A Summoning: Part V

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V
~Lovers~

“Hello—” Zotha started. Riana slammed the door shut and walked with purpose toward the demoness.
“Look, if you have some kind of mental connection thing or something you need to tell Jerod or whoever to stop and not give that idiot whatever he wants,” she said, angrily poking Zotha's upper chest with an index finger as soon as she was close enough to do so.

“..You I like,” she said after a moment, smiling. It was honestly refreshing to meet someone who wasn't instantly afraid of her—or, at least someone who had completely overridden that fear with a far stronger emotion. “He's your boyfriend,” she then replied, taking a small step backwards out of the physical contact. “Isn't he?”
“Yes. He's also a complete idiot,” Riana said, crossing her arms angrily. “I joined up with this whole stupid cult thing and kept up with him in the ranks just to keep him under control. Look: He can be really sweet, and he's not a bad guy deep down, but he is so immature and he used to be an awful bully back in high school, before we got together. That side of him came out more and more the more Jerod decided he'd earned the right to lord it over other people, and I can't keep a leash on him at all now if you just hand him over some unimaginable power!”

“Hmmn.” The demoness put a finger to her head.

Cameron burst into Jess's room, let the door shut behind him, and strode confidently up to the desk. “You said I can have whatever I want, right? Now that we summoned the demon?” He said.

The high priestess sighed softly to herself. Everyone had known this was coming—well, except maybe Zotha. She'd been mentally preparing for it ever since Prama announced who she was sending in where. The genius girl was right, though, Jess was the right one to send him to. Master didn't know him like she did, not yet.
“That's right,” she said. “So what do you want?”


“I believe we can work this out,” Zotha said. “Would you mind taking a seat?” She gestured to the chair nearer the door, and sat back down in her own.
Riana looked back and forth between the offered chair and the demoness. “...Fine,” she said, slumping into it with all the grace of an eighteen wheeler. “You better hurry though, he'll get impatient if 'his wish isn't granted', I bet.”

“It's funny you should put it that way, 'keep a leash on him'. Given the idea we've had,” Zotha said with a mischievous grin.

“I wanna be super strong! Buff!” Cameron flexed an arm as if to demonstrate his meaning. “None of this dumb flab, ever again! And taller! With a bigger—”

“I get it,” Jess said with a mild wince. “That, shouldn't be hard to arrange. Master's powers excel in physical transformation. Hmn.” She sent some thoughts to her Master and received some back, but was careful not to make it too obvious, or put her hand to her head like usual. “How..would you like to be immune to most diseases too? See in the dark? And have better hearing and balance?” she offered, giving a sweet grin.

“That sounds great!” he said. “Yeah, add that too!”

“We're going to turn him into a wolfman. Sorta like a werewolf, but no attachment to the moon. He'll have ears and tail like a wolf's, though,” Zotha said, pointing to her own ears and tail as she said it. “And a couple of other canine traits. It'll make him strong, buff and tall like he wants—whoa, hear me out,” she said, putting out a hand to stop an oncoming rant from the feisty girl she was speaking to. “This is where you come in. You get some powers of your own, including over him. Let me show you...”

“O-kay then. Just stand still for a minute, if you can manage that,” Jess said.

“Can do!” he gave a faux-military salute. With his left hand. She had to restrain herself from facepalming; this spell required both her hands and concentration. After a brief bit of chanting, she drew her Master's magic from her soul (through her eyes, where the connection expressed visually) and out into her hands. And then she sent it into him in a steady stream. Slowly but surely, Cameron inched taller than he already was; the flab of his belly sucked inward, turning into a healthy set of abs. His muscles bulged slightly more than they already had as he gained more strength than a human body would normally have.

He looked down and around at himself, clearly enjoying the change. “Oh..hoo yeah!” His eyes turned bright gold, and his tongue lengthened, his teeth turning bigger and sharper. “Whoa...haha, rruf!” He gave a single deep-throated bark as his ears grew up into tall, fuzzy wolf ears, the same dark red as his hair. “Yeeaah, that feels great,” he added unnecessarily as a rough, deep-red tail spread its way out from his back.

“Now, what I just did has a few effects,” Zotha explained after channeling magic. Riana was looking down at her hands; surely it had felt a bit strange. “First of all, you can change yourself back and forth at will between your original self and a tall, strong, male form. Strong enough to take on Cameron in a fight if you had to—and trust me, you won't. Secondly, your boyfriend's new form comes with a certain attachment to you. If he lets you pet his ears, you can change him into a small, weak, cute girl.”
She looked up at the demon-girl, quirking an eyebrow. “What.”
“Jess assures me this is a good idea! She said: 'He won't be able to stand that form, and will obey you completely just to get a chance for you to change him back. It'll be a great way to teach him some real humility and maturity'. End quote.”
“Hmn...she might be right,” Riana said. “It's utterly bizarre, but what isn't about this whole situation, huh?”
“I concur,” Zotha said. “Of course, nobody tells him—or 'her' how this works, you can just ask to touch his ears and go from there. And claim you can change him back and forth whenever you want—which is technically true. I'm sure by the time you've changed her back all you'll have to say is 'ears' and he'll lean over obediently,” she said with a slight smirk.
“You better hope this works as well as you think it will,” she said with a stern glare. “Otherwise you're helping me clean up the mess.”
“Naturally. I'll take full ownership of my mistakes,” the demoness said with a nod. “But I don't think this is one of them. Okay, he's on his way out now, so we should be too.” She stood up, and Riana got up too, following her out.

Jess followed Cameron out to discover a somewhat odd sight: Prama was standing right next to Anika, hugging the gigantic fox-tail close against her body. “Waah~, it's so so~ooft.”
“What th—who are you people? What happened?!” The wolfman, of course, was in shock.

“Uh..s-some things happened,” Anika said. “This is Parker, and I'm uh..um.”

“Andrew,” Zotha said, coming out with Riana behind her. “Anyway, you look happy.”
“I am!” he said, his ears flitting to a confident upright and his tail wagging. “Hey Riana, check me out!” he said, flexing.
“You're, r-really cute,” she said, developing an actual blush. If she'd found him attractive before, it was hard to imagine the upgrade now. She turned this to her advantage, coming closer. “Those ears look neat too. What's up with them?”
“Oh, yeah, they're wolf ears! Awooo~!” he faux-howled energetically. Cameron wasn't really able to keep more than one thing in his head at a time, and Riana's compliment made him forget all about the other girls for the moment. “You wanna touch 'em?” He leaned down slightly, even though she probably could've reached him if he hadn't.

Zotha and Jess made their way over to the vixen and genius, who were bemused at the whole scene (Prama's arms still around that tail) until they recognized the look in the high priestess's face that said 'hey, watch this'. So they did, quietly, watch as Riana reached up with both hands, putting one to each of her boyfriend's ears, and rubbed them a little bit.
“Mnh..rrf,” he barked softly.

“Ooh, you like that?” she said, moving in a little closer with a gentle smile. Cameron became an inch shorter. “I can keep it up if you want.”

“Oh..o-oh yeah..!” he responded, trying to sound confident but clearly finding speech more difficult than before. He shrank two more inches, his muscular arms and legs becoming a little bit trimmer. “Mrrf..rrf, arf..!” At this point she moved in for the kill.

Riana pulled herself close, into a hug, continuing to gently caress her boyfriend's ears. Their color paled to white, their fur turning visibly softer and fluffier, as his shrinking accelerated. His newfound muscle faded, his clothes going from tight to loose around him as his form melted downward. All the while he continued to softly bark and yip, his tail whipping back and forth in friendly excitement. Before they knew it, Cameron was the same height as Riana—not much taller than the demoness. He leaned a small, round face (whose untrimmed fuzz had already been reduced to stubble) forward, nuzzling her cheek as his body hair vanished the rest of the way, leaving his skin soft and smooth. By now both of the new girls knew exactly where this was headed, and Prama let go of the tail to cross her arms and nod approvingly to Jess while Anika looked on with something like empathetic pity, but a resigned sort that suggested she understood why it was necessary here.

Cameron continued obliviously nuzzling his girlfriend as he shrank still more, his feet lifting off the floor heel-first, then toes, as only her arms kept his face high enough to remain against hers. His hair paled like his ears had, spilling out into long, messy white locks that reached his upper hips. When some of that hair brushed against his tail the white coloration seemed to spread from it to its fur, and the wagging appendage grew soft, fluffy and white just like his ears.

“Rrf, aah~arf..Yip...!” His little wolfy noises began to steadily rise in pitch now, and a blush was evident on his face...but he couldn't resist Riana's continued petting, even as his muscles softened completely away to nothing, leaving him with slender, short arms and legs and an inward curve to his waist. His clothes abruptly shrank onto his new form just before they could start falling off, the hoodie turning into a light tan sweater with a wide collar to show off his slender neckline and his pants reducing to a pair of short, black girl-cut gym shorts. A rather small bulge was visible between his legs due to the tightness of those shorts, and it visibly shrank even smaller now, as high, girlish yips emitted from his mouth.

“Mrrnh~..rrf! Aaa~ahhhh...” Cameron sighed contentedly, obliviously nuzzling Riana as the shorts, and the underwear beneath them, pulled flat between her legs. And she only yipped happily a few more times as her bust pushed its way out ever so slightly, quickly becoming the smallest pair of breasts among the six girls now present in the cult's initiation shack.

“Mmnnh..” She still didn't seem aware of her situation, even as Riana gently set her on her feet and slowly released the hug (and her ears), taking a small step away. She looked...absolutely adorably cute; her eyes were closed like she was half-asleep after just getting out of bed, and she only now began to slowly wake from the haze of the transformation.

“Mrrnh?” Cameron raised a hand to rub one of her eyes, slowly opening the other one. Everyone looked on in anticipation of her reaction.

“Mnh?” Her eyes bolted open. She reached down and patted between her legs, her ears drooping quickly. “W-wha? What happened?! I—I feel, I'm...I...just...?” Her slight blush grew brighter; the effects of Riana's touch had made her oblivious throughout the change, but allowed her total recall of it after the fact. “R-Ri...?” She stared up at Riana in stark shock; her girlfriend looked back, arms crossed in a displeased expression. “What did you do to me?!” she said, zipping forward and putting her hands up on her shoulders. “I-I'm all small, and weak and, and it's gooo~ooone!”
“That's right, it is,” Riana said sternly. “I asked for the power to make you small like that whenever I wanted to. Only I can change you back, too.” That was a good improvisation, Zotha thought; Jess agreed.
“B-but why though?!”

“Because you've been a bad boy!” she said sternly, which drew a response from the wolf-girl's canine parts exactly like those of a dog being told the same thing. “Always pushing people around and hurting them just to get your way. Not even thinking about it when your actions might hurt everyone else around you! I'll only change you back if you're good. And you only get to keep it if you stay that way, too!”

“I-I...b-but we're,” the tiny wolf-girl said, looking on the verge of tears.
“We can still be boyfriend and girlfriend, don't worry,” Riana said with a crueler smile than even the demoness felt capable of. “Watch this.” Cameron shook slightly, slowly turning her head upward as she saw her erstwhile girlfriend rapidly grow and change, her clothes with her, gaining a foot and a half of height and becoming a well-built if slim, long-haired man, with that almost effeminate kind of handsomeness about him. He looked around at the new view with brief confusion, then cleared his throat. “Th-there.” The voice obviously sounded odd to him. “Now, c'mere...” He gently picked up the small wolf-girl into his arms, her face blushing massively now (and his a little bit too), and then began what seemed intended as a brief peck on her lips, but which lasted several seconds past that mark.

“Mnh..mmf...!” Cameron started enjoying the kiss very quickly, her ears lowering and her tail wagging, her arms wrapping around her partner. Seeing it was enough to make most of the others blush, and Jess even moreso when Zotha gave her a sly grin. She was panting heavily when it was over, visibly extremely confused at what she was feeling. “Th-that was, what was..wha~a?”

“Heheh, you're really cute,” he said once again, running a hand through her hair; it had an entirely different meaning now. “I think I'll call you little Kamari, how's that sound?”
“U-uhm...” Kamari blushed, speechless.
“Let's have a seat, hmn?” He carried her to a nearby loveseat and set her down right next to him, putting an arm over her.

“Indeed, now that everyone here has been 'rewarded', we need to discuss a little bit of cultic business,” Zotha said, taking charge of the situation. “Please everyone, find a place.” She chose a couch across from the one Riana had and it took only a single 'come-here' wag of her finger to get Jess sitting right next to her, still blushing furiously while the demoness hung an arm over her shoulder, too. Prama and Anika took a couple of comfy chairs next to each other, the Kitsune sitting too far back at first and needing to scoot up to make room for her tail.

“First of all, I don't..really like my followers being called a cult, actually,” Zotha said. “I guess we should probably come up with an official name or something since the goal is to—at least eventually—stop being a shadowy secret society and invite anyone and everyone in. So be thinking about new names while we work on the rest of this. Secondly..well, what's transpired here already necessitates some 'cleanup'. You two” (she indicated the wolf-girl and currently-male Riana) “can collectively change yourselves back to mostly normal. I think Cameron could get away with claiming some undiscovered wolfman lineage finally surfaced and caused some, relatively moderate changes to his appearance. Unless you're gonna be so bad that you stay that way into next week's classes.”
“Noo..I'll be good,” she said quietly, slumping in her seat and looking even smaller. Her boyfriend picked her up a bit, gently teasing her ears with his fingers, and she quickly descended into some quiet, pleased barks, taking her mostly out of the conversation for the moment.

“Right then. You two” (she waved toward Prama and Anika) “are more of an issue. There's somewhere people can go to report supernatural incidents who'll try and help get the victim's life back on track where that applies. The two of us went to them this morning, but it's important that our cover stories appear to be separate incidents so they don't, you know, start investigating us as a group too quickly? Maybe you released a djinn by accident and they granted you one wish; you wished to be smarter but then they 'corrupted' it by also changing your appearance?” she suggested to the smaller girl first.

“That's reasonable enough, and plenty close to the truth,” she nodded. “Assuming djinni even exist?”
“They do,” Zotha nodded. “I'm not entirely certain how I know, but yes.”
“And does your mysterious knowledge extend to knowing what one would plausibly look like?” she pressed.
“Ah, good point! Well...I'm pretty sure they're powerful enough to look however they want. So...you can probably think something reasonable up yourself. If anything it's better we don't all know each other's cover stories, just in case. As for Anika...?”

“Mnn~nng,” she half-groaned, half-whined. “Please don't call me that name.”

“Oh, sorry.” Perhaps the curse made others want to use the feminine name for her too? “Andrew.” But there was definitely no compulsion to that part if so.

“I'll just disguise myself as my old self,” she said, folding her ears down in annoyance. “I can't possibly face everyone knowing I'm a girl now. If even my roommate finds out something like this happened to me, I will never hear the end of it!”

“Cool, cool. Sooo, for when that inevitably fails, how about you report right away that a powerful Kitsune offered you a tail and didn't inform you that it came with a significant change of appearance?” Jess suggested.

“You really have that little faith in me?” the vixen said, giving Jess some unintentional puppy-dog eyes.

“Again,” the priestess continued unabated, “this is technically mostly true. But also tell them you only have one tail, so you're just not strong enough to change yourself back. If they do discover the curse and can't break it either, they'll reasonably think it was said tail-giver who hit you with it. Just tell them you want it to remain as much of a secret as possible from everyone else; I'm sure if you're honest with your reasons for that you'll convince them not to start announcing it around just yet.”

“I'm really good with illusions!” she protested again.

Jess was having none of it. “Oh, but be sure to get their appearance clear in your head before you go. Strong Kitsune can also look more or less however they want, so chasing them down won't seem realistic to them; but you don't wanna be caught out on inconsistent descriptions either.”

“Say, how many tails do you have?” Prama asked, leaning toward the fox-girl a bit. “It looks like only one?”
“Th-that's private!” Anika said quickly, leaning away.

“Why?” she asked, an eyebrow raised.
“I-if someone knows how many tails I have then they know exactly how strong I am, and that....that's...uhm..bad.” Her speech slowed down as she seemed to realize that she didn't entirely understand her objection to the notion.

“She clearly feels very strongly about it, anyway,” Zotha said. “Jess and I know, and that's bad enough already. Right?”
“Mm-hm!” She nodded at first, then stopped. “Wait, how's Jess know?”

“Mental link.” The priestess tapped her head with a finger. “I think, more of a soul link to her power, but we can channel thoughts over it all we want.”
“Pretty handy,” the demoness said. “We'd just figured out how to make it work when you four arrived.”

“Sooo..” Riana said, the wolf-girl now quietly hanging off of him and nuzzling a cheek, “I guess after that your plan is to 'reward' everyone else too?”
“Precisely our next order of business, yep,” Zotha said. “I think we should get as many of them as possible in here tomorrow morning, aaand...at least everyone here except Kamari should be able to interview them; that's five at a time instead of just two. With my estimate of our numbers...we could be finished by lunchtime. Except, well...Jess and I can grant things right away, and there may even be a few things in Anika's reach—” Prama cleared her throat loudly, and Zotha realized she'd used that name again. “—err, Andrew's, reach. But for the rest we'll need to come up with some sort of system to not make the two of us a bottleneck and negate all the advantage of more people.”

“Why don't we just 'pray' to you?” Prama said. “Jess told you you're basically a minor god of some sort now, right?”
“Not in so many words,” Zotha said, “but I came to the conclusion myself, yes. Jess's communication with me is sorta like prayer, but when she chants to use my power it's even more so. Hmn...” She ran a hand through her hair, 'reaching out' with her power to try and see whether something like prayer would work.

It was sort of like sending a ping out to all of her followers, and receiving their feelings toward her back. Zotha could still feel the mixture of terror and mild hope from everyone not presently in the room with her. There was also overflowing gratitude from Jess, something similar but less extreme from Prama and Riana and..Kamari, too? She would have expected the wolf-girl to be more angry at the trick they'd helped Riana pull, or perhaps afraid or annoyed or something. Anika had a mixture of gratitude with distress about her curse, along with a tinge of hope that Zotha would help her fulfill the conditions of breaking it, all of which was to be expected.

“Maybe if one of you thinks something 'at' me I can feel it?” she suggested.
“Umm..” Prama shut her eyes for a moment, and then opened them again. “...Hear that?”
“Not a thing. I really thought I was 'listening', too...”
“Ah! The ritual language,” Jess said, suddenly realizing. “Even I use that when requesting power from you. You all know it really well, too, 'cause I taught you. Try speaking some of that.”
“But it's just nonsense,” the bespectacled girl objected. “There's not even a discernible grammar to it, much less—”
“Just try, please?” the priestess said.
“Fiiine...” Prama spoke a few words of the ritual language, and Zotha could immediately feel the desire she was trying to express through it.

“You're..hungry? You want some ice cream,” the demoness said.

“Yep,” she nodded, “I thought it was a good test case. And, I really am a little hungry, too,” she added, tapping her index fingers together cutely with a very slight blush.

“Awwh~. Well that should be easy enough for me here.” Zotha snapped her fingers, and an ice cream cone appeared floating in front of each of her present followers in a small puff of purple smoke.
Jess and Prama took theirs without much thought; Anika reached half-out to the one in front of her before getting a concerned expression. “Uh...you just, made these? Are they really safe to eat?” she said, finally taking it cautiously. By now Riana had also taken his and Kamari's, offering the latter toward the wolf-girl's mouth and chuckling softly when she stuck her long tongue out to lick at it, finally returned to enough awareness to look, wide-eyed, around the room by now.
“Of course. Why would I make food you couldn't eat?” she said.

“Tastes great, too,” the genius added.

“But if you can just make food then, aren't you spending something to make it? You couldn't sustain yourself this way, right?”
“Mmm. Ahh, that is a good point,” Prama said after swallowing some more. “And wha'd you mean it's easy 'here'?”

“Mmh..I can only arbitrarily make and alter stuff like the furniture or food or whatever inside a place that's 'mine',” she said, trying to explain. “Land around here belongs to Jess's parents, and they more or less consider this shack hers, so by extension she 'gives' it to me for my use. I was able to make stuff in our dorm room too, but nowhere else.”

“But anything she makes is real, and just as permanently present as mundanely-made objects,” Jess said. “It can be taken out and used, sold, whatever, no problem.”
“I don't think I technically need to eat since I 'eat' people's beliefs in me, and gratitude, and so on,” Zotha continued. “I still enjoy food though, and I think eating is far more pleasant than using my power to supply metabolic energy nonstop. As for the question of cost—a few ice cream cones isn't even equivalent to the power I got during the past couple minutes, much less the burst of gratitude you four fed me over the past hour or so. Plus you're all grateful for them, so they've paid double for themselves already. All the redecoration I've done, and passively maintaining a little space-bending, is relatively expensive, but nowhere near being a problem for me.”

Anika had finally given in and started eating her cone by now, but she paused to ask another question: “The arbitrary powers in your own space doesn't extend to people, does it? You have to cast spells to change people, or draw some of your power together into a usable form to hand it over to someone else.”

“Very astute,” Zotha said. “I think this 'make or change stuff at will' power only applies to objects—not counting someone who literally has my power inside them,” she corrected, patting Jess on the head once to indicate her meaning. “I couldn't even exterminate insects in this space by only willing them to unexist themselves. Although..I believe I do have the power to banish any entities outside that I don't want here, and keep them from coming back unless a stronger power than mine breaks them in, or the place stops being 'mine'.”

“So uh, speaking of that—we probably don't need to ever take donations or anything,” Jess said. “Master could just make things and we can sell them. Like a 'bake sale' of delicious foods she made, or furniture on ebay, whatever.”
“Uh. Do we even need money when you can just make stuff?” Kamari said.

“You'd be surprised just how helpful money can be in a lot of situations,” Jess replied with a wide grin.

“Plus, more 'domain' for me means more room to make things in without needing to spend extra power on space-bending,” Zotha pointed out. “So purchasing—or if the dorm room's anything to go by, even renting—some real estate or storage space would help immensely.”

“I believe we have gotten well off track,” Prama stated, already finished with her cone by now. “The point is, using the ritual—or maybe 'prayer' language, we can ask you for things. So—we should be able to use that to ask you for whatever it is people want tomorrow, without you needing to do all the work yourself. A comprehensive reference of how you want wishes to be granted, which ones we shouldn't grant, and so on, would be appreciated, however.”

“Well, there's no reason I should be the only one to have a say in that. Riana already found one case where what a person asked for wasn't really best for them...or even what would make them the happiest. Isn't that right?” the demoness said, grinning down at the wolf-girl.

“Wh-what d'you mean?” she said, blinking in confusion.
“We'll talk later,” Riana said, patting her on the head a couple of times. “Anyway, yeah. It seems like a good idea to hash as much out here and now as we can, and then if something we hadn't considered comes up tomorrow it can be handled on a case-by-case basis.”

A Summoning: Part IV

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IV
~Star~

“Wh—hey, lemme go! Cameron, seriously I swear—”

After being shoved inside, Andrew turned around to find that demon woman looking at him. “Uhhh.” Looking back out the door, Cameron had of course retreated back to the other end of the lounge, and Riana looked ready to begin scolding him. Then he turned forward again, to...her.
“You can go right back out if you want to,” she waved. “All the way outside even. Seriously, nobody's keeping you here.”

“...You know what, whatever. Fine.” He pushed the door shut and walked inside. Zotha was leaning against a comfy chair facing the door, and waved toward a chair just across from it. He slowly, cautiously walked up and took a seat, whereupon she slid herself around onto the opposite chair, sitting about halfway forward on it probably to leave room for her enormous wings and that tail. Then she steepled her fingers, smiling sweetly at him. “I think I recognize your voice,” she said, “you're the one who tied the ropes, right?”

“Uh, yeah...sorry about that, really,” he said, putting a hand behind his head. What had he been thinking? Well, he probably just hadn't been thinking. Lately whatever Jerod told him to do, he did, like a good little cult member. He was too terrified of what the others could do to him if he didn't.

“On the contrary, I'm glad you convinced them I didn't need to be blindfolded or gagged. That stuff probably wouldn't have slipped off of me so easily. Anyway, you managed to get them tight enough to hold me without them actually cutting into me or anything, which is nice. How's your eye doing?”
“Um..” He unconsciously brought up a hand to poke near it a couple of times. “It's a little sore, but uh..no offense but you didn't really hit it all that hard.”

“Believe me, I know,” Zotha said, shaking her head with a look of mild disappointment at herself—her past self, maybe. “Anyway—what is it you want the most?” She dropped her hands and leaned in toward him slightly, her tail flicking back and forth like a cat's.

“W-well, uh...”

“Take your time. I know I wouldn't want to rush a free wish,” the demon-girl said.

“Do you even need wishes? After that ritual, you're practically some kinda god,” he said.

“Is that so?” Zotha headtilted slightly. “I haven't asked for the details of it all quite yet. I was under the impression that he thought it summoned a 'demon lord' into the target body from elsewhere, when in fact it just gave me the power of one. But it would explain what I've been feeling ever since then...”
“Uh—so like—he kept telling everyone in the cult exactly what kind of demon lord it would summon—a beautiful, powerful woman who would rule over us and make all our dreams come true or whatever.”
“I sorta remember that speech, yeah,” she nodded.
“And—well, I don't think I was supposed to overhear this, but one time Parker asked him why he kept emphasizing and repeating that, every time we got a new member and more, and he said something about how the ritual would make what everyone believed it would. He said if not enough of us believed, or we didn't have enough of a 'solid vision', then it wouldn't work at all. It reminded me about some stuff I read, like you know, how in some fantasy stories gods 'eat' people's belief in them and sorta are what their believers collectively see them as.”

“That sounds...spot-on, honestly. I should probably see if Jess still has the original reference for—wait, I think we got off track somewhere.”

Zotha cleared her throat emphatically. “What I meant was, I wouldn't want to rush a free wish if I wasn't some kind of..demon deity or whatever I am now. Like I was the day before yesterday.”
“Yeah, yeah. Sorry.” Andrew looked around the room for a minute or two. “Can you..do...like, immortality?” All that talk of gods had him thinking about the fact that they lived forever. As far as wishes went, living forever—or at least a lot longer than a piddly human lifespan—sounded neat.

“I don't think I can make you invincible. Heck, I'm not invincible; I can say that with confidence,” she said.

“I don't mean—like obviously if someone stabs me or shoots me I expect to die. Just, like, you know—I don't grow old and get weak and sick and useless and then wither away,” he said.
“Ah! Eternal youth,” Zotha nodded. “That's way more manageable, we just need to come up with an acceptable method. Well, hm. Technically doing what I did with Jess tied her to me and I can keep her young as long as I like, but I can only have one high priest or priestess at a time...apparently. My powers keep telling me new things, it seems. Obviously I have magic that can youthen a person or make them healthy...I don't want you to have to come back to me every thirty years or so for that, though. Since I exist it's not unfathomable that there's a fountain of youth or whatever out there that we could find and use, but those things tend to run the risk of overshooting. Nngh, it's surprisingly difficult to keep a human from growing old,” she said, getting slightly frustrated.
“A human, huh,” Andrew said.

“Just..spitballing here, but uh..what are the alternatives? Is there some way I could, y'know, look mostly human but be something with a way longer lifespan?”
“Oh! That's a great idea,” she said. “Let's see, let's see..Kitsune. I could try making you one of those; they never get old and they have a nice suite of powers too. You may even keep yourself alive in a lot of situations you'd die from as a permanently young-adult human.” She closed her eyes, seeming to think to herself for a second or two, and then opened them again, putting a hand to her lips. “Uhhm, this is sort of weird to say—I can try to make you one but it's not up to me if it 'takes' or not.”

“If it doesn't work we can just think of something else though, right?” he said, crossing his arms.
“Yep! There are other options, but this sounds like the most convenient one. Now let me see...there's a certain sort of ceremony to this. We'll need to both stand up.” Zotha got up, and Andrew followed suit; she strode a little closer, about an arm's length away. “Okay. Let's see if this works.”

The demoness took in a deep breath, and spoke in a strangely echoey, powerful-seeming version of her usual voice. “A ғʀᴀɢᴍᴇɴᴛ ᴏғ ᴍʏ ᴘᴏᴡᴇʀ I ᴏғғᴇʀ ʏᴏᴜ, ᴄᴏɴᴠᴇʀᴛᴇᴅ ɪɴᴛᴏ ᴛʜᴇ ᴛᴀɪʟ ᴏғ ᴀ ғᴏx..” She raised her hands up into the air, forming a bright purple glow in each; she then lowered them and placed them together; the glow gathered and coalesced into something resembling a ball of purple fur the size of Andrew's head. She looked him in the eye with a serious expression, her bright yellow eyes blazing with power and making the entire rest of the room seem pitch dark by comparison. “Dᴏ ʏᴏᴜ ᴀᴄᴄᴇᴘᴛ ᴛʜɪs ᴘᴏᴡᴇʀ, Aɴᴅʀᴇᴡ?”

“Uh—yes. I do,” he said, nodding slowly.

“Tʜᴇɴ ᴛᴀᴋᴇ ᴛʜɪs ᴛᴀɪʟ ɪɴ ʏᴏᴜʀ ʜᴀɴᴅs,” she said, reaching her arms out toward him with the ball of fur on them.
“Um..” Andrew carefully put his hands on either side of the fur and tried to pick it up. It felt impossibly soft and warm, and despite its size the fluffball was surprisingly light and easy to move. Once it was out of her hands, the demon-girl dropped her arms with a small sigh, and the glow and sense of power from her faded. Meanwhile, the “tail” faded in color from purple to white, and then glowed steadily brighter.

Half-mesmerized, Andrew lifted the ball closer to his face. He felt unable to even contemplate letting go of it, but he still had enough presence of mind to speak. “Is, it supposed to be—” he got out before the glow abruptly brightened into a blinding flash, and he felt something not easily described—like the fur itself burying its way into both of his hands simultaneously, and snaking its way up his arms, through his shoulders, up through his head and all the way down his torso and legs. When that sensation reached his ears they instantly flipped upward, each one growing in a fraction of a second into a giant, fuzzy white triangle—somewhat like the ear of a fox—and after it had finished filling his entire body he felt a push from his lower back as a thick, fluffy tail sprouted and, a bit more slowly than the ears, grew until it was as long as half his height, covering itself in thick fur—pure white like his ears, except for the third or so of it that included its tip, which sported a brilliant, hot pink instead. He curled it around in front of him instinctively as it grew, and witnessed the thickening of fur and the pattern of colors himself; he put his hands on either side of the tail and felt them running down the fur—both his hands experiencing the same warm, fluffy kind of fur as they had held a moment ago and the new appendage feeling hands moving across it, which was itself a curiously pleasant sensation.

The instant they appeared, the gigantic ears and the tail felt natural to him; there was no sensory confusion from the feeling of air across all of that brand new fur, no difficulty balancing with a significant weight now coming from his lower back. If anything he felt better-balanced than he ever had before, and had a curious sense that his hearing had been at best half as well as he should be for his entire life until these new ears appeared. But in the midst of all of that, one unusual detail hadn't quite escaped Andrew's attention.

As his tail slid its way back behind him and his hands brushed past the last part of it, he muttered to himself: “Pink?” It was an expression of curiosity at why his tail had taken on such a hue—mild confusion at worst. But unfortunately for him, it appeared to also immediately trigger a certain effect. He felt something soothing and warm wash over his body as it gained a bright pink glow all around it; he shuddered at a cool tingling running across his skin and blinked a couple of times at the sight of pure white locks sliding their way down before his eyes as his hair grew out almost as rapidly and enthusiastically as his tail had just a second earlier.

Andrew reached his hands up and brushed his hair aside, out of the way of his eyes; it seemed to naturally fall into place, shorter locks from the front and side of his head framing his face while the rest trailed all the way down his back to the bottom of his waist. It felt soft, much nicer than it usually did—and, it hadn't escaped his notice either that it was snowy white now, like most of his fur. Also, now that his arm was raised he could see that the body hair had vanished from it—and an accidental touch of his palm to his cheek as he brushed away the hair discovered equally smooth skin there, suggesting that the beard was simply gone from his face too.

“W, wha...I, I'm...?” The warm sensation invited him downward—that didn't make any sense, but it was the best he could have hoped to describe it in words. As a result he shrank, rapidly becoming both thinner and shorter. His clothes mostly hugged even closer around him despite this, his shirt growing longer sleeves as it held tight against his swiftly narrowing shoulders and slimming waist. His pants grew tighter around his legs as they became smaller and smaller, but looser around his hips—which grew rather than shrinking, becoming wider with his bottom slowly puffing out. He stared down at the floor slowly rising up, his clothes shifting on his transforming body, and then looked up at the demoness, who was watching with what seemed to be an expression of curiosity mixed with a tinge of concern. “Zotha, wh—” he started to ask, but his throat made a croaking noise instead of the second word's vowel. Not dissuaded, he tried again: “What's—” and stopped short again, hearing a voice he hadn't had since turning sixteen come out. He brought a hand (a much smaller one than had held his tail just a few seconds ago!) to his throat in surprise, and found it smooth, missing its adam's apple. “What's ha~appening to me~ee~ee..?!” he managed through more cracking and squeaking, each one leaving his voice sounding younger, ending up like that of a young boy trying to imitate his father.

“Some sort of...side-effect?” Zotha suggested, as his vertical shrinking slowed to a halt; the top of her head had risen from his lower chest to nearly his chin. Then his pants split apart at the thighs, the leggings turning into soft black cloth and hugging his slim legs close while the rest fluttered and combined into a patterned skirt mostly the same shade of pink as the tip of his tail. “It doesn't hurt, does it?” she said, her head tilting ever so slightly and the concern growing marginally more prominent in her expression.

“No, but I,” Andrew started, and squirmed back and forth, feeling heat in his cheeks at a tingly sensation down between his legs. “I fe~eel we~eei~rrd,” he said, his voice changing still more as he did so. Its pitch dipped slowly downward again, seeming to re-mature..but to do so all wrong. It sounded like a teenage...girl's now? “Mngh..!” As he thought this, he felt the tingling grow stronger. It was distressingly nice, and it made his ears slowly lower themselves toward the horizontal, his tail swish back and forth behind him a little faster in an increasingly pleased, submissive gesture. He felt his tongue growing longer and a curious sensation from his teeth as they gained sharper, longer fangs in place of human canines. “Mrr~rrh..?” Then he made a noise like an animal, still in that teenage-girl voice, as he felt his underwear rapidly tighten between his legs, the suddenly ultra-soft cloth finding much less to constrict against than it really should be.

“I, I..? Zo~otha, I'm a—a boy..right..?” he said half-deleriously, and immediately wondered why he'd used the word 'boy' instead of 'man'. His voice matured again, sounding even more feminine as it deepened. “Aah, aa~ah..!” The tingling got stronger again, and his underwear changed into a pair of panties in that moment, squeezing what little was still there uncomfortably close.

“Well—not for much longer, would be my guess,” the demoness said, frowning slightly. Her concern had disappeared entirely, replaced with what seemed like a purely intellectual interest.

“MrrRRrh~nn...n-no no NOo~oo!” Andrew stopped himself mid-vulpine-churr and shook his head back and forth, his hair audibly swishing and his ears flopping along with the motion. “I'm a boy not a girl,” he said in a deep, womanly alto, and felt the thing down there starting to pull inward. He tried to will it to stop, to go back out, his body to change back. “I'm a girl not a boy!” he repeated—and then clapped a hand over his mouth when he realized that it had come out in the wrong order. But it was too late to take it back, it seemed, as a pleasant sensation accompanied the final melting away of Andrew's manhood, and his hand slipped down off of his mouth, and then slowly slid along the center of his torso, while he let out a deeply feminine “MmnnnaaaAAA~Aahh~!” at the feeling of her sex fully changing down there, the panties pulling comfortably flat against new equipment as a gentle push coursed its way upward into the pit of her stomach—the growth of every little thing she needed to be a full-fledged woman.

She blushed brightly, her face burning with embarrassment and..ashamed enjoyment of the feelings down there. “Aah..w-wha..why..?” she mumbled as her chest began to tingle. She looked down to find her shirt converted into a long-sleeved, black blouse with white trim and a pink sort of tie-thing around her neck, a giant bow hanging down over her chest that matched the pattern of her skirt. She patted that still-flat chest with one hand, and discovered a bra underneath while a thick pink scarf wrapped its way around her neck, its ends hanging down between her long, voluminous hair and her back. “N-no no nonono,” she muttered, pressing her small, delicate hands ineffectually against each side of the bra as her chest began to push forward. It filled the tiny piece lingerie in no time, deeply sensitive new skin brushing against the soft cloth of both it and her top.

“No~ooh~mm, mrrh, mrrr~rrh..” Her protests disintegrated into more vulpine churrs as her womanhood informed her of just how much she liked this sensation (whether she liked it or not!), and the little bumps began to grow out faster, straining the bra until it was seemingly forced to expand itself out to a new cup size to accommodate them. “Mrrn, ahn..” The fox-girl fought hard against the wonderful sensations and the growing breasts, but it was all in vain; her voice betrayed the sheer pleasure she was feeling as she grew steadily more addicted to it. “AaaAAa~ahn, yip! Y-yip!” Her eyes fluttered closed, her ears all the way down and her tail wagging like an eager puppy's, as her hands slid up the growing breasts, on top of them, and retreated a short way into her slightly overlong sleeves. She made more helplessly cute, high-pitched yips and barks as her bra size grew again, and again, and her breasts kept on surpassing it, until finally she was left with an enormous pair of globes that not even the loosest of clothing could ever hope to hide—and which were presently housed in a perfectly-sized bra behind a rather tight top.

“Aah-arf! Y-yip! Mnh, mrrr~rrrh...” The fox-girl churred softly, finally feeling the undeniable, intense pleasure subside and her mind hazily, slowly return to her own control.

She opened her eyes slowly, panting softly and still blushing quite a bit, her hands still on top of her gigantic breasts. Later she would learn that her eyes had also turned that characteristic hot-pink color of hers while shut. The similarly pink glow had persisted throughout the entire change, but was gone now. She hadn't shrunk very much; she was pretty tall for a girl, but—well, still very much a girl now, with amazing curves, gigantic breasts, and hair all the way down to her shapely bottom. Her clothes weren't much help either: Thigh-high black stockings, a short skirt, and a tight dark blouse that left little of her figure to the imagination. She watched the demoness in front of her for a moment, deeply embarrassed that anyone had seen (or heard) what just happened—how she had just reacted to it especially.

At the same time, she could feel power washing through her body and mind—power over illusions, form, the elements of fire and wind. She became subtly aware of three more tails besides the one obviously behind her back, ready to be summoned into visibility if she wanted, but their power available to her always. In short, she became fully aware of herself and her newfound abilities as a Kitsune. She lowered her hands down to her sides as she fully caught her breath, dreading to speak for a moment in fear it might somehow trigger something else, something even worse. But after a moment she did find her voice.

“W-why did it turn me into a girl?!” she said. “I-is, are Kitsune a female-only race or something stupid like that?!”
“No..this really does seem unusual,” the demoness said. “From the moment you became a Kitsune, a curse appeared on you..I certainly didn't do it, which I think can only mean one thing.”
“A c-curse? What kind of curse?” She stepped forward and grabbed the demon deity by the shoulders. “What's it do?”
“Uhh..I don't know if I should tell you, you probably really won't like it. I mean, if you haven't already guessed.” Zotha pressed gently against her arms, and the fox-girl let go of her shoulders and dropped her arms again, feeling defeated already.
“It makes me a girl, doesn't it? And, what, I can't change back? I can't even say 'I'm a girl' without it turning into 'I'm a girl'. Is that it?”
“Pretty much,” she nodded, guessing correctly that her intended first hypothetical phrase had also been corrupted by the effect. “I was gonna say you have enough power, and Kitsune are good with shapeshifting anyway, to turn back, but with that going on I guess not. That's some pretty strong stuff, too; I...don't think even I can break it.” She said this last bit with a slight tinge of worry, evidently encountering the first thing she was not powerful enough for.

“Wh-who put it on me, then?!” she demanded. “Shouldn't you be protecting your followers or something?”

“Well..like I said, it wasn't up to me if becoming a Kitsune 'took' or not,” Zotha said. “Technically you're under the authority of someone else too now, just from being one.”

“Y-you mean..” Her ears drooped. “Nnn, I swear I can hear someone laughing at me.” It wasn't physical sound, but 'hearing' still seemed the right sense for what she was perceiving.
“That'd be her,” the demoness said. “Her? I didn't know that until I said it, interesting. Hmm.” She tapped her head a couple of times with a finger. “Okay..even more interesting. I have the feeling that 'I helped you cheat and gave you enough power for four tails when you didn't even have the potential for two before. So this is your punishment for cheating. It'll go away when you earn a tail by your own efforts.' That's a...weirdly specific feeling.”

“Greeeaat...” The vixen's entire body deflated in despair.
“Oh, and—'What do you think the chances are you don't grow to like that better than your ugly old self by then? Ha-ha-ha, ha-ha, ha'.” Her tone of voice during the 'laugh' was completely flat, as if reading it very poorly off of a cue card. “Okay, you can stop doing that now, whoever,” Zotha said, shaking her head with an annoyed expression.

The Kitsune grabbed her ears in her hands and pulled them downward, a natural-feeling expression of discontent. “Now I really can hear her laughing at me! Ugh, this was a terrible idea...”

“Well, it's not the worst thing in the world, is it?” the demoness said. “Similar thing happened to me, so I can relate. You are eternally young now! And you've got some phenomenal powers of your own, too. I'm sure you'll feel better once you get a chance to try those out. Just think positive, hmn?” She said, reaching out and lifting the vixen's chin with her hand slightly.

“Okay, okay...” She wrung her hands a bit. “But you better help me get that fifth tail! Not—in a cheaty way, obviously, the curse would prolly get worse then, but there's gotta be some help you can give me to earn the power to change back.”

“I'm sure there is,” Zotha nodded. “Absolutely certain. That voice from earlier isn't denying it either, and I can feel she would if it weren't so. Oh, hey,” she said, seeming to suddenly realize something, “would you try something for me?”
“Hmn?”
“Try saying 'my name is Andrew'.”
“Uhh...” This seemed like a pointless exercise. “My name is Anika,” she said. “Mmph!” And put her hand over her mouth again, surprised at her disloyal tongue. “Nonono, that's not right. I-it's Anika! Anika? Aaah-nee-kaaah. Uuugh...” She slumped in defeat again.
Zotha gave a small sigh, “About as I expected. Can you say 'my name is Samantha', even though it isn't?” she asked.

“My name is Samantha,” she tried. Her ears flipped upward for a second on realizing it had worked, and she tried her real name once more: “It's not, though, it's really Anika! Grrrr...” She made an animal growl, her ears lowering again and her tail sticking up in an annoyed expression.

“You're allowed to tell people a different name as long as you perceive it to be a girl's. But you default to 'Anika', at least for the moment,” the demoness said. “If you don't like it we can think of something else, maybe?”
“Noo...it's fine,” she said. “We'll get rid of this curse soon enough and then it won't matter!”

“That's the spirit,” Zotha nodded encouragingly. “Now, I know I felt better after flexing my new powers a little bit. You wanna try that?”

“Okay.” The vixen crossed her arms (under her boobs, which already felt more normal than she knew it should). “Let's see...” She raised a hand, and made a pink fire appear in it. Then she waved her other hand, and a light breeze blew through the room for a second, running across her fur and fluttering her hair and skirt a bit. “I can do way more than that, but I probably shouldn't in here,” she said, closing her hands. “How about..” She made a spinning motion with one of her hands, and a white wind-like effect swirled around her for a moment, making an illusion of Zothra around her. To the eye they looked positively identical. “I guess you can see through this, though,” she said, in a perfect match to the demoness's voice.

“Yeah, because you look like me and did it right in front of me. I dunno if I'd catch on so quick otherwise, and it's fairly resilient to dispel attempts too,” she said. “Not that I couldn't manage at least that.”
“Heehee. Feeling a little defensive after seeing a curse you can't lift?” the Kitsune said in a teasing tone. Even though a part of her thought it was a bad idea to poke the ultra-strong goddess, another (new?) part couldn't help the urge to mock and tease, just a little bit. “Let's see what else~.” She waved her arms again, and produced an illusion of her previous appearance. “Aha! I can—wait.” Her voice was still that default 'Anika' voice. And on closer inspection, the illusion was actually that of a particularly flat-chested girl of a moderately similar build passing for Andrew by wearing his clothes. “Grr, this curse is so annoying,” she said.
“Still, that'd be good enough to keep from spooking Cameron. I get the impression he'd bolt at the slightest mention of you two turning into girls,” Zotha said.
“You...two?” The fox-girl returned to her normal appearance with a brief pink fire-like motion, her ears one-up, one-sideways in confusion/curiosity.
“Perhaps it's better you see it for yourself,” the demoness suggested. “You're feeling a little better now that you know how powerful you are, right?”

“Yeah..I think I am,” she nodded. “This isn't even a fraction of the tricks up my sleeve, heehee~!” Anika said with a bright, cute smile. The idea of using those tricks to..well, trick, was sounding better all the time. “I'll earn that fifth tail in no time with all this!”

“Confidence is good,” Zothra said with a little nod. “Now—go help Parker convince the others to come if you can. No forcing, though.”
“Yep!” A brief flash of white wind put her back in the 'almost-Andrew' glamour (this time with a deeper, if still female, voice) and she turned and strode confidently out of the door.

Outside, a squeaky, breathy voice Anika didn't recognize was saying: “Yep, she made me super smart. So how about it, Cam? I'm sure you'd like to lose that pudge.” The owner of the voice was a small, cute bespectacled girl with two long braids of light brown hair, who now poked Cameron right in said overweight gut. Now that she was looking at her, the Kitsune could 'feel' the presence of an illusion, and perceive its effect on the other two in the room: Cameron and Riana saw and heard Parker where she saw a petite little girl and heard her adorable voice.
“I dunnoooo..” Cameron was putting on a token show of resistance.
“Come on, are you chicken?”

“I ain't chicken!” he said, insulted.
“Well, go get what you want then. It worked for me~,” she said. The feminine lilt in her voice didn't carry into the illusion.

“Hey Andrew!” Cameron waved, noticing Anika and taking any opportunity to distract himself from the conversation with Parker. “What'd you get, huh?”

“I'm immortal now,” she said, trying her best to affect a masculine tone. “And I have some neat powers of my own, too. You'll, ah, you'll totally flip when you see them.” It occurred to her that nobody present seemed to be asking about the...somewhat loud noises she'd made while in that room. That meant it was a secret between her and Zotha; she could only be so fortunate.

“Nnrrrgh...okay, that's it!” he announced. “I'm goin' in! Don't try to stop me!” Nobody was, although his girlfriend was sporting quite the facepalm by this time. With that, Cameron barreled straight into Jess's room. Probably somewhere in that head of his he'd decided that was less risky than entering the room with the literal demon in it. Or—realistically—maybe he wasn't thinking at all, and it was just the closer of the two doors.

Riana sighed once the door shut. “I really don't think it's a good idea to just give him whatever he wants,” she said.
“Come on, this is your boyfriend you're talking about,” Parker said. “How bad can it be?”
“Some people,” she said with a glare, “shouldn't get wishes yet. Some people need to grow up first. I guess I'll see whether our new 'lord and master'” (she used a deeply sarcastic tone for this phrase) “can help with damage control.” With that, she strode into the demoness's room. The tiny, brown-haired girl crossed her arms and watched Riana go with a pleased smirk.

“People are so easy,” she said, and then turned to Andrew. “You look a little different. In fact you look just like a girl in boy's clothing. What happened to you, hmn?”
“Uh..” With a small wave, Anika dispelled her illusion, a small flare of pink fire revealing the excessively womanly form she was stuck with for the moment. “Things...lots of things. Not all of them pleasant.” Some of them way too pleasant. “You?”
“I became a super genius, just like I said,” she declared with a hand proudly placed on her chest. “It cost a few things I don't care about—like manhood” (she added in a rapid near-whisper, which Anika's gigantic fuzzy ears had no trouble hearing) “—but it was worth it.”

Then she took a second, pausing and looking up at the fox-girl, the bottom of whose chest the top of her head failed to clear. “Hey...why'd you get to stay so tall?!” the small girl demanded with her hands on her hips.

The "Best" RPG Ever-79

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"Hey, it's Pirr!" Rayna waved at the elvish guard. "I guess you're fully recovered."

"'Nough for desk work, anyhow," she shrugged. "What d'you need?"

"Is the Captain in?" Rayna asked. "We fought some ogres coming toward our house this morning and they were carrying something unusual; I think it's worth reporting."

"Mmh," she nodded. "She just came in. Just 'tween you and me, had a satisfied expression of some sort. They're always real subtle, but you can tell if you learn to look hard enough. No appointments right now either, so you can knock and see."

"Sure."

The fox-girl went to the door and knocked.

"Who is it?"
"Uh, Rayna."
"Is it important? I have a lot of paperwork to get through." What seemed like it could be actual mild annoyance was present in her tone.

"I think it's slightly important. I can make it quick."
Her ears picked up a quiet sigh, and then: "Do that, then. Come in."
She carefully opened the door and stepped inside.

Rayna went straight to the point, getting the crystal out and setting it down on the Captain's desk. "We found this on an ogre this morning," she said. "It was fixed into a giant, crude staff and he was throwing magic around from it. I thought you might know something about it."
Ezra stared at it for a second, and then up at Rayna, who was slowly pulling herself down into the nearest chair. "...It's a magic crystal," she said flatly. "Surely you've seen them before."
"Well..sure." Now that she really thought about it, Rayna could 'remember' seeing people pull out small, glowing crystals and pull elemental magic from them—including Ezra, during the fire giant fight. They were frequently used by people who didn't have much magic capacity themselves, to be able to draw elemental power for spells from—but Rayna had always used her illusions, and when she became interested in magic Lynn had discovered she already had enough talent of her own to enchant arrows consistently without help. "But..have you ever seen one this size? On a monster? And Nora said it had a lot of different elements in it, too," she said, recounting the things that were actually unusual about it in light of the fact that magic crystals were Quite Normal.

"Hmm." Appearing to decide it was worth her time, the Captain picked up the crystal and examined it a little more closely. "..You're right. This is a level of craftsmanship most would be incapable of. The cheapest ones carry only one element at a time; this handles multiple elements differently from the power sources of those guard armors you found. It takes the more modern approach of 'compartmenting' the elements separately instead of trying to counterbalance them, which reduces capacity somewhat but doesn't run the risk of a meltdown if you spend too much of one element over the others. On the other hand, this kind is impossible to power constructs with."

She set it down again. "It isn't very practical for most people to use at this size, although that gives it an exceptionally high capacity. If you want to make use of it you should find someone who can cut it up into smaller pieces someone can wear in jewelry."

"Got it. You know, with the size and the way it was set into that staff, it's like it was made for the ogre or something," Rayna said. Something about that suggestion Ezra didn't like; not in the sense of her becoming angry at the fox-girl, but—well, there was just this slight movement in her eyes. Almost..worry?

"..Perhaps you should Look at it," the Captain said, pushing the crystal toward her across the desk a bit. "Your Sight may be able to determine something about its origin." Whatever had been in her eyes for a second there wasn't evident in her voice, which was as level as ever.
"Huh. I've never really tried that before...but it sounds plausible," Rayna nodded. "Let's see..."

The fox-girl leaned forward a bit, staring deep into the crystal. She tried to "look" at it, specifically through the veil of time...to "see" where it had come from, who had made it. She wasn't aware of it at the time, but exercising her powers in this way gave her eyes a faint visible glow. She only saw it set into that staff, being swung around by an ogre for a long while, at first, but then she tried looking deeper—farther back—and regretted it instantly.

"GaaAAAaah!" She jerked backwards, almost knocking her chair over, her eyes shut in a tight wince. It was like someone had managed to pump excruciatingly loud speaker feedback through her eyes! Her next motion was forward, doubling over in place with her hands up over folded-back ears trying in vain to make any of it stop. For an eternal few seconds she experienced something like staring into the sun while raking her nails across a chalkboard and taking a deep whiff of pepper spray—except that it wasn't in her eyes, or ears, or nose, it was in her mind and no amount of clawing at her ears seemed able to make it go away.

The first thing that woke her out of it was the feeling of a hand on one of hers. After that, her hearing seemed to catch up on the last few seconds—first the sound of a chair in front of her toppling backwards and the Captain saying her name once at a normal volume, and then again a bit louder. Her perception caught up on a third time, her hand being pulled gently off of her ear. "—na! Open your eyes. Look at me."

She made a choked whimpering sound, but managed to bring her eyes to a slight squint. Ezra's other hand took her chin and gently raised her head. "Right here," she said in a soft but firm voice, pointing the hand that had been on Rayna's own at her eyes. "Nowhere else."

The fox-girl felt a ragged, voiced gasp go into her throat, and realized she hadn't exactly been breathing for the past few seconds. She tried to focus on the eyes in front of her, and the..mind pain..slowly dulled and faded, seeming to become a bit more like the sun where it wouldn't hurt if she didn't try to look directly at it. Ezra's expression was sharp, stern, but also kind. Somehow Rayna had never noticed the color of her eyes before—two different colors. The left was a bright, fierce red, but the right was a cool, deep green.
"Tell me what you saw," she said quietly as Rayna began to recover her breath.
"It was..." She took a deep breath, trying to get a hold of whatever didn't hurt too much to think about. "Th-there was a hand closed around it, then holding it up. Like to the light? A little bigger than mine. Messy long nails, scars across the wrist," she said, running an index finger across the opposite wrist to illustrate the direction. "It was—there was a voice, but it was like twelve voices but it was one," she said, fully aware that it sounded like nonsense. "They—it, was saying, 'A gift. Now go...' That was where I stopped Looking."

Ezra nodded very slightly, making it a small enough motion of her head to keep her eyes easy to follow. "How long ago?"

"Um..Long time, I think. Years, a decade or two? I guess that's not all that long to you though."

"It's certainly not long enough," she said. "You should be okay now."

The Captain backed up, squatted to pick up her chair and put it back in place. Rayna understood that she had been leaning halfway over the desk for the past moment, and also that a piece of black cloth had been draped over the magic crystal Thing on the desk at some point so she couldn't look (much less "Look") at it by accident.

"Rrgh..what was that?! Gods, it hurt," she said, putting a hand on the side of her head even though what she had just experienced had not been any kind of headache.

"Some information carries barbs, and an unprepared mind attempting to learn or think about closely related concepts can run afoul of them," Ezra said. "Katherine should be able to scrub off the pain and just leave the useful information behind. Or if not, there's another psion in town who can definitely do it."

"You mean Tsaron, right? I guess it's obvious you'd know he was here, since he was in the same party as you," Rayna said. It was half-guess, but there was a lot of evidence for it to be true.
"Indeed."

"Now, take this but try not to think about it until your head's fixed," the Captain said, carefully wrapping the crystal Something in the black cloth and pressing it into Rayna's hand, maintaining eye contact the entire time, "and then do as I suggested later. Whatever its origin, Nora would have already noticed if there was any dangerous magic actually inside of it." Rayna put It in her inventory without looking, and slowly stood up. Ezra was getting up too. "I have an errand to take care of now," she said.
"I thought you were busy with paperwork?"
"It'll have to wait." Ezra brushed past her, walking briskly out of the door.

Rayna shook her head slightly, not feeling entirely recovered after the...whatever that had been. But she could stand up and walk out of the door fine, and gave Pirr a small smile and wave on her way out, starting to feel a little better. The best course of action was obviously to get back to the house and distract herself as much as possible otherwise, because even thoughts that literally hurt were sure to be subject to ironic process theory.

Her thoughts, when steered away from the pain, seemed gravitated toward the ruins, the ones she, Nora, and Mira had been through the other day. Her memory of the inside of the place seemed...sharper than usual, and thinking about it more (since this didn't hurt, and a meta-thought arose as to why her brain had brought this up at all) summoned the image, as clear in her mind's eye as though she were looking at it, of the collapsed area—near where the back exit was supposed to be: The room to the right facing the exit, the piles of broken "ultra-stone" and dirt flooded in from outside.

Nora had reported a certain feeling of dread, looking at it. Rayna's current mental image was different from what she remembered actually seeing. The fragments of broken wall and ceiling were covered in dried blood, and there was much more of it across the floor, as though it had splattered out from something just under the pile of dirt covering the right room.

She stopped, blinked a couple of times, shook her head. Had she seen that? The others hadn't, and she hadn't at the time; she would've said something. But her powers involved seeing truth, and Nora had an extra sense of her own that could have been the source of that unease. It was like something in the fox-girl's head had been blown...not open, but slightly ajar by whatever she had Seen in the...well, in whatever knowledge had made her hurt, and as a result she could just barely perceive something she didn't feel entirely safe knowing about.

Rayna resumed walking. Logically speaking, whatever disaster happened in that place had happened ages ago. There couldn't actually be blood still left over there, from that long ago. But if it wasn't actual blood she was remembering, then what was it? Conceptual blood? Indicating, what, that somebody had died there? It wasn't a surprise if they had...but in her memories of life in this world she had witnessed plenty of places people had died, or where the dead were, without "seeing" anything particularly special about it. What—if anything—were her powers really tring to tell her?

The journal would not have been there if its writer had survived and left. It was unlikely the place would be so abandoned, with no record of even its existence, if anyone had survived. They were also probably being funded by the castle Lynn and Rayna first appeared in, which was also totally abandoned apart from a guard armor and some weird ghost thing that Zack's party ran into—which obviously could have come in later, and had nothing to fear from that armor physically attacking it. The guard armors were constructs, which meant somebody originally had charge of them—the ability to turn them on and off and tell them what (not) to attack. They were clearly a valuable asset, too; if the castle's inhabitants had fled in anything but the utmost haste they would have taken them with them, or at least, probably, shut them off?

Her thoughts were interrupted by a small sigh from—not exactly any specific location. More like the concept of one, in her mind. Well, congratulations on distracting yourself long enough that I didn't have to. Tsaron's voice. She looked around for a second, but of course he was probably either 'invisible' or two-plus blocks away or something. It's much harder to mess with a thought a mind is holding onto, and most people get caught in an obsessive loop around the attack vector.

Indeed, the sense of mental pain was completely gone, the memory it had been attached to seemingly still completely intact. Rayna was able to think about the magic crystal looted from the ogre without difficult again. I didn't ask you to do that, she thought, annoyed.

You were going to eventually, I just saved us both the trouble. Katherine hasn't seen a dangerous thought in her life, and would probably fumble around with it helplessly for a good few hours or else get overzealous and just blast the entire memory out. The thought of a disappointed head-shaking. You can thank me later. Or not at all. I'm quite used to not being thanked. This was followed by the sense that he had left, although he was probably still watching. Rayna just gave a small "Hmph" and continued on toward the house.

---

Once she'd knocked on the door, the witch quickly ducked aside to wait for somebody to open it. There was an audible "One moment!" in a voice that sounded like a young girl's. A moment later, the door opened inward. The person behind it was a very short, slim Vulpin girl who looked like she couldn't possibly be older than thirteen, with something resembling a lab coat draped over her entire body, and a pair of glasses strapped around the back of her head like goggles for reasons that were obvious given her gigantic, ever-mobile ears. She sported bright blue hair and fur a much darker shade of the same color; while she looked to see who her visitor was, her expression changed from annoyance to what seemed like respectful fear on realizing an actual dragon was at her door. All the same, her ears barely moved from the horizontal the entire time.
"Hi~," Rose gave a friendly wave, totally oblivious to the expression. "Are you an herbalist?" Well, Mira thought as she leaned over and got a look at the girl herself, at least she wasn't making any assumptions based on apparent age.

"...That I am," she said after brief hesitation. Perhaps she was surprised at a lack of comment on her "age", too? "Can I help you with something?"

"Umm." That seemed to be about as far as Rose could get on her own. She wasn't really the kind to easily brag about herself, it seemed.
"My friend here is a nature dragon," Mira said, finally coming fully into view. The girl's eyes toward her were...much more curoisity and intrigue than anything else; if she even knew she was looking at a witch then she wasn't terribly afraid of them. "We thought she might know a few useful facts about plants that aren't so well known."

"Hmm." She adjusted her glasses—apparently a necessity even with how these were secured. "Well, I suppose I should at least invite you in. I beg you both to be most cautious not to knock anything over," she said toward Rose, and then turned aside to let them inside.

"O-of course!" Seeming to realize something, Rose concentrated for a second and shrank her wings back to how they had first started. There was nothing like that to do about her tail, but—it was a start, at least.

Coming inside, the witch winced instinctively, her nose assaulted by a large number of strong scents all at once. It was like some sort of greenhouse, with luminous crystals lining the ceiling, rows of plants in the ground and smaller potted plants covering every available surface. Even the walls had moss or vines running up them, or planters where there wasn't.

Rose, of course, was enamored right away. "Waah~, there's so many plants!" she said, looking around with a starry-eyed expression.

"Your reputation precedes you, of course. I admit I scarcely believed it when I heard a dragon had delivered some valuable material to our healers," the girl said, turning around once all three of them were inside. "Since I have you two at a disadvantage, my name is Vae. I don't mean to be impertinent, but my time is extremely valuable. Perhaps you would allow a brief test to see whether you really have a chance of knowing something I don't," she said, only barely softening the bluntness of the request.
"I'd be glad to!" Rose said. "Right now I only know I knew some stuff not in a couple of books, so maybe they were just outdated."
"...Indeed." Another adjustment of Vae's glasses; Mira could tell she was a little surprised at that being taken so graciously. Now that she'd been close to her for a moment, the witch's powers were able to inform her Vae was, indeed, at least a young adult and not some sort of child prodigy. The youthful appearance probably just ran in her family or something.

The fox-girl looked around the room briefly, before settling on a plant in a pot on a nearby table with white leaves that appeared to be faintly glowing. "Do you know what this is?" she said, pointing to it.
"Hm~mn. I usually call them glowies," she said.
"Terminology isn't a very fair test; she's been alone for quite a long time without any reference books to learn it from," Mira said.
"..Allow me to rephrase the question, then. What do you know about it?"
"Oh! Well, glowies aren't really plants at all," Rose said, "they're uh, like mushrooms? Fungies. They like to soak up magic in the soil around them. I don't keep very many in my forest since that's my magic they're eating then, and I sorta need it for stuff. But the brighter it glows, the healthier it is and the more magic it has, and if someone eats it then it can refresh their uh, magic stuff."

"Not bad. What of this?" Vae pointed to a plain-looking bush on the path opposite the table.

"Oh! You don't wanna touch that, it's like really prickly," she said, "and poisonous too. Sometimes I drive monsters that get too close to my forest into a little patch of those I've got near the edge, and they'll go down really quick. But every ten years or so it'll make these super sweet berries that aren't poisonous."

Vae nodded. "The toxins themselves are more useful for my purposes.

"All right," the small girl crossed her arms. "Tell me something that wasn't in the book you referred to earlier."

"Umm.." Rose looked around, and eventually identified a patch of blue flowers along with a wall planter that had a few of the 'princess' flowers in them (currently folded in on themselves in the 'daylight'), and pointed them out and explained the same thing she'd said to Lynn before.
"Hmn." Vae gave a thoughtful expression. "That isn't implausible, given their respective properties, but I would have to actually try it out to know for sure whether you are correct. At any rate, you've convinced me you may know some worthwhile information. We will perhaps need to take some time to correct the linguistic gap..."

"Umm..?" Rose seemed to have troulbe understanding the last couple of words.
"You and her have different names for the same plants," Mira explained.
"Oh! Yeah. Um, I can also like 'sense' what kinda plant I'm looking at if I've seen one like it before, but I guess if there's something you don't have here I'd have to show it to you in my forest. Or..try to describe it if I don't have it."

"Really?" For the first time since they had come in, Vae's ears actually perked upward ever so slightly. "There are a number of useful specimin that are immensely difficult to tell apart. That alone would be an invaluable resource."

"Heheh.." Rose just giggled bashfully.

"Well, I would be happy to discuss at length with you whenever we are both free, anyway," the fox-girl said, re-crossing her arms. "I'm afraid you've caught me in the middle of a delicate experiment for now, however. We're both lucky I was just to the portion that requires patient waiting, and that time is rather limited."
"Oh. I'm sorry!" the dragon-girl said, not happy to be interrupting someone.
"It's no trouble; for the moment I'm only making productive use of that wait. I can draw up a list of times to...wait. You don't exactly have a mailing address in town, do you?"

"Well, we do," Mira said. "If you send us something marked with her name I can just pass it along."
Vae nodded to the witch. "That would be most helpful. Now, please excuse me; I'll have to ask you to let yourselves out." With no further warning she whirled around and left through a nearby interior door.

Rose watched her go with a mildly confused expression. "I guess that 'limited time' ran out," Mira said. "C'mon, the smells here are gonna give me a headache." Then she led the way back out of the door, and took a long, deep breath outside.

"Is it really that bad?" the dragon-girl said. "I thought it smelled nice in there."
"One or two nice scents at a time is one thing, but that was just sensory overload for me. I can't even imagine what it's like with a sharper, foxy nose, but I guess she just got used to it at some point."

"I guess we can head back to the house now?" Rose said.

"Yep!" The witch started leading the way.

A moment later—perhaps when the dragon-girl thought they were out of earshot of those gigantic fuzzy ears—she said, "She seemed um...a little weird."
"Struck me as some sort of eccentric genius," Mira said. "Those are usually the best kind, though. At least she agrees you might know something good."

"Uhm...can I also say...she was really, reeeaaally cute?" Rose said, half a whisper and half a squeal. "Like waayy too cute!?"
"Heheh..well, I won't deny that. Even trying to 'carelessly' drape a too-big coat over her whole body just makes it worse. It'd be smart not to say that to her face, though. Or in earshot. I think she probably gets enough comments about her appearance as it is."

"Mm-hm! That's why I was trying not to say anything about how she looked, like at all," Rose said.
"Good plan."

---

Jacob had a mountain of books on the table in front of him. He would be annoyed at the library not letting him rent half of these tomes out if he didn't already find it to be the superior location for study in the first place. His cramped apartment was no good for thinking; he needed wide open space and the silence of the dead. Anyway...

Anyway, there was someone who'd only ever seen him here before, and if she wanted to see him again this was probably where she'd look for him.

He tried to brush off the distracting thought, poring over the ancient language of the text again to try and figure out just what Bimorphaeus was saying in this possibly-fictional tale. He hated to have to get up for a reference to the language when he knew most of it, it was just these two or three words that he was sure he could make sense of from context clues with enough effort. Unfortunately, he was districted by an actual noise this time.

It was a quiet, polite clearing of the throat—the kind of thing scholars did to each other when they didn't really want to disturb the other party, but absolutely needed their attention nonetheless. Applying the etiquitte he'd learned a long time ago, Jacob finished reading the line he was on, and then lowered the book just enough to peer over it at the person who had made the sound from across the table in order to determine whether or not he could be bothered to respond right away or needed another couple of minutes, please.

The elf jerked back in his seat ever so slightly, moving the book the rest of the way down and quickly (but quietly) setting it on the table face-up. He had never really seen her in person, but had heard stories. Seen pictures. The Captain of the guard was here, sitting across from the table and watching him. "Er...can I help you?" he said.

"More than likely, yes." She produced a small stack of papers and set it on the table, pushing it toward him slightly; it was a mixture of neat, tightly-packed writing in Common and what looked like detailed tracings of some magic sigils and glyphs. "You have an interest in Chaotic magic, do you not?"
"Uh..right," he said, recovering himself after a moment and forcing his eyes back up to hers before they could get lost in the writing. "It is, closely associated to my area of research. What's all...this?"

"Translations. Recently I had a party explore some freshly-discovered ruins, and there was a magically preserved journal inside. It seems that its last occupants were trying to find a way to channel the magic out of a monster and into a person."
"That's.." Jacob had difficulty coming up with the right words for just how bad of an idea it was.
"A terrible idea, yes," she said, agreeing with him. "However, they invented a large amount of magic along the way which has never been seen since.

"I know the ancient tongue the journal was written in, but I am no mage. It contained an impenetrable wall of jargon which I either left alone or tried to translate literally, and technical diagrams I'm not qualified to make heads or tails of."
"So you...what...want me to help you finish translating this?" he said. "What language is it in?"
"One too old for you to know. And no, I've done all the translation I think is feasible. What I want from you is to make sense of their methods, enough to put together a spell that does just the opposite."
"The opposite...?" Jacob had to back the conversation up a few lines to understand her meaning. "You want a spell to purge Chaos out of people?" he said. "That doesn't...a normal soul's very existence naturally rejects chaos to such a degree that a spell like that has no practical purpose. It..shouldn't, anyway, it.." He stopped, staring her dead in the eyes for a long moment.

"How much do you know about what I'm researching? And why, and how?" Jacob said, realizing that these were sensible questions to have asked near the start of the conversation.
"The library keeps thorough records of which books are checked out, or even removed from shelves, and by who. I haven't read every one personally, but I have a general sense of the contents of every book that isn't in the restricted section," she said. "I know enough about your research, and the kind of spells you have already successfully learned, modified or invented for your own use, to know that you're my best bet for this. That's why I want to commission this spell from you, and not somebody else.

"This is extensively dangerous knowledge," the Captain continued. "Anything to do with what they were attempting should remain clandestine. There is a silence spell between us and nobody close enough to hear this conversation through it—I checked. If it happens to point your personal research in the right direction...I don't object to that, and it should be obvious enough what needs to stay under wraps. But I want a spell that any idiot with half a brain and a drop of magic potential can learn. Preferably something that scales with the power output, but if you can't do that then reduce its cost as much as possible while keeping it effective so it can be done by one person in rapid succession instead."

"What...do you know that I don't?" he said. Her voice was quiet, calm, but she spoke quickly, crisply, and with a depth of intensity that made him feel a vague, fleeting panic on the edge of his mind.

"A great many things. But in this context, nothing." The Captain pushed the papers a little closer. "I don't know, but I have a feeling. Isn't that why you're still here after several months of dead ends? If nothing else, consider that the spell I want is basically harmless, and that you need support to continue living here anyway."

It was clear by now that she had come in already knowing exactly what his answer would be. Just the opportunity to see what such a group had learned about Chaos magic was enough to tempt him...not to mention everything else. Talking to her was like talking to a psion who'd mind-scanned you ahead of time, and so knew almost exactly what you were going to say about six steps ahead. Jacob understood now that his assent was basically a formality to her.

All the same, he did have to actually give it. Her hand was still on top of the stack of paper, as if ready to snatch it back to herself if he said no. But of course, Jacob didn't do that. He gave a small, exasperated sigh. "All right. I'll, at least see what I can do," he said.

The Captain nodded, picking up the offending hand off of the papers and dropping it to her side. "That's as much as I can ask for," she said. "There is no reason to believe this is urgent, but all the same—the sooner the better. As you may imagine, I want to know this spell myself and teach it to every magic-capable member of the guard, just for starters. I'll see to it that some official paperwork comes your way soon."

She then rose unceremoniously and stalked off, disappearing behind the shelves before Jacob could think of anything else to say to her.

Well, the encounter had been about as intense as expected, he thought, pulling the stack of papers closer. At least it had been...relatively amicable—offering him a job rather than, say, warning him away from his research as he thought most people who dealt with monsters daily might be inclined to do. He rearranged the books around him so that they obscured what he was reading from the front, and placed the first page atop the book he'd been in a moment ago, stowing the rest of the stack away for now. The first priority was to get a better idea of exactly what he'd just agreed to...

---

One could be forgiven for thinking that I planned this out well ahead of time, to ensure that Rayna was the one who showed the Captain the crystal. As a matter of fact, the first scene of this part didn't even occur to me until after I had part 78 already queued up.