It was a hot and humid day in Riverfall. The kind of day that dogs laid in puddles, children splashed in edges of the falls, and people moved as little as possible. It was a day that you knew storms would happen. You just did not know what type of storm. The rain was inevitable and prayed for. Mothers were frustrated by their children, children whined because the heat made it hard to do anything, men stayed at the tavern drink avoiding marital bliss. To say that everyone would was complaining about the heat would have been taking it mildly. Even the birds were splashing in the fountains, falls, and streams. If a navy of icebergs came in the harbor declaring war, people would fight them hand to hand, just to cool off.
The sea was so warm that the breeze had not started to blow in. Clouds were forming thick billows. It was a day that Naali wanted to loose the dress and any of the other garments of humanity imposed upon her and go play in the water. Naali hated the heat, it made her shed, big clumps of fur all over. Today was so hot and sticky that even the little bit of curl in her had left to find its own cool spot to hide in. So, she was a little snappy even with Master Nel, the mage.
Naali had begged, begged, whined, and pleaded with the head librarian to be sent down to the vaults to work on sorting books that had been stored there. It was dusty, dirty work. Spiders, scorpions, and snakes could be found in the boxes at times. But, it was cool and that is what Naali wanted to find, a cool spot. The problem was so did everyone else.
As Naalia opened the box, the first book was Irunalus’s tome of love poems. It had been required reading by some poor class at some point in time. Now it seemed to appear in nearly every box of books that she opened and sorted. She did not find his poetry all that exciting. Not to mention putting his name in the title seemed arrogant to her. But he had written a lot of poetry. She had come to understand that humans did that. She flipped it open to a random page.
Her lips were like glowing coal,
Beautiful to the eye,
Warming to the skin,
Burning with passion.
Beautiful to the eye,
Warming to the skin,
Burning with passion.
The illustration was risqué to put it nicely. Most of the page showed a suggestive young woman in a revealing dress with ample femininity for gawking to inspect. She flipped the book closed. It really didn’t do anything for her. She sighed and stacked it with the other twenty copies she had piled up over the last few weeks. Buried at the bottom of the box was a nice looking wooden box. There was a hand written note inside the second box that read,
To whom ever receives this box:
Congratulation,
You are now the proud owner of the statuette named Durga Masozi.
Good luck and best wishes, you will need it.
Congratulation,
You are now the proud owner of the statuette named Durga Masozi.
Good luck and best wishes, you will need it.
An ink spot stained the corner of the page of the note. It appeared to be from the ink bottle being knocked over.
As she took the statue out of the box, it looked like a little man with his hand who was looking out to sea on a sunny day. Naali said in a somewhat perplexed tone, “Durga Masozi, what a strange name for a statue.” The she put the items down on a different box and continued to sort books.
“Well, that’s a fine how do you do!” the statuette said with a huffy male voice. Naali banged her head and jumped back from the voice. The lid of the box closed with a thud nearly catching her fingers. Naali looks around for the voice.
“Over here,” a young girl’s voice says, the voice comes from the statue. Now the statue appears as a little girl with flowers in her hair and petting a cat in her arms. The girl continues, “Didn’t any one teach you not to play with magical items without knowing what they do?” she says with all of the rudeness that a six year old could muster, sticking her tongue out at Naali.
Naali gets a bad feeling about this and goes back to sorting the books. She decides to trying to ignore the statue. When it became a snake and struck at her leg leaving marks, she decided that enough is enough. The strike hurt and the jaws of the metal snake pinched hard on her leg. With two blinks, Naali was in her fox form backing out of the dress. The figure changed form into a porcupine. One swipe with a paw and Naali got a feel of quills in the pad of her paw. The good part was unlike real quills these were more like needles, sharp and straight. They came out as easily as they went in.
Naali tried to corner the porcupine only to find it changed shape into a snake.
Going for the neck, the snake struck and missed Naali. She grabbed it by its back, pinned it down with her sore paw and bit at the snake’s neck. Grabbing it she walks up the stairs, shaking it from time to time. She brings it up to the head librarian, still gripping it in her teeth, not letting go. It changed into a turtle and then an old man.
“Sir, tell this, this, this thing to put me down at once!” the old man figure said. “She does not know what she is doing.” This the librarian agreed with. There had been reports of a fox running around the library and worse reports of a naked woman. It didn’t take much for the librarian to put one and one together and get Naali.
“Put it down, and go get your clothing on,” the librarian said. Naali complied.
Coming back, the librarian was covered in water and a bottle of ink had exploded in his trouser pocket. “You need to talk to this statue and ask it some very specific questions,” The librarian said, getting up to go change clothes and clean up the ink.
The statue was now a warrior. “What do we talk about?” Naali asked.
Durga looked at her with some intensity, “Well, you could start by asking me to tell you about myself.”
The two of them had an interesting conversation. Durga ended up being quite funny. He taught her a little bit about how to turn him on and turn him off. She learned more about magical statuettes than she thought she would.
