A Summoning, Part L

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Part L
~Chariot~

"Damon, supper's ready!" The brown-haired werewolf bounded down the stairs before Onida had finished speaking. "Oh, hi—you're energetic."

"Um, yep! I'm also really hungry though."
"Pfft, okay then. Come on to the kitchen..."

Sam joined them not long afterward. "So, I guess things went well with Graham this afternoon?" Onida asked.
She gulped down what was in her mouth before speaking. "Y-yeah! S-so, um—" Damon's face flushed red. "Uh, her tail finished splitting! She has like magic powers now or something? I uh...was turned back into a boy for like two minutes, and we kissed...that was really nice."

"You—aah, back up," Sam said, putting out a hand. "So—she's a full-fledged Nekomata now. And turned you male?"
"Y-yeah..?"
"Did you, aaaah. Feel any sense of aggression or anything during that time?"
"Uh..y-yes..." she said, folding her ears down a little bit. "It was um, much friendlier aggression than wanting to attack someone, but—either way. I think she's strong and powerful enough that I basically couldn't hurt her if I wanted to."

"I guess that's aaaaaah, kinda good?"

"Do you..want to be male again?" Onida asked her sister seriously. "Once you're..fully recovered, mentally speaking, and have enough self-control?"
"I..I dunno..? I've been um..enjoying being a girl, I think. But at the same time..." Damon blushed brighter still. "W-well, with Graham, I'd like to...at least sometimes.......I think!"

"Well, think about it. I guess we now know another person who could just...do that for you, if you really wanted to. Although I guess it'd make things awkward with your streams, since you were supposedly irreversably changed by a disease, or something like that."

"H-heheh, w-well. Being a girl for that, at least, I might really wanna keep. We both definitely get more donos these days," Damon said—the other party of said 'both' being Sam, of course.

While Damon ran back upstairs to actually get things ready for a stream that night, Sam volunteered to help with the dishes. Onida paused a long moment during this, just watching her and thinking. Eventually she noticed, and paused too. "Aaah...something on your mind?"
"Um. Yes, you could say that. I'm..." She shook her head slightly. "It's difficult for me to know how to put this exactly. I guess...I always imagined getting to know someone I liked in a more..traditional kind of way, and part of me still wants that. Even though uh.." Her face felt a little hot, and she felt her tail wagging a little bit.
Sam smiled, returning the same body language back. "Y-yeah, aaah. So...you'd like to go on a proper date or two?"
"M-maybe...I, suppose I could use that male form I have for them..."
"Well, sure! Why not? I mean aaah, if you want—since I'm the one who was originally male, I could play that role, too."
"Uh, m-maybe, on one or two of them...b-but...I really wouldn't mind. Maybe I could use some getting used to being er..l-like that."

"Whatever you'd like. Let's aaah...let's make plans," Sam said, smiling cutely.
"R-right..."

---

Prama couldn't meaningfully bring up her idea to Boreas on Friday. The old alchemist was, if anything, in far too good of a mood. Not that Prama ever actually saw her smile, but she had a bunch of complicated mid-step tasks for some more difficult, expensive potions for her apprentice to do, and had also brought out an old notebook (the handwriting of which was entirely indecipherable to Prama) and kept flipping through it while asking her for responses to various ideas. While the genius girl didn't mind putting her mind to work, or the practice doing things more interesting than the basics she'd already mastered, it didn't really leave much spare conversation time between them for that entire day's worth of work. Saturday was only a little calmer, still not enough to go through the entire pitch.

It didn't really matter; this plan could eventually work without Boreas's help, so she proceeded with other parts of it in the meantime. Such as starting to help Logan ready himself for his last couple of tests in math for the semester. His grade really wasn't abysmal, but he was struggling to understand the very last, most complicated parts of the material, so she patiently guided him through problem after problem on Monday morning, and they agreed to meet again on Tuesday afternoon.

Around mid-afternoon, in the middle of a class lecture, Prama got a text from Anika. It just said: that guy you're tutoring is extremely close to awakening as a kitsune, fyi

She took a second to reply: Thanks but how do you even know about that?

passed by in the library

Well, that was nice to know...she'd need him out from under the veil for her plans to work anyway. If someone was that close to awakening, it wouldn't take a lot to nudge them over the edge, she thought. Maybe she could introduce her idea to Boreas during today's work, and buy a particular potion while she was there too...

---

Coming down the stairs from her visit to Damon was the first time Graham really noticed: Her fully-split tail and accompanying powers also came with a sort of additional sixth sense. She knew exactly where the other two werewolves of the house were, and which one was which; she could sense that they were werewolves in particular, and could feel Onida's presence much more keenly, seemingly as an indication that she was more 'powerful' than either of the others. Coming outside and driving, this sense threatened to distract her, and she found she was able to tamp it down or tune it up at will—and so made use of the former capability to better focus on what she was doing.

On Sunday, she demonstrated some of her power for her granddaughter—not in the form of transforming either of them, but rather making some simple illusions effortlessly, making fire and water come out of nowhere and float around, creating a brief indoor gust of wind and then quickly catching a bunch of objects that it had blown off of the shelves, from a distance, 'directly' with her magic, which showed as a bright purple glow surrounding them. Some of what she worked out how to do was because Rachel asked whether she could, having perhaps a somewhat better imagination than Graham did.

Walking toward work on Monday, Graham's new sixth sense picked up details about many of the people she passed by which she never would have guessed. She noticed a werewolf in fully-human form; a kitsune who was trying to hide his power entirely; and most interestingly, a few people who felt a lot like Neko or Kitsune or some other thing she couldn't identify, but were still decidedly human. There was a distinct sense that they only needed a little bit of help to become that other thing, a kind of help which she'd be able to give...but, not knowing any of them or what they might actually want, she didn't actually try to act on any of that. The longer she exercised this odd sense, the more she had the feeling that it wasn't actually entirely new—that, perhaps, it had been there since her initial awakening as a Neko, but had been so weak she'd barely noticed. And, of course, her tail splitting had intensely sharpened it into something that she could really use.

"Hello theeeeere!" Valoz emerged from her office as soon as Graham entered the door, hurrying over toward the Nekomata with her arms spread wide, and picked her up into a brief hug. "Congratulations! I knew you were lucky~!"

"Err, hello there to you too," she said, returning the hug gently and politely for the few seconds it lasted; then the greed demon set her down and hopped back out of her personal space. From the Mammon, Graham could feel a very strong version of one of the sorts of power she'd felt the potential for in some humans earlier, making it quite obvious now that this was demonic power. "I guess you can 'feel' the difference, eh?" It only made sense that a demon that powerful would be able to sense a Nekomata back, she guessed.

"Yep! It's really something to actually meet a real Nekomata after all my years, let alone already know somebody who ascended into one!" She placed her fists on her hips. "Well, Graham cracker~, you could probably just make your own gold and gems outta rocks if you wanted to, but here you are anyway. I guess you'd just prefer to play fair in society?"
"Well..it didn't really occur to me I could do that. But if everyone did who could, then gold wouldn't be worth much at all, now would it?"
"Nope!"
"Anyhow, I took this job partly to keep myself busy, so...not thinking of quitting all that soon."
"Well, that's great! I'm still very happy to have you on after the last couple of weeks of profi—I meeeaaan, stellar work ethic—I've had from you. So—you know where to find me if you need me," she said, giving a friendly wave before turning to head back to her office.

"Uh, sure."

---

Logan ran across one of his friends in the hallway after his last class. "Hey dude!" he said, waving.

"Oh, hey." He came over, and they shook hands like bros do. "Guess you decided the redhead look wasn't for you, huh?"

"Yyyeah, nah," his friend shrugged. "Besides, something way better happened last Thursday!"

"Uh-huh?"

"You know that girl—that woman I told you about before? I finally managed to ask her out on a date! She said yes, we went that night, and she paid for it herself!"

"Oh, wow. Good for you, I guess? I thought you said she was terrifying, though."

"Yeah...she really took over, too, man. But that's what makes it so exciting!"

"Uh, if you say so." Logan really didn't understand Jack's taste in women. Maybe it was normal for people who were part-wolf? "Anyway, I guess the date went well?" he said, knowing that he couldn't really ask about that.
"Yeah! Y-yeah..uh." Jack flushed a little bit. "I mean, it was sorta weird, but I still really enjoyed it?"

"What, did she make you dress like a girl or something?"

"Uh. Um....n-no, it wasn't that weird," he said, the extremely long, flustered pause making it obvious that it had actually been even weirder. Logan knew that several people's sexes had spontaneously changed since the weird cult more-or-less dissolved into a social club, so he knew that was a thing that could happen. Perhaps Jack's date had, instead, done that to him. Not that he could ask for clarification, though.

"Uh, any—anyway, we've got a second date lined up too! But how 'bout you? Meet any cuties lately?"
"I guess...?" He crossed his arms. "Last Friday, at lunch, this girl just sat across from me and started talking. Offered to help tutor me in math for basically nothing. She's cute but..I dunno, she doesn't actually seem interested in me?"

"I guess you've got a name? What's she look like?"
"Prama. She's..pretty short, light brown hair, purple eyes, wears glasses. Talks a lot about how amazing she is, says she's a genius. Seemed really nervous at first, then suddenly turned super confident—dunno what that's about either."
"Uh...huh." Jack's expression said that he strongly suspected some kind of unexpected correlation. "This Prama chick...she wouldn't have like, really long braided twintails most of the time...would she?"
"Huh, yeah, actually," Logan said, nodding.

"Yyyyeah. I think that's one of the people who were, involved in that whole cult thing before. You should probably be careful around her," he said. But Logan had the distinct feeling that that wasn't why he was concerned about Prama.

"I will, sure. But I mean—free help with passing my class? I can't exactly say no. She already helped me out yesterday morning, and I'm doing way better on the latest homework! So.."
"Yeah, yeah. I'm not saying don't hang out with her, or don't go for it if she is interested, just..you know...be careful."

"Okay, okay. I'll look out for if she wants me to help reform the cult or something," he said with a shrug. "Anyway, see ya later."
"Yeah, man, same. Let's shoot some hoops or somethin'!"

Logan watched his friend leave, his fluffy brown tail waving back and forth behind him the whole time. He'd been increasingly convinced, since he started seeing weird things back at the start of freshman year, that all of it was real...but he still had no idea how to bring it up. Jack had had furry ears and a tail since their first meeting, and had never said a single thing about it. Everyone else he knew or had met with similarly strange traits also seemingly went out of their way to say nothing about them. And, recently, several people suddenly changing to completely different, almost-unrecognizable appearances was a 'known medical condition'. Which, again, basically nobody really talked about much.

He felt certain there was a genuine, actual conspiracy happening around him, and really wanted to know what it was all about...but he had no idea what the consequence of admitting what he knew could be. Would they accept him into the conspiracy and let him know what was really going on...or just lock him up and claim he was crazy, so that nobody else would ever believe him?

For now, Logan just sighed and tried to push those thoughts aside to make room for more practical considerations. Like what he was going to do for supper tonight...

---

After trading introductions with the third Kitsune involved in Andrew and Steph's schemes, Toma and Stella had to wait a couple of minutes for the two of them to arrive. After all, the three of them were a few minutes early.

"No, that's the sixth," Steph was saying.

"You said the sixth was the twelfth," Andrew replied, "and the twelfth was the eighth, and the second was the fourth."
"I didn't say that. I very clearly told you which one was the fourth in the first place!"

"No, you sai—uuugh." at this point they reached the door to the study room, and Andrew just threw his hands up in exasperation, giving up, and pushed the door open. Toma was pretty sure she could hear Steph snickering on his way inside.

"Uh, hi," Andrew said, pulling the door closed behind him.
"Hello~," Stella said cheerfully, waving. "So, I understand you two have come up with a plan safe enough for our friendly neighborhood dragon to help make it work?"
"Yeah. Uh—it's not exactly what we were originally going for, so it won't actually involve any seismic movement. That, we couldn't find any way to make more safe. But we'll still really need you to lend some power, 'cause it involves me doing something I'm not actually very talented or good at."
"All the same, Andrew's been practicing hard to give you a quick demonstration of what it is we have in mind," Steph said, gesturing his way.
"Right. Okay, check this out." He put his hands out to either side, pointing the palms at opposite walls of the room they were in. In each place there appeared a rectangular, doorwayesque opening, and on closer inspection the openings were found to lead to each other. Toma leaned over to try and look directly into one of those doorways, and found an effect resembling the "hall of mirrors" that appears when two flat mirrors are placed directly across from each other.

"They're doorways!" the third Kitsune said, gesturing. "Go on and try going through one."
Stella and Toma exchanged a glance, and then the celestial shrugged and walked through one side, coming out the other. "They are functional! However..." she tilted her head slightly, looking over at Andrew. He was shaking a little bit, and starting to audibly pant. "This appears to take something of a toll on you," she said with a touch of concern.

"Uh...ffh.." He dropped his hands back to his sides, visibly sweating a little bit, and the openings disappeared. "Y-yeah.." His voice sounded strange, much higher-pitched than usual. "That's why we, hffh, really need some help with, like, powering it. Steph knows a way to—um." He paused, cleared his throat, and suddenly his voice seemingly went back to normal. "...Knows a way to channel magic from a willing 'source' into me. We did a more, complicated version between the three of us to make that storm, but in this case we just need some raw power. I think."

"Thinking with portals, huh..?" The dragon-girl crossed her arms and looked carefully at Andrew, tilting her head slightly. His voice hadn't simply sounded like someone tired or strained; it had sounded like a completely different person. Now that she had some experience 'sculpting' both Stella's body and her own, she felt able to discern the actual shape of a person if she 'looked' hard enough...and what her eyes saw wasn't matching what she felt from that direction, now that she was really paying attention. "Isn't it still physically straining to use powerful magic for a long period of time?"

"Yeah, of course," Steph said. "That's why he's been practicing. But in this case, most of that strain was from squeezing out so much of his own power to make it do that. With a little more practice, I estimate it shouldn't be much more tiring than the storm was. Which...admittedly, did require some bed rest and good food afterward."

"I see..." Toma nodded. By now she had a pretty good idea of Andrew's actual body shape: Shorter than what everyone was seeing, much longer hair, and most importantly female, with some pretty deep curves to boot. They'd said before that Andrew was hiding 'his' curse with illusions, so now she felt fairly sure she knew just what the curse's actual nature was. But was there any reason to bring that up right now? Probably not.

"Are portals safe?" she asked instead. "I mean, can they dump someone out in the wrong place, such as fifty feet up in the air? What happens if they close when someone's halfway through?"

"Longer distances take more energy and effort to make and maintain," Steph said. "Going against gravity does, too. It'd be harder for Andrew to make a portal that goes way up in the air, so that's not gonna happen by accident. And magic portals like these can't cut things, they just get ejected out one side or the other—practically at random, if it's truly exactly halfway in."
Stella nodded her agreement to this description. "The ejection exerts some force, but not enough to injure. At worst, it may cause one to stumble forward or backwards and fall onto the ground," she explained. "I could heal an injury as minor as that myself, with little effort."

"So, just to summarize—you want to basically swap the entrances using portals," Toma continued. "Just the main entrances, or all that you can?"
"At least the main and the side ones," Andrew said. "Plus, a minor illusion to swap the names of the buildings for some extra confusion. We'd like to do it sometime in the morning, have them set up right before lots of people start going in and out maybe, and maintain it for a good hour or more—enough that it confuses people again when things go back to normal."

"Okay. I think I can get behind this one," Toma said. "Maybe 'stretching' my own magic like that would be good for me anyway. But—not when people are taking tests. So, it'll have to be pretty soon."
"Agreed," Steph said. "Believe it or not, most foxes really do want to minimize the actual harm from our pranks."
"We should get a feel for how this all works, then. See how well you can do keeping those portals up from earlier with donated magic from me."
"I'll give some too!" Stella said. "This should be fun."

"Okay, that's fine," Steph said, nodding. "If you're sufficiently rested, Andrew?"

"Yeah..I should be okay to try again."

<hr/ >

"So..I don't really expect that you're curious what I want to ultimately do with alchemy," Prama said as she was putting her tools away for the day late Tuesday afternoon.

"Hm? Make potions and sell 'em, I'd expect," Boreas said.

"Well, sure, but that's only the broad strokes. I have a particular idea I'd like to let you in on..just in case you're interested in participating. The least I could do, out of gratitude for taking me on as your apprentice. I believe it's a very profitable idea, that might get requests for all kinds of unusual potions."

"Well, I'm not really hurtin' for money, but. I'm listening."

"Let's see—first of all, how familiar are you with the internet?"
"Uh..that's that human thing, with computers, ain't it?"
"Yes. It allows communication and commerce across wide distances. Spanning pretty much the entire world, actually. I guess maybe magic-using people have other ways of solving that problem."
"There's some ways of communicating long-range. Usually short-lived spells, or enchanted items, or such."

"Yeah, it's a lot less limited than that. Basically everyone can talk to everyone else whenever from wherever, using the internet."
"That...sounds exhausting."
"Oh, it is sometimes...but, to get to my point. You can also buy things on the internet. There's basically virtual shops where you can see pictures of the item you want, press a button to buy it, and the money goes from your bank to that of whoever you're buying the stuff from, and then they ship it to you."
"I see...that sounds like it takes an awful lot of trust between the buyer and seller."

"The thing is, it kinda doesn't? Usually both sides are complete strangers," Prama continued patiently. "The go-between is what both of them trust, the website and the banks and so on. Besides, individuals and online stores have reputations to uphold, if they want people to keep buying from them. Scams aren't unheard of, but scammers don't usually last very long."

"I see. And, you want to put your store on this internet thing, then."
"Right! Exactly. We could have a standard set, and have a form to commission anything special, a way to communicate with the alchemist for clarification, and of course a way to reject commissions if it's something that simply can't be done."

"Well, I guess if you know what you're doing, it don't sound too impossible.

"Lots of hurdles to get over, though. Just to start with: Normal humans, under the veil, use the internet all the time, don't they?"

"Oh, well. I'm not talking about doing this now. Definitely at least after I graduate college, if not also once I've met your approval to be a full-fledged, independent alchemist. And, from my conversations with Zotha, I've got a feeling we may not actually need to worry about the whole veil thing. But regardless, I've thought through the logistics plenty. Obviously we'd need less-fragile containers for as many potions as can remain stable in them; ways to pack up and send a liquid safely without getting the side-eye from shipping carriers; the actual website itself; so on, so forth. And I wouldn't mind being the sole proprieter and alchemist of this venture, but—if you're interested, we could also work together on this. Be able to sell more volume, or handle more complicated requests. Not even necessarily all the time, like, if you're just interested in really strange and difficult potions, I could filter out the easy stuff and leave only that to you. Whatever you'd feel works best, including your being completely uninvolved. But like I said: I wanted to let you in on it regardless."
"Hm. Well, I'll think on it, at least. Maybe wait 'till you've got it all set up to decide whether I'd really like to be involved. My quiet little business here is trouble enough for a lone wolf like me to handle," Boreas said.

"Fair enough," Prama said, heading out into the main shop to exit the building. "We'll see about it in the future, then. Oh—by the way, I'd like to buy this." She pulled a water bottle of standard magic-refill potion off the shelf. "I set some cash on the counter for it earlier."
Boreas glanced at the cash in question, then back to Prama, and nodded. "You could just take something that cheap at this point, you know. Think you made that batch yourself anyway."
"Sure, but I'd much rather save up my goodwill to buy something a lit-tle more valuable," she said with a sweet grin, then headed out the door.

---

Around mid-morning on Tuesday, Graham noticed (from the back of the store) an older man walking inside who could become Neko, given enough help. She went out to check on him from a short distance off, making sure none of the other employees were already helping him, and then quietly put a small illusion over her appearance. He looked to be in his late fifties or so, with gray hair on a partly-balded head; she kept her body's apparent shape the same, but created the look of some faint wrinkles and age lines on her face, like someone around that same age, but wearing some decent make-up, might be expected to have.

"Say, anything I can help you with?" she asked, coming up his way.
"Well, I don't know. Any deep-pocket sales you know of?" he asked. "Tore up my near-last good pair of jeans."
"Hmm. I think there's something over this way, if you'd follow me," she suggested, pointing and starting to lead the way.
"All righty then."

"Got a bit of an odd question for you, sir," she said while he followed. "Do you..ever wish you could be young again?"
"Hah! Every day o'my life," he said. "Just ten, fifteen years or so'd be great. I had a full head of hair back then, you know. And I should've found me a woman back then, too, when some of 'em would spare me a second glance."

Graham regarded him for a moment; he was a little bit overweight, but had the build and fitness of someone who did physical labor for a living. "You don't look half-bad for your age...but I know what you mean. I'm a widow myself, and lucky enough to have found another someone to be with since then," she said. "What if..you could be even younger? Say, back to age eighteen, or twenty?"
"Oooh, that'd be something," he said. "I'd sow some real wild oats then, lemme tell ya! Aww, I hope I'm not being too vulgar about that, but you know."
"Sure, sure," she said, nodding. "I'm well-acquainted with the facts of life, so don't worry too much about me.

"Now—these are on clearance. Half off, and I think a few of 'em look to be around your size," she said, gesturing to a particular stack of jeans.
"Ooh, you're a blessing, miss," he said, going and picking one up to get a better look at it. "These oughta keep from tearing for a while, at least. Price's just about where I can afford it, too."

"I'm glad I could help you out," she said cheerfully.

Awakening him, making him younger, or really just transforming him at all right in the middle of the store—especially if it was anything like when Zotha had done that for Graham—would make a bit of a scene, and probably be at least somewhat embarrassing. So the Nekomata went for something much more subtle: While he was sifting through the jeans to decide which subset of them he wanted to actually buy, she simply planted a little seed of her power into him. It would give him what he'd just said he wanted, and the more he liked the results, the stronger its effect would grow—and, eventually, it would be strong enough to fully awaken him as another cat-person. Its work would probably be done by the following morning, she figured, although this was partially a guess. She had never asked her magic to do something as complex as this before, after all.

Just to be sure, she kept up with him throughout the rest of the sale, continuing to be polite and friendly, and waved goodbye to him as he left, his appearance completely unchanged for now. But the seed was most definitely present, and had already 'grown' ever so slightly by then.

Graham paused, looking at the time, and jumped slightly. Her shift was just now over! So it was time to head home for lunch, then off to...play with Damon for a little while, and then everything else planned for the day afterward. Thinking about all of that, she mostly forgot about the whole "seed-planting" thing by the time she got back to the house.