants hadn't fit her as a wolf; even if she'd managed to figure something out about her tail, the cut of them was wrong for Keidran legs and the pair Sythe had offered her were too long. So she'd just worn her shorts the whole time with mostly bare legs, and bare feet. She'd missed shoes during that week. Meanwhile her sweater, which she'd already wrapped around herself as a tube top because it was too warm, had gotten bloody and much of it had been sacrificed for bandages, leaving precious little left to cover her.

She froze up in place when she realised now, a week after it had happened, that Sythe and Red must have taken her top off to make bandages for her out of it. Sythe, the Keidran of their group of all people, had been the one that reassured her about covering up back in the hotspring. Yet he'd also already seen her naked and had possibly been trying not to remind her of that. She hadn't even realised until now.

Well, he may possibly have been more concerned with stopping the bleeding, she'd done a lot of bleeding that night, but still. She felt she needed that bath even more now and hurried along on her way.

After noticing the structural weakness in the oasis room, and then seeing the manor from the outside, Raine had devised from the structure of the roof that there had to be another room, similar in size to the oasis room, on the other side of the same wing to it. When things had calmed down she'd gone for a look.

And now she was coming back fully prepared for it. Raine opened the door to the hotspring and was greeted with a blast of hot, steamy air. She ducked inside quickly before anyone spotted her, because while she did fully intend to tell everyone else about the hot spring room, she was going to enjoy it by herself for an evening first.

She still did a quick check around it first anyway, though there wasn't too much to go over. There was a small wooden hut with some benches, a few sun lounging chairs and a massive stone lined pool that looked like it was a natural formation as best as possible, though with ease of accessibility clearly designed into it. The wooden decking ran all the way up to the edge of the water, and there was seating inside the pool made from a mix of rock formations and wooden benching. It all gave the gentle impression of being built into a naturally occurring hotspring.

Past the other side of the rock pool was a beach and ocean that went off to infinity, but that she was sure were part of the room's illusion. What probably wasn't though was the tall log fence that ran clean across one side of the sauna room, and which she suspected housed the men's side of the sauna from the dimensions of the bit she could see. Suspected, because she couldn't figure out how to gain access to it, and she was pretty sure that was because she wasn't a man, there was magic hiding access to it or something similar.

Both sides likely shared the ceiling though, which was currently showing a warm summer's day, slightly before midday. There was even a cool sea breeze in the air. It didn't quite fit though, what with it being past dinner time outside the room, and so Raine gently ran her hand along one of the runes along the back wall of the sauna. The sun sailed gently across the sky until the horizon turned first red, and then white as the moon rose on the opposite side of the room and stars emerged out of the darkness. That was more like it for a late night dip.

Raine stepped up to the edge of the sauna, and then paused. Warm steam gently rolled off the surface of the water in the cool moonlight, and over the boulders that edged it. Condensation began to form along all the tips of the fur on her paws and lower legs, slowly weighing each hair down and matting it into its neighbours. It felt strange to her, like when her hair got wet, but different and not just because it was on her feet. She still wasn't comfortable in her fur and that was bothering her.

It wasn't the being in the fur that was bothering her, that is. It was that being in fur bothered her that was bothering her. This form was a part of her, not some curse like her mother had put it, and she needed to get used to it. She needed to not hide it away, either literally by trying to stay a human constantly, or metaphorically by covering as much of it as she could. And if she was going to just be in her fur for a bit then she might as well be while enjoying a sauna.

She just... had to take the towel off first.

Raine glanced around the room again. Of course she was alone, she was the only one that knew about the sauna, she'd already checked for anyone being here.

No, she was embarrassed to be naked around herself.

Well she was just going to have to get over that. Raine took a deep breath and steeled herself to be undressed as she slowly unwrapped the towel she was holding around herself, then folded it up and put it down on one of the tables next to the sauna. Then she took off the other towel she had wrapped around her torso and tied together to cover everything from her breast to her thighs. She folded that up as well, she'd brought two towels after seeing how much effort the other Keidran had needed to put in to get dry in the oasis room.

Now she was just wearing her top wraps and shorts. So she was only as naked as she had been while walking across half of Mekan.

That was supposed to have been reassuring to her, but it didn't work, she was still standing embarrassed in her own fur, unable to take off anything else.

She tried really hard not to think about how if she was underwater, then it slightly wouldn't quite count as being naked. That line of thought might get her into the pool but the point of today was to feel comfortable in herself, not run from one crutch to another.

She looked around again to check for anyone. And listened to see if anyone was on the other side of the fence. She couldn't hear anything, but that was only the absence of evidence. They would probably have said something about her changing the time of day though, so it was probably a good bet she was alone.

Raine continued to be not naked, standing on the edge of the pool for another minute.

Ok fine, maybe take the crutch of getting under the water quickly where the people that weren't here couldn't see her. Puppy steps were still steps.

She didn't bother folding her clothes and simply discarded them on one of the chairs before quickly stepping into the pool, plunging her foot in all the way to her ankle. Then a moment later, she let out a loud "Yip!" because now the water had soaked into her fur it was really hot and she hadn't been prepared for it and so she pulled her leg back out quickly, shaking it off frantically because all the hot water had soaked into her fur and wouldn't just shake off.

When she realised she was shaking herself about like a dog, Raine put her foot back down on the ground, and just waited a few moments to get used to the heat. Which was actually quite nice now she thought about it.

She looked around for anyone again, even though the yip would probably have gotten their attention.

Gently this time, Raine dipped her foot back into the water, letting the water soak in first, then letting herself get used to the heat, then tipping her other foot in and working gently from there.

And then, Raine discovered that she really liked hot tubs in her wolf form.

She'd already tried it back at barrows rock, but then she'd just been happy to soak and let the soreness of all the walking drift away into the heat of the water. Today as she sat down on one of the wooden benches and leaned back against the rock, she realised how soothing it felt to let her fur float aimlessly in the water, gently swaying back and forth in the current generated by the bubbling spring in the middle. Her tail meanwhile was just funny. She looked down at how it was trying to flick back and forth happily and grinned even more because it couldn't get any momentum going in the water, so it just swished back and forth in place.

A small tear formed in the corner of Raine's eye as she watched her tail flounder even more as it tried to wag faster. This was the first time she'd ever smiled at her own tail.

Raine picked up her tail and gently ran her hands over it. She still didn't quite know what to make of this extra limb her wolf form had. She was sure she was using it subconsciously to balance herself on her smaller Keidran feet. But it had a mind of its own, and while any Keidran child could probably control it she always seemed to struggle to and so it had felt alien to her, as though it were pinned on to her rear and not really part of her.

With the water holding it down though, she gently held it in her hands and ran her fingers through the soft fur of it, getting used to the feeling of it being touched. It didn't feel strange or weird any more, just new. She could get used to this new.

Raine had spent all of her life hiding away from this side of herself, treating it like a curse she had to avoid. And yet she had an almost unique appreciation for the differences between her two species. Only a few humans in the world had any knowledge of what it felt like to have a tail, while Flora had told her some tigers were obsessed with the idea that humans wore clothes to hide theirs in secret, so baffled were they by the idea of not having a tail.

She almost didn't want to put her tail down, but it had stopped wagging for now and it would be there later. Besides, she needed to wipe a few more tears away from her eyes.

Raine took a few moments to let herself calm down and relax, sliding down into the water some more and letting it soak into her fur up over her shoulders. She could get used to this, both the water and the fur. And both of them together. She had time free to enjoy it, and a plan to stay a while.

Perhaps there was still one downside of fur though, she took her hands out of the water and shook them off to try and dry them, but it didn't achieve very much besides splashing some water around. The fur was still soaking and dripping wet. Not wanting to get her hands wet again, she found herself hovering her hands above the water, hoping they would dry themselves off faster and generally feeling quite silly. She'd gotten as far as wondering how Keidran dealt with this problem before she realised that she could cheat.

Focusing her vision on her hands and concentrating somewhat hard, but not too hard because that made her lock up, Raine focused on seeing her hands with skin and then impressioning that vision of herself onto her hands. She varied between straining too much and too little, but after a minute she found the right balance and her hands swiftly lost their fur in a blue magical haze that ran down from her fingers, past her knuckles and over her hand. She stopped a third of the way down her arms, she didn't need to go much further, but now she could flick her hands dry quickly, and wipe the excess off on the top of her towel. Quick and easy dry hands.

Then she concentrated again, but this time with a little less effort, and the fur on her hands returned, this time quite dry. She felt proud of herself for figuring that trick out and allowed it.

Then, she reached over to where she had put the book down inside the first towel and opened it with two dry hands. She silently thanked Saria again for letting her borrow it, because she hadn't really asked. She was fairly confident it was Saria's at least, because while she had found it amongst the books of Trace's impressive library, it was about the forbidden love between a noble human knight and the wolven princess he had chivalrously saved from slavers, even at the expense of his own exile. It didn't feel like Trace's sort of novel so she was fairly sure it had been Saria's, because the crinkling along the spine told that it had been read before.

It was definitely her sort of novel though, and it didn't hurt that the wolven princess bore a striking resemblance to herself. And so Raine sat back in the sauna and relaxed as the two lovers embraced lovingly after the dramatic and tragic confrontation with the knights former best friend and confidant in arms.