Flashback Making Faces

[Bennar Witt]

19th of Fall, 511 A.V.

Lori laughed at his reaction. She was never self-conscious, but was always amused at his own embarrassment for her sake. Her bold nature was a counter to his own reserved one. But this was ridiculous! How was he supposed to keep his composure when she was standing there with a beard of thick red whiskers sprouting from her face? Benji had always thought she was rather appealing…visually. But with thick whiskers hiding her face the allure was somewhat ruined.

“What’s the matter, Benji? Don’t like my face mop?” Her smile was hidden, but the humor in her words did not escape him. Her pleasure and lack of concern that someone else might see her in this state turned his face all the more red. “You don’t think it makes me look more…majestic?”

“Quite majestic, actually.” Ben piped up. His pride made him try to go along with it. He would not be seen as the timid one! He had grown up running wild across Alvadas with his two older brothers. But they had Erasmo Witt as a father. Such public embarrassment was the darkest of taboos for their ever-proper father. “I think I get it.”

Lori showed mercy on her friend and let the disguise shift back to the usual smooth skin and raindrop face that he knew all too well. Her mischievous smile was now quite visible, and endearing. Benji felt his own mouth turning in a reflection of that smile. He was also ashamed to feel the dark creeping slice of jealousy. She was always the type of wild brave that he told himself he wanted to be, in everything she did. Her devil-may-care attitude was not an act, it was not a hesitant and nervous rebellion against an overbearing father. It was her. She walked the world, with all its dangers, and stood tall in the face of them. And here he was, with a boldness that melted at the mere glance from Erasmo Witt.

“Are all Sylirans so bold as you, Lori?”

“I’m no Syliran! I am Ravokian!” Her response was indignant. His unintentional slight seemed to rub her pride the wrong way. The smooth milky skin of her brow roughened with a quick frown and her eyes gleamed with warning.

“Ravok, Syliras, all places in Sylira. Doesn’t that make you Syliran?” Benji said, doing his best to put on a disarming smile.

“Does you being from Kalea make you an Isur?”

“No.”

“Exactly, do try to be less ethnocentric in the future.” She scolded him in a parental tone. When he did not respond she graced him once again with a smile and returned the conversation to the previous subject. “So you don’t need to copy someone completely. It’s just useful to have a few disguises ready, and once you successfully copy a model it get’s easier.”

Bennar nodded as if he understood the bulk of what she was saying. And he sort of did. But morphing was a lot harder than shielding for him.

[Bennar Witt]

Changing his djed was enough trouble for him. The intricacies of model choice was above and beyond his skill level. Lori was telling him how to run, and he was still working on the rudiments of crawling. He let the cool Alvadan air fill his lungs as he breathed deeply through his nose. Meditation was not one of his strong points, but he found it was vital in concentrating when it came to magic. With his other academics, concentration was easier because it had to do with exterior things. With this magic, it was a personal scrutiny that was much more difficult. Especially considering he was a hormonal teenage boy with all the stressors of growing up to contend with.

So he breathed deeply and tried to concentrate on the air entering and leaving his body. That simple point of reference was a gateway to shifting his mind to other parts of his self. He focused on the djed in his physical form. The skin, the tiny hairs, the muscles. He went deeper and found his own mental image of the bones. In this Morphing he would not need to shift his bones, or his muscles. He wasn’t sure he could do such deep magic sat his skill level, but the exercise helped him to translate the mental image of his flesh and bone to djed.

Benji began to see the shifting image of the djed overlaid across his own mental image of his body. The whole process was quite difficult, especially for a beginner. The required view of one’s self was radically different than the normal self-view he had been accustomed to living with before his introduction to magic.

“All the potential is within you. The skill is using it.” Lori’s voice drifted into his head from where she stood only a few paces from him. “But to use it, you have to know how to find it.”

Find it. She means the djed.

His djed became more pronounced as he concentrated and Benji found that he was able to focus on it more readily after a few minutes of breathing. He observed the djed’s relationship with his own physical form, the extent of the morphing he had done was mostly dependent on that relationship. So seeing the connection there was vital in learning how to change it.

Benji found that the essence was a hard thing to conceptualize, and that he could really only experience it. So he made no attempt to rationalize the process with his logic and simply rolled with the punches, so to speak. Benji observed mentally, and touched tentatively, the way the djed of his own body commanded his physical form into it’s shape and size. A hint of more potential, and of the fluidity of the djed, passed through his mind. The impression that the physical form he had always assumed was his whole being was actually just the one pattern his djed had settled on flitted through his mind. When he tried to focus on it, it slipped away. The potential for other forms, other identities was there, but too complex to be understood by Bennar, by one with so little experience. Instead he was left with a simple, faint impression of potential.

He breathed out a slow breath.

“Good, are you ready to try some small changes?” Lori’s voice was carefully calm and soft. She did not want to shake him from his focus.

Benji opened his eyes and let them focus on her. Without saying anything he nodded his assent.

“Okay, so now we need to find a model that you can use.” Lori said, glancing around the Alvadan streets below them. They were sitting on the gently sloping roof of the Witt residence. His father’s home was in a packed street complete with an assortment of vendors and pedestrians. Their legs dangled daringly over the the edge. The neighboring roofs were all deserted, leaving Lori and Benji alone on top of Alvadas.

“Oooh, this man here.” Lori said, leaning forward boldly. She indicated an old man who was seated across the street below, facing their direction. Her accompanying grin was darkly mischievous.

Benji frowned. “Why a hairy old man?”

[Bennar Witt]

“You’re already a young guy, sometimes it pays to have a different face on.” Lori said seriously. She had a sort of sage expression when she was speaking of things Benji had not encountered in his limited experience in Alvadas. Not for the first time, he wondered exactly how Lorainne came across these skills, and how she had used them to get all the way to Alvadas. He was reasonably sure she was once again hinting at a criminal background that she had so far chosen not to share with him.

Disregarding his doubts about the validity of the practice he was about to attempt, Benji peered down at the old man. He could almost make out the detail of his face, but not completely. With an effort he called into focus the djed within his body, and then focused on his face. There on the rooftop, he began to change his features. It was a mimicry of the grizzled visage of the old man. Eyebrows became harrier and wilder, their dark brown hue paling to a dirty grey. His skin darkened and became spotted with Syna’s touch, folding over his eyes a bit and wrinkling in his forehead. A wild beard sprouted from his jaw and his upper lip. But as these changes were made, and as he focused in on each one, the others reverted back to normal. He could only focus on each change individually.

Benji caught sight of Lori’s pained expression. He winced and abandoned the effort, letting his face slip back to its normal visage. “That bad huh?”

“No, no first times are hard. I mean, I’m no master so it is what it is.” She ran a hand through her hair, clearly thinking up solutions. Benji stood up on the rooftop, carefully stepping away from the edge.

“Maybe we just aren’t close enough?” She suggested, also standing up. She seemed wholly unconcerned with the edge, as if it would never be so bold as to endanger her. “Lets go see if we can find someone closer?”

They were off. The pair of them leapt across roofs and sent shingles clattering as they did so. Benji stumbled a few times as they went, and was definitely less bold in the leaping across alleyway gaps than Lori. But he kept up.

Eventually their rooftop world gave way to wider streets that they could not leap. Lori slid to a halt and Benji stumbled and tripped over himself to slide up next to her on his knees. They were both out of breath and laughing, excited by the semi-dangerous run.

“Oh there! He’s a bit closer.” Lori said, already scanning the balconies and street below them. Benji crept up to the roof’s edge to see who she meant. An old man with grey-blue eyes was hunched over a small garden on the balcony of his apartment across the street. He was no more than a few dozen steps from them, though completely oblivious to their presence.

Benji looked back at his friend. “What if he sees me?”

She shrugged. “You afraid of an old gardener?”

“No.”

[Bennar Witt]

She gave him that look again. The ‘Don’t be such a wimp’ look that he had not encountered until he met this wild girl. Usually he was considered the wild black sheep. To think what Erasmo Witt would say if he knew his already troubled son was hanging around with this kind of riffraff. He shook his head unintentionally, trying to banish his father from his thoughts.

“Petch it. Let’s do this.” He said, confidence emboldened by a deep seated defiance. Lori grinned widely at that.

“Al-right!” She said, laughing and slapping his shoulder. “Remember to try to keep the whole face at once. Focus in, but not so much that you can’t handle the whole thing.” She left her hand on his shoulder. Benji wasn’t sure if he could concentrate with it there but he didn’t want to ask her to move it…

He refocused on this old man. Lori and her particulars about the models… He seemed to have a similar skin tone to Bennar, as well as similar eye color. The boy mage slid up to the edge of the roof, laying on his belly. He peered over the edge at the old man. He began to focus on his own djed once more, willing it to shift. He felt the sparse whiskers on his chin sprout eagerly. Turning into the ashen grey beard that the man sported. He felt his nose grow and the hoods of his eyes dip even lower. Benji felt a tingling sensation as his hair lengthened and tickled his neck. He felt a wild exhilaration as he realized he was maintaining it all.

But as he thought about that fact, and not the actual work of the morphing his concentration wavered. Just as he was turning back to Lori to grin in triumph, he felt it slipping back to normal. He grasped at it but felt it slipping away like water through spread fingers. Her grin slid into a pained smile.

“What? Am I that ugly?” He asked.

“I was hoping for something a little older…” She gestured across the street with raised eyebrows.

Benji sighed and rolled over onto his back. The sun shone brightly in his face then, so he covered them with his hands. This magic shyke was so different from everything else he had ever learned. He was usually a pretty fast student, but with this stuff he had no idea how much progress he was making. “It’s easy when I’m not thinking about it, but once I do it becomes hard. And I can’t look away from the model.”

“That will change eventually, Benji. You just need to familiarize yourself with the sensation and get used to the process. You have done it! You can morph. You just need practice.” Lori said gently.

They practiced for another two bells, having to switch models once the old man went back inside of his house. The whole time Benji was unable to maintain the morphing after pulling his eyes from the model, this time a fruit vendor on the street. Their attempt ended late in the day, while the sun was falling. Benji felt disappointed in himself, trying not to let it show as they made their way back across the rooftops, more slowly this time.

“Hey, you did really well today. Same time tomorrow?” She asked, her voice sounding hopeful.

“Sure, if you still want to teach me.” The words weren’t supposed to sound so pathetic. He cringed on the inside.

“Of course I do!” She smiled and was gone, running across the roofs of Alvadas.

[Bennar Witt]

The next morning was bright and clear. The weather seeped into Benji’s mode, or perhaps it was his companion’s gleeful grin as they leapt the roofs of Alvadas. Lori somehow easily found the rooftop they had been laying on the day before and slid expertly into place. She wiggled until her head was over the side and smiled back at him.

“Our date is here.”

Benji bit his lip with concentration as he crawled carefully over to where she lay. “I can’t wait until our training graduates from the rooftops to the streets. You know, where people don’t usually fall to their deaths.” He joked as he plopped down next to her.

“Your training.” She corrected.

“My training.”

The old man with the bush of a beard sat across from them on his balcony. He was frowning over the edge at some birds hopping on the street, perhaps guarding his precious lilies against their scavenging. It was definitely the same old man as before. Benji could not mistake a face he had worn before.

Lori urged him to try again, just like the previous day. Benji went through the same process as the previous day, concentrating on the detail of the old man’s frowning face. He felt the shift in his features. The sag of his eyes. The thickening of his brows. The crookedness of his new nose. It all shifted more easily then yesterday, and there was a faint rush of pleasure in it. He felt a shock of thrill that came and went faster than he could really register it. It had been a moment when his mind had rejoiced at the change in him. As though he was enjoying being something other than himself.

Benji turned his eyes to Lori, focusing not on his triumph, but on that shock of pleasure. She looked supremely pleased. With herself of course. “I am good.” He said, thumping him on the head with the palm of her hand.

The contact didn’t even break the morphing. He was still reveling in the feeling that came with the djed manipulation. He felt the differences in his face as though he was simply not used to his own body. It was not a mask or an alteration, it was the norm. He just wasn’t used to it. He marveled at the change in reality. He glanced back at the old man to gaze upon his newly acquired face.

The old man was glaring up at him, a look of utter shock on his face. Benji heard Lori mutter a curse under her breath and slide back on the roof. He did the only thing he could think of, he stuck his tongue out at the old man. Just then Lori yanked him back by the ankles. She was giggling like a maniac as she clambered over the clay shingles of the roof.

“Hey! Wait for me!” Benji said, the morphing sliding back to his original face. As he chased after her he smiled at his success. He still couldn’t fully shake the feeling of joy at the morphing.

[Fable]

Bennar

Skills

Rhetoric +4
Investigation +2
Philosophy +1
Meditation +1
Morphing +3
Research +1
Socialization +3
Observation +3
Acrobatics +1
Running +1
Stealth +1
Persuasion +1

Lores

Morphing: The Relevance of Models
Morphing: Feeling Over Forcing

Rewards/Consequences

None

Notes :

I wasn't able to award full points for the morphing. At novice and competent, there should be a heavy emphasis on the djed manipulation. Just saying something changed isn't awardable, however I was able to award points for Bennar's active involvement in his teacher's instruction. If you would like to re-write his morphing to account for his lack of skill and necessity to focus on the djed's flow and rearrangement, you may do so and PM me for the extra experience. If not, no worries! It was a well written thread regardless! Though do keep in mind, not a whole lot surprises people in an impossible city, though they might grow suspicious if they see you doing the same "tricks" over and over again.