"Corbillat Karasu." Crow agreed with himself, scrubbing down his onmyoji-aspect's body and examining various curves. "A piece of my youth."
Not quite mind-child, not quite independent tulpa, not quite an independent summon, not quite mitama... One's hand. To hold but decide to cast separately. An exoself. Cybernetics by magic. It had a reference name, now. Corbillat, for the younger Crow. Different plumage, still recognizably adult... Jackdaw was too close to Jackal and rooks connoted a different subset. Can't always be Dhumavati about this, as much as Crow encompassed that. The Japanese default-man build would be suitably generic, probably.
There was something to be said for wasting a lot of water. Heat, steam, suds, and thinking in momentary separation from the world. Sometimes he'd play around with more people, but this was an expression. Speaking of expressions, his own... Corbillat's expression was alright, that bright and cheery smile Crow's main body was too malicious to do more than affably.
Crow moulded the shape, thinking to past faces and favored shapes. Touch here, touch there, retune the emulation of biology. Soften some curvature, deal with specifics of hair placement, where and when the colors of a living human changed. Cutesy but not too cutesy, mature but not too mature, trying to avoid degenerating into some yaoi vortex or another. Nothing that'd be a serious card-level Shift, but picking and choosing mundane elements from various Shifts to refine character design. This was primarily aesthetics, stuff so common that in the new system all but the most niche basics or customizations would let someone choose what birth had not. The character creator for one's pawn and partner when another was not suitable. All the sorts of aesthetic details that told a person apart from those who fit the same descriptive template, things normally wordless save to artists and anatomists. It felt like being god-touched, and in so doing was a completely different kind of vaguely-masturbatory self-examination. Same waxing poetic, less getting direct biochemistry activations. A little bit of deciding the Tōkyūjutsu pattern, for one who had so many births and so many faces.
The extent his intelligence and awareness was divided...trundled. A reverse-phantom sensation, a wholeness. To touch oneself, between bodies, and be recognized. Crow was no stranger to being a one-and-many man murder and murderer, even before the last few generational changes he'd set off. You'd come up with seventy alternative accounts too if you'd been that swarm of actors and actresses scheming to accomplish matters. But part of being so many people at once was to rewire yourself, to keep track of dozens of sets and officially 'do and do not know'. To fake working against yourself to throw off the spies, to be Huginn and Muninn, to be nine extra suns and burn down in god-war... The mantle of the priest might be more godlike than either the man or god under it, honestly.
It was less like having to juggle a dozen hand puppets, so, good on the Turner of Wheels for iterating. The proportion of Crow thinking in Corbillat was a bit specialized towards card processing and ritual. Partly that was because he had little personality, and partly because Crow's personality was so...role-aligned, now. Hedonistic, though probably his other horrors would cycle up eventually. But that was acceptable in a body conjured specifically to play magi to a medium and medium to a magi, right? Don't want their preferences to get in the way. Crow had structured over his current gender and sexuality simply because it was there. Certainly everything was in working order.
To clasp another pair of your hands. To stare into another pair of eyes, and see both your faces. To make out with yourself just to test your technique, alright, that was mostly force of habit (certain things made sense when both kissers were on the same wavelength). To compare erections, also force of habit (Crow's was bigger than Corbillat's, intentionally). To get down a rabbithole of the subjective properties of various underlying magical phenomena in emulated biology regarding sexual arousal, purely indulgence. Crow did a lot of indulging like that. Eh, they'd scrubbed off enough in the shower part, they could take a bath now. This part came with a warm bathing pool, something something if not a hot spring a sauna. The two-that-were-one sat on a side-bench, letting the water up to a bit above waist-height to just think about it already.
"What kind of personality should I really play up here?" Crow asked, prodding Corbillat's empty forehead and doing something with eye focus he hadn't seen much outside hypnosis. "Do I want a second me, or do I want a responsible...hrm."
Corbillat acted out a few routines, hitting the archetypal hits. Not much was funny in the way he'd want to keep up. Too close and it wasn't an effective differentiation, too far and it'd be disharmonious. Too indwelt into the god-aspect and he'd alternate between laviscous robbery and causing technological breakthroughs for evil. Not godly enough, and it'd be a bad fit for onmyoji. Balance yin and yang, but with what? How to align active within passive and passive within active? What was the priesthood of a priest, and how did it separate from the original?
Loyalty, maybe. Loyalty to god over clan, and the crows over the crows. No, wrong, that would be even faster dissonance to deescalate, and too convergent to escalate. That could cleave its way into 'adherence to ideals', but Crow's ideals were unideal for that (except maybe the sex things). Designing a mind sure was a hassle, especially when he didn't want it to blossom off. A self-facet and a character, not a son. Maybe the 'healbot cleric' had a point: someone who cared to mend matters in a way Crow did not, the innocent love of youth where the older-than-appearance man had been a bastard about. That could work, and would be heartbreakingly heartful. So it was (un)severed. Woven, bound, trait emplaced. This might be worth a card, but the cards were designed for something else.
An emotion, then. To change one's mind, to express that change in one's mind. Romantic, almost! Ah, this was the life. Crow cuddled up against the next step of Corbillat Karasu, and contemplated how he'd get this part cardworthy next expansion pack.