A Summoning, Part XLV

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Part XLV
~Judgement~

Over the phone, Onida had only briefly outlined the situation: She'd found the source of the howls, she was okay, she'd be heading home in a moment. She arrived at the back door only a little before sunrise, looking dirty and tired, so only after everyone had resumed human form and she'd had a chance to take a long shower had Sam and Damon (non-literally) dragged her into the living room to get the full story.

"...And then I ran back here as fast as I could, uh..following my own scent, I suppose...and, you know the rest."

After a brief pause, Sam said: "Look at you, taking down a feral werewolf!"
"Uh—"
"If that doesn't make you a 'serious' alpha, I don't know anything else that would. I've got a whole branch of my family that'd be super proud of that!"
"I didn't really...'take anyone down', though. I, I-I didn't want to! I couldn't..."

"Hey, aah, knocking him out still counts! Even better since he actually gets to live, with Zotha around."

"I—I guess."
"Anyway, there's seriously a local alchemist, too? You hardly hear of anyone making potions these days..." Sam finally read the room at this point, and quieted down to look over at Damon.

"So, so—no one else's gonna get bit," she said, "right?"
Onida nodded, "At least...not by him. I'm pretty certain that...if Zotha somehow can't do for him what she did for you..." she trailed off, not really wanting to finish her sentence.

"Yeah, Boreas sounds like the kind of old-school wolf you don't wanna mess with," Sam said. "Thing is, it's still in our traditions to 'take care of' feral werewolves, even though there's barely any of them around in the modern day. And the veilkeeper guys are usually on top of them before any werewolf even hears about it."

Damon said, "When you say...'on top'..."

"Well, yeah. Those guys are literally created with weapons in their hands. I think. Aaah, most of 'em anyway?"

Sam really couldn't bear to see the expression Onida had on right now. "Aaaah...hey, look!" she waved a hand around to get both siblings' attention. "Lemme put this another way: You saved that guy's life. Boreas wouldn't have given him a shot, right? So, whatever happened...someone's still alive 'cause of you. Isn't that great?"
"Y...yes." She nodded, slowly, and her expression turned a little less dark. "You're right. That, is, a good thing. And, I'm glad...as strange as it is...we could get some closure. About, what happened to Damon that night. It wasn't...someone being openly evil, or hurtful for no good reason. It was just, another man in pain, lashing out without meaning to." She took a deep breath. "I'm relieved because..when I thought, for only a few minutes, that there was someone to be angry at for what happened...I really don't like what I was thinking about doing to him right then."

Sam nodded. "Aaah...not that I've had it happen myself. But, the wild side can put some bad thoughts in you, in the wrong situation."
"Y-yeah," Damon nodded—speaking much more from experience herself. "I'm...glad you're okay, sis."
"Oh? Yes," she nodded, "Me too."

---

"Are you sure you're okay with this?"
"I don't know why I wouldn't be," Stella said, tilting her head slightly. "There's hardly anyone I trust more than I do you."
Thomas put a hand on the side of her head. "Aauuugh, that really just piles on the pressure to not screw it up!"

"I'm sorry. Should I have said: 'I don't trust you in the slightest, but do it anyway'?"

"No, yeah. You have a good point." The dragon-girl sighed. "Hhhokay. Just. Stand. Really. Still."
"Just like a statue~."

Frelye didn't like to change her own form much—aside from going between 'humanoid' and 'proper dragon' shapes—but she had done it before. She'd had two tips for Thomas: First, that a fire dragon found it easiest to accomplish transformations by 'forging the body in flames', so an earth dragon would probably find it easiest to 'sculpt' a body instead. And second, that it was much easier to figure it out by doing it to someone else first, then apply the same general idea to oneself. That, in turn, required a volunteer...which was why Stella was now standing across from her in Thomas's apartment, trying her best to keep her white-feathered wings from fidgeting around.

Like a statue... If Thomas really were looking at a statue right now...her powers over rock seemed to have enough fine control to just take little pieces off, or add pieces on from elsewhere, and rearrange what was there, to give it a different shape. She hadn't actually done that before, and it probably would've been a good thing to do before this, but this was what she was dealing with now, and it'd be really stupid to back out so soon. Stella was, pointedly, not made of the element she felt she had such fine control over...at least, not mostly. Thomas knew full well that humans were mostly water, and there was no reason Celestials weren't that, too. But if a fire dragon could breathe fire on a person and make them change shape instead of just burning to a crisp, then...

The dragon-girl tried something very, very simple. A height increase of..just a few inches. Her right hand moved as if she was raising a few pebbles up out of the ground to float them in the air. A faint, dark-green glow appeared around Stella's form, and she shuddered slightly for a second before suddenly shooting up half a foot taller, her bust popping out an entire cup size in the process. "Wah~!"

She jumped slightly from the motion, then looked around and down at herself, letting out a slightly relieved giggle: "Pffheheh..."

"Uh, I was going for something more subtle than that," Thomas said.

"But you got it to work!" the winged girl said happily, clapping her hands together a few times. "Rome wasn't built in a day, and not even its lowliest brick was fired in a mere few seconds."

"Okay, point. I did something. First thing I want to know is if I can undo it."
"All right~."

Back to normal, back to normal... Thomas could vaguely remember some kind of quote from a sculptor or something, about how he tended to envision the statue he'd be making as the 'true form' of the block of marble he started out with, which he was simply 'freeing' from all the rest of the stone. So she tried to 'free' Stella from that most recent shift. Her hand waved out in the Celestial's direction, and closed into a fist. Just as suddenly as she'd grown, she went back down to her original size—or, at least, the size Zotha's healing had given her. That had gone..unexpectedly well, given the first attempt.

"Good work! I appear as if unaltered."

"Uh, yeah. Somehow that felt a lot easier to get right."

"Do you know there are two kinds of transformations?" Stella said.
"Whaaat do you mean?"
"One's soul is said to 'remember' one's original form, generally. In the distant past, baleful transformations were always those that did nothing to that memory, and dispelling them allowed one's body to 'snap back' to the original shape that it remembers. On the other hand, Lady Zotha's power is clearly able to alter that true form itself. In addition some beings, like werewolves, can also have multiple 'true forms'."

"Multiple...so, is that what she did for Dai, then? Where he can just go back and forth whenever?"
"I suppose so. It seems like the most likely explanation."

"But—yeah, okay. So I'm not altering your 'true form' here, and that's what makes it easier to put it back how it's supposed to be."
"Most likely," she nodded. "I've no doubt that a dragon's magic is powerful enough to make the deeper change, but you'd have to put much more effort and 'weight' behind your spell to do so."

"Right, okay. That makes me a little more relieved..that I probably can't screw it up so bad I can't fix it."

"I'm glad~. But in that case, we should keep going, should we not?"

"Uh—yeah, you're right. Okay..."

---

It wasn't often that someone was called into the manager's office, and the manager was the one dreading the meeting. But this morning was special. Felix had to push away a deep-seated urge to procrastinate and put it off until the afternoon—but waiting through the entirety of the day before, when he'd been quote-unqoute 'sick', had been bad enough. This conversation needed to happen now. Still...he didn't like it.

A quiet knock came on the door. "Come in," he said, and it opened; Felix tried to put on something resembling a reassuring smile. "Welcome. Uh, please—shut the door and take a seat," he said, gesturing to the chairs in front of his desk.
Now that Onida was standing in front of him, he wondered again: How had he not noticed that tail? Those ears? The fact that she was shorter than before? The shift in hair color was excusable as dye, but the rest of that...and, now that he knew he was a werewolf, somehow he felt sure he recognized her scent from that night, too. Wait, but that meant...!

She took a seat, her face managing to look neutral, but her ears folded partway down with worry. "You, wanted to see me?"
"Uh. Yeah. This, isn't really a professional matter, but it's. I, can't ask you to keep working under me without clearing the air. Okay—I feel like maybe you already know. But, yeah, I didn't. Until, night before last."
"You were..the one who bit Damon," she summarized for him.
"Yeah." He leaned way back, running a hand roughly through the hair on one side of his head. "Ssssheesh, I don't have any idea how to apologize for that! 'I'm sorry' really doesn't cut it, huh?"
"It..you weren't really in control of yourself. You didn't know," Onida said. "It's all right.

"When I first...thought I could chase down, the person who'd brought so much suffering into our lives...I was really angry. But...that was wrong. You're just as much of a victim as my brother. Do you, have any idea how you became a werewolf?"
"Uhh, nope. I can't remember being bitten by anyone, or anything like that. Even though I have been able to remember a bunch of things differently since night before last. Really weird."
"Anyway, you shouldn't feel too guilty. You were..really kind to me, when we were dealing with the worst of it. When he went missing, and...when he returned, too. And in a weird kind of way..it all ended up working out pretty well. So, no hard feelings." She gave a small smile his way.

"So..we're okay, then? I mean—I was prepared to, you know, if you didn't think you'd feel comfortable working for me, I could arrange some kind of transfer.."
"No, please. You're the best boss I've had," she said.

"Including biting your brother?"
"Like I just said, that doesn't count. You didn't have control over that."

"All right. Then—you know, you've been getting a lot done lately. Sorry to interrupt you today, but..we really needed to clear the air about this."

"I agree." She got up, and came close enough to offer him a hand across the desk. "Let's put it behind us, and I can get back to my work."
"Yeah. Sure." He could definitely shake to that agreement...

---

In a study room in the college library, Andrew scrolled through pictures on her laptop of the 'fire escape route' maps of the two buildings the Kitsune wanted to try swapping out. She leaned in hard for a long moment, then back again, splaying her arms out. "Auugh, it's just no good. I can't think of any way to make any of it safe!"

"Um, yeah, sorry. No good ideas here, either." The girl who'd helped them with the rain prank before said with a shrug. "I think we'd need an electrician, a plumber, and someone who can make a bunch of chemistry equipment stay perfectly still during a seismic event...just for starters."

"There has to be a way to do this," Steph said. "Well—I'd like there to be one, at least. I guess there never was a guarantee that Stella's idea could be made practical."

"I wish we could just swap the entrances instead of swapping the buildings," the other girl said.

"Wait." Andrew sat up straight. "What do you mean?"
"Well, uh, you know. Like, in a video game you can swap the loading zone that an entrance goes to," she said, making an 'X' symbol with her index fingers. "So this one goes to that place, and that one goes to the other place? It's pretty much the same as if those two places had swapped locations, like, from the player's perspective?"

"Portals. Zotha can make portals!" Andrew said, spreading her arms out. "That means it's a thing magic can do in general, right!?"

This question was directed toward Steph, the one who'd been raised to know a lot about magic, and he said: "Uh, yeah. Teleportation is definitely a kind of magic, including linking two places. But it's something you have to..figure out how to do. And I think maintaining a portal requires some energy upkeep."

"Let me try.." Andrew stood up, and first just tried a short-range teleportation. With a puff of pink smoke, she disappeared and reappeared in a spot a few feet away—then briefly stumbled around before using her tail to regain her balance. "Okay, that's pretty easy."

"Right, of course. Disappearing to a short distance off is a very fox-ish kind of thing," Steph said. "Good for making a quick getaway after a prank. I'm not sure if the other kind is really in our nature, though."

"Well.." Putting a hand out in front of her, Andrew concentrated on trying to make it where she could step forward..and come out from where the door to the study room was. It took putting a lot of concentrated effort in, but eventually she felt like it had succeeded, and she demonstrated that the portal was working by walking through it.

Still holding her hand out toward the portal's 'entrance', she waved with the other one to Steph. "Hey, see if it works for you, too."
"Sure.." Once Andrew got out of the way, Steph also succeeded in stepping through and winding up coming from the doorway. "It works! But..you look like you're having a hard time keeping it up."
"Ugh..yeah." Andrew dropped her hand (which had just started trembling after Steph stepped through), and took a deep breath as the portal disappeared. "I'm gonna need to practice this. Holding it up feels pretty hard..and I think a longer distance would make it even tougher. I may not..ffh...be powerful enough to keep it up for long enough for the prank to work." She bent over, placing her hands on her knees and panting to try to get her breath back.

"Well—it's not exactly what we originally agreed on...but we do have a certain dragon's promise to help us with this," Steph said. "Dragons are chock full of power. I'd just need to use a spell to let her donate the energy to you, the same way we did for the rainstorm."

"Ooh! And if we swap the 'labels' of the two buildings with an illusion, it'd make the confusion hit even harder..right?" the other Kitsune said.

"Right," Steph said. Yeah—if we can get Toma on board, and pick a good day—I think we could actually do this!"

---

After several successes with minor shifts (although none of them resulted in exactly what she'd been picturing), and with going back to normal each time, Thomas felt ready to try a bigger change. "Okay," she said, rubbing her hands. "You ready?"
"Certainly~," Stella said cheerfully.

"Hhokay. Here goes nothing."

Thomas tried to 'scuplt' Stella's form to a male one. More specifically, she was going for a copy of how she'd have looked originally, when they first met—minus all the injuries, of course. With several motions of her hands matching more or less the various ways the Celestial would need to change to take on that appearance, a faint dark glow appeared around her as before, but this time it steadily grew brighter and brighter until it nearly blocked her body from view.

"Aa~ah..oh, mm~mmh.." Stella's voice deepened and shifted just slightly, as her silhouette within the glow of Thomas's magic shifted around, growing slowly taller and losing its slight curves. When the dragon-girl's efforts came to an end, a soft, barely-male sort of tenor came out with a couple of brief cries: "Ah~! Mmh." Then the glow faded off to reveal..not exactly what Thomas had had in mind.

Stella was male now: A guy with a slender build, a fairly androgynous face, the same long white hair and bright purple eyes, and only slightly below Thomas's height. The only real change to his clothes was the skirt and leggings turning into some baggy knee-length shorts, which left his top fitting kind of close with its hem trailing an inch or two up from where the shorts started. He was physically fit, the tight shirt showing some decent abs, but overall it wasn't quite the tall, broad-shouldered guy Stella had originally been. At the same time, looking over it all, Thomas felt like this slim, cute look suited him very well.

"Errm..it seems to have been a success!" he said, his face flushing red a little bit from the dragon-girl's staring.

"Oh, uh, sorry," Thomas said, making herself look away.
"No, no—that's quite alright. It..brings me a great deal of joy to see you admiring me like that..." He took a couple of steps closer, and gently placed an index finger on her chin to guide her head back to facing him, so her eyes could see his face. "You—wouldn't mind a little kiss, would you?"
"Uh.."

Stella's face looked very similar to that of his usual, female form...but this blushing, semi-shy, expectant smile was a new expression to see on that face. Alongside the request, it made Thomas's cheeks burn and her heart race a little bit. How she'd felt about Stella before had never before...come on quite so strong. "Um—s-sure..." came out of her mouth before she could really think about it.

"Heheh—all right." With that, Stella wrapped his arms around her and placed his lips on hers. That brought on an entirely different reaction.

Thomas had felt briefly nervous and giddy, but as soon as he was holding her and kissing her like that..she grabbed him tightly (not enough to hurt, of course) and started returning the kiss with a demanding intensity and passion. Mine! Her wings spread out to their full size and wrapped themselves around his form, her tail curling forward and twisting itself down around his left thigh. All mine!

"Mmh—!" Stella was definitely surprised by all of this, but didn't seem to mind..he returned the passion of the kiss and held on tight, for as long as both of them could hold their breaths to keep it going.

It took quite a while before the dragon-girl pulled out with a loud smacking sound from their lips, and then quickly turned her head out to the left side, leaning a cheek on one of his. "Uh...hfffh...s-sorry.."
"What ever..f-for?" Stella was no less out of breath than she was.

"I j-just uh..hfffh...that, possessive instinct...really flared up..!"

"I rather enjoyed the experience." Stella reached a hand up and ran it through some of her hair, making her jerk slightly, then shiver. "You are usually...ffffh...so calm, rational, and cautious. I do appreciate all that consideration, but I think I rather like this wild, aggressive side of yours, too. Especially if it's just for me." He pulled her head around gently so that their noses were touching, and his eyes directly in front of hers. "I'm not nearly as fragile as I look, you know~."

"Mmh." With that much of an invitation, Thomas couldn't help grabbing him into another long, deep kiss.