[OPEN] an animal, bipedal and featherless

[horkbajir]

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!

Comments

tbh first thing i think of when i think of humans locomoting like that

[faithlikeaseed]

Did Myr but know he'd gotten fresh with her--for a Hork-Bajir--he'd be suitably embarrassed; he'd been taught better manners than that. As it is, now that his curiosity is (temporarily) satisfied, he's happy enough to stand there with his hands just as they are.

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?"

[horkbajir]

Toby notices him falter briefly after that confident statement. "Fan out your fingers and then clench them, please. Hmm. You have makers? Who were they?"

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."

[faithlikeaseed]

Obligingly, Myr spreads his fingers before curling them into a fist tight enough to make the tendons of his wrist stand out. He's some grip strength, when he puts his mind to it.

"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?"

[horkbajir]

"Hmmm." Creation mythology. Well, she's not going to dispute it. With how things work it might even be true where he's from. "My people used to tell each other that we were born of the union between Mother Sky and Father Deep, but it's more deliberate and unhappy than that in the end."

If he's not human at base maybe she shouldn't be taking any cues from him, but he seems very close. There are small, slight humans, and the ears aren't such a big detail. An idea comes to Toby, and she takes her hands away to pick up the block of wood she transmuted into a leaping Merrow. "Some things happen again and again, yes. What I'm missing most is my peoples' culture. I'd like to see the homeworld, of course, but we've barely managed to pass anything down, and we aren't... oh, innocent, I suppose. My great-grandfather was so horrified to learn that one person could deliberately set out to kill another."

She focuses on the wooden figure. Transmutation has been getting easier, and by itself shape, even when intricate, is much simpler than what she's building up to. There's a soft noise of wood sliding on wood, and she makes a considering rumble. It's now a tiny wooden likeness of her, standing upright with her tail as a third support, as she's standing now. The blades are dulled. Enough to bite into fingers and feel sharp, not enough to cut skin.

"Here. I look like this, but larger." Toby wants to watch his face and hands work.

[faithlikeaseed]

It was true as far as the Chantry could verify, and that's enough for Myr to take it for fact. That, and the Black City being very obviously present wherever one looked in the Fade, and what else could have placed it there but the hand of deity? Nevertheless, he can infer how it might not work quite the same way elsewhere.

"Your creators were mortal themselves, then?" The dwarves made golems, after all, and those could think for themselves.

As samples of Thedosian elves go, Myr's not so bad a one if someone was looking for a human instead. Not at all slender and willowy like they usually came, and without his eyes he's missing the other inhuman part of his heritage. (Though the night vision might've been a useful trait to borrow, and not obvious in absence of stray illumination.)

He chews at his lower lip briefly--concentration--as he listens to her, slotting the new information away. Definitely a familiar story--old framework, new players; he remembers feeling the same way about the Dales when he was younger... And like he hardly deserved to walk there now, given what the Chantry had done to the elves who'd called it home. Not innocent, oh, that resonates. "You'd be concerned to bring that back with you," he ventures a guess. "The violent use you'd been put to."

Further speculation will need to wait until after he's puzzled out the statue she's handed him. His expression brightens from sober concentration as he takes it; that he's touched by her consideration is obvious. "Oh--thank you--"

Touched and more than a little fascinated, because already from the rough outline of the little wooden creature he can tell his curiosity's in for a treat. He turns it all the way 'round to begin with, cementing his first impression of her general shape and counting off each limb with a touch of one fingertip (one two three four five, ah, that's a tail balancing her equally long neck). Then to explore the finer details (his smile disappearing once more as he concentrates, right ear tucked toward his shoulder and chin toward his chest like he could look down and see what he's holding), beginning at those marvelous blades.

[horkbajir]

"They were. If we were their children, they were terrible parents," she says frankly. "And there's little left to come back to. Much of the world is poisoned to us now, to most of us. My understanding is that what isn't is mostly... breeding facilities, you could call them."

It's a distasteful topic, but has an easier answer than the other half of the guess. Toby's ancestors had been deeply upset about killing, yes; it's been part of her life, of the life of every other Hork-Bajir alive, that she can't exactly relate to that distress. That the terrible choice of becoming a slave or a killer seems so simple to her. Her predecessor had believed that becoming either would destroy his people and who they were; the Hork-Bajir are both, now, and still they live.

Ah. Humans, and apparently also elves, have much more sensitive, soft fingers, though she can't help wonder if it isn't uncomfortable how they squish against a firm surface. Toby has just a flicker of guilt seeing that this one is grateful; her initial desire to offer a miniature had had been for her sake.

She wonders if anyone's told him much about the various Monsters and what they look like. If she wasn't dedicating so much effort into transfiguring a disguise for herself, she might figure something out here, something more than this. "My name is Toby, by the way. Toby Hamee."

[faithlikeaseed]

Breeding facilities.

Myr's head jerks up at that, as if he could look at Toby in horror and alarm; his hands tighten on the little statue until his flesh is white where the wooden blades dig into it. That's uncomfortable, but he's too distressed to much care.

It's funny, how you don't really need that many words to paint a picture of a people's utter degradation. Even if she's nothing at all near an elf, it's hard not to see their plight in that of her kind. And yet she's so matter-of-fact over the fate of her ancestral home--

Likely because there's nothing to be done about it but get worked up, and that solved nothing any more than him carrying on over the Dales would put them back in elven hands. "Andraste's mercy--that's hideous."

He lets up his death-grip on the statuette, rubbing a thumb over its beaky face in an absent fidget. "Myrobalan Shivana--but Myr's fine for everyday." Shaking the ruminative gloom for unsolvable problems out of his thoughts, he smiles up in her approximate direction and offers the little statue back.

"It's a pleasure, Toby," in much more than the usual shallow social sense, his expression says. "What're your people called? And--assuming you're a Witch, and made this marvelous little thing," because people usually did not go around with statues of themselves to-hand in case they met an incessantly curious blind man, "had you magic before you came through the mirrors?"

[horkbajir]

"Yes," Toby rumbles. She feels a kind of perverse satisfaction. This and worse are what the Hork-Bajir have to live with, what the Yeerks would do to all species capable of serving as hosts if they could. People should feel the weight of it, should imagine themselves treated as bodies to be farmed and fueled, should realize why the free Hork-Bajir all prefer death to being recaptured. Why part of her always seems to be angry and afraid here, so far from them.

She's had a lot of practice by now putting that fear and fury aside to function trapped in placid Aefenglom. Toby takes back the figurine and returns it to the block shape this wood had been in when she'd first picked it up.

"I did not. I am what my people, the Hork-Bajir, call a Seer, but that denotes - insight, you could say, or capacity for understanding, and not actually magic. The place assigned me to be a Witch, though, and so I am."

[faithlikeaseed]

Thedas made it so terribly, hideously easy to imagine the horrors of other worlds by analogy.

"I take it Seers aren't all that common?" A guess educated by the rarity of mages back home. As often as drawing those parallels comes back to bite him, Myr's not going to stop doing it; there is no reason why others of the Maker's worlds shouldn't have echoes of the same patterns in them. "--Assigned, though, you said. D'you think there's something reasoning behind what we become here?"

Hands free once more, he moves them back to his staff, fidgeting with the fingers of one at the familiar patterns carved into its length.