you know, cuz it's like a vignette with Vir?
whatever
Virmir grumped and folded his arms while he leaned back in the hard-oaken chair provided – he was very used to this by now. “I’ve told you a million times that hypnosis doesn’t work on me,” he grumbled, slumping down further in the furniture, his eyes barely coming up over the edge of the table. It’s a good thing they did, too, as it was very important that he got to glare at his apprentice across it.
Said jackal of an apprentice was standing tall in his own copy of the same chair Virmir was in. He had his hands busy digging in to a tumbling pile of junk and trash that was, presumably, meant to let him hypnotize someone. There were at least a dozen things that the gray fox had already seen used against him, none of which had worked in the slightest. A golden pocket watch with a swirly amethyst in a prominent position in center of the face of the item went over the side of the table and clanked against the wood floor, sliding under a shelf. Virmir sighed and rolled his eyes. “You’ll be getting that eventually, I hope,” he mumbled.
“Relax!” Medik chimed in from across the way, using both paws to scoop a sizable chunk of items out of his face. “You should be relaxing anyway to make the hypnosis work. It’s kind of important! Your blood pressure might be too high at a resting point normally to make hypnosis possible.”
“I am calm!” Virmir told him in an admittedly not too calm fashion. He cleared his throat and adjusted his cape professionally and smoothed an antenna of hair. “I am perfectly calm. All the time. At least, when you’re not around.”
Medik shifted his own eyes. Apparently some of Vir’s habits were rubbing off on his apprentice, which both made him happy, for he wouldn’t have to try and force them through his thick skull magically, and displeased, as he didn’t want someone else copying his style. Dodging glances was his thing, blast it. So was his vocabulary. At least that was still all his own.
The jackal took his sweet time to sort through the copious garbage he had amassed on Vir’s furniture. Eventually, he finally recovered a silvery link of jewelry that fed into a single swirly pendant, the swirly bit sliding along the links with each little jitter of movement. It might have been a necklace at some point, he thought, but black-and-white swirls were most definitely not in fashion now. He sort of doubted they ever were, which made him wonder why there was any valuable metal at all involved with its creation.
Rather than putting it around his neck, Medik held it at some random point along the chain and lifted it up high, almost eye-level with himself. He even bent his head and the higher half of his spine forward, moving the swirly pendant along with him. He focused hard and put on his best piercing stare, looking right at the fox across the table. “You think hypnosis won’t work on you at all, ever, huh? This one is strong! I’m sure! I found it in a trash can one time!”
Virmir resisted the urge to gag. At least there was no lingering trash smell – he had been promised that everything his apprentice brought to bat today had been washed thoroughly before being brought onto the premises. “I’m certain that it won’t, ever. Especially not if you found some discarded trinket in the garbage somewhere. That doesn’t make me even want to fake it out of pity.”
“You won’t have to!” Medik reassured him. He started shaking the silvery pendant from side to side, prompting the swirls to start… well, swirling. “This thing should be so strong that it will hypnotize the entire world! …I think. Look, if you want me to prove that hypnosis can work on you, you have to be willing to let it happen, okay? It doesn’t work on anyone that’s unwilling, that’s the whole point! You’re just trying to go against the whole thing on principle!”
Sighing, Virmir decided he would indulge the ridiculous attempt. He sat up enough to be straight and looked forward, locking eyes with his apprentice. When Medik shot looks at the pendant over and over again, with matching exaggerated expressions of annoyance, Virmir groaned and complied, looking into the swirls. They were artsy, he supposed, but they didn’t hold any power in them. He would be able to tell, after all, being an accomplished mage! If there was some sort of spell going on, then he would absolutely know. Since there wasn’t even a tiny trickle of energy flowing free from it, he allowed himself to keep staring it over and lose his focus on other things, if only for a short while.
“Good!” The pendant stopped moving in such exasperatedly desperate ways, settling into a slow side to side motion like that of a pendulum. Somehow, the swirling of the pendant was perfectly matched with the sliding it performed while moving left and right. One never interrupted the other – each happened in a perfectly natural manner, a dance in utter harmony. Virmir admitted that that much was cool, and was promptly shushed and told to keep looking at it instead of speaking up.
“The longer you watch this pendant of mine, the sleepier you are going to feel,” Medik promised. Virmir felt no such thing, but he did feel like the room was a bit… darker, somehow. Maybe his vision was getting blurry from having to stare at the that swirl for so long. Still, just to keep his apprentice from getting upset, he kept on watching it.
“Over time, my suggestions will become more powerful to your hazy brain. It’s hard to focus when you are so sleepy. You feel much better allowing someone else to think for you and let you know what’s going on so you can rest your precious mind.” Again, Virmir could not say he felt this happening at all. He made some sort of affirming grunt under his breath, but didn’t say anything more than that; this hypnosis thing was a load of hokey but he wouldn’t voice that just yet. He could let the jackal keep trying, just to keep him appeased.
“Since you are so tired now, I will let you know how things are, as I’m sure you’d like to know,” Medik continued. “Your body is shifting. You are changing shape, from your old self into a more powerful and larger size, with dangerous claws and teeth.” Virmir almost laughed at that, and snuck a glance at his right arm while he could. Just as he thought, everything was perfectly in order, with his long crimson claws and lithe arm. He relaxed and slowly put it back down, going back to watching that pendant without any worry.
“Your clothes – um, what little there are – are blending into your body. You don’t really need to bother with them. You look iconic enough already.” Virmir couldn’t help but snerk and feel at his collarbone, feeling the generous amounts of fluff that stretched far past each shoulder. Of course he didn’t have any clothes. They looked ridiculous. All he needed was the V-shaped, collar-of-a-cape-like fur he had bunched up below his neck.
“Your hair has extended far beyond what it was before – not your fur, your hair.” Breaking eye contact with the pendant for a longer period of time, Vir snuck a look back to his hair and felt at it to boot. No; though it was already plenty long, it didn’t feel any longer than before. His ponytail bobbed and bounced as he turned back to look at the pendant.
Medik glared down at him from above the bridge of his wide nose, turning to put the tip of his nose back at the swirls, instructing him to keep focused. Virmir shifted his eyes before doing as he was asked, albeit with some more disgruntlement than before. His patience was wearing thin. It was obvious that the act wasn’t working, so why try and keep things going along?
“That hair has been bound up near the end like an actual tail,” Medik said. Virmir could catch him bobbing and tilting his head this way and that as he spoke, his own collar of fluff hiding the odd neck muscles at work there. “There’s a nice black band keeping it from falling all apart.”
Virmir scoffed. Of course there was – that was how his hair had always been. Now he was just saying obvious things to try and make the hypnosis seem like it was working, eh? In that case, he’d only allow a bit more of this big joke before he called things off.
With his eyes back to dwelling on the sliding pendant, he did feel a bit more at ease, though it was probably just because it distracted him from the overall ridiculous scene Medik was putting on. He kept moving his head around, almost trying to match the pendant as it moved, now only pinching the top of it with a finger and thumb. With how he was hunched over while he stood in the chair, he looked much more like someone squinting to read a sign than a wannabe hypnotist. Virmir put all the focus he had left in his peeved mind onto those swirls, allowing a few final attempts.
“Your power in magic is unparalleled – you manipulate shadows and fire as easily as one might feel their way through the air or sand. You can bend reality around you as you please.” Again, Medik was just stating the obvious at this point, and Vir had finally had enough of it. He shook his head, and bared his teeth, rolling his eyes.
“Okay, okay, that’s enough of that,” Virmir said, climbing out of the tiny chair and pushing it far into the corner of the stony cave. He wondered why he had ever agreed to stopping their expedition further into the dungeon here to allow Medik to try his ridiculous hypnosis against him again. This hovel of a room was plenty cramped for his long, tall foxy body and he was sick of his hair resting against the floor, and even worse, being threatened with being crushed by the rickety legs of the chair and table.
“Fiiiine.” Medik jumped down from his spot in the chair, readjusting his pose from an intense and attemptingly-hypnotic one to a normal and relaxed one, standing just as tall as Virmir himself. He grumbled and slipped his hypnotic implement around his neck, the steely ring bouncing against his chest as he walked while the leather that held it practically disappeared into all that white fluff above it. “I guess hypnosis doesn’t work on you. Whatever!”
“I already told you that, yes,” Virmir grumbled again, walking out of the side room and opening his maw to incinerate an enormous spider web that was further down the cavernous way. “Just get ready to move, alright? You’re still an apprentice on a mission with me and you’re going to be doing your best to help.”
“Sure, ‘leader,’ lead on,” he mocked, stepping behind Virmir while being sure not to step on that precious ponytail of his that kept dragging far behind.
