A Summoning, Part LI

 First / Previous / Next / Latest

---

Part LI
~Hanged Man~

Prama looked at the green, slightly-glowing potion in the water bottle, and thought about the events of the previous Thursday night. Does this make me a hypocrite? she wondered briefly, before shrugging. Doesn't matter, I'm doing it anyway.

Over the past couple of tutoring sessions, she'd observed that Logan liked to drink bottles of those sporty drinks that were supposed to replenish people's electrolytes, but which also had ridiculous neon-glow colors and were probably as full of sugar as any soda could ever hope to be. So she bought one from a vending machine with a greenish color that was a close enough match, and now—late Tuesday night in her room—she did a little bit of what people unaware of magic might sarcastically call "alchemy." She dumped around one-quarter of the drink's volume out into the sink, then replaced that with the magic-refill potion, and then tightly closed the drink's cap. It might taste a little bit weaker this way—she knew the potion itself tasted like slightly sweetened water—but not strange enough to draw any real suspicion.

The idea was very simple: This amount of potion would be more than enough to fully recharge a relatively average magic-user. The typical effect would be that person feeling a slight rush as the overflow naturally and harmlessly left them. But—if her theory was right—anyone sufficiently close to awakening as, say, a Kitsune, would find that overflow directed into helping complete that near-awakening into a full one. Even most people with some sort of potential wouldn't actually have this happen; a person would need to be only a short time away from inevitably and naturally awakening all on their own for this particular method to work. Anika had said Logan was 'extremely close', however, so Prama was pretty sure he fit the latter category.

If anything, she was saving him the inconvenience of awakening in a more public location, and/or when nobody was around who knew anything about the veil or could help him make sense of what had just happened. Or, if it didn't work, then she'd know Anika had been wrong or lying or that 'extremely close' didn't mean what Prama had thought it meant. In that case, she'd provided him with a free drink, and if she thought it worth the trouble to try again with a different potion later, he'd be even less suspicious then. At any rate, this quarter-potion drink wasn't capable of doing any harm—or at least, not any more than something composed entirely of the original sports drink would've been.

---

From overhearing the students' chatter as they walked the campus sidewalks and lawns, and even the occasional chat between faculty or staff, one could get the impression that absolutely everyone was happy with the results of the strange prank that had coincided with a rainstorm on April 1. However, there was one group of people who were not happy at all, and wished among themselves that someone would catch whoever was responsible and, at the very list, bill them. That group would be those who had to clean up the mess.

The flags, banners, and posters on the corkboards weren't really a problem; they was mostly taken care of by the students themselves, with so many deciding to take them down to keep as souvenirs. Erasing chalkboards and whiteboards was no difficulty at all, and usually the responsibility of whoever was teaching a class in that room first. However, the custodial staff still found plenty of scraps and other bits of mess all over the place, and the most longstanding mess was the one which the groundskeepers had to deal with.

Bill came back from his lunch break, which he had spent most of purchasing some fresh jeans, to a report that still more of those accursed flags had been discovered. They were evidently supposed to have popped up during the rainstorm, but several of them hadn't—and when it wasn't the automatic sprinkler systems setting them off, it was a small batch of them all in one area popping out of the ground at once, usually startling or tripping someone in the area. And then they had to get out the shovels and look very carefully around for any more of those little holes that indicated the presence of an unpopped flag.

As one of the lead groundskeepers, it had been Bill's responsibility for the last week-and-a-half or so to go wherever a new flag was reported, verify that it was one of the originals that had been buried in the ground rather than some imitation stuck shallowly in from above (because a few students were doing that too!), and then go help them look around and dig them out. He'd ruined one of his few good pairs of jeans working the shovel to try to get one of them out just a couple of days ago.

Well, Bill was proud that he worked for his pay, so as soon as he got the report, he took a company golf cart out to the site, had a quick look around, pointed out a few little divots that needed to be dug out for flags, and then cursed alongside the younger, lower-ranking groundskeepers as they all got shovels out of the back of the cart to start digging away. One of them asked if he was getting too old for this kind of work, and he just laughed. "I ain't too old 'till I get a heart attack!" he said, making the first strike into the earth.

The flags weren't all that deep. Digging out just a little bit of ground really wasn't that much work. The real pain was what came after: Putting the earth back like it was, making it level, replanting fiddly little patches of grass, and doing everything they could to ensure the scars on the lawn would no longer show. As they got through step one of that process, Bill actually felt a little less tired and sore than usual. Maybe all the digging he'd been doing since April fool's day counted for exercise, he thought. Whatever the case, he kept on going, doing the work alongside his juniors.

About an hour and half later, they were done. Usually all of the bending over that was involved in this part of the job had him well and truly out of breath by this point, but Bill was actually feeling better than when he'd started. Not one to question a blessing, he told the other guys that they'd done a great job, got the cart all loaded up again, hopped back into it, and then started driving it back to where it belonged.

Thankfully, the rest of that day was fox-flag free. Bill got to go back to his more routine kind of work, which was a little bit less physically demanding. He usually hit a wall of exhaustion around an hour before quitting time, but today seemed to be an especially good day for him. He could swear he was less tired by that time than he'd been when he left for lunch—shoveling up the flags and all!

On his way out from work, an office worker he said hi to nearly every morning asked him if he'd started using that "touch of gray" stuff on his hair, and he laughed—thinking she'd been joking. But when he got to his car and glanced in the rear-view mirror, he had a slight shock. His hair did look a lot darker than usual, and maybe a little bit more full, the bald patch not as big. He shook his head—it had to be a trick of the light. Bill possessed the unfortunate sort of genetics that made a man start balding by age forty, and he knew that balding didn't work in reverse. Anyway, he had more important things to worry about, like heading off to get a drink and some food, and then back home to launder his clothes, including the day's purchases.

It'd be nice, though, he thought—if he really could be ten, twenty, thirty years younger. That really would be something wonderful!

---

Prama had arranged to meet with Logan on Wednesday afternoon to receive his "payment" of demonstrating his skills. She'd suggested that they could meet outside this time, since the weather was nice and all he was doing was showing her a mock-up website on his laptop. So she sat next to him on a bench in a relatively isolated space between two of the campus buildings, letting him go through the pages in order.

"So, this is the 'store'," he said, pointing. "I know, the items make no sense and the prices are ridiculous—I was just messing around."
"That's fine. Would you know how to actually make a real online store functional? Secure? Anything like that?"
"Uhh, well, I'm familiar with what companies you'd want to buy those services from," he said, shrugging. "I am seriously not a security expert, but I know enough to know who's got a good reputation."

"That's helpful. It's good to admit what you don't know or can't do, right?" she said, half-repeating some advice from their tutoring.

"Hah, yeah.."

She could tell: He still wasn't sure whether she was attracted to him or not. She'd sat next to him to help him with his math earlier, but in a separate chair; now the bench was only wide enough to allow a slightly respectful distance between them, which she maintained. Maybe Logan was attracted to her, maybe not—but his level of uncertainty about her intentions was hopefully enough to distract him that little bit more.

"I guess these are just stock images, but—if you needed to, you could take pictures of a product, right? Or make some kind of graphic to represent them?"
"Yeah, sure. I'm not a full-blown graphic artist, but I know how to work a photoshop," he said with a shrug.
"What about making a form for text to go into? So just the owner of the website can read it after, or reply to."
"Uuhh, I think that'd be easiest to make as an email thing," he said, shrugging. "You know, you can make a form where you put in your address, type your message, and then the website is configured so that message shows up as an email from that address, to whoever. And that way you can reply directly to.." He paused, clearing his throat softly. "Ah, sorry."

"It's fine, I've had you doing a lot of talking," Prama said. "Hang on.."

She bent over, digging around in her backpack for a moment, and produced the bottle she'd prepared the night before. "A machine gave me this the other day when I asked for bottled water..you want it?" she said, partially opening the top before he could see whether it had still been sealed or not, then offering it over toward him.
"Uh..." Logan looked from the drink to her for a second or two, just long enough for her to wonder whether she was onto him, but then he said, "Sure," and took the drink, chugging some of it before closing it and setting it down again. "Anyway, mostly with a form like that you need to be careful about injection, uh...stuff. Like, people entering commands for the website to do nasty things as their message, and for some reason it obeys them? More security stuff I don't really get all that well, but there's some standard tools that're supposed to filter all of that out for you too."
"It seems like a lot of web development is taking and using things other people built," she observed.

"Yeah, kinda. I get the impression sometimes that that's basically how you do any software, in the modern day."

"Well, there's no reason to fix what isn't broken, I guess," she said.

Watching him during this exchange, Prama didn't really see anything happening. Definitely no fox ears sprouting, at least. But Logan huffed out some air at this point, and grabbed the front collar of his shirt, flapping it a little bit to fan his torso. "Hooh..sorry, feels like it's gotten a little hotter out," he said.

Prama didn't feel any difference in temperature at all, but said "Yeah," kind of noncommittally, watching him reach for the bottle and take another long chug of it. If his first swig hadn't given him enough potion to overflow his magic, this one definitely did.

"Aah," he let out after the drink, sounding relieved. "Uh, anyway, I'm trying to stay up-to-date with the latest..uh...the..." He trailed off, looking distracted.

"Logan? Are you okay?" she asked.

"Uh..I-I dunno, I still feel hot..and kinda weird." He bent well forward to set his laptop down on the ground, sat back up, and put his hand up to his forehead for a moment to feel for a fever. "Uh..ugh.." He dropped the hand, shivering slightly, and Prama caught sight of the first visible sign that he was awakening: The color of his hair shifted to a bright shade of blue, seemingly as a wave coming out from its roots to its tips which went beyond the locks' original lengths, making them grow a few inches longer to accommodate this new color's needs.

"Ah..I...urgh.." Logan squirmed in place, panting softly, as his hair slowly grew out a little bit longer still. However, a more notable change began a second later, as his facial hair vanished away, and his ears, now sporting a few patches of light-blue hairs on them, started to poke out past that growing hair. He looked over at Prama, bringing a slightly-shaking hand up to touch some light blue hairs that were now framing his face at the sides, and said, "Uh..g-got a weird question. Are m-my ears...uh..?" Prama just nodded in reply. "Oh..g-great...hffh.."

At this point he gasped, then let out the air in a distressed "Aa—aagh...!" This came with Logan's body suddenly shrinking, losing at least half a foot of height all in one go. His frame collapsed inward, his arms visibly thinning and his pants loosening around his legs as they did the same; his face visibly shrank and softened into a rounder, cuter shape that fit much better with the longer locks of hair surrounding it. Then he shuddered, struggled as if against some invisible restraints, and began shrinking again, more slowly and steadily this time. "Aah, aa~aah.." His voice cracked and squeaked, its pitch shifting upward as his Adam's apple started disappearing from his neck. This whole time, his ears were still slowly growing bigger, the hairs taking over more and more of their surface and becoming more proper fur.

"Aaa~aah...m-mnngh...!" As his ears finished growing out into two big, fluffy vulpine triangles, their fur the same color as his hair other than their inner fluff and tips begin white, Logan's shrinking finally slowed to a halt, leaving him a very slender guy with narrow shoulders and slim arms and legs, and only a few inches taller than Prama was herself. "U-ugh...wh-wha~aat..?" His face flushed red as his voice refused to come out in anything lower than a high, barely-male tenor tone. She could see the color of his eyes slowly brightening from brown to red as he squirmed around in place a little, trying to pull his now-oversized shirt back onto a shoulder it had slipped off of, only for it to slide off of the other one. "I-I...a-agh..!"

The issue of his clothes seemed momentarily forgotten as he suddenly hugged himself tight. "Mrrrh—yip!" A high, soft animal-like noise emerged from his lips at the same time as a tail shoved itself out from his lower back, easily finding its way out between the bottom of his shirt and the top of his pants. It was colored the same as his hair and ears, with a much lighter blue on its back fifth or so, and it rapidly grew longer and fluffier now that it was out into view. At the same time, Logan shuddered one more time, his blush growing brighter, and let out a high, soft "M-mrr~rrr~rrh...!" Then it was "Ah—aah—AAH!" with the last one coming out in a voice too high for any male vocal chords. Prama judged by what happened next that this was the point where Logan's sex changed.

"M-mmnh..!" Her tail finished growing out to its full size as she squirmed her upper legs against each other, then nervously pulled the top of her pants and underwear up to look—probably forgetting entirely that she had an audience. "I-it's..I-I'm..mmh..w-wah!" No sooner had she let go of the pants than there was a sudden puff of blue smoke around her entire body, startling both her and Prama. The smoke instantly replaced Logan's ill-fitting shirt with a kind of kimono-dress-thing, white with dark blue trim, complete with a blue sash around her waist that was tied into a big ribbon on the back. Said dress barely covered down to her upper thighs, and the smoke had left her with apparently no pants, so her slim, smooth legs were completely exposed by this wardrobe change.

"W-wha..!?" Another tail sprouted from the fox-girl's back at this point, and her eyes fluttered shut. "A-aah..m-mngh.." Her hips and thighs visibly pushed out a little thicker, and a pair of small bumps pushed out the part of her new outfit above the sash. "M-mrr~rrh..." Her ears lowered, pointing out to either side; both the full-grown tail and the one that was still on its way out wagged back and forth; and her blush shone its brightest yet. "A-a~aah..m-mrrr~rrrrh..." Logan's voice deepened ever-so-slightly, leaving it a little deeper and more mature-sounding than Prama's was. "Mngh..a-aa~aah..." Her small bust slowly, steadily grew out bigger and bigger, at the same time as her second tail steadily grew longer and fluffier. The two seemed almost linked to each other, and, indeed, appeared to finish growing at the same time. "Mrrh..o~ooh.." Logan slowly untensed as her mid-sized bosom bounced gently into place, her second tail now a perfect match for the first one. For a second or two, she breathed in and out, looking calm and, perhaps, satisfied.

This calm did not last very long. She blinked her eyes open, looked down at herself for a second or two, and then her ears popped straight upright and she jumped off of the bench. "Wha—wha..!?" Her hands hurried down to make a vain effort to pull the hem of the dress lower; the enormous sleeves around her arms wound up covering her legs better than it did.
"Uh, Logan, waaait a second—don't panic," Prama said, quickly dropping to her feet herself.
"What did you put in my drink?!"

"Uh—what do you—?"
"Don't play dumb with me!!!" She went and violently grabbed the bottle in one hand, pointing at it with the other. "You gave me a drink, and then I turned into—what!?—A fox girl?! I know what correlation is!"

"Okay, okay! There was something in it, but..that result was still very unexpected," Prama said, resisting the urge to mention causation. "Could you lower your voice a little please?"
"Fine—fine!" she said, the second one coming out as an extremely emphatic near-whisper. "So what was it supposed to do, turn me into a frog or something?!" this question came with her emphatically throwing the bottle backwards over her shoulder.

"No, it's—that kind of potion doesn't even do much of anything usually," Prama said.

"Potion!?!?" Logan hissed, waving her arms up and down excitedly.

"Oh, whoops—uh, one thing at a time.

"Look—you're a Kitsune. You know, a fox spirit?"
"Is that how it works? Have I always been one and just didn't know it?"

"Well, no—but you were already really close to becoming one, and the potion helped. I, don't actually know why you turned into a girl Kitsune exactly, but the potion didn't do that."
"Wha—then what did!?"

Prama crossed her arms, trying to think quickly. "Uuhh, well, magic awakenings like that come with a brief burst of power for the person being awakened. Some physical changes happening—beyond the necessary, like a Kitsune having fox ears and a tail—aren't that unusual. So, logically, the only power that could've done that part was your own."

"Why would I do that!?" she said, trying to use her hands to point at herself, bumping both of them into her new breasts, and quickly pulling them back off them, her face flushing red again.

"I don't know..I'm not saying it was necessarily your conscious will or anything," Prama said with a shrug. "But anyway—I do know some people who can fix that, actually."

"That's great I guess, but—whyyyy did you want to 'help me' 'awaken' as a 'Kitsune'," she said, making deliberate air-quotes with each phrase, "in the first place!?"

"I..thought it'd be the easiest way to help you come out from the veil," Prama said.

"Is that what it's called? People having weird traits like fur and wings, and magic obviously existing, and nobody talking about it?"

"I..guess that's one way to put it," Prama said.
"I already knew about that!!!" the blue-haired fox-girl shouted again, flapping her arms excitedly enough for the gigantic sleeves they were in to produce a gust of wind.

"Oh. But you—" Prama paused, engaging her genius mind for a moment. From Logan's apparent ignorance about the details of magic, and the way she had just described her own experience of the world... "Wait, do you mean to say that you noticed magic was real, but never asked anyone about it once you did?"

"Only for three years! What was I supposed to say? 'Hey man, why do you have a tail?'" she said in as low a tone of voice as she could manage, trying to imitate how her male voice had sounded. "I'd look crazy, and for all I knew someone would lock me up or kill me for knowing too much!"

"Uh, well, the veil doesn't work like that. Don't you think you'd hear of a lot more 'mysterious disappearances' if it did?" Prama said.

"I don't know! HowamIsupposedto know!?"

"Ssshh! I understand you're freaked out, but you're being really loud again. Uh, look—you did get two tails, and Kitsune are more powerful with more tails, so you should be able to just make both of us invisible and inaudible, and then you can yell at me all you want."
"How do I do that?"
Prama shrugged. "I don't know, but apparently things like illusions are supposed to come naturally. Feel for it, I guess?"
"Feel for...hmngh." Logan crossed her arms, making a visible effort to concentrate, and then in a puff of blue smoke, she vanished.

"Uh, that worked—I can't see you," Prama said. "Or—hear you, if you're saying anything right now."
The fox-girl reappeared in another puff of blue smoke. "Okay, so—"
"Just do both of us this time?"

"Yeah, okay. I'll just...uh." She made a vague gesture Prama's way, and this time the puff of blue smoke appeared around both of them, but with no effect that Prama could actually perceive. "..Did that work?"
"It should have if it felt the same for you, but I can't actually tell. I guess we'll know if you start yelling again and someone comes along to check on us."

Logan grabbed her ears in her hands and pulled them upward. "Aauuugh this is so weird! I guess it's nice you know someone who can at least make me a guy again, but I guess I'm just stuck with having fur for the rest of my life!?"

"Well, I think Kitsune can actually 'hide' those parts...I'm not sure whether you still feel like the fur is there or not," Prama said, while Logan let go of her ears, dropped her hands, and visibly took a few deep breaths to try to calm herself down.

"I-it's , I guess I can get used to it when apparently so many other people do. I-it's not all bad, if it apparently comes with superpowers..but how do you know all this stuff anyway?"

"Well, one of my friends is a Kitsune," Prama said. "Also—I guess you're not planning on staying that way, but I do know from experience what it's like to be, er, newly female."

"Oh, yeah—'cause you were part of that cult, right?" the fox-girl said, pointing at her for a second. "I guess you're one of the people who changed because of that. No wonder you were acting kind of weird for a girl."

"No, that's just how I am. And I wasn't just part of the cult, I was one of its leaders. In fact, the main guy was my roommate, and also happens to be one of those rich friends I said I have? Well, the new leader basically changed everything about most of us." Prama sighed. "Now we're all supposed to be nice and good like her. But I guess I'm not very capable of being 'good'. I'm just as selfish as ever, and can't even think about doing anything that won't personally benefit me."

Prama caught sight of Logan watching her with a slightly tilted head as she turned her own face away, feeling an unexpected formation of some tears in her eyes. She sniffed, and then: "Wah—!"

Suddenly, and very unexpectedly, the blue-haired Kitsune had come up and grabbed her into a hug. "U-uh..wh-what're you..?!"

"I don't know! Y-you looked really sad, and I just..u-um.." Logan paused to try to explain herself better, but instead realized something aloud at the same time as the other girl: "Y-you're hugging me back..t-this feels really weird as a girl..!"

"Um..s-sorry.." Prama let go. The sensation of the fox-girl's body against hers was nice, and a part of her actually wanted to touch the fluffy, warm-and-soft-looking fur of her ears, or even one of those tails, but she knew better. Logan gently let go of her and hopped a couple of steps back, her face entirely red again.

"N-no, it's fine. I mean, that was me, even if I don't really know why? Some kind of uh, fox-person thing, you think?"
"I uh..probably not..."

"A-a-anyway! I don't think you're that bad. You decided to help me out as soon as you thought I had a problem, right? And, you really didn't expect 'awakening' me to go like this," she said, pointing at her bust with one index finger.

"I didn't, but—the only reason I wanted to help you was to advance my own plans. Which, included needing you out of the veil to do it..."
"Still! You are the first person out of all of the..magic, whatever, stuff, people I know...to actually even try to tell me what's been going on! You have no idea how much of a relief it is to know I wasn't going crazy! A-and, I mean..superpowers, right? Maybe you can tell me a little more of what you know about that? Or uh, magic stuff in general..?"

Prama took her glasses off and wiped a few leftover tears off of her face with a sleeve. "Sure—I don't mind. I can..explain what I wanted your skills for while I'm at it, and...it's up to you if you want to help me or not with that. But—maybe not somewhere so public. I uh..don't actually have a roommate right now, so we could just use my dorm room?"
"Uh.." Logan hesitated briefly, blushing again, but then nodded. "Sure..that's fine. After that, maybe you can call someone to turn me back into a guy..."
"Right, of course," Prama nodded, although a part of her thought that it would be a huge shame...

---

Yes, another generated image. I did do a tiny bit of actual editing to this one; one of the teeth had a weird vertical line going through it, so I removed that. Otherwise, I'm still amazed that an image this good showed up.