Game 2Game 2 Outline| Game 2 |
Game 2 Outline |
As you cast the spell, a holographic image of the chosen animal appears, floating in front of you. As you complete the casting, the image collapses into a ball of orange energy, about the size of a large marble, and moves toward Jim. It flies over him and back, passing through the soles of his shoes and leaving a halo of multi-coloured light around him. It comes to rest at the top of the circle, just above Jim's head. Like static electricity, it seems to pull his hair up, making him look like something out of a silent comedy.
"What did you do?", he demands. "All my hair is standing on end!"
"You don't see it?" you ask.
"See what?"
Okay, you think to yourself, he notices the static-electric effect pulling his hair straight up, but not the ball of light causing it. Strange. You point at the ball above his head.
He looks up, but from the blank look on his face, you can tell he sees nothing. The circle contracts around him, tinting his face, neck and hands a pinkish gray, and vanishes into his clothes. The orange sphere above him drops down, touches one ear, and zips around to the other. Before your eyes, Jim's ears grow and stretch, until they are about 6" long and shaped somewhat like a donkey's. Finally noticing something, Jim reaches up and feels his new ears, his face reflecting a feeling of shock.
Having finished the ears, the orange sphere flies to his left arm and crashes into it in a bright burst of gold energy that flows up toward his shoulder. Shaking his arm as though it's "fallen asleep", Jim pulls up his sleeve ... only to see brown, bristly hairs growing from the now pinkish-gray skin. "What's happening? It feels like hundreds of ants crawling on me!" Suddenly, it seems to hit him. His eyes clear of confusion, he looks back at you. "I'm changing ... becoming an animal! A donkey?", he asks.
"No, not a donkey!", you smile, glad you can finally watch someone who knows what's going on.
Suddenly, the orange sphere reappears from inside the other sleeve, moving along that arm. You can tell Jim feels the strange sensation fade from the left arm as it starts up on the right by his turn to follow the progress of the change. As he turns, the sphere drops toward the ground before veering to collide with his left ankle. Gold energy flows up the leg, even as the glow (and most likely the discomfort) fades from the increasingly-shaggy right arm.
The sphere zooms out of the other pantleg as the now-familiar glow begins to reshape the body underneath, causing Jim to sit down suddenly on the sidewalk. Looking at him, his arms have become short and thick, hampering him as he leans forward to massage his legs. Pulling up his pantlegs, he can see that his legs have also begun to grow brown, bristly hair out of pinkish-gray skin.
As you watch, the sphere flies into and through Jim's shirt, which glows briefly as if fluorescent. Looking on, you're amazed that Jim says nothing about the colour displays. Is it possible only you can see them?
Jim starts with surprise as his chest expands, straining the shirt to the ripping point. He tries to pull on the shirt to loosen it ... and it comes apart at the seams! He drops the useless cloth and takes to scratching the tough-skinned, pinkish-gray body now revealed as his own. The hair on his body, still growing in, seems to be a dull brownish gray. Taking time off from scratching, he finally has the time to ask, "Okay, if I'm not changing into a donkey, then what?"
You consider several answers as you watch the sphere explode at Jim's feet, bathing them in the gold light before he jumps up, gasping and stomping his feet as the sphere moves away. He stands only with difficulty, and you're sorry to see that his reforming muscles seem to be cramping painfully. He is now only about 3 1/2 or 4 feet tall on his shortened legs. Sitting down again, he rubs his feet as they shrink to about half their size. The toes reform, becoming webbed at the base and sporting long, straight, shovel-like claws that make the foot look almost hooved.
You stare at his feet, so fascinated despite yourself that you almost miss seeing the sphere fly around Jim several times before diving into his lower back, gold sparks showering from the point of impact. Jim leaps back to his feet, supporting himself on a nearby brick wall as his spine bends, forcing him forward in a crouch. As his thigh and upper leg muscles expand, his pants pop several stitches before he can pull them off the thickening limbs. Just when he pulls them off (and holds them in front of himself to preserve some decency), you see the sphere exit from his lower back. As it moves away, you can see a tail form from the base of the spine, extending in the direction of the sphere as though pulled. As it reaches a length of about 2 feet, it falls from whatever hold the sphere imparted.
As the long, tapered cylinder of flesh and bone hits the ground with a solid-sounding thud, either momentum or shock loosens Jim's grip on the wall. Off balance, he falls, landing on his tail as though it were a stool attached to his hind end. Finding it strong enough to hold him up, he crouches on his feet (paws?). "Well, are you going to tell me what animal, or not?"
The sphere hits him right between the eyes as you say, "As a matter of fact, I was reading about this animal earlier today. It's called Orycteropus afer." As the orange ball reappears, Jim's face begins to stretch, his face being pulled forward like clay in a gentle hand. He squints, trying to see his nose. "Oh, really! Orycteropus afer has a long thin ... ?" He breaks off as he becomes able to see and feel his face push forward into a long, slender muzzle with a rounded pig-like snout for a nose. As his muzzle completes its development, lengthening his jaws and tongue,his eyes move to the sides of his head and his ears move to the top. The tip of his tongue protrudes from his mouth. "Never mind, I get it! I am Orycteropus afer, an aardvark!"
The sphere makes one last circuit of Jim's body, making the final adjustments ... turning his hands into his front paws, for example, the structure of his legs now giving him a quadrupedal stance that seems intensified by his hunched back. The hair has grown into a thin covering of bristle-like brownish-gray on his body, head and tail. With the transformation complete, the sphere dives into Jim's body with a bright orange splash and is gone.
"Yes. You are an aardvark. What do you think about that?"
Written by Mithril (edited by wanderer)
(This page has not yet been checked by the maintainers of this site.)