Solo Tricks in Reimorphing

[Tinnok]

Tricks in Reimorphing
15th of Fall, 513 A.V.

She sat up high in a tree, a baby Capuchin in her lap, who was delighted by her long hair, though confused whether or not to try to eat it, or play with it. After a few chimes of tugging, Tinnok relinquished the toy and wound it back into the tight braids coalesced upon the back of her neck like some dormant serpent. She scratched the little monkey's head before guiding it it onto her back where it wrapped tiny fingers around her neck, a large replica of it's mothers, and clung to the witch as she climbed up higher into the trees where the troop of monkeys had been spending most of their day foraging.

As soon as the little thing spotted its mother it was bounding, swinging and leaping over to her, and Tinnok watched the ease of the primate's acrobatics with wonder. Could she ever hope to master such a display herself? Well that was one of the reason's she was hear today after all. Bringing her body up as high as the branches in the upper story of the tree would allow for her weight, Tinnok perched herself upon a sturdy limb, legs on either side of the branch, and watched the monkeys playing around her, concentrating upon their jet black furry tails that twisted and curled even when they weren't using them as a fifth arm. They were nimble appendages, light but strong, and today she was going to attempt to replicate them.

She was a bit leery of an attempt, after all her only morphing attempts thus far had been to manipulate and change things she already possessed, eye color, her fingernails, and even her voice. A tail was something she had never had, nor was she sure she'd know what to do with one if she had one. But that was what this was all about, and she had to try.

She let her body relax, though she kept her eyes on the tail's that would be the main model in her transformation. Slowing her breathing she reached within to the fount of magical power in her center and pulled it out. It was still such an exhilarating experience, knowing this stuff had been part of her body all along, yet she had never had the ability to reach it or utilize until that day that Asheera had invaded her body with her res. Shaking the nostalgic thought from her head she guided the res to her rear. She made sure to find the point at the base of her spine, making sure she was guiding her djed to the correct place, and made sure to collect a sizable pool of her magic there in order to work with.

From here the half breed paused, unsure of how to begin. She decided to being with skin and muscle. First, head turned to look at her rear she began to stretch and expand her skin, which began with a long stretch of skin punctuated by her own natural scales. It was shapeless and limp, so she slowly began to lengthen and thicken the appendage, imagining the muscles required to work such a limb. She didn't know if monkeys had bones in their tails or it was just muscle, but as she worked she realized her creation looked much more like a serpent tail than a monkeys. It came to a distinct point, and since it was modeled after her own flesh, the skin was tan and scaled. It took several chimes for her creation to come to something akin to a finish, a strange lumpy looking line of skin with the vaguest definition of muscle showing through the thin layer of skin put over them. Tinnok frowned at her work, feeling a twinge of exhaustion in her stomach, but too focused upon the imperfections of her creation to focus upon it. She ran a hand over the odd looking tail and immediately pulled back. She hadn't seemed to put any muscle in at all, now that she felt it, just like a lsleeve of skin more than anything else. This time the djed flowed into her hands and she lay them down upon the tail, letting her magic sink in through the flesh on the top, creating a layer beneath the scaly flesh of corded muscle that would also sink in and fill out her form. As she watched she could feel the the tail thicken beneath her fingers. It came to a point like a snake's and curled slightly, drifting off of the tree a bit as she watched. When she was finished she shuddered a bit, thinking how it looked so very Dhani like, but it was a model she could replicate that she needed, and she didn't want to cut open a monkey tail to find out was inside.

But now that she had made this extra limb...was it even going to work?

[Tinnok]

If she had been born with a tail it would seem just like an arm or a leg, so Tinnok attempted to lift this new limb as if it were indeed that. It twitched a little, but Tinnok frowned. It didn't feel connected somehow, as if she had just sewn a Dhani tail onto her rear and expected it to fuse with her body. She growled in frustration, wondering what she had done wrong. She had connected it to her tail bone, formed bones, muscles, and flesh...which even thinking about made her stomach gurgle with the energy spent on such a task. She tried to push more djed into the appendage, to make some sort of spark that would make it work...but nothing.

Sitting, collecting her energy and taking a break she continued to stare forlornly at her useless creation. Eventually the strain of keeping such a thing bound to her body, tugged at her core and she let the tail go, it's form dissolving. The half breed sighed, and leaned exhaustedly against the trunk of the great tree, glancing up at the shenanigans of the Capuchins, playing and frolicking, others grooming each other and feeding on leaves. Maybe she should have just tried to make a monkey tail.

Closing her eyes she drifted off for a spell, the toll of her morph really sapping at her strength. Once she awoke again she ate a few pieces of dried mango and a handful of almonds to bring back some of her strength, and climbed up to join the Capuchins for another test of her skills: Reimancy.

This time she kept it light and simple. Pulling res down through her arms it seeped through the skin in both palms as a silvery goo. A few Capuchin's glanced over curiously, as Tinnok pressed both balls together and shaped them into a sort of circular orb which she then turned to an orb of water. She maintained a point at the center, keeping it silver and concentrating upon it. It took focus to maintain the shape, and as a noisy male trotted by her on a branch, Tinnok grinned and hurled the ball of water at him, transforming the center to water at the last instant. Screaming and cry the male scampered up with his brethren, several other monkeys joining Tinnok in laughing uproariously. She summoned up a small orb next, just from her left palm and tried to hold the circle of un-transformed res in the middle of a smaller water sphere as long as she could before dropping it down through the canopy, rolling her shoulders once it had been released. Compared to the tail earlier, the Reimancy was barely a drain on her body, but she still felt tired, as if she could curl up in the nook of the tree and fall asleep...which is actually precisely what she did.

[Tinnok]

When she woke a few bells later, bleary eyed and with a serious crick in her neck, Tinnok glanced around to realize she was suddenly alone. The Capuchin troop must have grown bored with her and the foraging in this tree and moved on. She took a moment to listen, but she could not hear any monkey noises nearby, meaning they had gone quite a distance away.

Tinnok rose, rubbing her head and straddling the branch she was on, collecting herself. Her muscles felt weak still from the rapid use of her djed, but she knew the feeling was nothing. She needed to keep practicing, just like with her bow, or her daggers, except that the worst one could get when playing with daggers is cut oneself. The worst that could happen with reimancy? She could turn her whole body to water or go completely insane like Asheera.

Tinnok sighed softly, and instead focused on clearing her mind. She wasn't sure precisely what the trick was to summoning her djed faster, if it was just getting practiced with the art, or perhaps the level headedness of your mind when you were summoning it, either way she needed to focus upon both if she wanted to get any better.

So instead of summoning her res, she simply sat on the branch there, letting her mind drift slowly away, focusing on the dripping of water in a pool, a stream running slowly over rocks. Her problems were little compared to this, and she was just another drop of water.

[Tinnok]

It was strange, she was so deep in thought and contemplation that when the first drops of an afternoon shower began to run over her head, dripping down her face and neck, it seemed perfectly at home with her senses, and almost as if she had summoned the act of rain itself. Realizing belatedly that she had no such power, Tinnok's yellow eyes slowly pried open to see the light rain falling around her, slipping through the leaves or collecting on their rubbery surfaces before spilling off in an endless cascade of droplets. The half breed laughed good naturedly at the event, deciding it was a sign from up on high to use her ability with water.

Well rested at this point, if still a bit sleepy from this morning's events, Tinnok summoned up her res, letting it flow slowly down her arms. Today was not a day for speed, but focus, she tried to latch onto the feeling of the substance coiling within her chest then releasing where she willed it, this time down either arm. The silver res floated up through her palms, settling like quicksilver there, and Tinnok admired it's opalescent hue for a moment. Small orbs formed in either hand and she reached out into the rain, watching the droplets fall onto her self made res orbs, seeing what would happen. Tinnok's lesson with Asheera was a strange one to say the least. She had barely been inducted before the mixed blood had disappeared into the wilderness, leaving her with newly awakened powers and only the vaguest idea of how to use them.

So the half breed didn't know that she could draw the elements she was familiar with to her res, but the idea of this very action, in not so many words, was occurring to our witch even now. The water slid harmlessly over the orbs, but Tinnok's attention was rapt upon the droplets. Even if she could master her element, at present she could not summon much water, and when she did it cost her dearly energy wise. She recalled that time int he forest with Svan when blood ran out of her nose and her limbs felt as if they had been filled with water. He had scoffed at her for overgiving, a term which she was very wary of now, but he hadn't explained the full extent of it either.

There had to be another way, and perhaps that way was to utilize the elements already present instead of making her own. Tinnok stared out into the rain and combined her silvery orbs into one slightly larger form, instructing it to float away and hover a short distance away directly in the rain. From here the witch was unsure of how to proceed, so she decided instead of focusing her will on transforming her res into water, she would focus on making her res act as a...magnet for water, sucking the water towards it. She imagined the orb resonating and drawing the falling droplets inward, and because it was an extension of her own body, the image in her mind was of her bare body and the rain flying towards it.

She felt a twitch in her power, something she was familiar with when she was tired, but she wasn't and her current work had not yet exhausted her. Then she heard it, like a pop as the first droplet arced out of position and stuck to her res ball, then another then another. Tinnok's eyes grew wide as a whole stream of nearby rain defied the laws of gravity by actually returning upward, the layers of rain water forming around the silver ball and floating there as if she had made it herself. Tinnok was sure there was a limit to the amount of material she could take and control at her present power level, so she stopped when the amassed water orb was about the size of the leather ball used in the Taloban Ball court.

She let it float for a while longer, admiring the strangely hypnotic way the water rotated around the orb, then decided to try something new with how she released control as well. The silvery ball of res was still unchanged and manipulable, but instead of hurling the orb as she usually did she decided to try making it explode. Closing one eye and concentrating upon her res at the center of the orb, Tinnok twisted her fist, the physical manifestation of her thoughts at the moment. She willed the ball to expand outward causing the water droplets to fly in all directions, and with a splash her res reached outward, turning into water itself as a hail of water was sent all over, including Tinnok's face and chest.


The witch leaned back, wiping away the water and chuckling. She felt her energy wane, but not as much...well that was a neat trick.

[Tinnok]

It was slowly growing dark. Tinnok hadn't left the same tree all day, but she felt a comfortable physical exhaustion sink into her limbs from the magical exercises she had been engaging in today. Despite the weariness that crept into her bones, however, now that she had figured out something important about her water manipulations, she felt as if she should return to morphing and try to solve the problem with her tail.

She turned around, glancing at her back side again, trying to figure out the issue, when something clicked inside her head. She remembered skeletons, Myrian ones, and how the base of the spine turned into the smallest almost tail looking appendage. She had been constructing a tail without bones, then mimicking a serpents tail. Even if monkey tails didn't contain bones, she knew Dhani tails certainly did, after all snakes were just one long spin with the ability to weave side to side.

Her lips curled into a smile and she felt the djed rise up in her chest almost without provocation. She repeated her process from earlier in the morning slipping the magic down into her back, this time specifically curling it around her spine as a sort of anchor for the model she was about to reproduce. Making the sleeve of scaled skin was first, stretching out from her back and lining the skin along the branch she was sitting over. Next she filled in and thickened the new tail with muscles, so it was about the size of the one she had created before. She took a bit more time to smooth out the shape, to make it more stream lined, less lumpy.

Finally, she needed the bones. She did not have a perfect model to work off of, but she remembered the linked nature of the bones in a Dhani's tail. She had seen multiple snake skeletons, not always Dhani related. Loosely interconnected for flexibility. First she worked with her spine, expanding it, pressing it into the muscles, weaving the djed through the already created flesh, and fitting around the layers. She felt as if she was working with clay, that she couldn't quite see...yet she could feel every inch of it, vibrant and connected to her being. She wasn't quite sure how well she was modeling the bones, but she knew it was a step closer to what she sought to achieve.

This time she felt the tole of her morphing more acutely. She felt as if she could barely move, but her main mission was complete, and there was a tail.

This thing should be an extension of her, just another part of her body, like an arm a leg or finger. As it was she didn't particularly feel like it was, but then again one didn't exactly think about the presence of their fingers either, which had been there for their entire lives. Tinnok now tried to move the tail, closing her eyes in the expectancy of failure.

rasp

Her eyes snapped open, though she didn't need her vision to see what she had done with the tail. It had flopped off of the tree, a considerable amount of weight that made her cling to the branch to keep from toppling over. Like a limb that was tingling after falling asleep she slowly felt her connection to it, and slowly curled it around the branch she was on like a monkey tail, tightening it's hold inch by inch around the bark. Then, tentatively, when she felt the grasp was tight enough, she slid off the tree, making her whole weight save for one arm be supported by her newly formed tail.

She felt the strained sensation in her rear that happened when only one of her arms was supporting her weight upon a branch, but she hung for a chime, and realized her grip held, and the limb worked precisely as she had wanted it to.

Which was also about the time that her remaining energy left her and the tail receded into itself, leaving the half breed with only one arm supporting herself. She yelped as her fingers slipped from their hold and she went crashing down through the branches.

Well one step at a time she supposed, and it had been a productive day. Perhaps it was time to call it quits.

[Empyrean]

Tinnok

Observation	+1
Climbing	+2
Morphing	+2
Reimancy	+2
Meditation	+1

Lores :

• Capuchin: Curious and Agile
• Morphing: An Art of Trial and Error
• Morphing: Creating from Experience

Notes :

Really nice little thread! I enjoyed the read!