The Next Chapter: 21

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The Next Chapter
Chapter 21: Who Can Fix This Mess?

"Hmm hmm hmmmnn~..."

Beth passed by a girl who was walking slowly in the same direction and humming to herself. She was about average height, skinny, with exceedingly long light brown hair and half-closed eyelids. She seemed sleepy, yet content. Alyssa and Zurik passed by this person too, but after another few steps it was Beth who paused, turning around to do a little double-take. Her companions didn't stop until she said something.

"Hey—sorry, but. You look...super familiar for some reason?"
"Oh?" The stranger tilted her head slightly, and also opened her eyes just a bit more. From a front-on look, and that expression, it finally clicked.
"Oh, I know what it is! Did you ever, uh, model? Like for an artist?"
"Sometimes, yeah~." She spoke a little slowly, some of her words sounding like they were mid-yawn. "Pretty much exclusively for my body pillow, though."

"Your—uh—what?"

"Ooh, sorry~. I guess it's s'posed to be 'boyfriend'?" She smiled peacefully. "This'll be way easier once he finally gets around to proposing...then I guess I can say 'waifu' instead~."

"Uh...s-sure. So, your boyfriend though—is Xavier? That hot new artist known for super colorful, bright paintings, but who's all gloomy and moody in person?"

"Heehee, yeah, that sounds like Xavie~. Oh, I'm Vade, beeteedouble-you."

"Sure. I'm Beth, this's Alyssa and Zurik," she said. "What brings you to a college campus, then?"
"Oh, just wooorrrk," Vade said, her tone of voice betraying a tiny bit of annoyance at the concept. "Say, d'you know if this is the right way to the Omega Zeta Kappa house?"

"It is. We, were actually just headed that way ourselves."
"Really? Are you three members?"
"Nope—just guests. But invited ones!"

"We're, gonna play DND with some of the actual members," Alyssa pitched in.
"Cool~. I'll just follow you then, if you don't mind?"

"That's fine, I guess," Beth said.

She'd had a twinge of concern that this "Vade"'s slow walking pace might make them very late, but after the three in front had turned around and started walking, she glanced back once or twice to find the odd woman always the same distance behind them as she had been to begin with. The stranger thing, on further reflection, was that she usually didn't hear any of Vade's footsteps either. She just shrugged to herself after a while; it surely wasn't that important.

"What...um...kind of work do you do?" Alyssa asked around halfway from where they'd met to the house.
"Commissioned enchantments, spells, that kinda stuff. I'm a mage," Vade reported nonchalantly. "Apparently some of my work turned out to be a tiny bit defective...I guess."

"Your work...d-do you mean the house? How it transforms men?"

"Mmm-hmm. I mean—I totally can't take full credit for the design, but I'm the one they called in to fix that stuff."

"It's um...not going to start transforming people, while you're repairing it, is it?"
"No way—I'm lazy, but not stupid," Vade said. "I know very well to turn things off before working on them."

They split up once inside, Vade heading off toward the lounge while the others went upstairs and to the game room. Besides the three of them, Ed, and Jay, another couple of members had expressed an interest in playing: Kyosuke and Lyrica. Evidently both of them were kitsune with majors in the realm of theater; Lyrica had already warned that she might have to be an "only sometimes" kind of player if (she'd said "when") she made it into a play and rehearsals got busy enough.

They entered the room to find one large table set up for the day's session as previously instructed through some emails, and people crowding around another, smaller table in another part of the room. A wolf-guy Beth presumed to be Ed in "male form" was playing chess with that goth girl who'd had a shadow-arm on their earlier visit, and Jay (currently a girl) and a black-haired fox-girl with two tails (probably one of those two kitsune) were spectating.

"Check," Mary said right as the three of them came in, and then the whole group turned to briefly look. Maybe it would be more precise to say that Ed was losing a game of chess, going by the relative number of white and black pieces on the board.
"Uh, hey—we were just waiting," he said.

"Lyrica's running back here from class as we speak," Kyosuke added.

"Got it," Beth said. "Let's get the snacks and papers in place, then!"

---

"We're like ten minutes late..!"

"Sorry 'bout that," Hendrix said. "Teach just kept talking past when class was supposed to be over."
"No—it's fine. I know it's not your fault," Fritz said, hurrying to get the door to the OZK house open. "I just—really hate being late. But I guess, in this case...maybe they deserve for us to make them wait anyway!"
"Yeah, that's the spirit."

They headed inside, Fritz leading the way into the lounge—which he had seen on that tour a few days earlier, and which was the agreed-upon meeting place. Their arrival coincided with an unfamiliar person finishing her sentence: "..'till I actually see it for myself." The speaker was a girl with absurdly long, light-brown hair, who was lying all the way across one of the lounge couches across from a seated Nancy and Polaris. She sat up slightly as the two of them entered the room. "Ooh?"

The other two sat up slightly and turned toward the newcomers as well. "There you have it—just who you were seeking!" Polaris said, waving dramatically. "This is Fritz. Fritz, Vade."

"And this is Hendrix," Fritz added, gesturing.

"Uh-huuh..." she waved. "Nice to meet you guys." Her eyes seemed especially fixed on Hendrix. "Whaaat am I lookin' at here?"

"What do you mean? He's my roommate. I mentioned him in the call last Tuesday; did it not get passed on?" he asked, looking Nancy's way.
"Oh, I mean—I get that. But like..wow. There's a double-stack of super complex enchantments on him to do stuff that can be done just way simpler in one. Who cobbled that mess together?"

"I guess that'd be me? It's not like I have any idea what I'm even doing!"

"Huh? But you don't...ooooh." Vade nodded. "I get it. Prob'ly, anyway. Can you take your ring off so I can confirm though?"

Fritz sighed. "Fine.." He slid the ring off, and immediately started turning back into a girl again. The sensations of his hair growing, body shrinking, manhood disappearing, and then her curves pushing out into place seemed no less strange despite having endured them every night since Monday. But something new and different happened, too: His jeans split apart at the thighs, the top spreading into a dark blue skirt while the rest of the leggings merged with his socks into some long, dark stockings; his shirt grew long sleeves, a bra forming underneath it to catch her breasts just as they grew into place, and it turned into a dress shirt—complete with a bright-pink ribbon tying itself around the collar right as the transformation concluded.

"A..aack! What the heck!?"

"Wh-what happened to my clothes!?"

"Huuh? The ring always makes your clothes fit, whenever you change, to avoid embarrassment," Vade said. "I thought you'd used it a few times already?"
"Y-yeah, but—but it never put me in a skirt before!" she said, awkwardly tugging at the hem of that article of clothing.

"At least you're fully dressed?" Hendrix offered.

She blushed, remembering the past few nights when—of course—she had wound up in an open shirt that nearly threatened to show off bare breasts. "Rrrgh."

"Well~..putting that aside, I totally felt it once you became a girl," Vade said. "Just like I thought—you must be a witch! So how'd you make those enchantments on your friend, exactly?"
"I..I don't know! I just—like—tried to do what this crazy house did to me. A-a-and then, when that changed him by accident, I tried to do what the ring did to turn her back?"
"Huh..? Huuuh. Hmmn." Vade pulled herself mostly upright, giving Fritz a long, interested stare. "You mean to say—you imitated those magic effects? Successfully? After just seeing them in action once?"
"I..guess?"
"Buuuut, the exact method isn't identical. You only put an enchantment on, while the house's effect does something a little more permanent. Yeah, of course! That must be your 'specialty'! Hey, can you do this?" she said, lifting her right arm. A pillow on another couch in the room floated into the air in response to this motion, coming over toward her. When she dropped her arm, it stopped floating and fell to the floor.

"Uh..sure?" Fritz tried to do what she'd just seen, imagining she had the force and wanted to pick up the pillow with it. When she waved her arm to do that, a bunch of sparks appeared around the pillow, and it began floating upward. "Oh..wow..!" Then some more sparks erupted around it, and it shot into the air so hard that it hit the ceiling with an audible thump. "Uhh..!" She quickly let go, and it fell under normal gravity until Vade put out her hand to 'catch' it and give it a more gentle landing, floating it back over onto the couch it had come from.

"Pffheehee...that was a pretty good try! You've got a ton of power in you, maybe enough to be kinda dangerous? I'd seriously recommend, like, finding someone to teach you some better control. But being able to imitate an effect right away like that is amazing!"

"Sure, I guess..? You said something about a 'specialty'?"
"Yeah." Vade sat fully up, bringing her legs around to the front of the couch. "Normal mages, like me, usually have to learn spells and stuff to do magic. Witches and warlocks are special 'cause each one has a 'personal' way of doing magic that tends to make it 'just work'. Like, I know one witch who has to phrase her 'spells' in the form of a question. Or, the guy who taught me magic is a warlock who has to speak in palindromes to do it. Those're kinda hard to work with, though, so he mostly just learned to do magic like a 'normal' mage instead."

Polaris cleared her throat. "All of that aside, miss Vade—are you able to confirm why the enchantment affected Fritz, despite his being conscious at the time?"
"Oh, yeeeaaah," she nodded. "Seems like this might happen for anyone with a big enough store of untapped potential, who's super close to awakening in some way. That's totally not ideal, though, and I guess I'm gonna have to come up with a way to filter those people out. Uuugh, there's soooo many ways that can happen, though; there's no way I could just manually detect every single one."

"I may have already devised a workable solution, actually," Polaris said, gesturing proudly toward herself. "If you would permit me a look at the enchantment's source itself?"
"Really? That'd be super convenient," Vade said, smiling.

"Uh, hellooo? What about changing me back?! Or, fixing Hendrix?" Fritz said, waving at her roommate.

"Oh, right. Yeeeaah, we should do that first." Vade stood up. "Hmmh. Are you suuuure you wanna permanently become a guy again, though? You'd lose access to that amazing talent of yours. Besides, uhhm. If you had so much buildup already before, it might just cause you to 'pop out' again later."

"Pop. Out," she repeated.
"Yeah," Vade nodded. "Liike, you're just walking down the street, and someone in the next house over does something that puts out just a liiiittle too much ambient magic. Your own magic might just grab onto that and turn you into a girl all over again. You'd be way better off with something that'd let you go back and forth, plus learning to use your magic properly and stuff."
She crossed her arms. "...But I'd be stuck as a girl most of the time."
"No no! Just some of the time. Like, when you wanna, or when you wanna do magic," Vade said. "Look—my boyfriend's a witch, and is basically only a girl in private. But we don't have any more of 'that' potion, sooo...hmm. Oh, I've got it!" she said. "Can I borrow that ring for a minute?"
"Sure..?" Fritz held out the ring (which was still in her hand since taking it off), and Vade waved her hand to have it float over in front of her, keeping it in midair around an inch above the palm of that hand.

"Hmmmn...yeah. I can work with this." She squinted, a look of intense concentration taking over her face for a moment, and the ring glowed like it had been put into a furnace and was about to melt. After a moment, the glow faded off, and Vade let out an audible huff of air. "Okay! There. Now it'll work differently for you." She sent the ring floating over toward Fritz again; as it arrived, she observed that its color had changed to a similar shade of bright blue to her hair. "Putting it on will toggle to the other form; taking it off does nothing. So you won't have to wear it all the time no matter which one you want."

It landed in her hand, and actually felt slightly warm still. "Great...thanks. So uh, what about Hendrix?"

"Weellll. I mean, you can obviously change him yourself, right?"
"I'd rather not be in charge of that forever!"
"Okay okay~. Theen, we should just dispel both the enchantments. If I do that all at once, it might get kinda messy, but—you've turned the second one on and off a few times already, right? Just do that, to start with."

"Okay.."

Fritz carefully 'pulled' the magic that was trying to imitate her ring (or at least what it had been doing before), and a few sparks flew out of her roommate as he shrank and shifted, letting out a soft "Rr~rfh!" as he grew the usual dog-like ears and tail. Hendrix's pants pulled rapidly shorter and tighter as he turned into a girl, until they were a pair of tiny daisy dukes with some rips in the leggings; his shirt grew a huge collar to expose her neckline and cleavage.

"Heheh~.." she giggled slightly as the shift came to a close, leaving her back in that dog-girl form she'd spent the past few nights in.

"What!? Why'd you still get to wear pants?" Fritz demanded.
"I dunno? I'm totally showin' way more skin than you are, though," she said with a slight shrug.

"I-I guess.." she agreed, feeling a blush hit her cheeks again. "S-so you can turn her back to normal?" she asked, quickly looking Vade's way.

"Sure, but.." She tilted her head a little bit Hendrix's way. "Do you want that?"
"Uh, well, I dunno. I do like me the way I am—you know, as a rockin' dude. But this is pretty sweet too," Hendrix said, twirling a little of her hair in an index finger. "Could yooou...hook me up with somethin' like Fritz got, maybe?"

"I don't see why not," she said, shrugging slightly. "I'd just need another ring?"

"Well." Nancy stood up, finally interjecting. "Strictly speaking, those rings—altered or not—are only supposed to be for members of OZK. I mean, I gave Fritz one because him getting transformed was our bad, but if the newbie witch transformed her friend, that's kinda on you?" She crossed her arms. "I can support turning her back as a one-time thing, but I don't know how our backers would feel about giving away an expensive item like that just because you want it."

"Oh. So, like, what iiif...we joined OZK, then?" Hendrix said.

Fritz looked back and forth between them a couple of times. "What if—we—what?!"

---

Right after Ed lost his third chess game of the day, Lyrica arrived. Mary waved goodbye, saying that she had some homework to get to, and everyone gathered around the table for the game.

Behind the DM screen, Alyssa seemed to turn into an entirely different person. She was bold, dramatic, and sometimes loud, practically acting out all of the NPCs their party encountered. It also seemed like she was ready for absolutely anything, given how quickly and smoothly she reacted to events such as Jay doing something incredibly stupid or Kyosuke's character flirting with every girl he ran into.

Ed had chosen a fighter: Straightforward and simple. Kyosuke and Lyrica had gone with a rogue and bard respectively; Jay chose a sorcerer with wild magic; Zurik was a wizard; and (probably after seeing what everyone else had picked) Beth played a cleric. Each of their characters had come to some kingdom to earn a reward offered by its king for exploring some ruins, and the chancellor had insisted that they work together. Apparently there was some place called the "tomb of horrors" which had, a couple of centuries earlier, been full of treasures and traps and had attracted and killed would-be adventurers in droves. The trouble was that those same adventurers' remains were now walking out of the tomb's ruins as undead and making trouble. The group's goal was to at least find out what was causing that to happen, and ideally to stop it.

As they progressed through the ruins, Alyssa gave a surprising amount of detail—though not so much as to become tedious—about some obviously pre-solved puzzles and broken, disarmed, or already-sprung traps. They fought a few groups of those undead adventurers and dealt with a couple of still-partially-functional traps along the way; the only treasure to be found was some mostly-ruined old equipment those undead had been wearing. And then they came upon one last group of undead, who did not seem to want to fight. Instead the one whose head and mouth were most intact was clearly trying to talk, but in a language that no one in the party knew. Lyrica's bard managed to figure out a way to communicate through sign language, and it seemed like these undead knew something about what had raised them, and wanted it dispelled just as badly as the king did. This was where the session ended.

---

"Think about it, dude! You're gonna be a chick like half the time, right?"
"I mean—no! Not anywhere near half!

"But still some of the time, right? Like, if you wanna practice magic stuff in our room?"
"Maybe? I'm still not totally on board with that."
"Aww, c'mon. Seriously think about it. You've got a super-amazing talent, riiight? Besides, I could see your face when you just casually picked up that pillow from way over there..."

After the blond dog-girl suggested joining OZK, Vade had gestured for Polaris to follow, then floated herself up off of her feet and quickly out the door and down the hall toward the laundry room. The celestial took a moment to comprehend this cue, and then quickly made her own movements silent so she could vault over her chair and run to follow. Their voices trailed off as the two of them entered the room, drowned out by the noise of a running dryer.

"Not that I will deny my own desire, but—are you certain this was an appropriate time to leave?"

"Naah, it's all good," Vade said, taking out a key from her purse to open the door to an adjoining room—which Polaris knew was where some "mundane" utilities such as a hot water heater were stored. "Trust me, I've seen this kinda conversation before. She'll end up agreeing to join, and then they gotta go aaallll the way upstairs and back again to get another ring for the blondie."
"If you say so."

Vade floated into the utility room, going to a bare wall, and placed her hand on it. Some glowing white magic appeared outlining the hand, then spread out into a large circular sigil. "That's...I thought I looked for enchantments everywhere," the celestial said.

"Heheh~. It's 'powered off' unless it's actually in use, which makes it pretty hard to notice," the mage said. "It only accepts a few specific people's magic—plus one 'backup key' we keep someplace else, just in case." The sigil brightened, then spread its light out into a brief flash across a section of the wall in the shape of a slightly thin, tall rectangle; then that section of the wall disappeared, revealing a doorway into a narrow downward stairwell.

"Sooo like..we technically weren't supposed to build stuff underground," Vade said with a slight shrug, "but it's way safer if the focus for structural..stuff, isn't inside the place it's affecting. You can keep a secret, right?"
"Immaculately."

"Pfft. Zale would just love hanging around you." The mage continued floating her way down the stairs into a small basement cut into the house's foundation, Polaris right behind her. The room featured a few tall, hexagonal crystals, each glowing and floating in place. She identified their effects immediately, and followed Vade to one whose light was bright pink—which was responsible for the transformation enchantment. With a couple of gestures of the mage's hand, that one's glow faded out.

"Theeere we go. Now, what's your idea for fixing the problem?"

"I was able to directly observe the enchantment's flux when it affected Fritz. It was quite irregular for several minutes before actually entering him. Therefore, it should be possible to detect such an irregularity," Polaris explained.

"Oooh, of course! Reactive rather than proactive," Vade nodded. "Let the magic's flow do the hard work of detecting instead. Just the kind of solution I like."

"Indeed. I believe I have some concept of how to implement the detection and cutoff measures, as well..."

---

"I-it was a lot of fun...! Um, y-you're really good at this," Zurik said.

Alyssa smiled. "Thanks. I have a theory that one can get good at anything, given sufficient practice."

"That bunch is a lot of fun to play with," Beth said. "Already looking forward to next time. Aaaand I appreciate you not making me turn undead another twenty times."

They split off from him after that, and Beth gently elbowed her friend. "Hey. You were kinda looking back a couple of times as we left the place. Something up?"
"Um...n-nothing too extreme. It's just that..."
"That..?"
"Lyrica. Whenever I looked at her, I.."
"Uh-huh?"
She blushed a little with embarrassment "I really...really wanna hug her tail! I-it looks like a cloud made out of fluffy fur. I bet it's really soft, and warm too..."

"Pfft. I guess you'll have to console yourself with your stuffed animals for tonight," Beth said. "Still—we're totally gonna see her again. I guess you could ask her then?"

"I-I don't know...it seems like a, well, a sensitive topic, is all. I'm, u-uncertain how to approach it," Alyssa said.
"Eh, you're smart. You'll figure it out," Beth said, patting her friend's head. "At least talk to her one-on-one next time, yeah?"
"Th-that'd be a good start, I agree..."

---

Nancy knocked on the door to the game room, then strode in, Felix and Hendrix (both back to being male for now) trailing behind her. "Excuse my interruption, but—those of you present who are members of OZK are enough to combine with existing votes into a majority, and I don't wanna be accused of making decisions like this by myself. We really need to elect a high council soon, at this rate. Anyway—these two are Felix and Hendrix. Due to some exceptional circumstances which are entirely Polaris's fault, they already have female forms, and want to join OZK. Introduce yourselves?"

Felix fidgeted his hands for a moment. "Uh..hi. I'm a sophomore in pre-law...and apparently a witch or something," he added quickly under his breath.

"Yo! I'm Hendrix, and I'm gonna be a rockstar," his roommate said almost immediately after, just as some of the sorority members (who all had animal ears) were reacting to that last statement. He made a brief 'air guitar' gesture, as if to further demonstrate his intentions.

"Oh, hi! I know you," Jay said, hopping up to her feet. "You're in choir, right?"
"Yep."

The two of them endured a barrage of questions after that—largely from the three fox-girls. Kyosuke was not willing to let go of the subject of Felix being a witch, and seemed impressed to hear of his "copycat" talent, eager to see it for herself. Lyrica wanted to know if either of them "gamed", and Felix admitted that he did "a little". After some chatter back and forth, the group more or less seemed to agree that they were cool with the two newcomers joining. On their way out, Kyo strongly urged Felix to get with her later to meet "some of the magic profs". After that, they were off to get supper before heading their dorm room to start moving out.

This really wasn't how Felix had expected this afternoon to go. But...the house was a huge upgrade from their dorm, and at least the people he'd met so far seemed like the kind of nerds he could get along with.

But...how were Gio and Ivan going to take this news?