Fionn had spoken of 'the fox' almost as if being a moonwalker meant she had an entirely separate being inside of her. The disruptive nature of time travel, glitches and all, had given Eve a stronger sense of that idea than ever, as the second she'd appeared in 1969 that part of her so frighteningly silent she'd wondered if the shock had left it dead. Up until the dreamers' reunion in the void, her face had felt numb for lack of senses she'd just barely gotten used to.

Upon her full return to the changed world, her inner fox was aggressively awake. While her wife spent the first days speechless with all the differences she was seeing, Eve nested herself in their bedroom drinking cup after cup of scalding hot tea to stay grounded.

It wasn't just how things looked.

It even went past the things they were hearing and reading about from fellow Visitors and the world around them.

It was absolutely everything. Every smell. Every sound. The direction of the breezes were slightly different and teased different tree branches, making the rustling of nearby evergreens an unintelligible static against what she'd remembered of the neighborhood. The Mercers' cars had new mechanical idiosyncracies and it was like nails on chalkboard the first few times hearing them pull out of their driveway that was now a full block closer to their own house. Leila had learned even finer control over her shifting weight, out of sheer determination to move through the house as quietly as possible when Eve was trying to get some sleep.

When Algernon had sent her an excited-but-professional message about how their shops shared a building, and her own shop was now a proper teahouse with more than one table to sit at, she could barely be excited about it herself -- it was a dream come true -- but the mere thought of eventually having to make her way up there and be bombarded with a crowded collection of overlapping smells filled her with the kind of dread that made her need an extra blanket. Add the chattering of voices inside the stores, over the clinking of cups on saucers and the scraping of paper against paper, and she was past ready to take another nap instead. Anything to get a break from the fox's persistent nosing and pacing and noticing everything.

Lady ended up spending more than one afternoon huddled up with her (sometimes as a deer) and gorging on berry yogurts (also sometimes as a deer), and making fresh batches of tea when the pot was empty (as a human, of course). She spoke briefly about relating to the animal senses, and feeling suddenly overwhelmed and bombarded by the real world. It helped Eve feel a little less frustrated over her need to hide from it all.

She still hated the helplessness and vulnerability, though.