But Spot wouldn’t let me do it. The energy of a young dog is rather hard to deal with when the outside land bursting with life is so close and yet so far away. “Fine! You want epic mind-blowing abilities that no Earthen dog has ever possessed before?!” I shouted, tossing a tennis ball up into the air. As I caught the ball, Spot’s full attention was lasered in on it. My outward excitement mirrored his as he vibrated with happiness as the thought of fetching a ball.

  “Yeah!” Gungnir joined in, “Give it to him! I need a wreckin buddy!”

  I tossed the ball to the overeager dog, which he tore to shreds in a few moments of epic bliss. I reached out and scratched behind his ears, then used my flesh sorcery to gently put him to sleep. I took a shard of Chaos that I had specially prepared beforehand with runes of joining and flesh. Placing the shard on Spot, I turned on the big generator to full power and began channeling the mana through me and into Gungnir, and then into the Chaos crystal, super charging it. I mentally sent my plan to Gungnir through our link as his senses were superior to mine and could make necessary changes on the fly. Also, his ridiculous stores of mana were there just in case. Making a small cut on Spot’s shoulder, I put the tip of the shard in the wound and let the mana flow from Gungnir to the shard, which began to dissolve into the wound. All of my concentration focused on joining this animal with the raw energy of possibility and creating what wasn’t there before. I gave Spot an instinctive sorcery over flesh, using my own sorcery as a framework, a pattern to be followed as it sank into every cell, permeating the very fiber of his being. Intents, thoughts and images flowed from me to Spot, concepts of self healing/regeneration/bone armor coupled with enhanced strength/speed/endurance. My dog will be a bony bruiser, capable of pulling sentry duty and healing when needed, but something was missing. As the crystal shard had almost dissolved, I imparted the concept bloodline stealing as well. I wanted this dog to eat other creatures and gain from their loss, to become a powerful familiar that make my enemies run in fear.

  “Oh that’s the right stuff,” Gungnir cackled with excitement, “Scaling mutt gonna make all the goblins run, and don’t even talk about the squirrels. Them fuzzy bitches won’t know what hit them! Yo! Make him able to climb trees, even cats will know fear!”

  The spear suddenly cut off the flow of magic. “All done with this dude man, can we do another?” it pleaded.

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  I think I might have imprinted my less than sane side to the spear. Some of its ideas were great, but it really had no concept of brakes. You need to test what you create, and then go from there. I had time, it had time, we all had time. But fuck yeah I wanted to make another. Actually, I wanted to improve this concept right now though. The main reason for giving Spot flesh sorcery was for the foundation it gave. It’s more than healing, it's manipulating your body to accept a new normal, to invent a new standard. Crystalline muscle fibers for strength and mana storage is not normal for mutts, but it will be for this one, soon. Using my own flesh sorcery as a scaffold or pattern for Spots would also allow me to more easily make changes in his body. I made Spot grow in size and muscular density until he was the size of a big wolf, then I made sure his bones were a little denser than a normal dogs would be and I overpowered his bite strength and back leg strength, giving him the ability to leap incredible distances and flat out tackle enemies. He had the sturdy build of a pitbull with rottweiler in there, so I worked on his weaknesses. Using flesh sorcery to grow more nerves in his shorter nasal cavity cranked up his sniffing sense to be more acute than a bloodhounds, and I messed around for a while with his eyes until he had the kind of vision Norn would envy. I widened his paws for more grip and toughened every part of his body, adding some more bone here and there to give better support and lengthened his teeth by just a bit, making sure that the enamel was much thicker than normal. If I saw a goblin, I wanted to be able to “Sick’em” and let Spot deal with the problem while I dealt with whatever else was going on. As I was making sure the final touches on the first transformation of my pooch was good to go, mainly checking for inherent mechanical problems, the fifth Ripple arrived.

  I had prepared for this moment in several different ways. There were going to be seven Ripples total and three of them left. My first visitor, who I’m pretty sure was either Hermes or Mercury, had told me that when this particular deity died, the Ripples were pure change and Chaos, which was the only thing that could break the dimensional seal keeping Earth in its own closeted magic-less space. After putting in runes of stability and reinforcement all along the walls of my river-bottom cavern, I had also taken some time to put runes of energy diversion/dispersal/conversion all over the walls to counteract or shield my living space from the Wave that might kill me. But that wasn’t all, I had also cleared a small piece of land not far from my hollow tree entrance and placed a couple key items there for when the Ripples came. I had five shards of Chaos that I recovered from my last run in with a deity, and used one of them on Spot, leaving me with four. These shards were my best and greatest trump cards as they could maybe do anything if I figured out the best way to use them. Which means, that I needed more. On that plot of land, I put out small conjured spheres of granite, onyx, obsidian, gold, silver, platinum, diamond, quartz, and a pile of glass from looted houses. Maybe I could find a material that when exposed to Chaos, became the crystal shards that I could use. And if worked, then there were two more Ripples coming my way that I could seriously take advantage of.