Completed [The Midnight Gem] Bending Ones Body To One's Will III

[Kelski]

Timestamp: 55th of Winter, 518 A.V.

Continued From: Bending One's Body To One's Will II

Kelski was starting to get the hang of Morphing both in theory and practice. And maybe in her human form, she was doing things for the wrong reasons, but in her eagle form, she wanted to do things for the right reasons: concealing her identity. Sea Eagles were notoriously easy to spot. They stood out in their beautiful white, grey and stark black patterning. From the ground people could tell what she was and if her Kelvic form was known, it wasn’t a stretch to determine that who she was as a bird.

While not uncommon, in and around the city Sea Eagles made themselves scarce. They weren’t trash birds like buzzards and certainly weren’t birds that gravitated towards humans like ravens and crows. They liked the wilds – endless windswept beaches where fat salmon and tuna could be harvested in the swells of the ocean. They liked beaches where clams could be gently gathered and pried open. They loved scurrying crabs along the shores. None of that stuff was found near or around Sunberth. The city and its population had long scoured things like that clean.

Incessant hunger and food shortages of humans caused utter destruction where they made their cities. They didn’t know how to range out for food like animals did, nor did they change food types as seasonal things became available. Animals did. So too did Kelvics.

But none of that mattered. What mattered was that Kelski could conceal her identity in the sky. One of the best ways to do that, she decided, was to lose the high contrast of her featherings. Walking among The Shadows at night proved that to her. If she could turn herself all black, she’d be both hard to identify and hard to spot in the darkness.

With her mind made up, Kelski rose, strode to her bedroom which currently looked like the inside of a deep purple geode and approached the full-length mirror. She stripped off her clothing, tossed it on the bed, and studied herself in the mirror. Without a thought she shifted into her eagle form and paced back and forth across the gemstone floor. She could still see herself in the mirror, but not as well, so with a flap or two she transferred herself from the floor to the bed where she could see herself in the mirror better, and paced the length of the enormous platform, trying not to dig her talons into the bed coverings.

With another flap and a hop she was on the bedpost perched, talons dug into the wood, where she stared at the image reflected. She loved her coloring, but knew it was necessary to fix it. So she concentrated, gathering a fixed image in her mind, and pictured the black and deep grey of her feathers flowing outward, expanding over her body, like spilled ink on a desk. Staring into the mirror didn’t do much… it was only when she applied djed by tapping her well and pooling the power in her feathers themselves. Feathers were like skin – sensitive and delicate – and she could feel each individual pinion and what it sensed laying against its fellow feathers.

[Kelski]

Darkness flowed outwards, coating her, and she trilled finally in satisfaction as the chimes passed and she grew darker and darker until she was nothing but a solid black eagle staring at itself with fierce mercurial eyes into the silvery surface.

It wasn’t good enough though.

Taking all that time to picture herself black wouldn’t get her out of trouble and wouldn’t get her into the sky anonymously. Hard work and practice would. She held the magic a long time then simply let it go, dispersing the djed and yawning. She paced a circle perched on the bed post, digging her talons into the wood. Then she unfurled her wings and snapped them out. Eyeing both of them carefully, she practiced drenching them in black again. It was faster this time, but in no uncertain way what she’d consider ‘fast’. It took staring, intense concentration, and her visualizing the black from the backs of her wings liquifying and drenching over the whites of the undersides of her wings. She snapped her beak, stretching her wings out further, looking closely.

She dismissed the coloration and the blank faded to nothing in almost no time. It had to be faster. Kelski concentrated again and this time instead of visualizing the color flowing over her wings like spilled ink, she just visualized the white fading to blank. It worked. The transformation of her pale feathers went far faster than she had it happen with the other visualization. She dismissed the coloration again, then concentrated. This time she used the faded visualization, but instead of letting it draw djed naturally, she forced djed into it and experimented. The wings blackened almost immediately.

Kelski tapped the mandibles of her beak together happily. Better. Far better. Then she spent the next bell slipping into her black feathering and out of it like a woman would try on new shoes. She wasn’t used to using so much magic though… and it tired her quickly. The Kelvic only halted her efforts when her speed stopped increasing and started backsliding into slower and slower morphing times. Coloring was easy though… Aer’wyn’s book had said, but just mastering tinting her feathers wasn’t as far as she really wanted to go.

The Kelvic traded feathers for skin and slipped out of her bedroom. She walked out into the kitchen without bothering with clothing, fully intending to fuel her recent magic use with some food. While being a predator, Kelski still had tastes for some of the food humans loved. And one of her very favorites was peaches. She had bought a small basket of them in the market and plucked one from it to carefully bite into. The sweet taste flooded her mouth, renewed her energy, and had her smiling as she munched on the tender flesh.

The fuzz tickled her nose and the pit scraped at her teeth a bit on the next bite. As a result, Kelski pulled out a knife off a butcher block and halved the peach, removed the pit, and set it gently aside, intending to save the pits to plant to see if she could grow some peach trees of her own.

[Kelski]

Then, leaning a bare hip on the counter, she contemplated morphing as she nibbled the peach. So far, she hadn’t delved into shifting her shape much. The Kelvic was almost afraid to. Instead, she intended to learn all there was about altering what she looked like in both forms enough to not be recognized before she moved on to reworking her shape.

Hair color, eye color, skin tone… even the shape of her face and eyes were something she’d be willing to work on before she’d be willing to try out a new form. She wondered if she could alter her age as well, perhaps delving into what Mosa looked like to conceal her identity as she walked among the humans.

Kelski gave it some thought and went back to Are’wyn’s journal. She still felt she didn’t have enough information to fully branch out into what she wanted to do… age, perhaps sex, altering her vision, perhaps growing gills, and a whole host of other things. But Kelski liked rules and she knew there were more in the journal for her to learn.

Finishing the last of the peach, she rinsed the sticky juice off her fingers after licking them clean, and walked back to the fire. The Midnight Gem stoked the fire higher as Kelski settled onto the couch, opened the journal, and began to read.

As she did so, she focused djed on her fingertips, blunting down her normally claw-like black nails and squaring them off to skin toned slightly transparent human nails. She worked the magic carefully, holding the shape of what she considered a normal human nail in her mind as she ran her fingers across Aer’wyn’s notes written in common over the language his wife had written that she could not read. He’d called the journal in code, but he’d thankfully made short notes by each passage so she could figure out what the woman had written.

Thumbing back and forth in the thick book, Kelski finally found a section where there was a list of ‘conditions’ that looked interesting to her. The first note talked about limits. Kelski kept her focus on keeping her nails human as she read. “Mages can only morph themselves into substances from the animal and vegetal world the mage has seen before. Unseen items from that world are too hard to visualize.”

That seemed interesting to Kelski. She couldn’t, for example, Morph herself metal armor. It would indeed be something she tried if she hadn’t read the note. Looking onward, she tried to find more rules. There were indeed quite a few.

[Kelski]

For example, Aer’wyn had noted that morphers could not transform others, just their own tissues, unless they resorted to glyphing or types of magic. Kelski didn’t know any sorts of magic and had no working knowledge of glyphing so she had no idea how the writing of mages could make her able to morph someone else.

She did wonder, however, if Philtering would work. Could a mage work a potion that would morph someone else? She didn’t know enough about philtering to know either, but she suspected it was possible. She’d definitely try it when she got her philtering skills up. Kelski made a mental note to remember to find out about it. Perhaps someone who knew philtering would know.

She thumbed through the book further, and found notes on partial transformations. They came with big limitations, evidently. One had to study anatomy, medicine, and even the balance of ones body or how ones joints functioned in order to get a good transformation when one was just doing part of the body.

Kelski knew immediately upon reading that small note that she’d have to study anatomy quite extensively if she truly wanted to be a good morpher. And it wasn’t restricted to human anatomy. She’d need to study multiple racial anatomies. If she didn’t know how people were put together, she wouldn’t know how to reconstruct those forms and functions in her own body.

By now, she’d almost read all of Aer’wyn’s notes in the journal. There were just small sections in the back, little fast notations, that she hadn’t studied. She turned to them, scanned the pages, and looked thoughtful. Mostly the notations were on the transformations themselves.

Morphers were in serious danger when they transformed into forms they were unfamiliar with. The magic itself, for example, could transform them into a fish, but it would and could not transform their abilities. A mage transformed into fish, for example, would not automatically know how to swim. Nor would a mage taking a bird form understand flight either. Kelski laughed. A Kelvic eagle would though. Flight would be no problem for her.

There was a small notation about fish though. Aer’wyn had suggested to himself to learn to be a mammal… such as a dolphin… before one learned to be a fish. For then, one didn’t have to figure out gills at the same time one figured out swimming.

So transformations should be gentle, natural, trading one similar form for another. And while dolphins looked completely different than humans or Akalak, they weren’t inherently that different. They had two flippers, eyes, mouth, nose, and breathed air. After reading it, Kelski completely and utterly decided she would study a dolphin’s form and learn it.

The section on gentle transformations lead her to a section on abilities and level. It seemed beginning Morphers could only perform small scale partial transformations with or without models. They were awkward transformations and were limited in time and space. So what Kelski had been attempting was right on track with what she had been doing.

As she grew in her morphing, then she could manipulate her whole body but she’d have to be careful to keep her original mass the same. Mass? The bulk of her body… if she was a hundred pounds, she’d need to transform into something that was roughly that shape or weight. A dolphin was perfect!

[Kelski]

She wouldn’t shift quickly, but she would shift faster and with more detail than she was now. As she grew further in her shifting, Kelski could get fast accurate shifts quickly especially of small things like what she was learning now. Bigger things will come faster too, but still not instantaneous.

When she was that good, she could start playing with her body mass, growing bigger or smaller by increments. Kelski was following how she should progress nicely, wondering what a master morpher would be able to do. Soon enough, she found her friend’s notes on it.

She read simply ‘unlimited’ and paused. Unlimited? Truly? Master’s didn’t need models… but when they did acquire them, they learned faster. They could be as large as a whale or as small as an ant. They could transform as they moved, inheriting special abilities from the creatures they modeled their transformations after.

Kelski was a bit stunned. Could she master morphing and be a wind eagle? She’d seen one once, circling over Lhavit. It had caught her breath and made her feel so small and so fragile as she stared at it. The Wind Eagle’s wingspan had blocked out the sun. And of course, it wasn’t a model she’d need to study. Kelski knew how to be an eagle. She just didn’t know how to be a BIG eagle. The Kelvic set aside the journal after carefully closing it and rose.

She spared one glance at the journal as she laid it on the side table then stretched out her long bare legs on the couch, reclining. Kelski cleared her mind, breathed deeply, exhaled, and breathed deeply again. She thought of twilight and her pale skin took on the sheen of oranges and pinks that faded to purple.

The coloration was slow in coming and driven by the Kelvic thinking of the sunset and Syna dropping from the sky in a color show that was part sendoff and part celebration of the coming of Leth. Kelski’s skin rippled with color and pulsed with djed as her mind drifted, lost in the sensations of a sunset.

Streaks of violet and deeper blue threaded through the deep gold and pinks that tinted her skin. Glittering white stars burst into appearance around her forehead and threaded down her neck and dusted her shoulders as her hair darkened and the night sky seemed to descend down her body, driving the vivid sunset colors away. Soon she was rippling with only deep purples and blues which blocked out any signs of color as Syna vanished in Kelski’s inner meditation.

It was only her skin tone changing, but it was good practice. True night fell in her mind and with that, her pale almost snow-white skin had darkened to black. It was a shade Akajia would utterly approve of, though the dusting of stars across her shoulders and forehead twinkled in and out of existence just like the actual stars of Zintila’s sky.

Continued in: Bending One's Body To One's Will IV

Count: 2546

[Kelski]

G R A D E S

Morphing +5, Strategy +1, Stealth +2, Research +1, Meditation +1

Stealth: Blending Ones Coloring To Match The Environment, Stealth: Using Magic To Assist Blending in, Strategy: Knowing How To Not Stand Out, Morphing: Augmenting Strategy and Stealth, Morphing: Changing Her Feather Color, Morphing: Being a ‘Generic Eagle’, Morphing: Only Organic Things – Plants and Animals not Inorganic, Morphers: Can’t Transform Others – without Glyphing or Philtering, Morphing: Required Anatomy, Morphing: Sunset Colored Skin

PM me with questions or concerns.