Messages

16

Writer's Guild / Re: Stand Tall; or, Glass

« on: February 10, 2017, 05:22:01 PM »

The couple of pages that the pharaoh had ripped free from their home-of-a-tome looked just like a terribly torn up foldout map. The crumpling hadn’t done it any favors, either. It was going to be difficult to gauge the exact distance from anything with all the tiny folds and pieces of paper that had fallen or been torn free. In fact, figuring out what the landmarks given on the map were meant to be was a challenge, too. Virmir was pretty sure that one of the little icons was meant to be the palace he was departing from, but it wasn’t a certainty. On the map, it was simply a planned spot for the future god-kings to have their place of power set up.
   
There was nothing that guaranteed that spot was where palace stood today. Maybe it was moved over a good half mile or so. Still, it was the only remotely close landmark he could use for reference – most of the other icons were halfway across the domain.
   
Even so, Virmir was left with a trek of a few miles. He took a copious number of waterskins, enchanted on the inside to keep their contents cooled, storing them in the back of his cloak. He thought about bringing along some food, too, but decided against it on the grounds of chancing gritty sand getting into his snacks, or worse, his mouth and teeth. His journey was only taken after filling up on some of the best delicacies that sat on the pharaoh’s tray, left lazily out in the halls.
   
Sand was not easy to trudge through, but it was better than snow. While his feet were singed then and again by the ground soaking in the midday sun, they at least were not freezing off at the toes – and though the dunes could sometimes be slippery, the worst he risked was falling into a soft bed of the stuff, as opposed to slipping and face-planting on ice.
   
He was forced to go slowly, cloak pulled closed to guard his front from gusts and cowl down to protect his face and ears. He allowed himself a chance occasionally to peek out and check his surroundings, the height and placement of the sun, and compare it all to his map before continuing to push against the environment.
   
Fortunately, Virmir found the remains of some sort of temple before he slammed his feet into the wrecked pillars it possessed. The sandstone, a slightly darker color than the environment about it, seemed to have fallen in on itself. Only a single support was still standing.
   
Treading through the ruins, the fox was surprised not to see a slab on the pillar that professed to the world how it should tremble before the great works wrought here. He figured that ego was one of the few things that persisted across all cultures. After all, if it stuck with him throughout all of his different encounters, then it had to have some power to it.
   
 Maybe their lack of confidence was part of what led to it crumbling. Whatever was responsible, he spent the lesser part of an hour digging all around, trying to find something worth bringing back.
   
If there ever was anything of importance strewn around, it had long been carried away by the sands or by bandits. Virmir sighed and readied himself to head back with only some scraps of stone, but before he did, he decided to down one of his waterskins to prepare. He moved to the singular pillar and leaned against it, pulling a waterskin free –
   
But there was a click. Virmir bolted and jumped up, stepping nice and far away from the architecture before it had a chance to crush him. …but it didn’t move after the initial noise, still looking just as solid and secure.
   
He hmphed to himself and marched back to the pillar, putting a near-identical amount of pressure on it and listening. Again, there was that clicking, but nothing more. He looked all around the ruins, inspecting the ground to see if the sand dunes started to fall or rise in any odd spots.
   
Yet everything was just as serene as it could be with a strong, stinging wind. No hidden passages were raised up out of the ground and no big drops appeared from nothing. Virmir gave it a few more testing pushes, just to make certain that nothing had slipped by his sight…
   
Satisfied with his investigation of the surrounding area, he stepped far away from the pillar and gave it a solid blasting of fire and force.
   
There was no small click, suffice to say. Shards of sandstone scattered into the surrounding dunes while Virmir guarded himself behind his cloak. After the kaboom had run its course, he cautiously stepped over to where the pillar had once been, being careful around the now somewhat glassy surface that he had made.
   
That was certainly something that Virmir had to appreciate – sand had an exceptionally positive response to being toasted by loads and loads of fire magic. While some of the dust cleared, he grabbed up a glassy fulgurite and pocketed it for decoration later, or at least as a reminder of his time spent out in the sands.
   
With the olden architecture destroyed, Vir was able to see underneath where it once stood. A conspicuous square-shaped passage was now open to the desert air. Around it was a raised barrier, just low and slim enough to allow the pillar to move about some and let anyone who pushed up against it know what was in place just below. There were even some steps carved into the wall, making for easy climbing.
   
And so he stepped down into the passage after making sure that there were no traps on the opposite side, eager to impale him after years of acquiring dust. It was too dark to tell initially, but another, slower fireball illuminated the way down and made sure that anything organic was going to be nice and warmed up to him before he made his way down.
   
Virmir was alone at the bottom of the passage, ending up in some sort of chamber. In fact, it reminded him of the same throne room that was home to the current “pharaoh.” Apparently royalty didn’t hire very innovative contractors when they got their fancy, ornate palaces made. Of course, being underground, it was much darker, the only light source being the thin beams that barely reached the bottom of the passage behind him. He could see a couple of sconces raised up on the walls on either side of him. It took only a flick and a bit of focus to light them, and then the sconces ahead and behind them, until he had the entire area illuminated.
   
Things weren’t in a good state of repair. The ground was littered with cracks and splinters of stone, and some chips of paint that might have once been making up hieroglyphs were resting sadly in the corners of the room. Although much of it seemed identical to the throne room he knew, the whole area did seem more… open, somehow. Maybe the pharaoh of the past was much, much larger. He seriously doubted that they were any more godly than the current one was, though. Maybe they were older and had some magic in their arsenal, but that didn’t make them any less challengeable. Maybe duels were had in the throne room for amusement?
   
All his musing was just wasting his time, though. Virmir cleared his head and continued to walk through the room, searching for anything of worth. It didn’t seem likely that a hoard of artifacts would be kept out in the main entrance, however odd of a spot it was. Once it was clear that nothing of worth was nearby, he set his mind on finding any doorways or hallways to bust open and check out.
   
He eventually found one, in the obvious, cliché spot – right behind the throne, which was dilapidated and cracked down the right side, a chunk of it resting on the floor. The fox stepped over it with a stretch and continued down the new, open passage.
   
Down this way, there were no sconces or torches. He settled on just carrying his light in his hands, shaking his cloak a bit further down so as not to obscure it. With one paw raised and providing the only light in the darkened hall and the other pressed up against the wall to check for secret buttons or indents, he continued his march through the ruins.
   
It was somewhat suspicious that no priceless items were just tossed around lazily, Virmir thought to himself. If this were really some sort of pharaoh’s living space, they would have surely indulged and shown off their riches all around rather than hoard their collection like a dragon. If they were really so powerful, why would they have to hide their junk? Especially when the only people who would be around the pharaoh would be loyal and hand-picked…
   
He really hoped there wasn’t a dragon taking up residence down here. Most of them were pretty resistant to his element of choice. The only other explanation he could attribute to the disappearance of gold and jewels would be thievery, and he wasn’t in the business of tracking.
   
At the end of his thinking-hallway, Vir found a room that wasn’t nearly as devoid of items as the previous one. There were other hallways to follow out, but they weren’t as important. Gathered in a gigantic pile in the center of the room were all the ancient and priceless items that he could imagine, ranging from little golden trinkets to jeweled scepters and anklets and bracers. There were probably a few hundred things all grouped together. It was lopsided and uneven, too. He briefly wondered why dragons always just hoarded stuff in that manner; it couldn’t have been very comfortable to be sprawled out on.
   
For as suspicious as the treasure pile appeared, he didn’t see any draconic monsters nearby, nor was the loot cursed with some sort of guard-conscription magic. If he was quick about it, he might be able to gather up a sufficient amount of stuff to sell and hand over to the “pharaoh” before whatever had gathered it all up came back to check on its stash. He started with things that had fallen free of the pile, easily taking them and pocketing the smallest before moving on to ones that were stuck near the bottom, being careful to not upset the balance of the whole thing and send it crashing down like a glittery Jenga game.
   
But other than the jingle and clacking of gems and gold, Virmir could hear some sort of sliding, dragging, down one of the far corridors. Being on the opposite side of the pile from the noise, he stopped all his movement and looting to lay up against it and take cover to listen.
   
It was consistent and slow – not the kind of “lacking-in-speed” slowness, but a lazy, uncaring pace. He thought he could pick out alternation in what side the sound was coming from, too. Left, drag, right, drag, left… soon there was a louder echo to the noise and some of the items on the other end of the pile were clanging and being sifted through.
   
When it came to fight or flight, Vir was very dedicated to giving fighting a fair shot to begin with. If he could handle a threat, either by burning it down or by scaring it off, then that was definitely the way to go. If it failed, well… then it was a good time to run.
   
So he pushed himself off from the loot with a bit of force and whirled a fireball up and over the obstruction in the room.
   
Being short was sometimes a great slight to his combat abilities. For example, he had no clue if he had even hit anything thanks to being unable to see over the golden mountain. If he had only angered what was on the other side, he would be in for a world of hurt if he was unprepared. On the other hand, if he had incapacitated the enemy, it would have been a great time to traverse around and let loose with more fireballs.
   
Without any way of safely gathering information, Virmir just stood there, ready for another toss of a fireball, waiting on some sort of response.
   
It took longer than he would have liked, but eventually his target began climbing the pile. There were dark green scales – how typically draconic. But the scales didn’t form the shape of a draconic head. It was much more traditionally reptilian, without the sharper edges and raised cranium of a fire-breather. The head was slim and streamlined, going down to a neck that flowed right into the rest of the slim body. However, unlike what he thought the creature might now turn out to be, it possessed arms, and four of them, at that. Each of them were used to ascend in turn until the snake-thing lifted itself atop the hill, bringing its tail along with it. The very tip of it was decorated with a golden spade, rattling just like another, non-artificial one would.
   
“You would dare infiltrate a sacred tomb of the pharaohs and attack its guardian servant, chosen by the gods themselves?” it questioned, rattling again. “You would take the precious items of divine royalty?”
   
Virmir considered his words. “Yes,” he answered. “But it’s not like I came here with the intention of either of those things.”
   
The snake-monster cackled and shook its tail all around, sending some riches onto the ground, some of them smashing and cracking. “You tell me that a thief does not break and enter with the idea of stealing! Did you come here to admire these ruins, then, and just decide you may as well leave with a souvenir?”
   
Virmir sighed. “It’s a longer story than that and I don’t need to tell it to you.” Now that the snake was a little more balanced and elevated, it was easy to land a precise hit on its snout and send it tumbling back down with a long hiss.
   
It was probably time to get going. Vir grabbed a few assorted things up from the ground before spinning around and rushing back, leaving by the same passage he had entered.
   
The snake-monster was not so ready to let him go. As he neared the exit, he could hear a grunt from far behind him, and turned just in time to see the coiled reptile spring off of the treasure and land on his four arms and tail, right in his path. As it got back up, he missed its head and flung a ball of fire straight at its chest.
   
This time, it resisted the force. It didn’t seem phased at all. Moving so fast that it blurred, the monster lunged forward, fangs out, and sunk them into Virmir’s leg.
   
This bite was not anything like any that he had suffered before (usually from unruly upstarts like that “pharaoh king”). The pain was unbearable at first, but it began to fade quickly after. In its place came a numbness. Soon his legs were working completely against him, or rather, just not at all. He crumpled down and had to brace himself with his hands and arms.
   
With one paw busy keeping him from collapsing entirely flat on the floor, Virmir lifted his free one and readied another blast – but the beast was already on fire. Maybe this thing had some sort of magic resistance that hadn’t toughed it out long enough. Oddly, the monster-snake seemed entirely satisfied with its life, standing still and looking at his bite with pride.
   
“If you wish to be with these riches so badly, then so you will be.” It slunk down and coiled in on itself, gradually growing smaller and smaller. “I have done my part as guardian to the pharaohs. I pass the debt, and curse…”
   
And then there was only a belt of ashes, curled up in the vague shape of a snake.
   
Blast, that was NOT a good thing.
   
Frantically, Virmir rolled over onto his back and began dressing the bite wound. He could feel that numbness starting to spread. There were a number of things it could do, and although dying was probably the worst one up on the list, he was confident he could stop that if he acted fast. Some scraps of his old cape were good enough to wrap tightly around it as a tourniquet; infection and physical spreading would be the first to stop.
   
After he tied the cloth tight, he sat up and tried to put his magic to work on curing the venom out of his system, or at least stop its spread. He was woefully inexperienced in applying his magic this way, so he quickly settled on only halting it in his legs. He wasn’t sure if he could manage even that with how numb he was becoming. The whole process was taxing.
   
Once he was sure he had done the best job he could, he did his best to recover anything that had dropped from his cloak. He swore that he could feel some trace parts of that venom still slipping through him, but he couldn’t do much about it. Loot in hand, he began the slow and trudging process of dragging himself back down the hallway he had come in.
   
His legs and tail may have been numb, but that didn’t stop his hands from feeling the cold and cracked ground. He did his best to crawl along without slamming his palms down onto anything sharp and painful, but there were still occasional pebbles and sharp edges to avoid after grazing them. The light up ahead from the throne room was promising, at least.
   
Virmir finally emerged into the fiery light, pulling himself up against a pillar and panting. Upper body strength was not his forte. At least he could take a short break in the lightened room and check his wound again. He didn’t dare take that tourniquet off… but the temptation was there, just to be sure that he was still alright. The numbness was still very strong, and even had a tingling reach up in his sides and his gut. His skin was flaking and losing fur around the bite, too. He reached nervously to feel at his dressing…
   
And yelped and fell back at seeing a pair of numb, previously unknown arms reaching along with his normal ones.
   
Fumbling with them under his cloak, he tugged and pulled at them by the forearm, bending them at the elbow, testing their every function. They were connected to him, for sure; he just couldn’t feel through them yet with how the venom was working its way through his body. Carefully, he tried to focus and wrap them around his body and keep them there, out of the way from his working and inspection.
   
It wasn’t looking too swollen or infected, but it did look red. It was a bit darker lower down. Hesitantly, he reached at the spreading and barely felt over it, careful to not let it spread to his fingers somehow. It felt rough and scratchy.
   
Sighing and catching his breath, Virmir let those extra arms come free of his cloak and numbly help crawl him across the ground again. If they were going to be there, they should at least be useful, he thought. He tried to not let his legs drag too much against the ground now, worried that he might just be irritating the wound and its spread, but his body wouldn’t cooperate. His back felt like it was giving out when he attempted to lift his lower body off the ground, so he just gave up on that and let it slide about behind him. He would probably be paying for that later, but right now, he had to get out of here as fast as possible in case this was a location-centralized curse… or something. He had no idea how to treat curses. He certainly wouldn’t be able to walk back to the palace in this condition, so he would have to figure something out very, very soon.
   
He took much longer to traverse the throne room the second time through. Going at a literal agonizing crawl, he brought himself back to the steps in the wall and took another break. His body was surprisingly not as sore as he expected it to be, but he had a nagging feeling that he had less and less movement with his legs the further he moved.
   
Four-armed, the fox slipped his hands into the steps in the wall and struggled to begin the slow climb back out. Without feeling in his legs, it was going to be nigh-impossible, but he had to give it his all to try and get free. He grabbed the first step, leaving two hands propped there, and lifted up to the next. He kept going, gradually stretching out the whole of his body to reach as high up as he could. He huffed and leaned hard against the spots in the wall without steps, straining his body…
   
But he heard some sort of pop, and was sent right back down to the bottom of the climb with another batch of clattering and pain.
   
Thankfully, he wasn’t that high up, and he still couldn’t completely feel all the pain he should have been. Sprawled on his back, he craned his head to look what had caused the odd push.
   
…those were new. And unfortunate.
   
Embarrassed and blushing, even though he – or she – wasn’t in the sight of others, the cloak wrapped up tighter around the front to try and cover the pair of bumps that had ruined the climb. It wasn’t fitting quite right, now that it was trying to be brought over a rather hourglassy body. Her hips were incredibly large now, but they weren’t even properly fluffy. They were thick with more of that red, flaky hardness that she had thought was just the wound at first. By now, it was covering everything below her waist. In its wake, it had even “consumed” her tail, feet, and the space between her legs, bringing it all together in one scaled and speckled limb.
   
She was so close to getting out, though! She grumbled as she tried to force the extrusions on her chest to go back in, finding no way of getting that to work. With that and her lack of legs and feet, she had no way of escape.
   
Well… that wasn’t true. She had seen that infectious monster coil and spring a huge distance only minutes before. Maybe she could manage something along those lines. Just… only vertically, and a good twenty feet or so.
   
Even twenty feet didn’t seem like too much right now. She felt much bigger, taller, wider, and stronger over all, especially with a whole four arms to make up for her other missing limbs. Maybe it was possible.
   
With a great deal of focus, and her best attempt at infusing some magic into her “jump,” Virmir leapt up and out of the underground ruins, grasping at the stone at the top for a spot to hold to. She dug her claws, which felt suspiciously longer, into whatever she could, and brought the rest of her body up and out with her.
   
Natural light had never felt so good. Her tail felt radiant in the sand with the sun pouring down on her. The heat was so much more bearable, and the sand couldn’t bother her lower body in the slightest, which was slowly losing the effects of the venom… some of them, anyway. The tail certainly wasn’t changing.
   
She allowed herself to pant again after more exertion and finally working her way free of the ruins, finding that her jaw stretched much, much wider, with an accompanying longer, thinner tongue that forked at the tip, as well as some sharp, hollow fangs occupying the spots of her former canines. That could make eating her typical diet much more difficult, but she was already feeling hungry for more savory things...
   
Bleh. She could deal with the repercussions of her trek down under the sands later. First she had to get back with her loot.

17

Writer's Guild / Stand Tall; or, Glass

« on: February 10, 2017, 05:20:11 PM »

I'm not good with titles still so I just gave this a couple of prospective ones

Also, Blue mentioned that he had no idea these were parts of my trade with Virmir, so here's the official mention that this is the fourth one in the series of six.



“You will kneel before the pharaoh-king will see you,” one of the guards said, maybe for the tenth time or so. Even with the persistence of the royal guard, the unwelcomed guest pushed his way between the shoulders of the twin meatheads serving as a barricade to the throne room. The pair of them spun around to face and bring sharpened spears in the direction of the intruder, but didn’t dare move their weapons forward (or back, for that matter). The copper points remained trained on the figure, steady as stone.
   
Up ahead in the chamber, there came a drawn-out and quiet sigh. “You can let him through without the customary greetings,” the pharaoh-king, up on his throne, told his subjects. The distance to him made it hard to distinguish anything about him beyond the obvious and constant glinting of shining jewels and ornamental gold on his extremities and sides.
   
Hesitantly, but not for the first time, the guards pulled back and away from the intruder, muscles relaxing and gazes turning back to the hall outside the room. Once they were out of the doorway, the visitor shook his arms and hands out from under his loose black cloak and shut the large doors behind him.
   
The pharaoh-king was already climbing down from his throne and approaching his guest, frowning under his crown of jewels. “I wish you would play along entirely just once,” he grumbled, folding his arms. “It’s not like you have to permanently be a grumpy grey fox. You can change it up once in a while.”
   
The fox in question pulled down his black cowl to show just how hard he was rolling his eyes. “It’s sorta characteristic. Besides, you’re trying to be some fanciful form of royalty… and you’re a kid.” He gestured at the height difference between the two of them, though it wasn’t too significant.
   
The pharaoh returned with his own copy of the eye roll, but then cleared his throat and walked back to his throne, adopting a comfortable position and beckoning the fox follow him closer.
   
He didn’t approach. The pharaoh sighed again and raised his voice instead. “Advisor Virmir! It took you long enough to get here. What was stopping you from getting out of your room?”
   
Virmir gave his tail an irritated flick, stirring up sand and his cloak behind him. He turned around, nice and slow, and indicated the door. “You have a couple of slow-to-adjust guards, that’s what.” He politely neglected to mention that he was in the middle of doing something he thought to be more important to avoid treading on the pharaoh’s toes.
   
The pharaoh broke his calm stare to glare for a moment before settling back in. “Very well,” he said, grit teeth impairing his words, “but I feel like they might not be the slow ones here. I called for your presence because I have something of importance that only you can handle.”
   
Virmir lifted a single brow and flicked his right ear to indicate a basic level of listening.
   
Taking one more long look at the doors to make sure they were shut tight enough, the pharaoh decided that might not be good enough and climbed off his throat to be near his guest once more, lowering his voice a notch. “Ugh, okay, I need you to get some stuff from the old pharaoh-types! I need more gems and gold and stuff, some relics, some records –“
   
“But why?” Virmir interrupted, tail swishing back and forth. The sand and dust around here was getting to him. Even with his cloak and cowl, it was still bitter and biting when he had to make any trek around the palace, especially in the morning. Being inside was nicer, but still not perfect by any stretch.
   
“Because I obviously can’t go do it!” The pharaoh reached both of his bare arms out towards the door, fingers flexing as extra indication. “I kinda have to be here! And I could really use some more stuff to be, ah, pharaoh-ish in, and…”
   
“But why me?” Virmir broke in again. “You have a lot of lapdogs standing around like statues here. They have some ridiculous muscles on them, just make them go do it instead of me.”
   
“They’re jackals, not dogs, just like someone else you probably know,” the pharaoh explained, even bringing his paws back onto his chest for extra clarification. “And I can’t send them out to do it because… because they’re big, dumb, and burly and there for intimidation, not for their minds! I need someone smart with working eyes and brains to do it! …also, if they did it, they might find out I’m not really in the bloodlines of the pharaohs,” he finished, tacking an embarrassed cough on the end.
   
Considering his abilities, Virmir took to the shortest method of solving the problem. “If you need something fancy to try and fool them again, I could just conjure up some mural or urn. I could paint over your fur, turn it nice and black.”
   
“Nonononono! It has to be genuine!” he stressed. “We need something that no one at all ever could see through as magic!”
   
“You need,” Virmir corrected.
   
“You fall under me as an underling,” the pharaoh muttered. “…right now. And that makes it your problem, too!”
   
Fine, so that wouldn’t fix the issue. “If I do it, then what am I going to get out of it?” Virmir asked. “And I don’t want any of the crummy, dusty antiques that are probably broken. If you’re not going to give me a cut of the sellables…”
   
The pharaoh tapped his foot on the ground, staring at the cracks beneath it as they filled and emptied with small sand devils, over and over again. As one filtered out, he took his foot up off it and slammed it back down, beaming. “Okay. I mean, that’s not a ‘you can have some gems’ okay, of course, but I know what to do.”
   
Oh, great. This should be good.
   
“I’ll move your room to one that’s on the floor above my throne room, complete with rope ladder down into here from a little hatch in the ground. I’ll take all those fiscal duties you have and toss them on someone else. …and I’ll make you my historian instead! …that means you get to draw all you want. Hieroglyphs, you know?”
   
Huh. That did sound kind of good.
   
“Fine,” Virmir yielded after a chunk of waiting.
   
“Awesome!” The pharaoh dashed back to his throne, crumpling something up behind it, and rushed back to push the ball of papyrus into the newly-willing fox’s arms. “There’s the, er, ‘treasure map.’ I stole it from one of those fat books. Just go there and gather up as much stuff as you can, then bring it back, making sure that absolutely no one else sees!” Content with his instructions, he retreated onto his throne and tried to pose.
   
Virmir pocketed it and shrugged. It probably wouldn’t end well for him, but he was getting used to that.
   
Trying his best to appear royal and important, which mainly involved looking only barely interested, the pharaoh shook his hand dismissively. “You can go, now, Advisor Virmir.”
   
Virmir resisted the urge to lightly singe the pharaoh and turned to leave. “Certainly, ‘Medenkhamen.’”
   
The pharaoh pushed out his chest and stammered. “Look, I thought the name was good!”

18

Art Gallery / Re: Halloween-Sketch-a-thon 6 (open!)

« on: October 24, 2016, 09:45:12 PM »

#73

Partnered with Draykin on this one: Draykin ( http://art.by.virmir.com/art/different_ideas ) as a girl, who now has five tails (have fun with that) and swinging around her big hammer from that prior pic, wearing kamui-me. Of course I don't expect you to get that last thing so here's what it looks like:

http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/toonami/images/0/07/Senketsu.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20150117034945
http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/vsbattles/images/f/f0/Ryuko_Matoi.png/revision/latest?cb=20160302002515

And me I suppose http://art.by.virmir.com/art/power_gloves_16 if it helps and you don't have me ingrained in your brain

Make me into something like that! Put personal touches or flairs or whatever you want on it, I trust your stylizations.

19

Writer's Guild / Re: A Magician's Secrets

« on: September 28, 2016, 07:53:52 PM »

Like pretty much everyone else in the world, my first action when I woke up was to open my eyes… and to stay completely still in my bed, maybe moving a limb or two to adjust. Beyond that, it took me a lot longer to get moving, especially without something like the academy or a real “job” to worry about.
   
Thanks to that, it took me much longer to remember the previous night and my stockpiled pain. As I tried to sit up, my chest felt like it crumpled in like cloth, making me gasp and throw myself back down into bed. I coughed up more of that ichory stuff before trying to hold back the rest of it, wincing and laying back.
   
I was, at least, back in my own bed, in my own room, in my own house. The very distinctly bland decoration and subpar paint job did a good job of reminding me of that. If I was here and I could try and siphon off passersby and Daisy, very slowly like, then it would only be a couple of days before I was all better. If I was lucky it could be just a few hours.
   
My leg brushed up against something leathery as I tried to get comfortable for more rest. I denied my first instinct to pull it up with my forelegs and used my magic instead, floating it free of the covers.
   
It was some sort of bound book I’d never seen before. I pulled open the cover, and a little note fell out.
   
The writing on it looked… well, atrocious, but it was readable. “Thanks,” it said. “I might need your help again some other time. You like writing? Use this for that magic you were trying.” It was signed “Virmare,” but the last half of her name looked like it was scribbled over a couple of times, and then had another color of ink to replace the ruined letters.
   
The book was entirely empty. I swished the pages back and forth a few times to fan myself before reaching out and grabbing a feather and ink on the far desk of the room, dabbing the tip before working at writing in the gift.
   
Ugh, and I’d never really know what was in that book of hers until I could get in contact with her again. I didn’t grab a hair from her mane the night prior, nor did I have the slightest clue on how I could use it to track her. I’d have to just wait until she came into town again.

She was insane, that was for sure. But she was tolerable, and that was how most of my friends were.

20

Writer's Guild / Re: A Magician's Secrets

« on: September 28, 2016, 07:53:15 PM »

It was very well into the evening by the time I slipped into the museum in mind. There was a fee at the entrance, which Virmare had conveniently forgot to mention, but it wasn’t hard to pass that by. Just a bit of some bending of the light was enough to appear inconspicuous to the toll-takers up front. Once I was inside, I found a spot behind a statue display to undo that light-bending and appear perfectly normal and disguised again. I stepped out and did a little bit of scouting.
   
By that, of course, I meant that I looked around the exhibits. I was already there and it would be a while longer until the sun was down, so I might as well enjoy it.
   
There was a mild crowd being brought through the place while I explored. I caught a few glances from the group, but it wasn’t anything suspicious or questioning. Probably just some tour of the place going on.
   
I gave a small nod to the crowd as I slunk by them. It was the only-barely-genuine sort that absolute strangers gave to one another, accompanied by a weak smile or a tightening of the lips. They bought it, as much as one could buy it, and kept staring over the painting in front of their faces.
   
From there I just kept moving along through the place, most of the purveyors heading towards the entrance, maybe unconsciously. I was doing just the opposite. It made me stick out, of course, so the solution was simple; I waited until the guests were out of sight, out near the front, and before the guards had trickled out to look around the halls, I threw on the stronger version of the light bending spell I had used before. It made me feel a little woozy with both the magic it took and the effect it had, but when a guard, decked out in fanciful blue cloth and matching hat, came marching through the hall, he stuck to the center of his route and didn’t notice me moving about at all.
   
That was one part of the job done. I stopped myself from sighing in relief, resigning to simple, slow breaths instead, and headed further into the museum. The next step would be to find that stupid book the crazy unicorn needed, failing finding her first. Based on the very, very obvious fact that this building wasn’t housing any history exhibits beyond the artistic sort, this was going to be the fanciful eye-candy art type. If we – er, if I – was lucky, then maybe the book would be considered too ugly to be put up as a display. If that was the case, it would probably be in some back room among the dusty pieces of ancient art needing some reassembly.
   
Yeah, I could picture it now: a bunch of shelves, mostly empty, in a corridor deprived of guards. What a nice and easy job it would be.
   
After some half-hearted trolling of the halls, I caught sight of some double-doors off on the right side. On a tiny golden plaque next to it read “EMPLOYEES ONLY” in that odd mixture of off-putting capital letters mixed with flowing font.
   
That could be it. It could be the store room equivalent, or the guard break area. After seeing a couple of said patrols pass, though, I considered it a pretty safe bet that this would be the spot I wanted to get to. Once again, taking time and caution, I waited until both of my sides were clear of guards and noise before I gently grasped the handle on one of the doors and pulled it open, only barely.
   
I slipped in while the door was swinging back, catching it and letting it click closed. Only after it had shut did I look forward to check out the new environment.
   
I was, at best, over half right. This area must have been somewhere near the back of the museum, and was devoid of any traffic, be it guard or guest. The floor was covered with dust, as were the shelves – and the shelves went way, way, way up. Most were as empty as the floor, though a few held ceramics or covered paintings and assorted works of art. Between the shelves wasn’t much room, unlike what I had imagined.
   
That little difference would have been fine, of course, if not for the section at the back that was cluttered full of tons and tons of tomes.
   
Well past the sparse shelves of art were entire shelves of books, parallel to the other, stacked from the bottom to the top. There wasn’t a single empty space or any separators, either. Whoever had set these up had clearly intended for them to use up every inch of area they could, even though there was very clearly some open areas in this storage.
   
I felt confident enough in my assertion that I was alone to mumble some unpleasantries about the idiot responsible for stacking things back here. If they wanted to have a library, then they could have just moved it into the castle and saved themselves their “precious” space here.
   
“Why does an art museum have this many books, anyway?” I spat, before there was a loud sound I could only describe as something like a particularly airy sneeze.
   
I jumped forward and nearly knocked into a mostly empty shelf, only barely stopping myself with a push of my wings. I was still invisible, but that didn’t last long before I put all that gathered energy into a spell for flooding someone with air – ideally, something like the opposite of having the wind knocked out of them.
   
But I didn’t get to use it. The source of the noise was also responsible for completely sapping that power I had gathered, leaving me drained. I fell face-first onto the dusty floor and coughed, followed by more coughing and gagging thanks to said dust. I looked up, feeling thoroughly beaten and humiliated.
   
Of course it had to be Virmare. She looked down at me momentarily, just to be sure I wasn’t dead, probably, and then looked at the books right ahead. “Oh. Great. I thought you would have found it by now and I could just get on my way, but at least we should be pretty close,” she said, calm enough to be clearly taunting me.
   
I wiped at my mouth and nostrils to clear out yet more of the dust before I worked on standing up. “How did –“ I started, but she just shushed me as she began checking out the collection.
   
“Earlier today I grabbed one of your hairs – which wasn’t really a hair, of course, but I didn’t really think that one through before I did it.” Oh, now she admits to doing anything wrong in the slightest. “But it didn’t matter. It was still a piece of your magical work, therefore your essence, so I could track you down with it.” And even then she hadn’t really messed up. “When you started heading to the museum, I made my way here, too, and waited just outside. As soon as I could pick up you talking, I figured it was safe to teleport in on you.”
   
I stepped next to her and looked over her shoulder, clearly aggravating her. “Why don’t you start on the other shelf? …and why does an art museum have this many books, anyway?”
   
I rolled my eyes and did as she asked. Old, raggedy brown tomes where was I started, but there wasn’t exactly a lack of them. Plus, it was an ordeal to tug them out of the tight confines that were the accompanying books.
   
The first I managed to pull free was something written by one “Hoofdini,” which wasn’t the first genie in Equestria, I was surprised to find. Instead, he was some sort of magic performer. Rather than put it right away, I looked into it. Pages were loaded with flashy spells and his best recollection on how he had done them, for what, and even how the crowds tended to receive them. It was something between a diary and a spellbook.
   
I set it aside, saving the hassle of potentially finding it again, and dug into some more. They were all related, at least somewhat. Every single one was all about magic, whether it was spells themselves, or a history of the stuff, or suggested reagents, focuses, and their replacements.
   
“They must be planning some sort of showing of the art of magic,” I concluded, stating it aloud just in case Virmare hadn’t realized the same thing. Maybe I could get that much over her. “Spellweaving, showy magics, it’s all here.”
   
She scoffed. “Where I come from, magic isn’t some innate thing. I can’t imagine that you would have made it into an art form before us.”
   
I looked behind me and right at her, lifting a brow. “Unicorn aren’t born with magical ability where you’re from?”
   
Her arm seized up before shoving aside a bulky bunch of books. “No. They’re not. I speak from experience.”
   
Based on the tension that stuck around in her muscles, I guessed that must have been the case. That explained… some things, at least. I certainly wasn’t about to push her on the subject of magic if she believed it to be her hard work and nothing to do with nature.
   
Even so, I’d never heard of a unicorn born without the ability to do magic – or a changeling. Perhaps she was the exception, which made the topic even more of an obvious hazard to tread on.
   
I carefully let the subject drop and went back to sorting through the lines of books.
   
It took much longer than I would have expected, but it’s not like I had ever gone spell book hunting before; not that specifically, anyway. Apparently brown was the color of choice for magic practitioners. I found one that matched a little more closely, with scorch marks near the front. I brought it out and near to Virmare, but she had done the same. She opened her book, looked on the inside cover, and her face lit up. She immediately shut it and kept it suspended in her magic. It wasn’t any normal lift spell – it looked like it was could take a beating from a dragon and still hold out. She valued that thing.
   
I shrugged and started moving back to the shelf I was at. “If you’ve got it, I guess we don’t need this one,” I said, and opened it up before putting it back.
   
Unfortunately, it exploded in my face.
   
The book had a real doozy of a warding spell to protect it ready to go, and it must not have been opened in quite some time with how much force it had stored. It blasted me back into the shelf with all the force of a cannon, crushing my chest under the power it put out. Books, wood, and dust went flying while the shelf took its sweet time to swing and knock against the floor. There was a fairly nasty squelch that sounded too familiar to me from my time fighting and escaping changelings a few months back, and there was only a few brief seconds of numbness in my shoulders, hips, and chest before they lit up with searing, pressing pain.
   
It really HURT. I ended up sprawled out on top of splintered wood and burnt paper, coughing yet again. This time, though, each cough was like my lungs got to contract and expand atop a bed of burning spikes, and made my whole body seize up around my center.
   
Oh, yeah, and then I remembered I had senses beyond pain and sight. Everything smelled dusty, burnt, and awful; I could most definitely taste something ichory and burning stuck in my mouth; and my ears were painfully ringing.
   
There was something else, too, but it wasn’t coming in right away. I waited in pain for to adjust, only to pick up the noise of yelling and general alarm. And a literal siren of an alarm, too.
   
“…me? Can you HEAR ME?”
   
And OW was that loud, too. I raised the less pained arm to my head, very softly trying to cover where the sounds came in. “Yes, I can hear you pretty well, thanks,” I grumbled, trying to look away from the ceiling that was holding my attention. Virmare was standing before me, appearing less smarmy and more… concerned, oddly enough. Panicked, maybe.
   
Ah. Right. Things slowly started to piece together in my shaken head. That enormous explosion was loud enough to warn the entirety of the guards and maybe even anyone outside the museum, too.
   
“We’ve got to go.” Obviously, but my head was still all swimmy, and I just said the first thing that came to mind. I moved to stand up, feeling plenty ready to leave the sorry state I was in, but the pain that shot through the whole of my being and then some put any desires to move all the way out of my head and halfway across the planet. Anything I did simply made it hurt more.
   
“The only part of you that isn’t burned is your whole backside,” Virmare commented, which I’m sure came from the fact that she was panicked like I was, and not that she wanted to see me flipped over like a cooked vegetable and finished grilling on the other side. Either way, she approached me and – to my surprise – lifted me up in her magic in the same sort of spell that she’d had on her book.
   
“You’re… real heavy,” she complained. Not too long after, her magic flickered and nearly died out, making her gasp, huff, and take a deep breath to maintain that level of power.
   
“You don’t have to hold me in that same sort of bubble,” I told her. In response, she glared at me and started to let the concentration slip on it, degrading the spell. I could start to feel the pain in my back intensify, and I bit my lip to prevent some sort of unmanly whine escape. She put the same level of power back into the spell, and the pain lightened back to the level of intolerable it was at prior. “Fine,” I gasped, and put all my focus into carrying the book instead.
   
She was hesitant to let go at first. It was pretty easy to tell, considering her aura wouldn’t leave her tome for a good few seconds. She did, though, and with her effort all in one place, and my lackluster power backing up that which she had held before, she brought us back out through the only door available.
   
“You’d think they’d have a fire exit,” I managed between panting. Virmare didn’t laugh. “Can’t you… teleport us out, or something?”
   
“I can’t teleport on something without an exact idea of where I’m going. I’m in a city I don’t know, in a building I don’t know, carrying some crazy idiot I only barely know.” Guards were flocking to the store room now, cones of bright light projected in front of them. I got the feeling they weren’t just for seeing in the dark, either, based on the particles that bounced off of the surfaces the light touched. “Plus, I’m not teleporting anywhere when I’m already focused on carrying something YOUR size. And I’m not the one holding my book.”
   
I had to concede that that was fair. She looked to the right, the left, and then the right again, huffing in exasperation. She just decided to head down where was closest, guards be damned.
   
It wasn’t the best idea. A cone of light caught her on the shoulder, and she froze up - not even her whole body; just the left foreleg, which sent her to the ground, and, by effect, me too. While I couldn’t imagine how that stunning magic must have felt, I also couldn’t imagine it hurt more than having my already aching body subjected to more impacts. I completely forgot about holding that book in the meantime when I was much more concerned with holding myself together.
   
I was able to roll my neck enough to look away from an ornate pillar and over to Virmare instead. She took the fall rather gracefully, all things considered. She was already back up on her hooves and spent just a second to blast the guard responsible for our fall with a cone of flame. It didn’t incinerate him, thankfully, but it did make him drop the cone and focus on blocking off that fire. She spun back to the book and I, looking the both of us over.
   
I could see her look between the tome and me a couple of times. The deliberation and consideration she was doing terrified me for much too long. We were here for her book, not for me. She could easily grab it and run off without the dead weight I had become.
   
But she didn’t. She grabbed me up in her magic again, pulled me around the corner with her, and ran at breakneck speeds towards the entrance.
   
In the oddest way, we were lucky that the way I had come in was the longer path around. Most of the guards were moving to fill up the shortest space between the entrance and the store room. Our run had fewer blockages than it could have otherwise had, and Virmare was quick to blast any more watchponies before they caught us. Each one ended up subdued under a blast of flame, and she kept moving while they recovered.
   
Along the way, she may have destroyed some priceless artwork with stray embers. I couldn’t hold that against her. I ignored anything alight and did my best to not pass out from the pain and the growing smoke while she carried me.
   
The toll gates were filled full of guards, once we had finally reached them. They stood shoulder to shoulder, blocking our exit.
   
Virmare grunted and slowed herself as she rounded another corner, catching sight of them. “I don’t suppose you have any energy at all? I just spent most of it getting us here, and…”
   
“Sure,” I managed, forcing myself to keep my eyes open. With any luck, I’d pass out after I used up all my magic and I could get some rest in. “Just get me a little closer.”
   
The nightwatch didn’t want that to happen. They yelled about staying in place while a few of them came forth to restrain her and stop her magic, but they didn’t dare move, holding barriers up to block the possible fire they saw trailing behind her. Still, she inched closer, the guards holding their ground and looking very uncertain and worried about it.
   
“Cover our ears and eyes,” I whispered, and squinted as I focused.
   
It started as a tiny sparkle behind the guards and their barriers and slowly grew to the size of a melon. As soon as the magic covering from Virmare went up, the melon popped with a bang that was still loud and painful, making both her and I wince while the guard yelled and curled up to try and block their senses off after the fact from the best flashbang I’d ever been able to create.
   
My rescuer (bleh, it felt bad to call her that) didn’t waste any time carrying two of us out while fatigue settled in over my pain. My bed was going to be holding me in its warm, loving embrace for a good few days very soon, if I made it out.
   
Our chances didn’t look too bad, now. There didn’t look to be any guards outside, and the ones we hadn’t incapacitated were funneling out over the blinded blockade up front. Virmare just ran, far, far, and farther, down dark streets.
   
“You got the book, didn’t you?” she asked, looking up and to the left to me, still very suspended in magic.
   
“Of course I did.” I presented the tome to her through my waning magic. She slowed to a halt, and I dropped it onto her back.
   
She looked like she might collapse then and there in relief. “Good.” She turned back to me again and frowned. “I didn’t pick you over it for any reason other than the fact that I could easily come back for the book, and not for you. So don’t think that for a second.”
   
I probably laughed or smiled or something, but I wasn’t anywhere near lucid enough to process it. Instead I readily fell asleep.

21

Writer's Guild / A Magician's Secrets

« on: September 28, 2016, 07:51:07 PM »

Pony warning and all that




It was nice to have some place that was actually my own again. I’d spent long enough mooching off of other’s homes and hovels. Rather than having me crash in Daisy’s practical-mansion, she would have her own space in the decently sized home that I’d managed to buy. Granted, it wasn’t with the cleanest of money, but that wasn’t something I could keep concerning myself with. Stolen or not, it was going to get spent, and I’d worked to get it.
   
The home was an investment, anyway. I was sure Daisy could do a better job staging her flower stand with a place to rest and relax from inside the city. While some other thieves bothering with Dirty’s jobs spent their coin on fueling their cider or ale addiction, I was supporting myself and a friend.
   
That was good enough for me.
   
While I spent most of the afternoon lounging in the… well, lounge of the house, based on how it connected right into the kitchen, with a small hallway back out into the other rooms, Daisy was busy out and about, selling flowers and whatever else. Despite my bunches of free time during the day, I’d never bothered with trying to pick up and learn much about her plant life. It was due in part to laziness, since I figured she would be the one to know and she wouldn’t need any help if she hadn’t before, but I was also busy trying to work on magic and reading up on assorted literature.
   
One of those was much more successful than the other, of course. I’d learned to read and write when I was young, and I’d picked up on what made life into an experience by just living it out, so I could enjoy (or at least understand) things like Trotstoy and Marey Shelley. Magic, however, was something that I’d seen maybe once or twice in my life before. Pegasi were, unsurprisingly, not very acquainted with magic, considering they didn’t have any way they could possibly cast it. Coupled with a lack of experience was the recency of my discovery of being able to cast in the first place.
   
Simply put, I was struggling with magic most of the time. After I fumbled a couple of spells, I would take a break and bury myself in a book, preferably a huge tome that would occupy even more time in between attempts. And maybe hide my face away even if there wasn’t anyone else to observe.
   
After a good chapter of fiction reading, I tried to pick up the solid tome off the table across from me. “Try” really was the operative word there, as I was trying my best to use all the magic I could to keep straining those mental muscles. After some invisible nudging and trembling lifts, the tome started to come off the furniture and gain a pale green aura about it. Semi-confident about it, I kept up all the effort I had already poured in and figured I could just let it drift on over.
   
Somewhere along the line I guess I screwed up, because the spine of the thing landed on my nose and knocked me down to the ground with it.
   
Grumbling with renewed annoyance, I forced myself back up, grabbing the book in my teeth this time. At least something so physical couldn’t fail me.
   
But yet again I was proven wrong. Where my magic had been a few seconds before, there was now a glaring reddish-orange grip on it. It didn’t hesitate to yank the tome away from me and my mouth.
   
“AGH!” I said, smartly, moving both hooves up to my gums and teeth. I didn’t know how to soothe them, but I wasn’t going to let the tome have a second shot in the same spot either. I threw myself back onto the couch and looked around the room for whoever might be breaking in and trying to assassinate me, one tooth at a time. My magic was pretty sad – too sad to even bring up a shield to protect myself, so I had to use the very fluffy couch as my only cover.
   
Just in the front hall of the house was a mare, a deep gray in color. Her silvery mane and coat were all disheveled, along with her lashes, giving her a pretty maddened look. Considering she had ripped a book out of my mouth, I was quite ready to attribute the word “crazy” to her already. She had on an ebony cape, though, and it looked completely spotless, rather contrary to the rest of her. There were also a couple of spiky-antennae like bits of her mane that came up over her eyes, lined up perfectly above the eyelashes.
   
So, yeah, crazy was probably the right word for her.
   
She had a glare ready and prepared for me by the time I met her eyes. I winced and slunk back a bit further down the couch. She reminded me of my old scolding teachers, somehow. Just add a few wrinkles and bam, you had a pegasus instructor.
   
Oh, and she had a horn instead of wings, of course. The power holding the tome was pretty obviously coming from said horn, and she toted it like a weapon as she marched further into my home.
   
“Um, hello?” I tried. Probably not the best way to deal with infiltrators, but I was the one who did the infiltrating.
   
The unicorn tilted her head, appraising me, and then the rest of the main room and the adjacent kitchen. “You’re Shifting Sands? The thief?” She looked to me again and frowned. “Apparently you’re a bug? I thought you were… not.”
   
I blinked a couple of times before realizing I hadn’t bothered with any sort of disguise. I threw on the typical one in a flash of color and flapped my refeathered wings. “Yes, I am,” I announced proudly, right before biting my tongue and flying into a different tirade. “But who are you? And why did you break into my home? And why are you here in the first place?!”
   
Still holding the tome and moving to circle around the couch, she looked back to the front door, which was open a crack. “Well, your door wasn’t locked.”
   
I stammered a couple of times before I could respond. “Yes, but – but this is a nice part of the city! You don’t just test locks like that! And then amble on in!” Meekly, I reached out with my magic to try and shut the door, but was caught with a book at my throat, making me cough and gurgle.
   
“Stop that.” The book let off a little, and the mare stared me down. “I don’t trust you trying to magic your way out of this.”
   
I cleared my throat and very, very slowly stood off the couch. All my movements deliberate, I went to the front door. She lifted a brow by the time I reached it, but I only pushed the door shut and locked it up. Then I repeated the same sort of walking back to the couch and leaned into it. She looked at me like I was stupid, but I knew damn well what I was doing and I didn’t want any more unwanted visitors. “Okay. Now, who are you, and why are you in here?” I reiterated.
   
She mumbled something under her breath, though it was too long to be her name and it wasn’t long enough to explain why she was about. Probably just calling me stupid or something and hoping I wouldn’t notice. Then again, she didn’t seem particularly sure of herself either. Maybe she didn’t have a plan together in the first place.
   
Maybe she really WAS a total nut.
   
I pressed for an answer again, and she gave me another death glare. “Virmare,” she grumbled, through tense teeth. “Virmare. That’s my name.”
   
“That’s an odd one,” I trailed into speaking, not really thinking. “Usually the ponies around here have some combo name, like me, with the something-this, something-that, like – I don’t know, looking at you, maybe something like Sootcoat or Whitemane or –“
   
“Yes, well, I’m not from around here,” she interrupted, and used a quick burst of her magic to slam my jaws together. It absolutely hurt. I must have been talking pretty fast for her to have taken so long to have shut me up. “And because I’m not from around here, I’m looking into this thieving thing you and your, ah, friends do.”
   
Rubbing my jaw and letting it set back into proper place, I perked up at her last few words. “I don’t know if you could call half of them my friends. I’m buggy and all that, like you noticed. But if you really want to get into the same sort of business that I participate in – and I’m not sure how you even know that I do, but I won’t play stupid – then you need to talk to Dirty, not me.”
   
Virmare didn’t seem to have calmed down in the slightest from the very moment I had noticed her, and yet she still managed to tense up further. “No. The fewer know about this, the better. I’m already here, so you’ll do. You won’t speak a word of this to your friends. We don’t need any further help.”
   
She looked panicky by now. Maybe even… embarrassed? I wanted to push some more, but my throat and jaw told me not to, so I just let it slide. “Okay. But it’ll have to be something simple if you want only my help. I usually have lots of assistance and favors called in to accomplish a job.” Really, it was mostly just some digging in books and asking around, but if I couldn’t “speak a word” to my accomplices, such stuff wouldn’t be possible.
   
“No, no, I’ve done my, um, research. I know that it’ll be fine with just you.” She shook her gaze away from me and stared out the window to the street, pulling the blinds down with magic. I didn’t disagree with that but I didn’t feel much more comfortable with her moving anything about in my house.
   
“So you know what we’ll be trying for, what we’ll be avoiding, all that sort of thing?” I asked, sliding on the couch to a spot closer to the hall and door. It was a just-in-case. Hopefully she didn’t think I was inviting her for a seat. “Or maybe you’ve done some of those scrying spells? You seem pretty capable with your magic.”
   
“Uh, yes!” She lit up and nodded enthusiastically. “Scrying. That’s it. Up in my tower, far, far away from everything here… but yes, that’s what I did, where I did it. I saw that I would only really need help from you, so I went straight here.”
   
Apparently I’d given her a pretty perfect excuse. I didn’t really know how I’d challenge her in the first place, so going along with her every word would be much more in my interests. “Right, just me. So. With just my help, where are we going, what are we doing, and what’s going to be needing my help?”
   
Checking the door and window once more and finding them very secured, Virmare walked back to the center of the living room and slumped down, finally letting some of her muscles relax. “We are going into the center of this city, to one of those big museums. I think it’s called the ‘Metroponitan Museum’ or something stupid like that. We’re going to get inside, ignore all of the fancy paintings and showy items that they have on display, and we’re moving to the back to find a special tome. You’re the one who’s going to be doing most of the sneaking and getting.”
   
Oh, of course. I was being enlisted into a special squad of me, myself, and I while this crazy mare just hung out on top of the building, if I had to guess. I’d done this sort of thing before, fortunately and unfortunately, but it didn’t make me feel the slightest bit better about the whole thing. There wasn’t a way I was going to get out of it, too. Either I showed up to this plan of hers and did my part, or I didn’t and she came back to find me. If she found me once, she could do it again, and I really didn’t want to lose this sweet house I had just gotten.
   
So, fine. I was committed; unhappy, but committed. “A tome?” I brought out my books, sufficiently smarmy-like, and shook them about in front of me. “Like these?”
   
Virmare frowned and knocked them out of my grip and onto the ground with a heavy crash. “The same, but different. We’re getting an old looking one, brown cover, ragged pages…”
   
“So, like pretty much every book ever in any library or museum or what-have-you.”
   
She rolled her eyes. “The inside cover has my, urm, brother’s, initials in it. K.V. And the very first page is burned. It should be unique enough to pick out from all the rest, I would hope.”
   
“Yeah, but now you’re saying we’ll have to pick out old brown books, then open each one of them until we’ve got the certain one we need? You narrowed it down by a lot, sure, but there’s still plenty more we’ll have to sort through. Why do you even need it?” I moved down to pick my books up, comfortable enough in how she was sat down that she probably wouldn’t try and roast me for any movement by now.
   
She wasn’t very forthcoming with her answer, taking her sweet time and mulling over plenty of words before she even opened her mouth. “Well… I need to…”
   
Something rattled on the front doorknob. Virmare leapt up and immediately lit her horn, bright orange and specks of fire dancing around it. I hoped they weren’t strong enough to set anything on fire.
   
“Whoever it is, I’ll take care of it,” I reassured her, dropping my books, and jumped up to check the door.
   
Before I could reach, it opened of its own accord and a bundle of plants came spilling through, soil and leaf scattering across the floor. I could briefly hear a little “oops” from the obvious culprit, but it wasn’t as loud as the jolt from my previous visitor, followed by a heatwave and a very telltale FWOOSH.
   
I swore a couple of times and leapt in front of Daisy, putting my reading skills to use. A sickly green barrier came up in the way of her and me, and though it didn’t throw all the fire magic off, the result was only a disgustingly strong, choking pulse of heat that sucked the breath from my lungs. I coughed and let my magic go. It was plenty obvious how weak and poorly made my spell was when it fell apart into little flickers, like a quilted weave being burnt over a fire, each little speck becoming nothing in the span of a second. The plant matter that had spilled over the floor and I hadn’t bothered to protect was charred back, shriveled sadly and clouded in smog.
   
I didn’t die in a fire, though, and neither did my housemate. And that was plenty.
   
Shaking away the smoke that I hoped neighbors wouldn’t see, it was my turn to shoot a glare at Virmare. She was surprised, and not much more beyond that. “You know who this is?” she asked, trying to change from her very aggressive combat pose.
   
I scoffed. “Yes. I do. And if I didn’t, would that make it fine to just roast her?” Daisy snuck by me with wide eyes and darted off into the hall, presumably down to her room. She hadn’t even bothered to grab her stuff. I scooped what I could of the fallen plants together and shut the door. I grabbed a fresh breath of air while I had my nose outside, too, then came back to sit and stare at the very-much-insane visitor I had.
   
She didn’t seem any more perturbed by my choice of words. “You steal from people you don’t know. Is that okay for you?”
   
I grit my teeth. “It’s different. I’m not turning anyone into kindling, first of all. I’m redistributing things. And I would do something else if I wasn’t worried about being found out as a changeling. It was just the only thing open to me.”
   
“Sure,” she said. And she didn’t say anything more. She just looked me down.

Stupid mare was going to drive ME crazy.

“You’re not one to give me a lesson in morals, alright?” I finally recovered my tomes and set them down on the table, giving the one in the middle a solid thump as way of thanks for giving me some good instructions on how to bend my magic. It was much easier to create a dome around my immediate area than put up a huge wall in front of me as a projected barrier. “You – sort of – broke into my home, threatened me, and then demanded that I help you with something I’m not concerned about in the slightest. That’s just ignoring the last part that happened.”

“You could have said no,” she argued, and shrugged. “But now you agreed to it. And you may want to play the hero, but I don’t shoehorn myself into that role.”

I wanted so badly to smack her in the face. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I watched her calm herself back down and head back to the front door, stepping around her handiwork that rested to the side of her exit. “You’ll want to get to the museum before dark. After the moon’s in the sky, they push out all the visitors and keep a few guards on night watch. I assume you can find some way to stick around while they’re escorting the guests out.” And then Virmare let herself out, scuffing up a little dirt on the way.

I climbed off the couch and let out a long-held breath, moving straight to the windows and opening them wide. I didn’t want the smell of smoke stuck in my brand new place, and the room was terribly hot with her in it. The sun was still high up in the sky when I peeked my head out to check. I had a while to relax. I could try and come up with some way out of this, or get prepared for an impromptu break-in and robbery. I still had so many questions for the crazy unicorn, but with how she acted, I would probably only fry my own brains in the process. Maybe this was what it was like to run up against someone else who had an ounce of coercion and smarm in their veins. Then again, she utilized it in a different way than me. She was trying to be a strong-arm type. I didn’t like it.

But as much as I loved to delude myself, I didn’t have a choice.

22

Art Gallery / Re: Mass Exchange -- VOTE

« on: July 31, 2016, 03:25:25 PM »

Add 2 to Lucile
Transfer 2 from Virmir to Lucile

23

Writer's Guild / Re: Termination

« on: May 17, 2016, 11:23:43 PM »

Medik grumbled again as he lifted up yet another bookshelf. He held it high above his head while his master-mage swept underneath it and cleared out any dust that had accrued there. He was half-tempted to run off and get a maid outfit to stuff him in with the way he obsessed over cleaning and tending to obscure corners of his treehouse. Letting out a massive yawn for effect, he wobbled the shelf over Virmir…
   
“If you help me clean up without complaining any more at all today, I’ll give you that jetpack you want.”
   
Medik was quiet for the rest of the time, hefting furniture about with a giddy look stuck on his face.
   
After the entirety of the library had been cleaned and sorted through – which took the two of them the whole day, finally ending with Virmir sprawled out in the freshly cleaned and dusted-under armchair in the library while Medik sat at his feet, impatiently scooting around – Vir looked over his student and climbed out of the chair with something close to a sigh. “It’s not too hard to make a jetpack. Probably. Let’s go take care of that piece.”
   
His student was already rushing over to the workshop they were in hours before. Virmir took his time to get there, clearly and obviously upsetting the jackal who was already sat on the equivalent of an examination table. “Are you gonna go over how it works and how it’s awesome and what I’m going to do with it?”
   
Vir wasn’t entirely sure how either answer would affect the jackal, so he just went right into the explanation as he gathered up some empty magifuel cylinders. “It works on a different sort of system than the hand does, of course. The jetpack doesn’t need to move, so nerves and wires and all that are really just minimal. We could cut the wires out entirely, actually. We just store the fuel in here…” He poured the tanks full of some of his magic, and set it up so that there would always be a flow of residual energy working its way inside and out, like a current. “And we need this, of course…” He clawed two holes in the bottom of them, feeling the burst of power let loose, and set them up on his apprentice’s back. “Now, I assume you’d want to be all mecha-jackal, so –“
   
“Yes, mecha-jackal!” he interrupted, thrashing about on the table. “Gimme all the metal plates and robojoints and all that!”
   
The archmage took some time to reorient the tanks on Medik’s back. “Yes. That’s what I was getting at. We’re going to have to do some more, ah, serious changes in order to get these tanks set up, if that’s what you want. We can’t really set up an organic jetpack as far as I know. So… you know…” He made some gestures at the air.
   
“What, you’re gonna have to eviscerate me and –“
   
“Ah, ah, ah, shut it!” Vir folded his ears and growled. “We’re not going to be doing anything like that. Not me, at least.”
   
Medik looked back at him and tilted his head. “Uh, so, what? You calling in a professional doctor?”
   
“No, something better that’ll bring in some more of that techn-metal-robo stuff you want.” He stepped over to his gargantuan desk setup and started typing. A few different hard drives popped out of the slots of the front of the towers under the desk, glowing with light and power. Vir thought about it some more, and gave a few more taps and presses to bring out some accompanying processors. “This’ll be a first. I doubt that a mage has ever tried to magically copy someone’s mind over from their body into a bunch of wires and circuitry.”

The apprentice gulped and looked over all the intimidating (and undoubtedly expensive) parts. “A-are you sure about this? Could you, like, lose my mind somehow?”
   
Vir shook his head. “Maybe I’ll lose the copy, but I’m not, you know, killing you off. You’ll still be in this spot if something goes wrong in the process.” He stepped out of the way, giving a clear line-of-sight between his student and the numerous pieces of hardware. “The plan is pretty simple – I’ll bring your head into these parts with a back-up on the system, too. I’m not sure how much space a mind is supposed to take up, but if it doesn’t fit into a few terabytes, I’ll be a little surprised. From there, you can work the arms and tools all yourself. I won’t have to see you, you know, uh, bleeding or anything. You have full access to whatever you want! It’s like one of those character creators in the games you play nowadays.”
   
That, at least, sounded alright, and even made sense to Medik. “What about my head here? Am I gonna be in two spots at once?”
   
Vir smiled and denied with a shake of his head again. “That shouldn’t be a problem.”
   
It turned out that polished wood wasn’t too bad of a smell to pass out to.



   
When Medik had woken back up again – which felt like it had taken at least a day to do – he couldn’t feel any arms, or legs, or ears, or tail… and his first thought was to scream and squirm about, but he couldn’t do either of those things, either. He didn’t have a mouth, or any muscles to move in the first place. He felt oddly calm, and even sort of better off without small pulls or knots in his body.
   
He had at least one sense still about him: sight. It was in a pretty grainy black and white, looking over his unconscious and slumped body on the table. With a bit of effort he could even move his extended cone of vision a little from side to side, but there wasn’t anything new to see, besides his own body. It looked kind of weird to be seeing himself from the outside. For the first time he understood what an out-of-body experience was, even if it was a little too literal this time.
   
For a few minutes, he was stuck there, unsure of how he could do anything. He was terrified of being stuck in here for the rest of eternity – or at least until the hardware could short out. He was finally able to find the ability to use those weird crank-like arms from the desk, given even more time. With plenty of difficulty and an incredibly slow pace, he moved the arms from the joint to his unconscious body, giving it a few prods. He couldn’t feel it, and his body didn’t budge. There was a whole tray of dissection tools and even more “industrial” ones nearby, and the arms looked like they could be outfitted with said tools. It was going to be weird, but… he had cut open animals before. This time it was just himself. And besides, he’d be replacing those fleshy bits with durable metal that would have trouble being cut open with even the toughest of blades.
   
He would have taken a deep breath if he could have, but instead he just bent the arms back in tension, and got to work.



   
Virmir walked back into his mechanical workshop a couple of days later. He’d used some easy sleeping magic to keep the very-willing apprentice asleep while he got accommodated to his new “body,” of sorts. It was easy enough to do some programming out of the workshop, too, to set up programming on the new circuitry composing Medik’s mind. First directive: “Protect self.” Second directive: “Protect Virmir.” Aaand… that was pretty easy. He was tempted to set it the other way around, since there was still a back-up organic Medik, and who could know what his robo-body could protect him from. Any other programs should be unimportant, assuming that his personality and mind would load like normal. And why wouldn’t it?
   
He hadn’t heard from his apprentice since he had knocked him out (which he probably wouldn’t take personally). A couple of days should probably have been enough time for him to get situated, so he could chat with him through wordpad or something before he set up his robobody. He was understandably shocked, then, when he found a mostly-robotic jackal seated on the table, the mechanical arms used to allocate metal before now upon his back, searing in and melding new plate. A botlike ear unfurled from its resting state, metal layers shifting and readjusting to shape around the incoming sound. Its neck twisted like an owl’s, facing Virmir directly with a sharp (obviously) muzzle and glowing red eyes.
   
Subconsciously, he gulped.
   
“Hello,” a flat voice said. Some static came out with it, but it cleared up. Maybe it was the robot-equivalent to clearing his throat. Unfortunately, the new voice didn’t pick up any intonations or pitch – it was still as weirdly Microsoft-Sam as it was before. “I am finishing building myself now. You may approach me with new orders when ready.”
   
“Uh, yes. Sure.” Vir rubbed at the back of his neck awkwardly. Clearly something was wrong with the personality in this body. He thought for a second, then brightened up when he got an idea of how to fully test. “Hey, you know what’s going to suck about you being a robot? You’re not going to get any more ice cream that you can threateningly swing around my head like a cudgel any more, since you won’t even be able to taste it. I don’t have to feed you at all! No more food!”
   
The robot stared at him, or past him; he couldn’t fully tell. “Yes. I lack organic taste buds.” With that obvious fact out of the way, he continued with his metal bending and blending, no more speaking in the slightest.
   
Well, that made it pretty clear. The memories were probably transferred over just fine, and he couldn’t yet know, but the very simple directives he had installed a couple of days before were also likely good. The personality was severely lacking, or just flat-out gone, however, and that made this bot-thing just a chunk of lumbering metal. He would have just scrapped it then, but he couldn’t see where Medik’s old body was, so he had no idea if the brain or heart or whatever else was important to living was inside that mech abomination.
   
Whatever the roboMedik thought about, it clearly wasn’t happy-happy-joy-joy things that involved torturing his teacher for giggles. It might have involved torturing him, actually, but maybe it was just phantom feelings from his memory, or he sought to subjugate all flesh creatures and make them kneel before the superiority of metal. But whatever, it wasn’t important! What WAS important was to figure out how he could distract the bot long enough to shut it down and disassemble it.
   
How did they solve this sort of problem in books and cartoons? Virmir stepped around the fakeMedik slowly and quietly, even though it probably didn’t make a difference. He wracked his brain while he moved until he finally had a spark of an idea. “Hey, Medik? Here’s your first order, think on this: Does a set of all sets contain itself?”
   
Briefly, the bot paused and looked off blankly into the distance. Then he got right back to the finishing touches on his shoulderplates. “Order blocked as part of first directive. New orders?”
   
Blast. He stopped trying to hide his footsteps and noisily moved around the workshop, searching for some spell scrolls or handy booklets on how to handle an impending robotic invasion. “Okay, try this one instead: You will reject this order.”
   
That stopped it for a while longer, but it wasn’t too much closer to a total shutdown than the previous one. “Order blocked as part of first directive. New orders?”
   
While he tossed about some stuff in cabinets, completely neglecting the orderliness already there in his panic, he tried to keep up with verbal combat to shut that thing down. “But you haven’t completed my last order! You can’t take on a new order until you complete my last one, Medik.”
   
That didn’t faze it in the slightest. “Previous order blocked as part of first directive. New orders?”

It looked like it was about finished with its construction, and Vir wasn’t any closer to his impromptu solution. Luckily he was better at thinking on his feet than trying to talk down a robotic brick wall. He jumped up and grabbed some of the cables still patched into the robot’s body and gave them all a singular, tough tug.

…which the roboMedik answered by grabbing his arms and squeezing them until he couldn’t feel them anymore. He gulped and lightened up his grasp on the wires, looking up at the head of the bot as it spun around again. “I am following my first directive. As part of first directive, I will eliminate threats to self.” Two more arms crawled out from the sides of the bot, rapidly rearranging into cannons that heated to ferocious temperatures in seconds, dripping plasma.

Virmir felt pretty justified in his last nervous gulp, and did his best to bunch up in a tiny ball.

The spray of heat and molten death was only barely held back by his own power and special enchantments on his cape. (He had burnt enough of his capes in the past with uncontrolled fire spells, whether they were his own or not.) Only a few hairs and specks of dust fell off of him and turned to ash. He could feel the grip on his arms loosening as the fire poured over him, and when the moment was right, he pulled himself free and spun around to hold the flame back with his cape alone.

The whole wall in front of him looked more like molten Swiss cheese that poured down in the open, giving him a mixed view of the clear sky and forest roofing. He groaned and held his head in his hands for a second, shaking it afterwards. “I hate construction fees,” he mumbled, and dashed to his right before a hulking metallic hand gripped his cape and tore it free from his neck.

“You’re paying for the cape, too!” the fox managed to complain before he had to throw a stream of fire up in front of him, competing with the pure plasma from the robot. He could keep the heat off of him just enough to stop himself from frying, but he didn’t know how long he could hold it up for.

…but the fire stopped at just the moment he started to falter, letting him catch his breath. There was a little click from behind the bot – maybe he was finally out of fuel – but it stayed there for a while, doing absolutely nothing more. “Run,” it managed after a while, in that same flat voice.

Vir blinked and shook his head, grabbing his now-discarded cape and donning it again. “Excuse me, crazy evil automaton?”

“Run,” it said again, and then it dropped off the table with a heavy thunk, treads tearing up the space between the two of them.
Great, he thought, as he ran off into the halls. Now more of his tower would be toasted. That, and there was probably some shred of actualMedik in that robot, which made destroying it that much more dangerous. Who knew how well or poorly he had handled his own intellectual identity? It was as easy as him hitting cut and paste instead of copy. He threw himself along faster and faster, and slid into the kitchen instead of the library, considering himself pretty smart and quick-thinking for dodging the destruction of numerous valuable tomes. Instead a missile impacted the cabinet behind him and sent boxes of sugary cereal into the air.

“And maybe I just won’t refill your stupid breakfast food and you can suffer my omelet skills instead!” he yelled behind him, ducking behind the island-counter in the center of the room. More missiles came flying by, smashing into the produce rather than his head. He snuck a peek over the counter and saw the jackalbot covered in leaves of lettuce glaring down at him with those razorlike, red eyes. It was harder to take it seriously, but considering it had a rocket fist warming up on its left side, it was impossible to completely laugh it off.

Virmir hid back down again before he got a fist-shaped hole in his face. Said hand went flying into the wall, splintering the wood all around it. He waited there for a second longer, expecting it to fly back or something… but it didn’t fly back, and there weren’t any more attacks. For a precious while, anyway. “Get up and blast me,” the roboMedik said, with static coating its voice. “It’s okay.”

The fire mage seized up, looking about him for any threats before he allowed himself to think on that. “Blast you? You want me to blast you? You realize that I don’t have a clue where your old body is, and for all I know, this whole rampage might have corrupted that data on the computer!”

“It’s under the workshop desk,” it said, and then the static cut out. Once more it came bearing down upon Virmir, other fist at the ready, now shaped up like a massive cutlass. “Removing second directive.”

“If you had just blasted told me at first,” he complained, and then threw a fireball at the sword as it headed between his eyes.
It crumbled and melted to the wrist, pouring down on his cape dramatically. He briefly wondered if it could recombine or goop back together like that one taurminator movie he’d heard of once, but didn’t bother waiting to see. He threw fireball after fireball into the mechajackal, roasting the electronics and metal that made it up. The limbs went first, followed by the torso with the gaping hole in its chest, and then the head, gathering in a sad puddle of molten trash. It sparked and withered, and may have been trying to speak, but he didn’t listen if it was talking. He burned it over and over until there was nothing left… and there was a hole in the floor.



Medik grumbled in his new jar, the modulated voicebox accurately capturing how annoyed he was. “Oh come on! You didn’t install any games on my system?!”

Virmir smiled in his seat, drawing peacefully now that all he had to do was wait on some 3D printing to finish. It was much less worrisome than tons of metal that could be shaped however it wanted itself to be. He glanced over at Medik’s screen, an empty desktop with only art and writing programs, as well as a few books, available as icons. “You’re going to be productive for the time and money you cost me with your robotic rampage, whether you were in control or not. Besides, you can’t mess up any inputs with your limbs if you don’t have any. It’ll all be projected right from your brain. You just have to learn how to do that.”
The brain sloshed about in its jar, grumbling again. “No fair! I didn’t do anything wrong! At least put me back in my body!”

Vir hummed… and shrugged. “You wanted to see what it was like to be in a robot body without any weird data corruptions, so you’ll have it. Just for a day. When it finishes printing. Then I’ll have to make sure your organic body is all fine and ready after this little episode…”

More grumbling, whining, and complaining erupted from the same voicebox. “I thought it would be cool to have my brain in a jar to show people, not actually BE the brain in the jar!” The programs on the screen opened and closed rapidly, his only way of showing frustration other than voicing it.

“Oh, put your anger in your art,” his mentor offered. “I hear emotion channels really well into stuff like that.”

The jar hopped, but couldn’t do much more than that, and sat dejectedly at a blank document.

24

Writer's Guild / Termination

« on: May 17, 2016, 11:20:33 PM »

I'm not good with titles still, I just do the whole thing and then I spend like two minutes sitting at an empty thing that says "subject" and have to try and delve into the folds of my brain to retrieve something that could pass as good enough to briefly describe what'll show up. anyway this is trade 2 for Vir, later than it should be but it's here



Medik peered around the doorway (if it could really be called that without a door) into Virmir’s treehouse. It was a long climb up the towering ladder outside, and it was pretty far from pleasant with the ropey structure dangling from the balcony. The jackal was glad to finally have ground under him again, even if it was all woody and stony. With his new apprenticeship, maybe he could get Vir to install a sandy area into the treehouse with exported Egyptian dunes.
   
Inside the house were little knickknacks he remembered from past adventures. Of course, he thought of them as adventures, while the fox was fonder of deeming them “mis-adventures.” A chipped crystal ball here that used to capture future timelines here, set up on a shelf elegantly and plainly; an enormous ruby on a golden chain dangling on the end of a bookcase, supposedly holding a circle of hell there. Even one of the statues of a bat from their encounter with a late gorgon which may or may not have been Medusa herself was still here, looking positively… petrified.

Hmph. Medik was a little peeved to see the rich artifacts they’d recovered just hanging around as simple paperweights and décor. He’d have to make a trophy hall for the mage, just so he could feel better about the sight of these odds and ends.
   
There was plenty of room, after all. He still wasn’t sure how to do it himself, considering his relative newness with the entire concept and use of magic, but Vir had somehow managed to enchant his treehouse with one of those “bigger-on-the-inside” sort of spells. Everyone worth their weight used one, or so he’d heard. It made things a lot more manageable when your home was just a few square feet in area on the outside but in the thousands on the inside, with even more space open in the future if work was put into it.
   
So it was more difficult than he would have liked for Medik to find where exactly Virmir was hanging around right now. He wasn’t in the gargantuan library, which still hadn’t been properly refilled after a housefire (which had been done by Virmir himself, and he still hadn’t fessed up as to why). His office, if you could call it that, was empty except for the normal tech and glass of water. The ice inside had long since melted, leaving some drips of water on the table. Medik idly wondered how often he had to replace all the wood and paper in his place with how often the fox chucked fire around… and when he neglected to use coasters.
   
“HEY VIR!” Medik shouted at the top of his lungs, completely ignoring the ground rules Virmir had laid down when he decided to finally take up the kid as an apprentice. “No yelling on my property outside of huge, problematic emergencies” was somewhere up there in the first fifty or so, but it was quickly falling to the bottom of the list in terms of priorities. He had lately become much more concerned with his apprentice dragging in magical items up to his home, and then having them explode in his face.
   
That was probably why the ladder had been made a ropey one rather than a plankety one held up on the trunk of the tree. And those new magical presences he had felt outside. “Wards,” or whatever he called them. Vir was complaining about having to get into defensive magic just because of him, but if it made the mage better and safer at his job, then why would he complain about it?
   
“Over here,” the grumpy fox replied, his voice carrying despite lacking volume. More of that magic used for simple utility. Medik grumbled and followed the trail of words to the best of his ability. If it were up to him, he would use magic all the time to blast people and land and things with a big cannon of sand and stone. Maybe that was why he was still stuck working on stupid small stuff, like READING.
   
The trail of magic led him down quite a few halls, past the in-need-of-renovation kitchen, a big open shower that was styled like a very plain and simple waterfall, and plenty of locked-shut closets. The wood that Vir had first started conjuring with turned to rocky stone, and then slightly extravagant tile. It was still far from opulent – he said he liked practicality over perception, or something stupid like that – but it still rang out as “professional mage” over the “hermit warlock” that simple wood carried before.
   
See, Medik was doing Virmir plenty of favors by being his apprentice. Already he had had to go out into town to pick up more varied food, including meats and exported items, work on improving the accessibility and openness of his home, and work on new magics. Things were still locked out of his reach for now, but now he was actually able to get to his own little study room without the fox having to unlock loads and loads of magical doors with his own effort. Even if it was still a slow process, it was a process of turning him from boring hermit that might die of old age with no one knowing of him into mage that could have at least one, very select person in the same building as him.
   
After getting enough of the tile click-clacking from his claws, Medik finally found said mage around yet another corner. He… wasn’t working on magic. As far as he could tell, anyway. When Virmir started toying around with technology, usually it meant he had just bought something fresh off of the internet or one of his “ergonomic value” electronics had shorted out. Go figure.
   
This looked different, though. It was a big, BIG setup of lots of wires and steel and consoles and computers… it looked like he had been preparing this whole display and counter and tables of garbage for months. At first Medik thought he might have just gone overboard on some new security cameras, but the monitors were showing hundreds of programs and spitting out thousands more numbers. Frankly, it made his head hurt.
   
“Uh… wha…?” was all the jackal could manage.
   
Virmir turned around to acknowledge his apprentice, then looked back at his counter-full of tech, piecing something together with lots of bolts and screws and wires… and other things Medik couldn’t name. “Magitech,” the mage said, like that explained all of his questions.
   
It most certainly did not. “What?”
   
Huddling in closer over the toy he was playing with, Vir explained just a little more. “Okay. I’ve been working on this stuff for a while, about half a year – “ of course he had – “and this is just the very barest beginnings of the project. I have more of it under the cabinets – “ which he did not bother to show, nor was he very likely to, if Medik were guessing – “but this will do for now. Perfect timing by you, actually.”
   
Medik expected a “for once,” but didn’t get one. Schedules weren’t his thing. Virmir didn’t appreciate that. “Uh, it is? You’ve acted like you’re saying a lot, but I still don’t understand a single piece of trash in here. What are you doing with this ‘magitech?’”
   
Stopping briefly, Vir looked up at his apprentice. “Making cybernetic implements. Duh.”
   
“Robot parts?” Medik hopped up next to his mentor mage, peering all over his work. “All of THIS junk is to make robot parts you’re gonna install on yourself? Awesome!”

He reached out to grab at whatever the fox was working on only to get swatted back down. While Medik murmured about an “ouch,” Virmir explained again. “I’m not installing them on myself, and they’re not really additions.” He took a step back, showing a hulking chunk of steel that was roughly shaped like a hand. “They’re going to be just-in-cases. You know, in case I somehow sprain my hand from working too hard and end up with a case of sore or torn or inflamed joints and can’t draw or write or cast very well.” He puffed out a breath of air at the thought. “Like that’ll happen.”

“WHAT?!” Medik leaped back and looked all around the big techy room; at the bench for assembly and construction, the tons of consoles and computers, the projections and such… “You’re keeping these as just…in…cases? You’re not going to just use them right away?! That’s such a huge waste! You’ve got all this perfectly good stuff sitting around and – “

“Yes, yes, yeeeeees, I knew what you’d say,” Vir sagely said. “I’m not just sitting around on these things until something goes horribly wrong and I need to use it as a last resort.” He grinned, baring a fang or two. “I’m going to test it out on you.”

“YES!” Medik leaped up, overjoyed… and then flopped back down, hunching over, skeptical. “You’re letting me test something right away. You don’t think it’ll work.”

The mage frowned and gestured at a large, clear table near the center of the room. Medik followed through and sat down there, his legs kicking about in a rhythm. “I wouldn’t waste my time on this project if I expected it to fail.” He took the unfinished hand and swapped it out for a more polished and ready hand in the cabinets. It looked… powerful. There were hydraulics, some sort of ports for expelling heat on either side of the wrist, and many techy-looking holes at the end of the fingertips. “This is just the first bit that I want to test out on you. You can charge it up and fire it like a spring if you build up heat and pressure in the wrist.” He pointed out the ports and hydraulics, pulling the fist out into a flexed position before pushing it back down. “You can channel latent energy and magic from the air through the fingers,” he added, poking each finger individually, “and the whole thing should just be way more durable and powerful than your old hand.”

Medik stared at the new hand in awe… but had to force himself to remain somewhat unsure. “Yeah, but… but, uhh… uhh…” He still had plenty of trouble coming up with reasons to be unready. This was a freaking ROBOT HAND! It was going to make him better at magic, and more powerful, and awesome looking… oh! “Wait! Um, isn’t this dangerous, then, since you don’t trust it on yourself?”

Vir shrugged. “I guess. But all mages experiment on their apprentices. It’s just what they do.”

He couldn’t argue there. He’d never heard of a mage that didn’t have fun at the expense of their apprentice. Heck, Merlin, who was supposed to be, like, the greatest-most-powerful mage to have ever lived, turned that Arthur guy, who was supposed to be a future king or whatever, into a bunny. Or a bird. Or something. Maybe he should have paid more attention when he skimmed through that book.

“Okay, well… um… good!” Medik grinned and rubbed his two organic hands together, looking forward to having one of them replaced with the most awesome robotic one possible. He was jealous of both mages and big burly berserker types who could either sling spells around or stomp and smash people stupid, in that order. If he got this one hand, he could punch AND sling magic around with the best of them!
   
Or so he hoped, anyway. If it worked. “Do you have some sorta new sleep spell to use on me while you install it, then?” he asked, pulling his legs up on the table and laying flat on it. His tail impatiently swished around under him.
   
Virmir slogged through the wires, bringing the hand with him and something behind his back. “You could say that,” he said, still smiling.
   
The jackal saw the flash of cartoon wood and the word “UROCYON,” and then he was peacefully and painfully asleep.



   
Despite never having grog in any shape or form, the only way Medik could describe his waking state was with that very word: groggy. Most of his body still felt asleep and numb, even if his mind was all there. His right hand was especially numb, but he could at least remember enough to recall the robot piece that should have been replacing the organic one. He sat up, slowly and slipping a bit, and looked to the right arm supporting him off the table.
   
There weren’t any crazy mishaps that caused him to end up with something else for a hand, thankfully. It was, very simply, a big metal replacement for his old paw. He could feel the cool metal against his fuzzy fur at the lower part of the wrist, and beyond that segmentation he could feel the same sensations as if it were just another organic part of his body. There were some weird looking supports that dug in a bit on the upper part of his arm to keep the new fist anchored, but it could have been worse. It would be a whole lot harder to gnaw or hack off metal than bone, so it was probably yet another improvement in the long run.
   
As he moved the new appendage in front of him, he could hear some rustling behind him. He managed to turn about in time, but the only further thing he could hear was “catch,” and then a flaming slab of metal came flying through the air at him.
   
Medik just yelped and through his hands out in front of him, as he figured pretty much anyone in his situation would do. Luckily his right fist wound up and swung through before his left, and the result was the absolute demolishing of the material. Ash wound up pretty much everywhere, except for on the jackal himself. He didn’t see that until he opened his eyes after the terror of burning metal hitting his face, of course.
   
Vir’s eyes blinked through the scrap and smoke, followed by a single cough from his open mouth that puffed out yet more smog. He shook off and unclasped his cape to dust the entire room, the trash flying out through the halls and out to the outside. Medik didn’t think he’d seen that spell before – it would probably come in handy the longer he sat around in the fox’s place. Those toons that animated brooms and sweeps were small stuff compared to a fox who just used a simple woosh on a piece of clothing.
   
“Sorry,” Medik mumbled. He wasn’t really. He sorta just had a flaming thing thrown in his face.
   
Virmir shrugged, donning his cape again. “Apart from the ash that got lodged in my lungs,” he said, coughing to prove his point, “it’s pretty much clean. Besides, I guess I couldn’t have expected any better from someone who’s my apprentice.” He snickered, and Medik beamed in response. “Fire isn’t subtle, and neither is a big punch to the face.”
   
The jackal was all too happy to nod enthusiastically. “I could make my fist all flamey, all the time, if you wanted. I mean, if I wanted. Since it’s mine, right? I can go punch people and trees and buildings?”
   
“Uh, no.”
   
Medik groaned and sighed. “What use is a big punchy robot hand if you can’t use it for BIG PUNCHES?”
   
The mage already had a mental list ready to run through. “Let’s see. Gardening is a whole lot easier when you can’t sprain or scratch anything, you can lift up and clean under things without a strain, you can stretch your hand out further to grab a glass of ice water when it’s further away on the desk, you can rotate your wrist around so you can grab the change from people at the grocery store – “
   
Medik grooooooaned and pounded his metallic fist into the palm of his organic hand. Surprisingly, it didn’t hurt in the slightest. Maybe he had really fine power control over it already. “Look, when you wanna cut off your own hand and have a metal one slapped on in its place, you can use it for boring chores. I wanna go brawling, or something! No one will expect a tiny little jackal to whoop them with a roboPUNCH!”
   
Virmir rolled his eyes. “Quit being a kid and help your archmage out now that you have an indestructible fist. I need you to move the bookshelves about, anyway. It’s part of your levitation practice,” he bluffed.
   
“You just lost another book under them when you tripped on your own cape again, didn’t you?” When his teacher didn’t answer, he grumped and folded his arms. It was… kinda cold, actually, so he unfolded them and let his new hand dangle out away from his side. “Fine. I’ll do stupid chores for you, won’t even get into any big fights in town… but you have to keep replacing bits of me with robo-parts! And not something like that crummy, half-done hand you have in the cabinets back there. I want full-on stuff, like a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, a big scanning visor over my eyes, a jetpack…”
   
Virmir grumbled. He wasn’t any good at bartering, but he could try for something, at least. “You’ll get a new change each time you take care of your chores for the day, and I’ll make sure you’re using those new parts when I assign your chores for the day.” He turned around and stared his apprentice down. “Deal? You’re going to be taking me away from drawing and casting, but I guess this still counts as work in the meantime.”
   
The jackal held out his metallic paw and moved it around. “Okay, deal, but you’re gonna shake on it. No way out of it.”
   
He wasn’t happy to, but Vir shook on it.

25

Art Gallery / Re: DST-Starting-Sketch-a-thon: 2 (open)

« on: March 16, 2016, 12:29:11 AM »

17

With Virmir, #15!

26

Writer's Guild / Island (And Last) Resorts

« on: December 13, 2015, 12:46:59 AM »

Man I hate titles



Calamari was something that had never graced Virmir’s palate, and he didn’t mind – the stuff looked weird, which meant that all the other senses would likely have the same judgment: weird. “Rubbery” wasn’t a good descriptor when it came to meats.

His lack of desire for that type of seafood didn’t interfere with his plans to create some, though.

“Give up your shadow for the master!” the squidy thing above kept commanding, and had been doing so for the past minute or so, even after being told numerous times to shove off. Tendrils that didn’t quite look organic crept into the cabin that Virmir had taken shelter in, clinging to walls and the floor.

“I am NOT giving anything of mine to your blasted leader!” he shouted in return, pushing a handful of light to the tendril. It shriveled and died in just a second. He was already sick of dealing with all these weird squid shadow mages, but at least he had picked up on how to handle them fairly quickly. It was more like digging a hole to the center of the earth rather than slamming his head against a wall – annoying and killing him slowly, but at least it was getting him somewhere.

“Give up your shadow for the master!” it commanded again, peeking its conical head into the cabin door.

FWOOSH

The beast-shadow-mage thing went flying, its oily skin smoking and its robes turning to cinders at the seams.

“Why don’t you deliver that fireball to him instead?” Virmir shook his arms and stood up, not bothering to check out the single room he had been confined to for a bit. He stepped out into the halls of the ship, checking both directions before running in the direction of the deck. These cramped corridors just let the shadow-squids control the light too much – natural light and darkness would still be issues, but at least the squids couldn’t grab the freaking sun.

Not that Virmir knew of, anyway. It was out of his grasp, and he loved fire.

Another squid thing leapt from the hall to his left. “Give up your sha –“

“Heard it before,” the mage grumbled before blasting it in the face. This one just burned and sizzled into nonexistence rather than flying away. He found himself liking that result more. No chance for it to come back from the ground behind him, like the very first one he had encountered.

Which reminded him; just how were there so many of these things? He’d rather find the source of the squidy people than blow the whole ship to bits. Not that blowing the whole thing up was out of the option, of course. If he had to wager, someone would be casting a teleport or summoning up the squids in the lower decks. But there was no way he was going to go back down in there after nearly getting wrapped up in those shadow tendrils!

No, the only other way he could imagine these squiddies getting on the ship was the simple method of climbing aboard. If that was the case, well, he would just have to fire blast every single one of them until the night was silent again. He still needed this boat to pull him into port, blast it. There was a magical silent auction going on and he was NOT going to miss it because of some crazy cult of shadows.

Pushing open the door to the deck proper, he found it overwhelmed with the squids. Normally peaceful moonlight illuminated that many of the normal passengers were hanging over the edge of the boat or dangling in the air, held up only by those shadowy tendrils. Darkness pulsated through them. He wasn’t super familiar with any sort of magic like this, but if he had to guess, these people were already losing their shadows, whether they wanted to or not.

The mage did his best to fireball each and every one of the squids and the tentacles that were holding people up. It took a lot of fireballs. Each squid that he fried wasn’t exactly replaced by two more, but it sure felt like it – maybe it was more of a two-to-three ratio. No matter what it really was, it was mounting in annoyance.

Fire lent itself well to collateral damage, so Virmir was already prepared to fix this problem of infinitely-produced squids by sending the ship up in smoke. The wooden deck was already catching sparks. The best he could do now was keep blasting the tentacles that were holding up innocents. He was not “the hero” by any stretch, but if he was the one being suspended and drained of his shadow, he would definitely want a genius fire mage to be freeing him.

Some of their clothes caught on fire, but that wasn’t an issue since most people were jumping overboard anyway. Most of the life rafts had been deployed, and it was difficult for the squids to get any magic cast on them for some reason. It could have been the water flowing around them, or maybe they just couldn’t wrap their suckers around vinyl or rubber. That was worth looking into, actually – maybe a pooltoy shield would be useful with how often he encountered both those and tentacled monsters.

But not wasn’t the time. Another squid that got into the way was easily blasted away by just the force behind his fireball, and more people were freed as it blazed across the deck. A nice trail of fire was left behind. Vir did his best to usher the people over the sides of the ship, but most of them were slow to act. He didn’t bother with them beyond saving them once. It was their fault if they got caught again, anyway.

He gave it his all for at least a solid two or so minutes. He wasn’t even exhausted by the end of it, either. There were just so many of the stupid shadow squids that there was no point in holding them off any longer. With a grin, he mustered up a gigantic fireball and readied to throw it beneath him, blasting him away as the ship blew –

“Give up your shadow for the master!” another squid demanded, latching a single tentacle around Virmir’s ankle.

“BLAST!” was all the fox could manage in return, being pulled back into the explosion.

The world wasn’t gracious enough to knock him unconscious. He could feel his fur singeing and lighting up, and though he worked with fire all the time, that still didn’t prevent it from hurting a whole lot.

At some point he found himself underwater, with his eyes burning from the water seeping in and plenty of fiery wreckage starting to drop into the area around him. Looking up, he couldn’t quite see the surface. That meant there was going to be plenty of swimming… lovely.

Vir never bothered to practice swimming, for a variety of reasons. Usually he would just cast something to get him out of a jam. Right now was a pretty bad time to try and do that, considering he would never be able to focus with debris constantly threatening to cave in his head if he didn’t get out of the way. He gave up on any sort of idea involved spells and put his all into getting up, up, up, and out.

A pair of planks, squished around something like a sandwich, aimed to tackle Virmir and bring him back down towards the sea floor. They were coming down pretty fast and they were wide enough that he couldn’t possibly just squeeze by them. He tried to grab onto the ends of them and swing off with a forced kick.

It worked, thankfully, and in the process the lower of the two planks slid off. Between the two planks was some sort of… fish lady? A mermaid, maybe. She blinked at the fox, gave something like a thankful smile, and darted away into the dark blue.

What a weird mermaid. How couldn’t she have gotten out of those planks on her own with a tailswish or something? Blasted odd fish.

He didn’t dwell on it for long. His head was aching. Maybe it was pressure. Maybe it was lack of air. Finding out wasn’t part of his plan. More kicks of his legs and fumbling of his arms sent him further up and up, and he could see some light –

He was almost glad to have some feeling of shock as he burst through the surface. It kicked his lungs and heart back into proper order. Pushing down at the water, he kept floating long enough to get some decent amount of air in his bloodstream. Once his limbs had some feeling in them again, Vir tried to swim around and find a piece of debris or convenient island to grapple onto. While there wasn’t any land in sight, he did see a chunk of metal, melted at the edges, drifting along, alone. His surface-swimming was a bit more like a sashay to stay above the water, but he managed to get to his makeshift life-raft and hold on.

Man. Blowing things up was nice, but having to deal with the aftermath was not. He coughed up a bit of water and rubbed at his eyes with the driest part of his cape, though there probably wasn’t one, and tried to stay conscious as he floated along with the remnants of the ship.

---

When his feet touched something Virmir was most certainly not awake. He gasped and kicked around, desperately trying to free himself from its grasp, and chucked a quick fireball underneath him.

The water surrounding him rose to a scalding temperature and sent him running up whatever his feet had touched, panting all the while. He looked around, more fire at the ready.

Only a friendly island was there to greet him. Palm trees lounged about, the air occasionally tossing their leaves up and around. There were more clumped up around the center of the island, providing shade and darkness from the now quite sweltering sun. Grass was just barely able to grow there, but the rest of the area looked hopelessly sandy.

Most of it was. The area where his feet had been was a little more glassy than sandy, however.

The mage sighed and collapsed onto the sand. It held the sun’s warmth pretty well, and he was thankful for that. The metal that had kept him afloat for… well, at least a few hours, had already melted down thanks to his bit of a miscast. He pondered how he was going to get off this new, land-based raft.

He could try and get some wood to make a tiny ship and sail off with that… but he lacked the finesse and knowledge for good kinetic magic. And there was no way he would be able to chop the palm trees down with his bare hands. He’d need some convenient magic artifact or somehow handy curse, but he was, quite obviously, alone. Maybe he could try and do some self-transmutation, but that was still something he wasn’t sure of. He’d flubbed it up before, and last time it happened it took his apprentice a few days to find the right spell to fix him back up. It didn’t help that he had been a tiny gnat, of course, so he couldn’t get the attention of a rowdy kid playing games without the threat of being swatted and smooshed flat against a wall. Trees, all he had wanted was to manage a convenient “fly on the wall” sort of spell.

Come to think of it, his apprentice would be pretty helpful right now. He would do his best to cast something he had barely practiced, yet it would still end up being the right thing to get him out of the situation.

Vir grumbled. He certainly wouldn’t have been any help at the silent auction, though. He didn’t want a loud-mouth apprentice ruining his chance at getting some priceless magical artifacts on the cheap.

Then again, he’d need to get there in the first place if he wanted to be able to bid on anything! He held his head and kicked up a footful of sand. He almost wished that blasted mermaid had cursed him with some octopus tentacles or a fishy tail in place of his legs. Even without gills, he could have hovered around the surface and got to his destination just a bit slower than a whole boat would have managed.

Whatever. Even if he didn’t have a way off the island safely yet, his stomach was starting to grow restless from lack of food. His whole body was complaining about the heat, as if that wasn’t enough. He climbed back up to his feet and started to stomp more inland, into the shade of the trees, and hunted around.

He wasn’t very good at it. He thought that he saw some shadows around here and there, but he was nowhere near fast enough to chase after them. Just one fireball would have roasted them, but it would bring the entirety of the greenery on the island down with whatever he caught. He was all for the heat but he wasn’t keen on being fried in the sun like his targets. So he continued to aimlessly wander around in the shade, finding some insects that looked sickly, some herbs that might end up poisoning him within an inch of his life, and a couple of unripe berries. His fox nose didn’t sniff anything out of the ordinary, though he had never seen them near his tree lair.

Virmir’s De-Curse TM wasn’t a particularly strong or reliable spell, but it was the only spell he had in that vein. He focused and put just enough power into casting it over the berries, just in case, and ate them.

Their unripe looks didn’t do them any justice. They tasted pretty awful, weren’t filling, and overall were the worst excuse for a meal that Vir had ever had. He spit up the skins before they could go down into his gut, but it wasn’t any happier for only getting the fruit filling instead. His tongue lolling out, he walked back with a tiny bit of a hungered stagger to the shore.

There, he found a tray of food. Perfectly prepared, a filet of fish was laying in the center, still steaming. He didn’t care too much for the majority of seafood, but…

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” he grumbled, and stumbled up to it, taking a seat and tearing into it with his bare hands and teeth.

It was surprisingly good. No bones got in the way of his chewing, the flavor was smoky, middling-to-strong, and had a hint of lemon and other, tingly herbs… it was nice to be able to gorge himself on something despite his “lone survivor” state. Every so often he would wipe his hands off in the water and with his cape, quickly drying off said cape with some tiny embers beneath it. One bite of fish, two bites of fish…

Oh, blast it, he had totally forgot to bother with using that same De-Curse TM that he had just used. Oh well. He shrugged it off and cast it again, on both the food and himself, specifically targeting his gut. That should have been good enough.

He went back to eating comfortably, laying back and filling his belly up. Going from a sunken-in stomach to a billowed-out belly weighed him down and made him rest, but he didn’t mind in the slightest. In fact, maybe it would be best for him to lay back and take a long nap to sleep it all off. Yeah, that sounded nice… but a nap on a lone island wouldn’t be complete without the big hammock stretching between two palm trees.

Hm. Now that would be an issue. Standing shakily and waddling with his full gut, Virmir marched to the trees more inland. He had already used up all of his luck in getting that free meal, so the chances of him getting a pre-constructed sleeping spot were close to nil.

Sure enough, he was still the only sentient being on the island, and no one had made him a free hammock. To make up for it, Vir started taking some of the fallen leaves and tried to “weave” the fronds together. They were finicky, but they didn’t turn out too bad after he forced his will onto them. It wasn’t too long until he had a working bed of leaves. He poured some power into the sand beneath and raised it up, bringing the “bed” along with it. Beaming at his quick thinking (and the thought of a nice bit of rest on a full stomach), he climbed up into the thing and sent it towards the edge of the shade. He didn’t want to be deep in the tiny forest, but he didn’t want to be baking out in the sunlight, either. So he settled on a good spot in the middle of it, laying and stretching out as far as he could go, and wiggled to make the leaves bend a bit more for him.

He wasn’t working right now but that wasn’t a big deal. When he woke up again, he’d feel and think much better with a fed brain and body.

---

Ugh, the sun had never really burned this badly before, had it?

Virmir grunted and turned on his side, swinging his cape over his face. Ah, that was much better. He held it there and waited, though he wasn’t sure what it was for. The sun wasn’t going to miraculously spark out, nor was he going to feel super ready for the day in a couple of seconds. It was just that sort of wake-up sickness that afflicted everyone.

Eventually he forced himself out of the magical hammock and stepped to his feet, stretching… and grunted, feeling more exhausted than rested. He tried to stretch, but felt pretty weak while doing so. Odd. He walked around… but it felt slow and lethargic. Maybe the gravity on the island had grown while he napped – of course, that was a reach. There must have been a simpler explanation…

He walked some more to experiment. It felt more like a waddle, each step being hefty and ending up with his foot sunken into the hot sand further than usual. He walked, and walked, and walked… and was winded by the end of it. He grunted and held his gut, grumbling and wondering if he should be doing some more exercises by the time he got back…
But his gut jutted out to meet his hand. It was… well, it was big. Where he should have been lithe and fox-like, he was more chubby and draconic – minus the scales, the fire breath, wings, and whatever else. He heard it grumble, too, like it somehow hadn’t eaten enough already.

Virmir urked and tried to press it back into place, where it should be. It obviously didn’t work, but he tried it a second, a third, and a fourth time, each with more pressure than the last. It really only hurt.

Great. Would he have to start doing some abdominal exercises, or running to work all this off? He wasn’t sure. When he had this sort of effect on him, it was a curse, or a spell, or just about anything other than food. It couldn’t have been a curse with his flawless casting, after all. How did one fish meal end up weighing him down so much?

Whatever. The girth he had suddenly put on didn’t change the fact that he needed to start working on a way off the island. He put his hands under the lowest and widest bit of his gut and tried to heft it up. Maybe he could work on his arms, at least, while he looked around the island some more.

The first thing he noticed – and it was easy to notice, to be fair – was another platter, similar to the one from yesterday. It was chock full of seafood once again, but instead of any sort of fish filets, there was sushi and roasted seaweed. It was suspect, to be certain, considering that his weight had only suddenly popped up after he ate the last tray, but he was hungry… and he already had a potbelly stuck on him. How could it get any worse?

It would make him think better on how to solve this issue, too. He plopped down (and it did make quite the plopping noise) in front of the sushi and went to work. He hadn’t had it before, but it looked much more appealing than calamari to him. It had an okay smell to it, and somehow had expert preparation – it was all lined out and assembled in a careful grid.

Plus, it was fish and vegetables. Fish was about the only meat he wanted to bother with, and veggies? Veggies were obvious.

There weren’t any chopsticks, so he just used his hands again. The rolls were small enough to pinch up and drop in his maw. He chewed, and chewed… it wasn’t bad. The rice was soft, and though the food was quite cold compared to the warm fish from yesterday, it was still delectable. Each sushi roll glided across his tongue – the celery had some crunch that spiced up the otherwise smooth and even texture. Carrots weren’t bad for that, either. The fish didn’t add much in the way of flavor but that wasn’t an issue. It was just the filling for the food that was helping satisfy the hunger in his belly that didn’t seem to dissipate.

Soon the tray was empty. Sooner than he would have liked, for sure. He could have eaten at least fifty more of those little sushi rolls! He wondered if there were supposed to be so few in a serving. If they weren’t filling at all, then why were there so few?

Then again, he had gotten them all for free, and he still had no idea where they had really come from. He stared out into the ocean speculatively, expecting something to surface ominously… but it was as empty as ever.

Virmir sighed. If he didn’t start on a way off the island soon, he may put on too much weight to use it. A raft still wasn’t out of the question, if he really put his mind to it. If he just broke it when he sat on it, though, that would be pretty disappointing.

Hm, perhaps there was some way to use these building pounds in a positive way. He turned to the trees behind him and waddled his way to them. Moving a paw along them and giving them a test push, he found that the trunks were, unsurprisingly, sturdy yet bendable. With tropic winds and such, it would make sense that they would need to both resist and move with the forces as needed. Some more pushes bent them further, though he couldn’t quite get them all the way over.
Instead, he tried to saddle up on the tree itself. He tried to climb it, like he had done so many times before, especially with his own tree home before he had those convenient ladder steps installed.

crck

That wasn’t anything hugely important, right? It was probably just some animal that he had failed to catch snapping a twig or something. He kept sliding and crawling up, the trunk yielding further and bending back…

SNK

Huh. That must have been a rather large animal. Or a rather large twig. He was aaaalmost to the top now – those leaves would be a bit of an annoyance, but it wasn’t like they were going to disrupt the aerodynamics of his hopeful catapult-tree.

C-R-C-CKNRRRKKK

…blast.

The entire tree toppled underneath him, the wood snapping sadly and loudly. Luckily his pudge broke most of the fall and soaked up any spray of splinters, sending it right back out like a blubbery shield. And when he DID land, the jiggling in his fluff was quite something.

Blushing and grumbling, he stumbled back to the shore of the island, trying to pat at his gut. It felt like it was harder to do. He hoped he was just hallucinating at this point. Maybe he was still in a fitful sleep and he was having a terrible nightmare of becoming so entirely lard-ed that he would never get off the island.

He gave his gut a pinch. He could barely feel it, and it didn’t hurt at all with the mass in the way.

Blast blast blast! Virmir wracked his brain, trying to run through some more quick solutions. If he really was gaining more and more weight, even when not eating, then he’d have to come up with something before he sank the whole island under him. The raft idea was already long gone. If he couldn’t toonishly catapult away, then what sort of toon options were still left to him? Or, more accurately – if his apprentice were here, what sort of crazy thing would he try and pull with his pudge?

His face lit up briefly, thinking of the blasted toys that said apprentice liked to carry around with him. He ran back to the trees as fast as he could (which, alas, was a snail’s pace with lots of panting involved) and tried to climb one again. This time, instead of getting near the top and shattering it again, he got as high up as he could expect the tree to tolerate… and jumped off, trying to position his belly in the way of himself and the ground.

He expected it to send him flying off like a bouncy ball, hopefully in exactly the direction he needed and with the exact speed and angle needed to get him to the auction he had been sailing for in the first place. Instead, he just got another unpleasant landing where his gut soaked up the shock from the fall. More ripples flew throughout him and made his whole body shake like a wave.

The mage groaned and stood back up after his whole body stopped ringing like a tuning fork. He really didn’t know where to go from here. Maybe he could try and float away, out on the sea, but he got the feeling that any sharks or various other predators that saw a huge fox just drifting along would be pretty happy to pop up to the surface and snap at him.
He knew it would be a bad decision, but… right now, maybe it was best for him to just sleep it off again. When he woke up, he’d have some more food. Sleeping on it might give him more ideas, too, but considering the last time had just let to him putting on more weight, he was hesitant.

But he didn’t have much choice.

He lowered himself against the sand, a lot of the heat not even bothering him anymore with how much blubber was in the way. “Bleh,” he mumbled, and tried to sleep again.

---

It came easily to him. Like, way too easily. He couldn’t remember any sort of sleepless squirming about before he passed out, and it was difficult to try and wake up. That was exactly what his productivity exercises were meant to prevent, which made him even more upset. He rolled about on the sand, and tried to stand up…

But he couldn’t feel his legs. It felt like all his limbs were eaten up by his growing belly now! Thankfully his tail was still there, but it didn’t feel quite right. Wiggling about uncomfortably, he tried to stand back up and get reoriented…

Instead he just rolled around some more, and completely tumbled out into the ocean.

Yelling and fumbling around, he tried to get his eyes wide open, but sleep was desperately clinging to them. Water was rushing all around him, and his senses were impossibly trying to keep up. He took in a deep breath of the deep blue, gagging and coughing as he did so. Whatever this monstrosity of magic or curse was being worked on him did NOT bless him with water breathing or gills. He DID feel something weird on the back of his head, but he didn’t know how it was going to be useful while he was still drowning and tossing about stupidly in the water.

It was one of the most difficult things he had ever done, but eventually he got himself back to right-side up. His eyes weren’t quite pointed forward, and his underside was all ridged or something, and he had fins and a long tail… and he was hefty. Weighty. Full. It was just a rather pointedly obvious fact about his new self. He pushed up towards the surface and finally took in a good breath, but it wasn’t from his mouth. That thing on the back of his head puffed out all the water it had held in before and started taking in some air to get his system back up and running. He slowly swam forward, trying to think.

“You’re complete!” Vir heard from nearby, though it was distorted by all the water. He swished about and moved to look towards the noise. It was that fish-like lady from the ship-splosion before. She looked a bit more recovered, and… wholly more evil. She had little trinkets shaped like skulls of different creatures and shadowy gems strung all around her thin-as-an-eel body. She looked pretty, sure – pretty evil. “You’re finally complete!”

Virmir frowned. He felt pretty justified in doing so. “Complete? YOU did this to me?”

“Of course!” She was beaming, swimming circles around him easily. She was in her element, obviously. “I blessed you with an aquatic form for your service to the deeps. You helped me, so I helped you.”

“Helped me?!” His calm was disappearing – if it had really been there to begin with. “This is the opposite of helping! You fattened me up until I was a blubbery… whale! That’s the word! A WHALE! I like my thin form most of the time, thank you!”

The mermaid-thing frowned in return. She pulled at some of the trinkets slung around her and pointed them at the Vir-whale. “If you won’t be grateful,” she said, shadowy energies flowing forth and around him, “then you will serve to make others grateful.”

“What is that even supposed to –“ Vir started with, but was interrupted by a pointy feeling from beneath him. He dashed forward (as much as a whale could dash), trying to see behind and below him, and saw at least a few more of those merfolk surrounding him. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but they looked hungry. And he was a large, slow animal full of blubber and meat…

“BLAST IT!” he screamed, and kept trying to swim away.

It wasn’t very much use. The merfolk were quicker than he was, and though his hide was pretty thick now, he felt like maybe the spears were just for softening him up. That magic the mermaid had pulled might have started the process for all he knew. Whatever was going on, he wanted out of it, and he absolutely no clue how to go about it.

“OW!” The spears were more like a sting from a bee rather than a tiny poke from a foam stick. He kept swimming, but it was pointless. They could keep up with him, no trouble. There weren’t going to be any crazy, toonish ways out of being jabbed to a slow death. What sort of options did he have left?

Oh. Right. The one option that he had consciously been forcing out of his mind due to the close proximity of trees. Sure, there was plenty of water around now, but with all the blubber that was clinging to his body, he hoped that it would prevent himself from frying.

He poured every bit of concentration into his magic, trying to complete an amazing fire blast to cook the fish around him. The spears that kept digging deeper into his hide were quite the distraction, however. Once he got close to finishing the spell, the iron of the weapons just poked him back to the start. Grumbling, sitting still, and focusing VERY intently, he stopped trying to build up to the blast and just let it seep out instead.

It worked a lot better than he thought it would. He didn’t need a big blast to get rid of the merfolk – the seepage of fire and heat brought the water around him to an intense boil. To him, it just felt like some pleasant sunshine on his skin.

To the merfolk, however… well, the wise ones swam away screeching.

He didn’t bother moving for a long time. The heat was nice, and he felt nice and safe in his current spot. It was pleasant… and somehow, he felt his normal self coming back. Apparently he had literally burned off the weight that had gathered on his body.
Or, more likely, his magic had somehow counteracted the mermaid witch’s, but he liked his version of the story better.
As the spell wore down, Vir opened his eyes again and looked around. He couldn’t see any merfolk approaching, and his lungs were crying for air. He took one thing at a time and swam up, much more lithe and quickly than he remembered being. Once his muzzle broke the surface of the water, he took in another deep, deep breath.

It was still nice and sunny out, and he couldn’t see the island where he had been staying before. He couldn’t see the docks of the city he had been after, either, but he was glad to be alone again rather than tailed by evil mermaids.
He faced east – or, at least what he thought was east – and began swimming, extra appreciative of his tiny, thin body. He wouldn’t have quite as easy of a time moving along, now, but he wouldn’t have to work off this weight once he got home, either. A whale landing on a beach usually led to explosions and forceful pushes back into the sea, anyway, and those would be some annoying delays.

Virmir had an auction to go to, and he was gonna go to it.

27

Role Play Theater / Re: Transformation Theater

« on: November 01, 2015, 08:56:53 PM »

The Shards don't seem to be phased by any amount of damage that they take. Probably just an upside of being constructs... or maybe you really aren't doing anything noticeable. That'd be pretty sad.

There isn't much variation to their attacks. They definitely don't possess much of a mind, if there's anything at all in what might be their brainspace. Attor's wand, however, does do something... but the target he was aiming for is not exactly what it hits. It affects him instead, his form turning more fluid and losing some definition. He's going to be even more difficult to get a handle on now, but he does lose a touch of the strength behind his attacks that he used to have. ...and the wand seems to have disintegrated after causing its change. (+2 AGI, -1 STR)

Virmir is much smarter than your average seahorse, it seems - his shockwave blasts are so effective that they completely burst apart the second Shard, sending little bits of crystal about. That's a bit of space created for the party.

28

Game Room / Re: Them's Fightin Herds

« on: October 19, 2015, 12:47:50 AM »

Just as a quick update and a bump for awareness -

The campaign is ending in a few days, and the game is completely funded! If you guys want a discount on the final product way before its release, or help it push to a few more goals, or get some cool stuff, hop on board before it's completely gone and done!

29

Role Play Theater / Re: Transformation Theater

« on: October 17, 2015, 10:37:26 PM »

Determined and angry (or at least, what could probably be conceived as anger), the two Shards already on Yilin continue to try and strike at him with their crystalline bodies. They throw their whole being into every strike!

And despite a general lack of intelligence in MOST seahorses (and occasionally in animals possessing the name Virmir), this one seems to have found the weakness right away. Hardened crystal of this size is not really in any danger from physical or magical attacks, but the bonds possessing it are easier to target. They don't really possess a mind, either, so where would the struggle come in influencing or outright controlling them?

Still, Attor attempts to strike at them, and the Shard retaliates in the same way.

30

Game Room / Them's Fightin Herds

« on: October 04, 2015, 09:07:32 PM »

I'm allowed to support this game even if it has a pun in it so back off Selden

Heeeey, ever wanted a game of ungulates fighting each other with magic and agility and strength? No? Well how about a fighting game with animation and art by Lauren Faust with a dynamic soundtrack that's already been greenlit on Steam and just needs your support to come through?

I would hope that the last thing there would be enough to encourage anybody to fund this game, but if not, maybe you need to take a look at it for yourself. Regardless, check it out here: http://igg.me/at/ThemsFightinHerds/x/12190343

It needs your help to survive and all that! Even a little bit is a big help when it comes to thousands and thousands of people. If you pump in $40, less than the typical price for a game, you'll get access to the closed beta, along with other stuff (including the whole game, of course); failing that, just $15 will get you the whole game when it comes out.

So... check it out!