Once again, Dema came out of the dream, or, as she now more nearly believed, the reliving of that past existence, to find herself in the guest bedroom of her childhood home. From this latest dream she had gained a deep understanding and sympathy for her ancestral self. As in the dream, she wore the full form of a snake, long and pale. But this morning she felt strong and vigorous. All symptoms of the wound were gone.

As she slid her long, lithe body off of the bed, she began for the first time to assess her snake-form attributes analytically. She seemed to have retained her natural body weight, which in snake-form translated into a length of some sixteen feet. She could easily raise herself up until her head nearly brushed the nine-foot ceiling, which meant that she would tower over any normal human. Yet she could wind herself into a tight coil not more than two feet across. At its widest point her slender body was scarcely six inches thick.

She noticed that even as she made these analytical observations, her dream-like mental state persisted, although now that she had become accustomed to the feeling it seemed less intense. She could, and did, transform her upper body so that her arms and hands reappeared. She found that in doing so the dream state intensified momentarily, but then relaxed again once the transformation had been accomplished.

She moved to the mirror, and willed her human face to appear. It did so, and without apparent transition, other than again the momentary lapse deeper into that somehow timeless dream-state in which it seemed all things were possible. In her analytical state of mind it occurred to her that the transition was something like the quantum-level tunneling that is so essential to modern electronics, the ability to go from one state to another without ever occupying impossible intermediate states. Such transitions, she knew, could be highly improbable, but possible nevertheless.

She now found it completely effortless to banish from the reflection of her face all signs of scales, even the transparent ones over her eyes, so that her eyelids became normal and for the first time in days she could close them.

She opened them again and, as she had willed, her hair had reappeared as well. But it was still white, and her skin still deathly pale. And her eyes remained yellow. These things she could not change. Something was restraining her will from making that final step to normality.

This thought brought a low chuckle from her nearly human throat, and she looked down from the mirror, for her lower body remained a long snaky coil. But that was now easily remedied, and in a moment she stood there in fully human form.

Again she had to chuckle, for the sight of her own nakedness made her realize that she had been going about naked for some time, never giving it a thought. In snake-form she found it perfectly acceptable, but the sight of her naked human breasts made her want to clothe herself.

She realized that her bags were still in the rental car outside, and the clothes she had worn when she arrived were not in the room either. She recalled that Sedna had taken them to the laundry. She found herself somewhat unwilling to leave the room in her naked human form, so she made the dream-shift back to half-snake form before she went out the door. It was becoming very easy, almost automatic, and she felt a little thrill of delight at her growing mastery of this ability.

She slid quickly down the hall, and up the stairs to her own bedroom. It was the first time she had been in there since her return home, and she could not help feeling a touch of nostalgia as she entered it and saw the familiar collection of keepsakes from her childhood. But that passed and, shutting the door behind her, she shifted once again to human form and got dressed.

She began to select undergarments out of her dresser drawers, then thought better of it and went to her closet, where she chose a simple jumpsuit that would be easier to shed if she wanted to shift back to snake form. She slipped her feet into a pair of sandals. Thus attired, she left the room and went downstairs to visit Sedna.