Imagine this: your daughter returns from her duty on a space ship, but when she returns, she's now has three eyes, horns and a snake tail; is part-goat, part-snake; has a different voice and name; remembers things from other lives; and on top of that, she introduces you to her new femboyfriend that towers over you. Such is the case with the Thandi family. They have to get used to the changes their daughter Kim (previously Kiara) went through, from the way she slithers with her new tail to her changed face, but eventually there's still enough of their daughter there to love her.

For Kim, these moments are more important than her parents may realise: from all three lives, this is the only one with a loving family that's still alive; Micha's family is mostly dead, and she doesn't want to have anything to do with Inžreś' abusive family. The love she gets from Mama and Baba Thandi hits her deeper than before, having one soul in her that never reSally know familial love, and the other who had lost it for a long time. They were the reason she decided to stay fused as a chimaera.

Nurlan was invited by Kim to meet her family. However, being a snow leopard means that the Kenyan climate is hard for him to cope with. He's minimally dressed just to deal with the heat. Since Kim's parents don't have an universal translator implanted in them, Kim has to interpret his sign language to them. His deafness is rough in the beginning while staying with the Thandis, mainly because he had trouble following conversations, despite Kim's efforts to help him with that.

Kim's teenage brother Ocheng is excited to see them both. He's thrilled to see Kim performing some of her magic, which he has asked about since they heard the news about Kim's transformation. But the bond he builds with Nurlan is a bit more complicated. At first, he's having trouble dealing with Nurlan's deafness, finding it hard to understand his gestures. He's also shocked by the feminine way Nurlan was dressed, as he had never seen a man dressed like that. But slowly, he begins to warm up for him. It fascinated him that Nurlan has four arms and imagined what it would be like to have four arms himself. The boy showed all the little electronics kits he had built and said he wanted to become an electrical engineer, and Nurlan found a common interest with him. Over the weeks he stayed at the Thandis, the two of them had a lot of fun tinkering and assembling all kinds of devices, and in the end, Ocheng began to see Nurlan as the big brother he never had. Nurlan had become part of the family.

Illustration drawn by  Cervelet as a Patreon reward.
Digital colouring by  MandelSoft