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[OPEN] an animal, bipedal and featherless
Who: Toby and You!
When: Between the end of the Dorchacht dream and whenever the diplomat teams leave Aefenglom
Where: Around Aef; primarily around the Coven, but also elsewhere.
What: Toby trying to use transmutation magic to fake being human enough to fool the Dorchacht witches. She could use some help.
Warnings: none, will add if that changes.
Toby, a very tall lizardlike alien, doesn't want to be human. That is, she doesn't want to be human and not Hork-Bajir, she doesn't want to renounce her species, she finds self-transfiguration and being without her blades and tail and everything else disorienting and not pleasant. She does, however, admit to curiosity and an awareness that it may be practical, especially in the near future. It had been a casual interest before trying it in the dream; now, she has to learn a lot and in not much time.
While she does forgo her other classes for Transmutation and looks into anatomy, she knows hands-on experience and actually trying it herself will be essential.
[a] a plucked fowl in the lecture room
It may be in the Coven between classes or out in the city. On a couple of different days a class goes out to an elaborate fountain in the Entertainment District, a broad basin featuring an assortment of carved Merrow and aquatic Dragons cavorting with dolphins and hippocampi admist a variety of flourishes and spouts. Each transfiguration student picks a statue and tries to magic a block of wood into its likeness, which some manage better than others.
Toby finishes early and looks around, holding her miniature. If you don't look busy she may turn to you with a question. Her voice is very deep and on the guttral side.
"Pardon. Would you let me examine your hands?" Or the way your jaw works. Or, if you're not digigrade, how you walk. It really doesn't matter if you're a Monster or nonhuman or not, just as long as you look more human than she does. "I'm making a study of anatomy and physiology. My body doesn't work the way yours does and I need to mark the differences."
[b] a featherless biped with flat nails
One big issue with transforming herself is the exact shape and appearance to take. It's easier for her if she keeps a similar mass. Wiry though her build is, her tail, her blades, her height, and the density of her muscle and bone guarantee that the shapes she takes are large. Always over six feet, with degrees of muscle, general stockiness, or fat differing each time. Her features and coloration change, the weird redness of her dream attempt becoming less pronounced. Her hair definitely changes, and her proportions become more average.
She's told friends and acquaintances that she's trying this and asked for help. Maybe you watched her do it, saw the unpleasant shiver and the impression of something being turned inside out and settling, or maybe you see her afterwards and have feedback. Maybe it's time to go out in town and see if she can pull off acting human, too?
[c] I am looking for a human Wildcard! If you think of something else, go for it!
When: Between the end of the Dorchacht dream and whenever the diplomat teams leave Aefenglom
Where: Around Aef; primarily around the Coven, but also elsewhere.
What: Toby trying to use transmutation magic to fake being human enough to fool the Dorchacht witches. She could use some help.
Warnings: none, will add if that changes.
Toby, a very tall lizardlike alien, doesn't want to be human. That is, she doesn't want to be human and not Hork-Bajir, she doesn't want to renounce her species, she finds self-transfiguration and being without her blades and tail and everything else disorienting and not pleasant. She does, however, admit to curiosity and an awareness that it may be practical, especially in the near future. It had been a casual interest before trying it in the dream; now, she has to learn a lot and in not much time.
While she does forgo her other classes for Transmutation and looks into anatomy, she knows hands-on experience and actually trying it herself will be essential.
[a] a plucked fowl in the lecture room
It may be in the Coven between classes or out in the city. On a couple of different days a class goes out to an elaborate fountain in the Entertainment District, a broad basin featuring an assortment of carved Merrow and aquatic Dragons cavorting with dolphins and hippocampi admist a variety of flourishes and spouts. Each transfiguration student picks a statue and tries to magic a block of wood into its likeness, which some manage better than others.
Toby finishes early and looks around, holding her miniature. If you don't look busy she may turn to you with a question. Her voice is very deep and on the guttral side.
"Pardon. Would you let me examine your hands?" Or the way your jaw works. Or, if you're not digigrade, how you walk. It really doesn't matter if you're a Monster or nonhuman or not, just as long as you look more human than she does. "I'm making a study of anatomy and physiology. My body doesn't work the way yours does and I need to mark the differences."
[b] a featherless biped with flat nails
One big issue with transforming herself is the exact shape and appearance to take. It's easier for her if she keeps a similar mass. Wiry though her build is, her tail, her blades, her height, and the density of her muscle and bone guarantee that the shapes she takes are large. Always over six feet, with degrees of muscle, general stockiness, or fat differing each time. Her features and coloration change, the weird redness of her dream attempt becoming less pronounced. Her hair definitely changes, and her proportions become more average.
She's told friends and acquaintances that she's trying this and asked for help. Maybe you watched her do it, saw the unpleasant shiver and the impression of something being turned inside out and settling, or maybe you see her afterwards and have feedback. Maybe it's time to go out in town and see if she can pull off acting human, too?
[c] I am looking for a human Wildcard! If you think of something else, go for it!
BEHOLD, A MAN
That hadn't kept him from slowing to a stop on his careful way through the square, fascinated despite himself by the overheard instruction; the talk of theory and practice echoing half-a-hundred lectures he'd sat through himself. Though of course it's all couched in different language here, many of the ideas the same but without reference to the Fade-- Interesting enough that he lingers even as the students break off for their exercises, straining over the sound of the fountain to catch any particularly interesting questions and the answers they might warrant.
He'd been leaning hipshot on his staff with a touch of a woebegone expression on his face when Toby turned to him--and he straightens sharply at the question, half-turned toward the sound of her voice. "Not at all, serah--if you'll tell me how we differ," he replies, though there's a teasing lightness about his tone that implies he wouldn't really care if she didn't.
As does the way he leans his staff against his shoulder and promptly holds out his hands toward her. Mostly toward her. Despite the antler buds on his brow--and the pointed ears--he's as close to human stock as one might wish in other respects.
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"I appreciate it. I'm going to take your hands, and it will be more clear. I won't hurt you," she adds after a second, because he doesn't have claws and might not like hers.
The hands that she slides under his are decidedly larger and more elongated than human hands, or elven ones. Not as broad or as padded, and warmer than the air but cool and dry. The palms and insides of her hands have skin textured like leather, yielding to coarser almost barklike skin on her wrists; the outsides of her hands have scales like on a bird's foot. And of course she has claws, curved and a couple inches long, which would probably seem large except for how big the whole of the rest of each hand was.
He can probably smell pine sap on her. With her diet of tree bark and the way she digs her claws in to climb, the scent never really goes away.
he gets down on all fours & breaks into a sprint [...] actual cannibal myrobalan shivana
Inexperienced with most animals as he is, he has no ready reference for what something owning hands this marvelous might be. He touches one of her talons fleetingly--then remembering himself, turns his hand back over and gives the direction of her voice an apologetic smile. "Sorry, serah; I'm sure there's nothing whatever like you on Thedas," and he's a little overawed.
oh dear
"My people were made on another world in order to tend to the trees. They are larger there, as tall as thirteen hundred feet in some cases, I am told, and wider in the trunk than any one building in this city. We are equipped with blades for the cutting of bark, which we eat. Bark is my bread and meat; when I eat other things, they are more supplements, I suppose, or sides."
There are some broad differences in hand and arm structure, but also various similarities. Toby recognizes that turning a hand over is an effort of the forearm that crosses and uncrosses two bones within it. "Were you made for anything, or did you just happen?"
tbh first thing i think of when i think of humans locomoting like that
And listen, of course, his face upturned to her as he soaks in her words. Stories of other places and the other lives lived in them will never cease to fascinate him.
"As an elf, to create new things to the Maker's joy; as a mage, to use His gifts in service to Man," he says, with all the conviction that comes with a lifelong sense of purpose.
Except he's not going to be either of those things when Geardagas is through with him, so where's that leave him?
...Talking to a marvelously large person from another world. "You've never seen the trees yourself?"
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He's not what she would have expected from an elf, but then her knowledge of elves is from wading through some Tolkien on one hand and a much more easily digested picturebook involving the helpers of a being called Santa on the other.
"I have not. In my great-grandparents' time, aliens came to our homeworld. Some wanted us as slaves, some wanted to deny our bodies to the slavers. We were caught in between and only the slaves survived. My grandparents were taken to other worlds to kill and be killed. My parents escaped on Earth, the homeworld of humans."
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"Only the one Maker," as there was only one world, one life, one death--seems part of that verse would need reinterpretation. "He created Thedas from the Fade Ages ago, before placing elves and humans and all the other races upon it."
Sad to say Toby's story rings all too familiar, even if the players involved all wear different masks. He frowns faintly to hear it. "Maker's breath--some things are the same everywhere, aren't they? Do you feel as if there's--anything missing, having been born so far from your home?"
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a
"... Clearly."
He gives Toby an appraising look, hastily smoothing out the front of his robes. Having regained himself, he stands straighter again, though there's a tenseness to his shoulders that's hard not to miss.
"What... manner of creature, are you?"
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"Any resemblance is a coincidence. My kind were created around another star. If you are curious, the only flesh we eat belongs to eggs and insects, and not so much of either. There is nothing special about my breath, or my strength, and I am not particularly vulnerable to Cwyld. No more than most, anyway."
She'd patiently show her teeth but knows by now that that isn't reassuring. Toby's jawful of grinding herbivore molars is alarming in an entirely different way than sharp fangs.
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"I see." An eyebrow arcs. Her words raise more than a few questions, but he tries to focus on what's most immediately pertinent. "I'm sure you've been told, and realize, but you do have a fascinating... appearance."
Anatomy. He means anatomy. But somehow that doesn't seem like it'd come out right. And obviously, she knows she's, err, fascinating to those unfamiliar with her kind. Viren presses on.
"Is there magic where you're from, then?
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"I could say the same for you," she counters, though it's not entirely true. When she arrived, the throngs of human people, some of them altered somewhat but largely recognizable, was very strange. Before she'd only seen four half-grown youths, three or four Controllers, and gifted books and magazines bearing their images. It's been about six months now, and she's much more used to them. "The fur on your face isn't the same composition or color as on the rest of your head, have you noticed? Why is that?"
Toby cants her head. "Perhaps. I only know it as stories and the product of technology beyond my understanding, but my understanding is limited."
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"The fur on my face - we call it hair. And typically, at this length, it's called a beard. But humans will groom it into different styles, which that may warrant calling it something else."
Viren's mouth presses into a thin line, bringing a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose. But his claws are sharp, and the enthusiasm of that gesture had that hurting more than he'd anticipated, so the hand drops back to his side. Actually, having kids, answering completely weird questions isn't entirely out of his skillset. Still. He pushes down the disappointment of hearing about her lack of understanding of magic.
"When humans grow older, their hair may start changing color. Sometimes in patches, like the one on my beard."
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Also, how old 'older' is, because it's going to be some ridiculously high number what with how long aliens live. The human form she makes probably won't have many signs of age, just so she doesn't have to work out how wrinkles change and the extent of grayness.
"You may begin to understand how wearying it can be when your body is the subject of constant comment," she says in a dry tone. "If you like you can continue, but I'm not a passive item to be observed, and I intend to understand what I can."
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And then he sighs, heavily, to regard her with a reserved sort of wariness.
"Fine. If you are amenable to my questions," he doesn't suspect he will have too many more, anyway, what with her opening explanation; startling as others' appearances may be from time to time, he's becoming more and more accustomed to seeing what he, at least, regards to be the unfamiliar and fantastical (.. and thus, fascinating). "Then, if you still seek to understand, I will comply with yours."
He does dip his head, now, intended as a cordial gesture.
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a - an animal, belatedly
He recognizes Toby and waves as she approaches - even with the occasional dragon in the city, she still stands out. (For that matter he does too, with the skeleton thing, but he's not trying to recognize himself approaching.)
"Most peoples' bodies don't work like mine!" Papyrus agrees quickly enough, and exaggerates: "I'm the very model of a human skeleton, you can see bones like me on all the posters. But they don't move... So I'm an even better reference!"
He isn't exactly that - his proportions were a little off to begin with, and they're even moreso now that his feet and legs have gotten a little more digitigrade. Not to mention - and he carefully doesn't scratch at his neck as he thinks this - the growth of skin and fur along the back of his spine has extended up to the back of his skull.
<3
"This is true. Life is a better model than the art which imitates it. You have... seven neck vertebrae, do you think? How much can you move your head?"
His bones seem to have the projections that normally serve as attachment points for muscles. Papyrus does not, on balance, make a great deal of sense, in a different way from how other things in this setting have their own weird logic. But she only has so many options for examining how the inner structure of a human body works.
o/\o
The question - and the opportunity to show off - are enough that he briefly forgets about the fur growth. So he unselfconsciously unwinds his scarf, wrapping it up in his hand before demonstrating his head's mobility, twisting and turning in demonstration.
For the most part he moves around without any clear mechanism. The webbing of skin on his spine is thick enough to hold tight with hairs growing out, but it's not thick enough to house invisible muscles.
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"I suppose a short neck can only support so much movement," muses snake-necked Toby aloud, and decides against commenting on the hairy skin clinging directly to bone. "How about leaning side to side?"
She demonstrates by basically just leaning her long neck out to the left like a smaller arm.
WILDCARD | BACKDATED TO RIGHT AFTER THE DREAM
There's some relief, there. That he is able to wake up, that it's finally over, that maybe the blood he saw wouldn't amount of anything after all. He feels his neck with his hands, and the phantom pain of iron lingers. It's all too much to deal with.
He spends the next little while checking in on his roommates, trying to be sure they've woken up as well. Focusing on someone else helps to distract him briefly, but once that is done, he is left filled with nervous energy that won't go away. Unable to eat and too scared to sleep, he finds his way to the courtyard.
Lion is out there sleeping, and Steven sits down in the grass, leaning into his mane. The night is warm, but still a respite from the summer days. Lion wakes up a little, shifting to sniff at Steven, before getting a sense of the mood and staying still enough for Steven to cuddle. The sun is threatening to rise.
Why can't he just go home?
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She's learned enough teleportation to shorten the walk. It still takes time, trudging the dreary angular human streets, enough time and effort to calm and settle, as she'd hoped. The few people about avoid her, flitting out of the light of her horns as if bearing guilty consciences. In time she's there, passing through the oppressive closeness of the house building, into the little well of the courtyard garden.
"Steven," she says. It's not that Toby isn't hearts-sore, it's not that she doesn't feel the sickness that comes with violence, but she's much, much less upset.
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"Toby?" he says, his voice cracking with anxiety and weariness. "You... You were there. That was you, right? Just... like everyone else?"
He feels the need to confirm that, before he says anything else. His emotions are even more obvious when they're this close - shame and guilt wound up into a tight knot, bearing him down with oppressive weight.
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Strange to not have to clean her blades after battle. They were clean as they had been when she went to sleep, just the usual tackiness of traces of sap, but she still felt the usual need to wash them and rub them down with leaves and woodpulp. At home, everyone helped each other with that task, part of the affirmation that they all were still alive.
"That's right. It was another of those dreams, but worse than they usually are." Steven reminds her here of Bek Mashar, the young child who rambled away from the valley and was found by humans and displayed in a cage, then taken by Yeerks and used as bait in a trap. By now Bek's story was the one every caregiver told to children as a warning not to stray, and a reason to keep them all under closer watch, and the poor thing knew it. "I'm sorry I didn't stay near you. This wouldn't have happened, or not the way it did."
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"No, it's my fault," he says, sinking down low against Lion's mane again. "I went off on my own to try to learn something and all I did was get everyone in trouble."
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He's not wrong about what he did and its consequence. "I still should have been closer to hand. Or maybe if you had a human Bonded, she could have gone with you and claimed you, and it would have ended differently."
A human Bonded. There's a few ideas in there, ones which she doesn't find savory. Maybe it would be better to bond human Witches to human Monsters, maybe living together in dark, close artificial caves is an essential part of the experience. Maybe that suspicion she's always had that different species can only be separate is founded.
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"What do you mean?" he asks, his eyes widening with concern. "Toby... I'm not human, either. Most of my family isn't even from Earth."
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