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interesting one.   So maybe I'll get you clear of your confusion."
     
    Gary didn't trust this, but seemed to have no viable alternative.   "Agreed, then.   Show me how to find Trent."
     
    She paused to consider, her feet not quite touching the ground.   "The old folk are down in the Brain Coral's Pool, waiting for you.   So we'll have to go there."
     
    "What kind of pool?"
     
    "Oh, you don't know about that? I thought you gargoyles knew all about water."
     
    "We purify running water," he said, slightly aggrieved.   "We ignore pools."
     
    "This pool is not to be ignored.   The Brain Coral is a weird inanimate entity who likes to collect things, such as living creatures, which it keeps in suspended animation in its deep subterranean pool.   Once every decade or so it lets a creature out, if there's really good reason, and that creature is exactly the same age as it was when it went in, even if it's been there for several centuries.   Of course in the Time of No Magic, back in the year ten-forty-three, fifty-one years ago, everything got messed up and some captives escaped; it was decades before the Brain Coral completed its inventory and knew exactly who was gone." Menda shrugged in sections, like a moving caterpillar, her head, shoulders, breasts, midsection, pelvis, thighs, legs, and feet taking their turns.   The effect would have been interesting, had Gary been a human male.   "By then it was a bit too late, of course.   But there's still good stuff in those dark waters, and right now Magician Trent and Sorceress Iris are there."
     
    "They are in the pool? In suspended animation?"
     
    "Of course.   Do you think they want to wait in the regular realm, getting older every moment? Iris already has too much of a problem in that respect."
     
    "She does? What's wrong with getting older? Doesn't everyone do it?"
     
    "Every non-demon, I suppose." This time Mentia's right side shrugged in one direction, and her left side in the other direction.   Gary did find that interesting, especially when her eyes passed each other on the return trip, overshooting the mark.   "But Iris is ninety-three years old.   That's ancient and doddering, for the average human being."
     
    "But Magician Trent must be old too, so they're even."
     
    "Ninety-seven, technically.   But he was youthened to about twenty-five last year, and is now one handsome hunk of human.   Why should he mess with a woman of great-grandmotherly physical age?"
     
    "That makes a difference?"
     
    'To a human, yes.   The man can be as old as he wants, but the woman has to be young, or she's a waste.   That's the way it is, with human folk.   So she'll take a youth potion to knock about seventy years off her physical age;
     
    that's her reward for helping you.   After that, who knows what she may be up to.   She's a long-suppressed woman." Mentia's clothing turned transparent for an instant, showing a flash of her considerably curved outer contours.
     
    Gary shook his head.   "You claim to be a little bit crazy, Mentia, but you don't seem any worse than regular humans are."
     
    The demoness, caught by surprise by the compliment, flushed.   The contents of her head melted into red fluid and drained down the pipes of her neck, leaving a hollow translucent shell.   The fluid gurgled through her body, and pooled in her feet, which swelled voluminously.   Then, gradually, her head filled again, the fluid rising from the bottom to the top, until it was complete and she resumed normal activity.   "Thank you," she said when her lips were full again.
     
    Gary realized that for all Mentia's disclaimers, she did care at least a little what other creatures thought of her.   That didn't seem to be too much of a fault.   "How old are you, Mentia?"
     
    "A hundred and ninety-three, but who's counting? It doesn't matter for demons." She inhaled, and her bosom became magnificent and burst out of its halter.   Gary was no judge of such things, of course,