Chapter 18:Growing Pains Part 2

Winnie cleared her throat.

“Can I get a drink before we do?”

Derek frowned.

“You shouldn’t be thirsty. We kept you hydrated far beyond what your normal needs should demand.”

“Amazing how I’m still thirsty then, isn’t it?”

Derek rolled his eyes and remembered he was supposed to be the good guy in this conversation. His eyes lit up in a mischievous glint.

“Of course, my apologies, Winnie. I sometimes forget that I am not the patient. Here, this should help.”

Derek pressed a button on the console before him, and a panel on the ceiling of Winnie’s chamber slid open. A nozzle on a metal shaft descended to point at her face, only a few inches from her mouth.

“I’m not a hamster. How am I supposed to dri-“

A spray of water exited the nozzle, thoroughly drenching Winnie’s face. She made inarticulate noises of protest.

“Wargbbl!”

“Oh, don’t worry. It is pure. There, is that better?”

After a few seconds, the water shut off, and the nozzle withdrew into the ceiling. Winnie gasped and spluttered for a few more moments.

“What is wrong with you? Just spraying it on a girl’s face like that? Some warning would have been nice!”

Very little of the water had gotten into her mouth. She was too busy trying to breathe during the spray to swallow much of it. Winnie did not notice the water dripping down her face and body being absorbed by her skin. The water that made it into the earthen mound her feet were planted into was greedily sucked up by the soil.

“Again, I apologize. Do you feel better now?”

“I’m not thirsty anymore. Not sure if that’s because I’m pissed, though…Why do I feel like I’m still drinking through my feet?”

“See, it was what you needed. As to your question…”

Derek paused before switching topics.

“If you aren’t thirsty anymore, what happened when you were trying to calm down the simulacrum? We must understand the events that brought you here.”

Winnie looked around the room at the consoles and the containment chamber she was in. Her gaze lingered on Pellet flapping frantically and silently in the cage in one corner of the room.

“Let her out. She’s going to hurt herself. At first glance, you guys have done this before. This took people and resources to set up. Where am I? Are you with the guild? Prove it.”

“I don’t think she will add anything to the conversation and probably distract you.”

“I don’t care. If you don’t, then this conversation stops. I’ve taken a lot of this on faith, and it’s time you do something to prove you aren’t an enemy.”

Derek sighed as if put upon but touched another control on the console before him. Pellet’s cage slid across the room and through the barrier surrounding Winnie. The sound outside the barrier was cut off from her, but she hardly noticed it.

The owl’s frantic screeching was suddenly audible to Winnie, and she shouted to be heard,

“Pellet! It’s okay! I’m here!”

The cage door sprang open, and the juvenile owl sped out of the cage and onto Winnie’s shoulder. She began frantically headbutting the bound woman and pecking at the restraints. Winnie made soft, soothing sounds to calm her friend for a minute until the owl had calmed enough to stop her screeching.

Derek calmly watched the interplay, then touched another control. The return of sound Winnie hadn’t noticed continued to sulk at not getting attention from the woman. The soft whir of magic humming throughout the room’s controls was more intrusive than she had realized.

“There, see? She’s alright. If we could continue, Winnie?”

“Who are you? What do you want with me and Pellet? How did you even capture us?”

“I understand you are distraught, Winnie. But I have already introduced myself. I am with the researchers guild of the knowets.”

“Prove it.”

Derek sighed again, withdrew a guild seal from his robes, and showed it to her.

“See? I am with the guild. Can we please continue where you were having trouble with your simulacrum?”

It could be fake. But why go through all this song and dance? If he wanted to kill us, we’d probably be dead already.

“Winnie? Did you hear me?”

Winnie sighed but continued. Her face scrunched as she tried to recall what had happened.

“We had just finished the fight. The simulacrum was anxious for more. We were ambushed by more of the white-furred monsters we had first been hired to clear from the area.”

“White- fur…About two feet tall? Antennae? Clawed hands? Red eyes?”

“Yeah, Nixen mentioned something about interlopers at the guild hall. Is that what they were? I hadn’t seen that kind of mob before.”

Derek waved the question away,

“Just confirming the description. Please, continue.”

“ I was injured. I couldn’t stop it. I think Cato had capped one of them at this point, but it was resiting the caplace.”

Derek made a note.

Confirmed interloper capable of resisting caplace. Further testing is required.

“Resisting how?”

Winnie snapped at the man.

“I’m a druid, not a mage. It was using a spell of some kind. It went all glowy, more than it already was, and then Nixen hit it, and it lost control. It blasted one side of the forest with beams from its eyes.”

“One side of the forest? Do you mean it blasted to the side?”

“No, from where I was, it looked like one side of the forest was just gone.”

Derek wrote another note.

Magical capabilities beyond the scope of those reported before this event. Prioritize testing on captured survivors or ask someone with higher clearance to confirm.

“That seems unlikely. A journeyman wouldn’t take novices into the range of any monster capable of that.”

Winnie lost her temper at the statement.

“Well, I’m a little fuzzy on the details. But then again, I was bleeding badly at the time. One of the fuckers used lightning claws on me too.”

Derek continued his oblivious annotations.

The subject is combative. Trauma is a likely cause.

“Apologies, Winnie. Nothing about this situation is normal. I should be more open-minded about the report of a novice put into a place where they were clearly out of their depth.”

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Winnie eyeballed the man, wanting to slap him with harmful intent.

“Yeah, sure.”

“What happened next?”

“Omara drove off one of the others from trying to rescue the one that got nabbed by the simulacrum.”

“With mind magic?”

“She used a spell. Don’t know what kind. Something with apples.”

“Apples?”

“Apples.”

Derek raised his eyebrows and noted another faulty link between correlation and causation.

One interloper is confirmed to be driven off with a spell involving mind magic and apples. Possible weakness to natural sugars? Are the interlopers diabetic?

“I lost control of the simulacrum completely. I’ve seen it get ornery before, but this was different. It seemed angry and eager. It ripped the monster in half, and I got caught in the spray, and then…I think it rushed me. That’s the last thing I remember.”

“There, I’ve told you the tale. Now, where are the others? Is Omara okay? If Cato got banged up, I wouldn’t complain. What about Journeyman Nixen?”

Derek put on an expression of sympathy and concern. Winnie had seen a similar expression on her elder druids and Nixen, often enough to learn that bad news was coming. She attempted to brace herself for whatever she was about to be told.

“I have some terrible news. I wanted to ease you into this, but we have reached a point where you would be better served by ripping off the band-aid, as some people say. Your party was injured in the accident that put you here. Journeyman Nixen was the only one to escape entirely unscathed. That drinking sensation is because you aren’t human anymore.”

Winnie stared at the man standing behind the console on the other side of the barrier in front of her. Her mind had started screaming at her abruptly at the revelation.

Winnie took a slow breath through her nose and let it out of her mouth in a controlled exhale. She did this a few times until she didn’t want to start screaming at the man for answers.

“I’m gonna need some more context to understand what you just said. Pellet, is that true? Did Omara and Cato get hurt?”

The owlette chattered at Winnie with soft squeaks and whistles for a minute.

“She says-“

“I speak owl. I know what she said. Kindly stop showing how to suck eggs in front of your grandmother.”

“Well then, you know she says they’re all fine. And you’re mean.”

“Some would agree with her. Others would agree that I do things that need to be done. And she called me an asshole, how does a bird even understand that insult?”

“Never mind, what did you mean when you said I wasn’t human.”

Derek paused after typing something else into his annotations and touched another control on the console before him. The shimmering barrier between them turned opaque, then reflective. Winnie gazed at herself.

Besides the restraints holding her to the wall and the strange cable attached to her chest, she seemed shorter. Her feet and shins had been buried in a mound of soil beneath her, so that might account for the appearance of a change in height. Her knees bent the wrong way, but she didn’t feel much pain beyond what still occasionally flashed through her.

She realized abruptly that she was naked or at least not wearing any clothing. Her various naughty places were covered in a carpet of tiny, multicolored flowers. She might call them pretty if she wasn’t so upset at being exposed to a stranger.

Her skin had changed to a mossy brown color from her thighs up, with darker patches here and there where she remembered taking wounds during the fight. Her hair…it was vines of ivy now. Long vibrant green lengths of ivy sprouting from the tresses so it poofed out to the sides a bit before cascading down her shoulders. A flower grew out of the side of her head.

She twitched her head to the side to ensure the hair wasn’t an illusion. The swinging vines slapped her in the face before caressing her gently and then withdrawing, telling her that part was genuine. She tried to look down at her own body again, but her view was partially blocked by the thing still attached to her chest.

The barrier turned transparent again, and she gazed at Derek as he typed away at the console before him. He glanced up from his typing and waited for her to speak.

“Alright, not what I would have chosen for a wild-shape form, but this seems easily fixable. Get me to an elder druid, and they can help me change back. It may be a long conversation with nature, but still doable.”

“The elder druids have been consulted on this many times over many years. It’s not wild-shaping. The ambient magic of nature has fused with portions of your soul.”

Winnie stared at the man. She was agog that he had just called her an abomination.

He must not understand what he just said. That can’t be right.

“Nature magic doesn’t work like that. We talk to it. We entice it into helping us. Sure, we join our minds with it in small ways, but we do not control it. The newest druid is taught that linking your soul to it will overwhelm the most experienced druid, and you would lose yourself to the magic.”

Derek smiled at her grasping explanation while typing more notes,

“They would be taught correctly. What your elders leave out for the new joins is an emphasis on how far humans have strayed from what the ambient magic of nature’s domain considers natural. It wants to take control. Not have a conversation.”

“Gryphon shit. Nature seeks harmony. Not dominance.”

“Your idea of nature is skewed. For the last hundred years or so, it has been rather upset with the path humanity has taken within our kingdom.”

Winnie lost patience and jerked at her restraints as she started yelling.

“Do you have any idea how arrogant that sounds when you tell a druid she is wrong about how nature works?! You’re saying the nature of the world is angry with humanity?! And then you have the balls to tell me the elders lie to us?! Are you fucking stupid?! Why would they do that then encourage the most talented among us to come to the guild?”

Pellet on her shoulder screeched an echo of the anger her friend was portraying. Derek typed in one more note as he nodded satisfactorily at the evident anger.

“Good. Your anger means you are passionate about our discussion. It shows you still have vibrant human emotions. We can use that to help you recover and prepare for later on. Listen to your question. Why would an organization dedicated to the balance of nature want agents to participate in a different organization that has control over how that magic interacts with humanity?”

Derek’s eyebrows rose with the question, like smarmy caterpillars obsessed with proving a point through leading questions.

“But this animosity is not productive to our conversation. Perhaps some more rest will help you calm down enough for us to continue gathering enough data to help the next poor soul this happens to. I think some time to reflect on what we discussed and that needed rest before your first therapy session would be beneficial.”

He pressed another control on the console. Another series of panels on the ceiling of Winnie’s container slid open. From within extruded three metal shafts. Attached to each shaft end were the water Nozzle from earlier, a round globe of faceted glass, and a wooden box covered with runes.

Winnie eyed the water nozzle with anger still burning through her tone as she spat.

“I didn’t like it the first time! Why would you do it again?”

“It’ll be different this time. Just relax and let this happen. You’ll feel better after it’s over.”

Derek smiled in a way that some creepy bastards would say was empathetic and turned a dial on his console before touching another control. The soft sounds of wind issued from the runed wooden box. The faceted globe lit with more runes beings revealed as the light within grew to an intense glow bathing Winnie’s form. The water nozzle did not hose her down again but started releasing a fine mist of something that looked like water that refracted light too forcefully to be untainted with something extra.

Winnie struggled against the restraints holding. Her eyes showed panicked anger as Pellet started screeching in protest. Her eyes drooped immediately as the glow and water coated her restrained form.

Winnie got out another statement as her struggles slowed.

“You creepy son of a bitch! Do you have any idea…how fucked… up…”

Her movements slowed further, then stilled. Pellet was screeching madly, flapping around and attacking each metal shaft pointing toward her friend.

Pellets’ ineffectual attack still scratched up the equipment more than Derek liked. After a sigh, he touched another control as limbs grew from various parts of Winnie’s upper body. The limbs, concentrated around her shoulders and head, were starting to bud and unfurl more ivy-shaped leaves to catch the spray of liquid and intense light.

As the leaves reached full extension, a segmented metal tendril rushed from the cage in which the pellet had been contained. It had a clawed appendage on its end, snapping open and closed.

It snatched the juvenile owl out of the air roughly. The claws extended further around the owl until it drew down its wings close to the body, and a smaller claw snuck up to snap her beak shut. Soft, muffled screeching could be heard as the tendril withdrew into the cage, and the door closed swiftly behind the retreating tendril. The muffled screeching grew fainter as the cage was withdrawn from the barrier surrounding Winnie.

Derk waited until the container slid to his side, then tapped a few controls on its top. A delicate silver powder descended from the cage’s roof to spread across the owl’s body. As it coated her feathers, her frantic flailing slowed, and her screeching faded to calmed breathing. Derek tapped another button on his console and watched as the clawed tendril unwound from around the bird and laid it on the cage floor. Readjusting its position. The claw gently scooped the owl up and nudged the perch with the dangling feet of the owl.

Derek wasn’t sure how a mechanical arm could convey annoyance as it repeatedly bumped the owl’s dangling feet against the perch, trying to get the owl to grip it. Eventually, the owl grasped the perch, and the segmented arm withdrew into a panel on the side of the cage, clacking its clawed end in irritation.

Pellet was now calm and submissive as she wobbled slightly on her new perch with her eyelids drooping. Derek glanced back to Winnie’s form within the container. Her eyes were fully closed, but the rest of her still form showed no visible sign of breathing.

Her head had tilted back and angled toward the water mixture gently misting over her form. Her head had tilted back with her mouth stretched wider than possible in a standard human form. The ivy vines around her head had spread to catch more of the mist. The thorny teeth within her maw had been folded back, and a long vine-like tongue extruded from her mouth, waving lazily through the tainted water vapor.

Derek sighed again at the sight and muttered quietly to himself,

“Well, that could have gone better.”

Sarah’s dulcet tones of snark extruded from the air of the room,

“Nobody likes that joke, Derek. Or how your mother dresses you. And you make parties awkward.”

Derek pressed fingers into the bridge of his nose, trying not to scream his response.

“Shut up, Sarah.”

In one corner of the room, an ornamented wardrobe sat unobtrusively with the doors cracked slightly open. A single human-looking eye observed the room through a screen of red hair. A soft scribbling sound went unnoticed by the rooms occupants.