sythyry | (no subject)

Cloak of Pararenenzu [1 Thory 4261]

One hour and one cley to graft Cloak of Another God. Nine minutes to fly over to Strenata's apartment. Nine more minutes to discuss the situation. Nine more minutes to chat with Rhedwy when she showed up. One cley and one instant to cast it...

The first thing I noticed about putting on an Orren shape is that it is big.

Or, I suppose, that I am ordinarily small. I know for a fact that I am ordinarily small -- I should be surprised if any adult in Vheshrame were smaller than me: Hezimikkinen is a quarter-pound heavier, and nobody else could reasonably be considered.

Which means that a typical Orren is a few times larger than me.

Which means that, when I am an Orren, I am a few times larger than me.

Which means that, when I am an Orren, everything looks a few times smaller to me.

Consider the fairly ordinary act of flying through a door. First of all, this act is impossible for most Orren -- including me, when I am an Orren, although Strenata has a spell that would let her do it. So one must walk through the door. One may choose not to try walking on two feet at first, although one quickly discovers that one's hind legs are not built for walking on four feet, so one walks on one's hind-knees, with the actual feet trailing behind. Barely elegant at all.

Then, one comes to the door. One is fairly certain that an Orren can in fact get through the door with some room to spare -- one has, after all, seen Strenata do this feat many's the time, and one has not considered it the slightest bit miraculous.

But when one approaches the door onesself, one peers at it nervously. It has shrunk terribly, like everything else, and it no longer seems the huge chasm which one could fly through with minimal risk to one's wingtips, which of course one no longer has. It now seems to be a narrow thing, no wider than the space between pages 80-81 and 82-83 of Impractical Uses of Destroc, and one is not in the slightest bit certain that one's shoulders will fit through it. One, indeed, suspects the smirking Sleeth over the couch of having cast Shrink the Hole on it, making it considerably smaller than it should be even when the entire universe is shrunken.

Still, one grits one's teeth -- which are, at least, of a reasonably comforting number and shape and size, even if the two points of one's tongue have gotten stuck together and one cannot pronounce one's name quite properly any more -- and one proceeds forwards.

And one passes through the door, almost entirely without colliding with the frame.

And one hears laughter and chucklage from Seeks-Handkerchieves and Rhedwy in the room behind one.

For one is now female, as one's proper sex is not a choice for Orren. And one's personal region are not nearly as well hidden by a bit of fur as they once were by scales, and one has not learned the proper mammalian manners of keeping one's tail low at many times. And, of course, one is still wearing nothing but ribbons, which is suitable for a Zi Ri, but rather revealing on an Orren.

One quickly discovers how hot an Orren's ears feel from the inside when one blushes.

[OOC: The World Tree book doesn't explain what happens to gender with Cloak of Another God. My treatment of it here is thus a house rule -- and yes, I do have house rules in my campaigns, even though I am one of the authors of the game. By default Cloak keeps the caster the same sex in the new shape if that is possible, or picks the sex randomly if the caster's original sex is not a choice for the new shape. (This is what happened to Sythyry). However, the caster may control what sex she winds up in on a roll of Wits + Finesse + s20 >= 20. There is nothing special about sex here -- the same goes for, say, fur color. Once the caster has controlled it, the spell generally just repeats the last choice until the caster controls it again. -bb]