The dog that appeared out of the spell dwarfed the miniature fairy by enormous amount. Dahlia stood at roughly eight inches, if she struggled for every little bit of height that she could. The dog, no, the wolf, that answered her call stood 3 feet tall at the shoulders. The length of the wolf proved incredibly hard to guess, especially for the easily distracted Dahlia.

“Oh, you’re the greatest doggy in all the world! A Warp Wolf! Oh, who’s a good boy, who’s the goodest boy?” Dahlia cooed at the white-blue spirit wolf. While other Fey creatures such as Rocket Dogs, Dimensional Distortion Panthers, and Elegant Sparklebutts frequently had magical auras, Warp Wolves existed in a state somewhere between energy and matter which resulted in a constant visible distortion.

The wolf leaned down so Dahlia could pat its nose, and she did so. While the wolf appeared to shift between translucent, shadow, and blue-white solidity, the constant flux made it hard to study or focus on. Especially the cracked silhouette that gave it a jagged, rippling look, almost like looking at it through a fractured mirror.

“Do you have a name yet?” Dahlia asked.

No. The wolf shook his head no, while a deep echo-y voice rang in her mind.

“I dub you… uhh. Let me think.” Dahlia fluttered up and down, then landed on the wolf’s attractive fur. Despite the strange, fractured appearance of the wolf it had incredibly soft fur. She could happily sleep in the warm embrace of her familiar’s cozy coat. Perhaps a nap would be just what she needed to think up a name for the wolf?

The wolf’s tongue lapped up and caught her above its nose. The sting of its saliva reminded her of the open wound on her arm, and she fluttered down to swipe a blade of grass to make a bandage out of.

The wolf flickered around the meadow in short teleporting jaunts. It reappeared next to Dahlia. Her familiar had scanned the area for immediate threats and returned to guard her before she even secured the bandage in place. The rapidity with which Warp Wolves could disappear in a poof of magic and reappear far out of physical reach was disorienting to witness.

“That’s it! You’ll be Mr. Disapoofer! How’s that sound?” Dahlia clapped her hands together in glee.

“Ruff!” Mr. Disapoofer barked happily, pleased with his new name. His emphatic approval filled the back of Dahlia’s mind with a warmth of love and adoration.

Familiar bonded.

Familiar: Mr. Disapoofers has Loyalty level 3.

When Dahlia looked directly at Mr. Disapoofers for a few seconds without blinking information filled her vision.

Mr. Disapoofer

Level

1

Strength

12

Intelligence

6

Dexterity

16

Wisdom

14

Constitution

13

Charisma

10

Damage Resistances

Psychic

Immunities

Frightened, Charmed

Senses

Dark Vision 60 feet

Languages

Telepathy (60 feet) (Understands Common and Sylvan)

Traits

Phase Step (Recharge)

The Warp Wolf can teleport up to 40 ft to an unoccupied space it can see.

Warp Dodge (Reaction)

When an attacker the Warp Wolf can see targets it with an attack, it can use its reaction to teleport 10 feet to an unoccupied space.

Flicker Movement

The Warp Wolf ignores hazardous terrain and attacks of opportunity.

Dahlia understood the gist of the information. Or so she thought. She flew up and landed on the head of Mr. Disapoofer. She luxuriated in his soft, warm fur that practically radiated with magical energies. The wolf represented the comfort and security of the Soulweald, a touch of home in this strange world Dahlia had found herself exiled too. A confusing place full of voices in one’s head, and knowledge acquired as if by osmosis.

Mr. Disapoofer’s wisdom attribute left a pit in Dahlia’s stomach. Her familiar, a glorified teleporting doggy, had more than double her wisdom! She wrapped her arms around her stomach to stop the frustration and embarrassment from transforming into an ache, and repeated Nyxaria’s words to her again and again like a mantra. Attributes could be raised. The dog wasn’t smarter than her.

“Rip that big tail feather free for me!” Dahlia commanded.

Mr. Disapoofer flickered over the large bird and ripped the big tail feather free from the corpse. When he opened his mouth the feather drifted through the air, bit into multiple pieces. Wise or not, the wolf didn’t have opposable thumbs.

“Ruff!” Sorry! I thought a giant bird tail feather wouldn’t break so easily. Material world animals are very weak. Mr. Disapoofer yowled sadly and pawed at the separated pieces of the feather in the air.

“Oh well. You tried!” Dahlia said. She patted her familiar encouragingly on the head. Even the pieces of the feather drifting in the air were far too big for her to put into her pouch. Why did everything have to be so obscenely big? What were the architects of this world overcompensating for?

“I don’t know where to go now, boy. Can you lead us to people?” Dahlia requested. A touch of hope had entered her voice and Dahlia found herself smiling for no good reason. Warp Wolves were intelligent creatures that could speak via telepathy even without a familiar bond and were considered a good omen in many of the fey realms. Not only were they intelligent, but they were also blessed with some of the best hunting senses in all of the Soulweald. She’d hit the jackpot with such a powerful familiar, even if he lacked feather plucking skills.

“Ruff!” Yes, Mr. Disapoofer answered Dahlia. The wolf sniffed at the air, again and again. Then he took off at a brisk run, and Dahlia had to hold onto his soft fur for dear life. The fact that Warp Wolves casually disregarded obstacles by teleporting around them, or even teleported to bounce off vertical surfaces, made the neck breaking pace the wolf set all the more terrifying.

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Unless you were like Dahlia. The idea that the speed they traveled at, with the strange obstacle jumping movement style, might be dangerous never even occurred to the fairy, or if it did, she remained willfully ignorant that it was anything but fun. She let out screams of excitement and encouraged Mr. Disapoofer to go even faster.

Warp Wolves appear to ‘jitter’ when they run at full speed. This effect is especially difficult to watch from a distance, as mirage-like echoes of where a Warp Wolf might move appear and disappear along with the actual wolf itself are prone to experience intense bouts of vertigo. The strange sensations feel much different when you ride on one. Each time a copy of Mr. Disapoofer appeared to one of the sides Dahlia experienced her eyes attempting to water and her mind fighting what she saw. Like any good Fey, she immediately tried to reject the image as an illusion and deprive it of its power. Warp Wolves did not use illusions, though, and disbelief had no effect upon the jittery images of Mr. Disapoofer.

The longer Dahlia sat upon her new mount, the more she sensed the truth of what was happening. Mr. Disapoofer could teleport at will, and in rapid sequence, and the afterimages of him were high-potential teleportation spots. When she focused on the weaves of thaumaturgy her wolf created, she saw the tendrils of his magic expand out to form a teleportation conduit, but the Warp Wolf only used a fraction of the conduits it created. The rest were only partially realized, but served to warn off less magical creatures from even thinking of interfering with a Warp Wolf.

Dahlia quickly realized she could shut her own eyes and use the power of their familiar bond to look through the eyes of Mr. Disapoofer. For whatever reason, the wolf wasn’t even slightly bothered by his own clones and copies, and ran at full speed as if the jerky, erratic path it chose made total and complete sense. The far side of the Soulweald had a lot of creatures like Warp Wolves. Mistress Nyxaria said it was because the Far Realm constantly tried to seep through an old wound in that part of the forest.

Had Mr. Disapoofer come from the Soulweald?

“Arrrooo!” Yes! Mr. Disapoofer answered her stray thought.

Mr. Disapoofer ran until he stood on the banks of a river.

“Do you need to cross it?”

“Ruff!” Yes, Mr. Disapoofers answered.

“Let me handle this, buddy!” Dahlia opened her eyes and shot up into the air. With a wave of her hand, Mr. Disapoofers vanished in a puff of fairy dust.

“I wonder where he goes when I do that,” Dahlia mused before she flew across the river. It was a large river, hundreds of feet wide. She wondered how mortals dealt with the humungous river. Boats, or maybe a bridge, she figured. In no time she flew across it, although she’d had to go higher up into the air to avoid fish trying to eat her after the first one failed.

“Ta-da!” Dahlia waved her hand, and made cascades of fairy dust fill the air as she summoned Mr. Disapoofer back. The wolf reappeared amid colorful poofs of magic, unconcerned, but happy to see his master again.

“Ruff!” Hi! Mr. Disapoofer greeted her excitedly, tail wagging.

Dahlia settled back into the comfortable fur atop his head. Some creatures might wrap their hands with the wolf’s fur, but Dahlia used the magical principles of fairy flight to comfortably cuddle down against the wolf. It took less effort and kept her far more securely against the wolf’s fur than she could hope to manage with her tiny, weak hands.

“Let’s find some people!” Dahlia cried. She wasn’t entirely certain if she was reminding Mr. Disapoofer or herself of their goal, or maybe both.

“Arooooo!” This way! Mr. Disapoofer howled before he charged into the brush that led upriver.

Mr. Disapoofer jumped, warped, and flickered through and around the underbrush near the river like a pro. Dahlia found the high speed acrobatics beautiful in a way wholly different from grace of her own flight. Yet she couldn’t help but find the slapdash, turbulent running of her familiar charming. Perhaps she could charge people to watch him race?

Humans ahead. Enemies too. Mr. Disapoofer warned her telepathically. The wolf sniffed in huge amounts of air as it determined what lay upwind.

“Let’s see what’s going on!” Dahlia decided without giving it much thought. The woods of the Soulweald had been a peaceful place, not one full of violence. But Vaelmir was only the third human Dahlia had ever seen in the Soulweald.

Twenty seconds later the wolf burst through brush into a clearing. Two human men and a woman had been backed against the river by a pack of four ugly hyena-men. All of the humans had minor wounds already but stood with their sad weapons drawn against the much more visually menacing hyenas.

Dahlia wondered if she should save them. They looked marginally more useful than the hyena-men, who were icky. Their stench was an assault on her delicate nose, especially when she forgot to turn off Mr. Disapoofer’s enhanced sense of smell being shared with her. The mortals didn’t smell all that much better than the hyena-men—they reeked of sweat, blood, and fear.

The nearest hyena-man turned and growled at the loud entrance Mr. Disapoofer made.

Dahlia did the first thing that came to her mind, which was try out her other magical spell. She pulled the ingredients from her belt, even as she sang the words of power to Call a Shadow. The appearance of the Warp Wolf had thrown the humans and Hyena-men into confusion, and neither party had even noticed a fairy upon the wolf’s head.

♫ “From shadowed graves in silent lairs,

Awaken now from endless despair,

Shadow of death, heed my call,

Come forth, and slay my enemies all!” ♫

Dahlia tossed the speck of bone and dirt into the air as her spell finished. A brilliant flash of radiant power consumed both items to birth dark wisps of necrotic energies which burst from the ground and took the form of a spectral Shadow, one of the weakest types of insubstantial, spiritual undead.

Call Shadow: You conjure a spectral Shadow to do your bidding until it is released or is destroyed. Material components: grave dust, bone fragment.

“Kill the Hyena-man!” Dahlia commanded the shadow, and Mr. Disapoofer. The sudden appearance of a Shadow, combined with the flares of magic and the command to attack, broke the standoff between all three groups.

The nearest Hyena-man lunged forward with its spear to attack twice, but both of its thrusts failed to hit the actual body of Mr. Disapoofer.

“Hail fair wolf, aid us and we shall reward you!” A large man with a huge axe shouted. His huge axe was mostly keeping him on his feet. He wasn’t dressed for combat like the other two but seemed attired to perform forestry. He had a few bad-looking wounds barely hidden under his woodsman attire. The blood spilled all over the ground seemed to be his.

“You idiot, that’s a fairy riding a wolf! That IS a wolf, isn’t it?” The brown-haired woman hissed at the biggest man. She didn’t let the absurd occurrence stop her from letting loose an arrow. She shot the hyena-man in the back of their pack in the face with an arrow.

The smaller man, a half elf, had a longsword in one hand and a short sword in the other, and he shuffled his feet in a weird way. His blades formed a barrier of steel that parried and pushed the hyena-men back from the trio.

“It isn’t the craziest thing we’ve ever seen, Zorah.” The Half-elf downplayed the abrupt appearance of Dahlia as if it were a common occurrence.

“It’s the craziest thing I’ve seen today, Joel!” Zorah disagreed in a higher-pitched voice than before.

“Yessss,” the Shadow hissed. It darted forward toward the Hyena-man that had attacked Mr. Disapoofer, and in a moment the Shadow struck it with claw like appendages. To Dahlia’s vision it looked like vibrant life-force passed from the Hyena-man to her Shadow with the successful attack. The Hyena-man Hunter took the blow, his body spasming under the powerful enervating attack.

That's when, in a swift and surprising attack, Mr. Disapoofer made a sudden lunge forward, his jaws clamping down on the creature's thigh. If the Shadow's attack prompted a visual and audible response from the Hyena-man Hunter, then the ensuing scene—Mr. Disapoofer's massive canines tearing into the creature's exposed thigh, shredding the large veins in its fleshy leg, and causing a geyser of blood—elicited a pained howl from the wounded beast-man multitudes more severe than the Shadow had managed. Mr. Disapoofer wagged his tail with pride.

The other three Hyena-men shifted their focus onto Dahlia’s wolf.

Thunk. Another arrow from Zorah hit the spell-casting Hyena-man in the chest.

“Soul Lash!” Dahlia cried out excitedly, and the blast of radiant magic struck the already very injured Hyena-man that her minions had attacked. The luminous lance of power smote the Hyena-man, who made an awful gargling laugh sound as it fell to the ground.

“Shouldn’t pick fights you can’t win!” Dahlia crowed loudly. Mixed with her gleeful laughter, the tiny fairy climbed up the priority list for the other Hyena-men.

You have gained 25 experience.

Dahlia’s cheering remained short lived. The biggest of the three remaining Hyena-men stepped over its fallen brother’s corpse and swung its giant sword at her and Mr. Disapoofer. She noticed the huge iron weapon looked more like a club than a sword, with hardly any edge to it at all, and then she was looking at the creature’s back.

Mr. Disapoofer used Warp Dodge (reaction).

The Half-Elf slipped up behind the lagging Hyena-man Hunter. The ugly laugh of the Hyena-man taunted Joel as it parried the attack with his long sword and casually side-stepped his follow up swing with the short sword in his other hand.

Joel got his own laugh when he caught the Hyena-man’s weapon with both of his, made some kind of flourishing motion with his hands, and the hunter’s weapon crashed into the rocks along the river.

“Tis a poor fighter who can’t tell he’s been baited,” Joel declared condescendingly to the unarmed Hyena-man.

The spellcaster hyena-man opened its mouth. A mass of putrid green insects eagerly flowed out of its mouth towards the female human who repeatedly shot it in the face. The archer managed to dodge the entire swarm by contorting herself into ridiculous poses. The plague of insects splashed into the river harmlessly before the spell fizzled out.

Thud. The archer’s final arrow took the caster in the eye.

You have gained 25 experience.

“Are you laughing or are you choking on your own breath?” Dahlia asked the big sword-wielding Hyena-man, as dark tendrils of psychic power wrapped around him, his frail intellect unable to fight off the intrusion of Shadowy Whispers.

The big creature tried to wave away the dark miasma that settled into its thoughts, which was right when Mr. Disapoofer jumped up and ripped his throat out. The Warp Wolf toppled the largest Hyena-man and landed atop of its fresh corpse. There, he howled at the sky.

“Awooooo!” I’ll kill stupid hyena-things all day! Bring it on! Mr. Disapoofer proclaimed to the world.

You have gained 25 experience.

“Get him,” Dahlia commanded her Shadow, who dejectedly awaited orders. Her tiny hand pointed at the last of the Hyena-men.

Dark claws ripped vitality from the Hyena-man, another arrow from Zorah hit it in the shoulder, and then Joel sliced its throat. The awful laughter of the hyena-men ended in a lingering yowl which echoed across the riverbanks with uncanny glee—as if even in death they had claimed some twisted triumph.

“Grrr,” Mr. Disapoofer growled suspiciously at the dark forest which the river ran through. Cursed, the warp wolf relayed a single word to Dahlia, who was uncertain if he meant the woods or the Hyena-men. Both had the lingering discordant notes that separated the cursed from nature.

You have gained 25 experience.

“We won! Yay!” Dahlia jumped up and down on her place above the head of Mr. Disapoofer.