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.
