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

[Kelski]

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

Continued from: Bending Ones Body To One's Will I

Kelski stared at the image in the long dressing mirror and simply absorbed it. Could this be her new normal? Could this be her way in to a new society without the stigma Kelvics wore like auras around themselves? They were stupid, feral, dirty, often out of control, and unskilled. The eyes and hair would have to change too, but how hard would that be? These were small cosmetic changes. And while she hesitated to work on her eyes immediately until she had a better handle on Morphing, her hair had to be easy after changing the pigment of her skin.

Kelski leaned forward and picked up Aer’wyn’s journal from where she rested it on the dressing table. Completely comfortable in her nudity before the mirror, she occasionally glanced up to make sure her trickle of djed feeding the change was still fueling it. Being a Kelvic she didn’t flip from front to back, but randomly browsed through the book until she came to an interesting page. It talked about the degrees of transformations and at what stages people should tackle them.

The Kelvic scrolled down the page, running her finger over the sometimes-sloppy handwriting. She had to pause and squint a lot, but she carefully read the words, trying to take in what they meant. There seemed to be four degrees of transformation, which got steadily harder and more unpredictable the higher percentage of one’s body the person transformed. That made sense and was how Kelski guessed it would work. But it was nice having her thoughts reinforced in her reading.

Tapping the page, she found the exact breakdown.

Partial transformations, full-body transformations, model transformations, and something called supreme transformations. Naturally Kelski skipped ahead, guessing what the first three were about before she double checked her thoughts. It seemed that the best and brightest wizards could transform into fantastical and almost mythical creatures. And if he happened to be lucky enough to have a model, then he or she could mimic successfully the special powers or innate abilities the model had. Kelski traced her hand down the page, looking for examples and finally found them. Something called Velispar, which were ancient and said to have extraordinary powers… and also listed were Laviku’s children, the Kalvikasi who were monstrous creatures of the sea.

Kelski blinked, thinking that one over. What would be the point? She had no experiences with war or times of great need. The word famine and conquest had no meaning to her in the age she dwelled in. So she didn’t understand when the author of the journal – Aer’wyn’s lady – had mentioned that these transformations could become great weapons of conquest.

Kelski glanced up. She frowned, thinking something that should be so beautiful had somehow by no doubt humans, had been turned into a weapon of sorts. Dismissing the whole thing, she went back to read what she had skipped.

[Kelski]

Partial transformations were small things, much like Kelski had already been tackling. They were exercises for beginners and spies, those that wanted to alter their appearance for whatever reason. It was also the way humans could gain natural weapons that normally only animals had access too. Kelski gritted her teeth at this.

Humans should never have access to sometimes claws, fangs, or even wings. Of course, she was a hypocrite for thinking such things. Here she wanted to look normal – to look human – and resented humans wanting to be bestial?

The Kelvic shook her head and moved on.

One could completely shift one’s face shape to look like someone else? Huh? Why would… oh. Spying. Kelski wrinkled her nose in distaste. Sure, disguises had their places, but as a Favored of Akajia she was completely against spying – learning secrets and selling them for cold hard coin. It was everything Akajia despised. However, sneaking into someplace as someone to learn information she herself needed to survive or thrive was a whole different matter. Kelski could change her looks in a heartbeat if it meant escape or survival or even blending into the crowd.

The Kelvic kicked back and decided not to be so judgmental. Keeping an open mind about the magic would get her far greater distances than locking her heels and being stubborn like someone else had been. The Kelvic furrowed her brow, wondering where that thought had come from. Did Gilthas put the brakes on something that had slipped her mind? She wasn’t certain and shrugged off the feeling. It left her uneasy.

She went back to the notes. Full body transformations. That sounded a bit more difficult. But it looked like something competent morphers could accomplish with practice. If one studied another creature, they could become that creature and do as that creature did.

Kelski smiled, thinking of Vasin growing wings and flying with her. He was open to the magic, and even if he didn’t take a sea eagle’s form, any sort of large bird of prey would be fun to travel with and fly out with. It was the first time someone wanted to join her in her favorite element… the air. Kelski was actually delighted.

Kelski went back to studying the journal. It looked like full body transformations took time and probably a lot of energy. It would take chimes to transform and not be very accurate unless the mage had a model. A model? What?

Kelski blinked and wondered what the literal definition was. She flipped through pages and pages of the journal until she was back by the front and saw what the author meant. A model was anything she could study as a morpher that would give her the details her memory might not supply to her. The journal explained that the mind had a tendency to gloss over details and just fill In what it didn’t know with blurs.

Thus true morphers had gaps in their transformations that would look sloppy before they looked perfect. And with a model, the mind didn’t tend to blur out facts and haze over details that would look imperfect to a viewer. Models had all the details there in front of the morpher for them to copy.

[Kelski]

And one the details were absolutely correct, the third type of transformation would be able to happen. That was a model transformation and it was usually perfect for all the reasons the journal had already stated. The mind’s tricks of hazing out the facts and unmemorized detail was thwarted and the recreation was usually very very accurate…. Especially at higher levels. And what was most astonishing about it was that if details were copied perfectly, much like in the supreme transformation, some of the unique abilities of the creatures could be reproduced.

That didn’t mean details and abilities couldn’t be copied and mimicked at lower levels. Aer’wyn’s writing in the back of the journal suggested producing a fish’s corpse to study the gill structure in order to carefully recreate gills and be able to breathe indefinitely underwater.

Kelski immediately thought of Aer’wyn’s eyes and how he could see with infravision. She’d love to have that ability.. so if she could come up with eyes that could do that, she could mimic them through morphing and steal a racial trait without stealing the whole race.

The thought somewhat excited her. The Kelvic wanted to try immediately. But again, she was hesitant to work magic on her eyes that might result in her blindness if she messed up. It was better to start small and see what she could do with little things, like eye and hair color, or even altering her face structure to look like someone else.

Then Kelski stumbled over a passage in the journal that was interesting. While she could morph into a fish with enough practice, that didn’t grant her the ability to swim. She would have to swim all on her won… using her own skill. The journal cautioned practice practice practice and more practice so that when life or death situations arose, she was ready and well prepared. Kelski took a moment to let that process. She had to be careful which forms she used so she could use forms that she could actually be successful in.

Kelski set the book aside, sighed and stared at the vanity mirror again.

Her gaze rested on her hair with its ombre streaks of white. It looked exactly like some of her feathering. Without a true thought, Kelski reached up and ran her fingers through it, tapping her djed and willing darkness to creep into her hair, to blacken it all into a more manageable normal color. White would look out of place unless she was older.

The Kelvic wasn’t sure she wanted to learn to make wrinkled crepe skin with liver spots just yet or not. Her age was not going to protect her from such things for long since Kelvics aged fast. So she went for a dark glossy ebony black. And as she pulled her fingers through the thick unruly locks, she willed the color to spread like ink spilled on a writing table. It did, the power pooling in the fleshy tines of her fingers. Where they touched her hair, it darkened until there was no sign of white or grey left.

[Kelski]

Kelski laughed, pleased with herself and the results.

Then she reached up and ran her thumbs over her eyebrows, setting them up to easily and quickly match the hair on her head. They only had fine little smatterings of white in the emotive arches of hair, but she wanted them an exact match and she got that surely enough.

Smiling she looked back in the mirror, noted what sort of trickle if djed she had to use to maintain the look, and then gave a satisfied nod. Easy. This was so darn easy. How come she didn’t know about it before? Sure the fully body transformations were going to come hard and involve a lot of study, but what Kelski really wanted Morphing for wasn’t all that. Sure she might enjoy running with Ebon as a night lion or exploring the city with Ember as a mouse, but truthfully she just wanted to blend in, seem normal, and be accepted by society as a whole.

These little things were by far the most important... at least for now.

That reminded her…. body mass was important wasn’t it? Kelski flipped through the journal looking for more notes. There had to be something about it. She actually had to run through it twice before her eyes caught on a passage Aer’wyn had written that cleared up her question. She’d been looking for size, but the word she really wanted was ‘mass’.

Kelski could shift as a novice and a fairly skilled morpher, but it wasn’t until she was something of an expert that she could shift her mass. If she wanted to run as horse with Moth and Maisa, she’d have to get a lot better at Morphing. That would mean doubling her size almost tenfold to be a thousand pounds like Moth was. She tapped the word Mass, wondering its exact meaning.

She eventually found the meaning. It was a measure of the ‘stuff’ she was made of. All objects have mass. It was a term that described the physical body of an object person or thing, but it was also a measure of its resistance to acceleration or any change of its state of motion when force is applied. Mathematics. Kelski had to smile. She was finding math in all things. She noted that and went back to her study.

What other things could Morphing be suited for?

Curiosity drove her, wanting her to get ideas. Looks where one, of course, but there was also traits, special abilities, and even things like voices. She also found a section that talked about wounded morpehrs. Changing ones flesh didn’t heal wounds… but wounds made shapeshifting harder. A morpher could not, for example, morph new skin over torn away skin. It was just too painful.

There was other math involved too, she soon discovered. But she didn’t understand it. There was something called a square cube law. It was about how strength grew with size, but mass grows with cube. It made no sense to her, but she was certain she could ask Gilthas for a lesson on the law and he’d know enough to teach her.

[Kelski]

Quickly she rose, made a note to herself to ask him about square cube law, and then returned to the vanity. She leaned closer, studying her mercurial gaze and frowned at it. Tapping her well, she pooled djed in her eyes like she’d done a thousand times before for looking at something’s aura. Then, carefully, she visualized the silver of her eyes darkening to grey or even deep blue.

The magic went to work, mixing and muddling the grey and blue until it was a horrible muddy mess in her orbs. Kelski wondered what went wrong until she realized she hadn’t given the magic a clear direction… she’d been torn between dark grey or deep blue and because of that nothing had formed in a solid way that didn’t look odd or incompletely.

The Sea Eagle blinked trying to rid her eyes of the magic and glanced in the mirror at herself with her eyes full of magic. Auristics kicked in and she saw herself swirling in bands of blue and purple. She could see the glow where she’d morphed away color from her skin, normalized her nails, and saturated her locks with black.

Kelski could even see the fading color on the failed attempted at changing her eye color and the streams of djed connected to each other fueling the morphs. Kelski gasped, staring at the beauty of the magic for a few chimes, all but lost to it.

In a way it was a happy accident. It gave her a deeper understanding of how the morphing magic worked and how it flowed through her from her well to all the things she’d changed about herself. Looking deeper, looking further, Kelski wondered how she’d gotten to this place where she was so unhappy with how she looked and so unsatisfied with her features standing out. She glanced away, glanced around, and realized the answer was staring her in the face all along.

She was alone. The Kelvic Sea Eagle was struggling through life without a bondmate and without a prospect of one. There had to be a reason for it. She was free. She was successful. She had coin and knowledge and was not feral like some Kelvics were.

It had to be something else.

It had to perhaps be her looks? Maybe even her personality. She wasn’t sure. Something about her wasn’t right for others. Something about her put others off to needing or wanting her in their life. Her loneliness was all consuming and hurtful, a deep wound that kept bleeding inside her psyche which never healed.

Even the presence of The Midnight Gem – which was even now reaching out to her to wrap her mind in love – wasn’t enough. She wanted a mate, a partner, someone to walk the world with and share each morning and each night with. It was a hard thing to deal with, meaning a hard thing to accept.

But maybe these changes, these abilities to alter her looks and be normal, might draw in more prospects. And maybe if she tried to be nicer, more humble, perhaps less aggressive and less of a predator that too would work.

Kelski wasn’t sure. But she was willing to try.

Continued in: Bending Ones Body To One's Will III

[Kelski]

G R A D E S

Psychology +2, Research +4, Morphing +5

Psychology: Could Looking Normal Shed The Kelvic Stigma?, Morphing: The Four Degrees of Transformation, Research: Looking For Literal Definitions, Morphing: True Morphers Had Gaps In Their Transformations That Look Sloppy Before They Look Perfect, Morphing: Using Models, Morphing: Unmodeled Transformations, Morphing: Partial Transformations, Morphing: Model Transformations, Morphing: Full Body Transformations, Morphing: If Model Transformations Were Detailed Enough – Abilities Would Transfer, Morphing: Had To Develop Skills To Survive In New Form – ie.. Fish = Swimming, Morphing: Details Are Important, Morphing: Wounds Would Transfer, Morphing: Great For Microchanges like Vision Alteration or Voice Changing – Though Harder Than Just Looks, Morphing: Square Cube Law Must Be Followed, Morphing: Changing Eye Color, Hair Color, And Skin Tone

PM me with questions or concerns.