2. Positive Body Image

The problem with inhabiting strange bodies - however you happened to come by them - was, quite simply, that they were strange. On a merely mechanical level you might have noticed a limp, a disbalance or a weird weight distribution where none of them were before (in your own body). However, most of those were readily compensated by muscle memory the body still possessed (no pun intended). That same inherent, non conscious memory had more profound impacts on magical level, of course. Magic, in essence, was a force, an energy. While some believed it lived in or sprung from mostly the mind, the truth was much more complex. The physical body was a conduit allowing the magic to move, live and interact with the world around. And, just like different minds were more susceptible to certain kinds of magic and resistant to others, different bodies conducted the energy flows differently.
Which, Master Mawhub was finally forced to admit, was going to be a problem.
At first he thought it would be possible to train the body up, power through and overwrite the genetic programming, if you could have called it that. But it wasn't working and he was running out of time. Trinkets and salves, and the occasional mindtrick (paid for by a mother-of-all headaches later), were all well and good for a start. But the sheikh was getting hungrier and his new chief advisor was running out of time.
There has to be a better way, he thought in the darkness of the night. His eyes fell on the moon framed in the bars of the window.
The prison. You lived there... how long? he asked the other consciousness in his mind - the one he usually pretended wasn't there.
Oh, just about twenty years I worked there, Koba stirred up and continued: Although I only lived in that hole there after Allah took my wife to him.
Mawhub could feel the shoulders twitch in a shrug, as his consciousness scoffed at the religious mention.
Would have worked there until He took me too, if it weren't for you and your... whatever, now it was the mouth that twitched, as if forming a spittle. Why the sudden interest?
I need to know what appealed to you there. What has drawn you, motivated you...
There was a silence, as if the other man never really thought about that before.
Power unencumbered with conscience.