Ash 54, 122
Though she did not really understand it as such, Imogen Ward had proven to be almost preternaturally gifted at the use of the Cardinal Rune of Animus. She had experienced a difficult initiation, losing herself to the totem almost immediately, and so assumed that her prowess with the sorcery would be equally incompetent. That was not so- instead, she’d managed to re-create the full-body transformation in a matter of weeks, and experienced little in the way of difficulty since.
Imogen herself didn’t grasp the unusual felicity with which she changed her shape, but she had noticed that the magic had gotten very easy to use very quickly. Her theories ranged from “Animus is simply quite easy to use” to “perhaps the mechanism is similar to Orkhan scales, and so I have been practicing all my life” but it hardly mattered that much to her. What was important was that Chief Oping’s gift to help her connect to the lands of Ecith had rapidly become a toolbox of incredible worth. But she knew that instinct alone was a poor substitute for real honing- practice, exploration and, most of all, consideration.
Most of the days since she’d returned to Zaichaer had been swallowed by business- in the fallout of calamity, a thousand minor crises raged, and she was conveniently deployable and sufficiently tough to survive any assignment. Stand guard over a Warrens entry for ten hours? Check. Spend days trying to hunt down hypothetical necromancers who might, on balance, not really exist? Check. Escort a couple of minor covens north, past the monsters? Check. Simply stand in the Sanctuary of the Sunstar awaiting commands for hours on end? You’d better believe that was a goddamn check.
So when at last a day came where there was nothing at all to which she could attend, she lost absolutely no time in claiming it as a free day and vamoosing. ”Not to worry, I’ll be around if anyone needs anything!”, she assured the duty officer on the way out the door.
A statement too vague to be a lie, but definitively bullshit.
In fact, she flew for almost an hour until she found a spot she liked. Her qualifications were somewhat sensitive; she needed to be well off the main road, in an open clearing rather than the forest, and far enough out that she could concentrate. Though she’d been experimenting with bringing lighter clothes by Albatross-form, Imogen had not bothered with that today, which meant her experimentations would necessarily be in the nude. Even if she was prepared to defend herself against travelers wary of witchcraft, she had no desire to be caught out in the state of nature.
Thankfully, the woodlands west of Zaichaer had such amenities (if a bit of wild can be called an amenity), and she located a small clearing with no immediate signs of human disturbance. Gingerly she touched down, planting her webbed bird-feet on the cold northern soil and deliberately ruffling all her feathers. Now below knee-height, she stalked the ground in a quick circle, checking to make sure that nothing was in evidence.
It was not.
Not in evidence, that is.
That is to say, there was nobody there.
Having solved that physical and linguistic conundrum in good time, Imogen considered what she was there to do. She’d gotten a lot of good use out of individual forms so far. Bird for travel, of course, the cat for stealth and night vision, the lemur for… well, everything, actually, it was surprisingly versatile as a form. She’d also, she thought, done pretty well in figuring out which animals could be evoked rather than transformed-into for useful attributes. The most surprising, and by a large margin, had been the common housefly, the spirit of which was capable of enhancing her reflexes to the point where it almost made her worse at swordplay.
But Animus wasn’t just about turning into an ever-growing variety of creatures, nor was it simply a tool to enhance a witch’s swordplay. There was an incredible level of potential in chimerism, the art of transforming partway into multiple creatures in order to create a new beast with all the strengths of many.
…in theory. So far, she’d mostly just used it to give herself arms while a bird.
So then, to work. It was time to try… Chimeric shapeshifting!
She began with a very simple combination- her own form and that of the horse totem she had only recently stolen from a Kalzasaern officer to the north. The process was easy enough. She simply returned to her Orkhan form (still quite starkers, but no matter) and began the process of morphing her legs into those of a mare.
It took a minute. There was no point in expending extra aether by doing these transformations quickly; besides, she thought it was best to pay close attention to the signals her body sent in response to the magic, to feel if it was working well. Mostly it felt like her legs had dissolved into gel, which moved in unexpected and unpleasant ways as she reshaped her own skin, muscle and bone.
When she was done, she stood up… and stumbled. She’d tried the form of a horse without significant issue in the past, but her upper body was a surprisingly serious weight where a neck ought to be. Was this really how horses felt when someone was riding them? She hadn’t had the opportunity to check for herself, yet.
But no, she thought the problem was too great for that. When a rider sat a-saddle, the seat was located over the horse’s back, not so far forward on the body. Though the horse-body was larger than half an Orkhan, it was still much more weight than it was prepared to deal with.
Perhaps, she mused to herself, this would be more bearable with a lighter torso? I could dwindle to a human’s size, and the reduced weight might make this whole process easier. But I cannot really think of any use for a half-human half-horse which would not be more easily accomplished by… well, a horse.
With Carina’s totem, Imogen could have tried the thought experiment out, but she saw no real point without first expressing some purpose to the shape. She decided that centaur-form was a success, but not a particularly useful one.
One exception to Imogen’s history of neglecting chimerism was the winged lemur, an experiment in flight she had just about gotten to work during her time with the fae boy Destyn.
It wasn’t… good. She’d thought it would combine the best features of the bird (flight) with the best features of the lemur (having hands), but it had actually produced a lemur which was vaguely capable of faffing about in midair if it really, really worked at it.
Still, she wanted to keep practicing. She had a hunch that at some point she would acquire a totem worth using in battle, and it would be really nice if that form could also fly. So she whittled herself down into the form of a cat, then grafted the albatross’ wings to the feline back. Once she was sure they were firmly in place, she took a running start on all fours, leapt into the air…
…and flew?
To the Ork/cat/bird’s surprise, this worked better than the lemur had, at least at a short distance. Where the lemur had struggled to gain lift and control itself, the cat’s form was much more adaptable and aerodynamic, and she had little trouble moving, as long as she was moving forwardish.
Well, she wasn’t sure what advantages this had over a bird, but there might be some. At the very least, it would save a few rounds of full-body transformation while spying.
Ever since attaining the form of the iron-shelled beetle in southern Ecith, Imogen had pondered trying to add the shell’s hardness to other forms. There were… problems.
Ordinarily, bugs had exoskeletons or shells of hard chitin; this one had a shell of metal, a weird variety of minerals somehow siphoned out of the earth. Manifesting metal was no issue for Imogen as a mage- she did it all the time in her Reaving. But the beetle had gotten away with the inflexible shell mostly because it was built in overlapping segments, which could move and slide into one another without bending or breaking. If she tried to simply turn her skin into iron, it would work, but also cripple her.
To minimize the amount of area she needed to manipulate, she returned herself to human form, then began a series of experiments.
First, she tried scales. Scales were a system she was very familiar with, and she knew how to locate and size them for efficacy on a humanoid form, but something told her she could do better. Scales had to be manifest in patches, interlinked, and couldn’t be too close to joints.
Next, she tried large plates, like the beetle used. She could manifest these a little like one-sided plate armor, which was effective enough up her limbs and down the sides of her torso. Unfortunately, guarding her flank while leaving all her vitals otherwise exposed did not greatly appeal to the Ork.
After an hour of quiet pondering, however, she hit upon another notion. What about fur or feathers?
This was very, very time-consuming. To meld the beetle’s shell and cat’s fur into one was an intensive procedure, requiring her to shape minute amounts of anima and split it among totems. After several failed attempts, nearly another hour later, however…
She stood in the clearing, idly banging her arm against one of the trees. She was mostly in humanform, but her entire body below the neck was covered in fine black fur, each bristle of which was almost inflexible. She couldn’t feel any details of the tree at all through the impromptu armor, even when she thwacked the bark hard enough to tear it off.
Was this useful? Maybe. It wouldn’t stop much kinetic force like a plate would, and she wasn’t sure it was all that useful against thrusts or stabs, but she was hard-pressed to see how a slashing weapon would do more than slide off. Perhaps it wouldn’t revolutionize combat, but she thought it might be possible to use such fur beneath other clothes in order to remain somewhat armored, all undetected.
She decided this was a mild success.
Imogen limped back to the tree she’d been testing her fur on a few minutes earlier and slumped against it, feeling aches throughout her body after the awful tumble. She hoped very much that the splitting pain in her neck was going to fade soon.
”Okay. That one is going to need a lot more design time.”
After the misadventure as a pegasus, Imogen wasn’t all that keen to try wings on larger forms… but she could hardly avoid it. The ability to fly while remaining dressed, while holding things, wielding weapons? It would certainly be a useful tool to have.
What’s more, Imogen was sure it was possible. She’d met several of the avialae in the last year alone, and encountered them sporadically throughout her prior life. They were, to her untrained eye, much larger than her human form, heavier, and simply equipped with wings at the shoulder. If she moved wings to the shoulders of her human form, it ought to work, surely?
In truth, the experiment wasn’t disastrous, not in the same way the horse had been. She could make wings large enough to glide short distances, to be sure. She didn’t simply tumble out of the air and wind up splayed across the ground, gasping for breath.
She also didn’t get enough lift to go anywhere.
After some practice and thought, Imogen decided that she was missing something. Some key organ, perhaps? She’d never examined avialae in a close capacity (medically or sexually), so she had no opportunity to consider the mechanics of their soaring.
”That, however, is a problem with a ready answer.” she mused.
She would just have to get herself a bird-man’s totem.
Though she did not really understand it as such, Imogen Ward had proven to be almost preternaturally gifted at the use of the Cardinal Rune of Animus. She had experienced a difficult initiation, losing herself to the totem almost immediately, and so assumed that her prowess with the sorcery would be equally incompetent. That was not so- instead, she’d managed to re-create the full-body transformation in a matter of weeks, and experienced little in the way of difficulty since.
Imogen herself didn’t grasp the unusual felicity with which she changed her shape, but she had noticed that the magic had gotten very easy to use very quickly. Her theories ranged from “Animus is simply quite easy to use” to “perhaps the mechanism is similar to Orkhan scales, and so I have been practicing all my life” but it hardly mattered that much to her. What was important was that Chief Oping’s gift to help her connect to the lands of Ecith had rapidly become a toolbox of incredible worth. But she knew that instinct alone was a poor substitute for real honing- practice, exploration and, most of all, consideration.
Most of the days since she’d returned to Zaichaer had been swallowed by business- in the fallout of calamity, a thousand minor crises raged, and she was conveniently deployable and sufficiently tough to survive any assignment. Stand guard over a Warrens entry for ten hours? Check. Spend days trying to hunt down hypothetical necromancers who might, on balance, not really exist? Check. Escort a couple of minor covens north, past the monsters? Check. Simply stand in the Sanctuary of the Sunstar awaiting commands for hours on end? You’d better believe that was a goddamn check.
So when at last a day came where there was nothing at all to which she could attend, she lost absolutely no time in claiming it as a free day and vamoosing. ”Not to worry, I’ll be around if anyone needs anything!”, she assured the duty officer on the way out the door.
A statement too vague to be a lie, but definitively bullshit.
~~~
In fact, she flew for almost an hour until she found a spot she liked. Her qualifications were somewhat sensitive; she needed to be well off the main road, in an open clearing rather than the forest, and far enough out that she could concentrate. Though she’d been experimenting with bringing lighter clothes by Albatross-form, Imogen had not bothered with that today, which meant her experimentations would necessarily be in the nude. Even if she was prepared to defend herself against travelers wary of witchcraft, she had no desire to be caught out in the state of nature.
Thankfully, the woodlands west of Zaichaer had such amenities (if a bit of wild can be called an amenity), and she located a small clearing with no immediate signs of human disturbance. Gingerly she touched down, planting her webbed bird-feet on the cold northern soil and deliberately ruffling all her feathers. Now below knee-height, she stalked the ground in a quick circle, checking to make sure that nothing was in evidence.
It was not.
Not in evidence, that is.
That is to say, there was nobody there.
Having solved that physical and linguistic conundrum in good time, Imogen considered what she was there to do. She’d gotten a lot of good use out of individual forms so far. Bird for travel, of course, the cat for stealth and night vision, the lemur for… well, everything, actually, it was surprisingly versatile as a form. She’d also, she thought, done pretty well in figuring out which animals could be evoked rather than transformed-into for useful attributes. The most surprising, and by a large margin, had been the common housefly, the spirit of which was capable of enhancing her reflexes to the point where it almost made her worse at swordplay.
But Animus wasn’t just about turning into an ever-growing variety of creatures, nor was it simply a tool to enhance a witch’s swordplay. There was an incredible level of potential in chimerism, the art of transforming partway into multiple creatures in order to create a new beast with all the strengths of many.
…in theory. So far, she’d mostly just used it to give herself arms while a bird.
So then, to work. It was time to try… Chimeric shapeshifting!
~ #1 The Centaur ~
She began with a very simple combination- her own form and that of the horse totem she had only recently stolen from a Kalzasaern officer to the north. The process was easy enough. She simply returned to her Orkhan form (still quite starkers, but no matter) and began the process of morphing her legs into those of a mare.
It took a minute. There was no point in expending extra aether by doing these transformations quickly; besides, she thought it was best to pay close attention to the signals her body sent in response to the magic, to feel if it was working well. Mostly it felt like her legs had dissolved into gel, which moved in unexpected and unpleasant ways as she reshaped her own skin, muscle and bone.
When she was done, she stood up… and stumbled. She’d tried the form of a horse without significant issue in the past, but her upper body was a surprisingly serious weight where a neck ought to be. Was this really how horses felt when someone was riding them? She hadn’t had the opportunity to check for herself, yet.
But no, she thought the problem was too great for that. When a rider sat a-saddle, the seat was located over the horse’s back, not so far forward on the body. Though the horse-body was larger than half an Orkhan, it was still much more weight than it was prepared to deal with.
Perhaps, she mused to herself, this would be more bearable with a lighter torso? I could dwindle to a human’s size, and the reduced weight might make this whole process easier. But I cannot really think of any use for a half-human half-horse which would not be more easily accomplished by… well, a horse.
With Carina’s totem, Imogen could have tried the thought experiment out, but she saw no real point without first expressing some purpose to the shape. She decided that centaur-form was a success, but not a particularly useful one.
~ #2 Flying Cat ~
One exception to Imogen’s history of neglecting chimerism was the winged lemur, an experiment in flight she had just about gotten to work during her time with the fae boy Destyn.
It wasn’t… good. She’d thought it would combine the best features of the bird (flight) with the best features of the lemur (having hands), but it had actually produced a lemur which was vaguely capable of faffing about in midair if it really, really worked at it.
Still, she wanted to keep practicing. She had a hunch that at some point she would acquire a totem worth using in battle, and it would be really nice if that form could also fly. So she whittled herself down into the form of a cat, then grafted the albatross’ wings to the feline back. Once she was sure they were firmly in place, she took a running start on all fours, leapt into the air…
…and flew?
To the Ork/cat/bird’s surprise, this worked better than the lemur had, at least at a short distance. Where the lemur had struggled to gain lift and control itself, the cat’s form was much more adaptable and aerodynamic, and she had little trouble moving, as long as she was moving forwardish.
Well, she wasn’t sure what advantages this had over a bird, but there might be some. At the very least, it would save a few rounds of full-body transformation while spying.
~ #3 Metal Humanoid ~
Ever since attaining the form of the iron-shelled beetle in southern Ecith, Imogen had pondered trying to add the shell’s hardness to other forms. There were… problems.
Ordinarily, bugs had exoskeletons or shells of hard chitin; this one had a shell of metal, a weird variety of minerals somehow siphoned out of the earth. Manifesting metal was no issue for Imogen as a mage- she did it all the time in her Reaving. But the beetle had gotten away with the inflexible shell mostly because it was built in overlapping segments, which could move and slide into one another without bending or breaking. If she tried to simply turn her skin into iron, it would work, but also cripple her.
To minimize the amount of area she needed to manipulate, she returned herself to human form, then began a series of experiments.
First, she tried scales. Scales were a system she was very familiar with, and she knew how to locate and size them for efficacy on a humanoid form, but something told her she could do better. Scales had to be manifest in patches, interlinked, and couldn’t be too close to joints.
Next, she tried large plates, like the beetle used. She could manifest these a little like one-sided plate armor, which was effective enough up her limbs and down the sides of her torso. Unfortunately, guarding her flank while leaving all her vitals otherwise exposed did not greatly appeal to the Ork.
After an hour of quiet pondering, however, she hit upon another notion. What about fur or feathers?
This was very, very time-consuming. To meld the beetle’s shell and cat’s fur into one was an intensive procedure, requiring her to shape minute amounts of anima and split it among totems. After several failed attempts, nearly another hour later, however…
She stood in the clearing, idly banging her arm against one of the trees. She was mostly in humanform, but her entire body below the neck was covered in fine black fur, each bristle of which was almost inflexible. She couldn’t feel any details of the tree at all through the impromptu armor, even when she thwacked the bark hard enough to tear it off.
Was this useful? Maybe. It wouldn’t stop much kinetic force like a plate would, and she wasn’t sure it was all that useful against thrusts or stabs, but she was hard-pressed to see how a slashing weapon would do more than slide off. Perhaps it wouldn’t revolutionize combat, but she thought it might be possible to use such fur beneath other clothes in order to remain somewhat armored, all undetected.
She decided this was a mild success.
~ #4 Winged Horse ~
Imogen limped back to the tree she’d been testing her fur on a few minutes earlier and slumped against it, feeling aches throughout her body after the awful tumble. She hoped very much that the splitting pain in her neck was going to fade soon.
”Okay. That one is going to need a lot more design time.”
~ #5 Winged Human ~
After the misadventure as a pegasus, Imogen wasn’t all that keen to try wings on larger forms… but she could hardly avoid it. The ability to fly while remaining dressed, while holding things, wielding weapons? It would certainly be a useful tool to have.
What’s more, Imogen was sure it was possible. She’d met several of the avialae in the last year alone, and encountered them sporadically throughout her prior life. They were, to her untrained eye, much larger than her human form, heavier, and simply equipped with wings at the shoulder. If she moved wings to the shoulders of her human form, it ought to work, surely?
In truth, the experiment wasn’t disastrous, not in the same way the horse had been. She could make wings large enough to glide short distances, to be sure. She didn’t simply tumble out of the air and wind up splayed across the ground, gasping for breath.
She also didn’t get enough lift to go anywhere.
After some practice and thought, Imogen decided that she was missing something. Some key organ, perhaps? She’d never examined avialae in a close capacity (medically or sexually), so she had no opportunity to consider the mechanics of their soaring.
”That, however, is a problem with a ready answer.” she mused.
She would just have to get herself a bird-man’s totem.