Solo [The Menagerie] Practicing Medicine and Morphing

[Kavala]

Timestamp: Mid Fall, 513 AV
Continued From: [The Sanctuary] Birds Of A Feather

The Healer had duties at The Sanctuary but she often volunteered her time elsewhere as well. Not only did she routinely see the slaves at Rattling Chains for free but she often dropped by the Menagerie whenever the folks that ran it dropped her a line about having a sick animal. Kavala thought of this as part of her duty and accepted no pay in exchange for her services. All she really wanted was the ability to take Tasival and Shayru to the Menagerie whenever they wanted to see different animals than the ones they had at home. Shayru was always particularly interested in the captive species the Akalak often kept on as exhibits, creatures like Symenestra and Zith. Kavala took him often, not wanting him to be afraid of the things that were Riverfall folklore and considered deadly beyond measure. She wanted her son to know what a Night Lion looked like up close when he didn’t have to fight for his life to prevent being eaten by one. All in all, Kavala thought the menagerie was a brilliant idea and unique among all the cities she’d visited. And so she went often both for Tasi and for the animals at the facility.

It wasn’t a pleasure trip Kavala was visiting for this time. They had a rather large species of snake, one that was in fact native to The Orchards, which had swallowed something inorganic and indigestible. Kavala was told she might have to perform surgery on the creature and so she was all set with as many tools as she could think of needing. When she’d gotten there, dropped off by Aweston driving the pony cart, she quickly assessed the situation and found that an orchard constrictor had indeed swallowed something unholy… a stuffed toy that was made of rabbit fur but filled with cedar chips. The toy was one of those given to the young moneys that either lost their mother or were weaned and needing company. The cedar deterred fleas while the fur made it soft and loveable. To the snake however, the warm rabbit smelling toy had seemed a delightfully easy meal. No one knew how it got into the snake’s enclosure, though they suspected one of the monkeys tossed it high and up into the snake section.

When Kavala had seen what it had done to the snakes inside, she used her gnosis immediately to halt the pain and had performed surgery immediately. She’d managed to remove the toy through a careful incision through the skin, but had found that it had ruptured in the snake’s stomach and had spilled cedar chips inside the creature. That meant that Kavala had to remove its stomach partially, rinse it out, and then follow its long winding intestines down, removing cedar chips as she went. It was a long process, but in the end Kavala felt good about the snake’s prognosis and that it would live a long and healthy life if rabbit fur and not rabbits kept continuing to find their way into its enclosure.

When Kavala was done, all there was left to do was wait for the snake to recover. Sometimes the anesthesia she used on the animals was harsher than the surgery, so to Kavala it was important to remain until the snake woke up and even ate something. While it was lounging in the recovery portion of the sick room, Kavala took a chair and then took a moment to start drawing what she saw of the snake’s eye. The snakes’ eye was an oddly designed thing. It had no movable eyelid and that meant that it had very limited mobility. Instead it had a transparent eye cap called a brille that kept the eye moistened and protected. That meant snakes never blinked.

Occasionally, with no sign or another, the snake would streak out its tongue, flicker it, and put it back in Its mouth. The tongue was never directed at her, but as Kavala observed more closely, she seemed to get the impression the snake was seeing or something else with the tongue more than with it was using its eyes. So she carefully examined it, looking at the design and how it actually looked with her auristics as well. The Konti concentrated and stared at the tongue carefully, noting the forked nature and that it just seemed so different than her own. And while the snake was still slightly sedated, she pried open its mouth, checked out its teeth, and noticed the flat pad of tissue on the roof of its mouth. All this Kavala committed to memory and to her sketch pad, making note of the double row of teeth and the wicked bite the creature had, even being a more ‘harmless’ nonvenomous type snake.

Kavala was actually just lucky it was an orchard constrictor. That meant it was large enough she got a good look at its face, inside its mouth, and its general anatomy. A smaller creature would not have given Kavala such a good look at structure and form. Kavala concentrated, pooling djed behind her eyes, and flared her auristics, looking again at the snake with a vision attuned to looking for pain or weakness in tissue or bone. It wasn't as if the magic could pinpoint these things, but when Kavala used Auristics she could look at the overall animal and note where it was all the same in her magical vision and where it looked 'different' . Different looked obvious under the color changes in her vision and that often gave her a clue as to where to look. So Kavala scanned the animal with auristics, looked for difference, and found nothing too remotely wrong with it save for some broken scales and irritated dry skin. She finished with her exam and some of the menagerie officials returned the snake to its enclosure, while Kavala asked for a few minutes alone to recover from the surgery. She as sure there would be more procedures while she was here, so she wanted to make sure she was rested enough to not tax the baby while she was giving out treatments.

But that didn’t stop her from trying a little morphing. Kavala wanted to investigate the snake eyes and tongue before it got too late and she had too many patients under her belt. Later in the evening she’d be tired, especially after having a few clients. The fact that they’d left the Konti in a near darkened room quietly away from the other animals helped enormously. She closed her eyes, concentrating, and felt the djed amass in her mouth. Kavala thought the sensation was inherently and incredibly odd, polish lush and thick and rich. She licked her lips and concentrated on her tongue and the mechanisms she observed in the snake’s forked organ. She also concentrated djed on the top of her mouth where she’d saw the snake lick repeatedly after flicking his tongue, and knew that’s where she wanted to concentrate her efforts. Clearing her mind, breathing deeply, and focusing, Kavala spent chimes reforming her tongue into a forked representation of what the snake had. She also formed the soft plate above and behind her teeth. When she was done, and the djed that was unneeded had drained out, Kavala flicked her tongue out of her mouth, licked the air and touched the roof of her mouth.

Sensation flooded her… not taste, not sight, but smell. Kavala was so shocked the form slipped away quickly and a headache exploded in her forebrain. She reached up, clutched her temple and rubbed at it whispering a curse. Snakes SMELLED with their tongues… not tasted, not listened… not even looked. Kavala had no idea at that point why they had nostrils at all, but perhaps it was only to pass air in and out of their lungs. The tongue was what smelled for the snake… and in that moment before she lost the shape, Kavala knew it was an incredibly sensitive sense of smell.

The revelation was so profound Kavala stood up still clutching her temple and then felt blood on her lip. She reached up and realized she was bleeding from her nose, the shift obviously harder than she had anticipated and more complex than she had thought. The Konti wiped the blood off her face and pressed her hand to her temple, tapping her gnosis marks and flooding her head with healing. It wasn’t great, but it was enough to get her straight enough to keep working if they brought her another patient. It was then that Kavala relaxed, rested, and tried to process what she’d just learned.

[Kavala]

Kavala quickly recovered, not because she was sitting quietly alone in the dark, but because they soon brought her new patients and one of the byproducts of wielding a lot of healing gnosis was in fact healing. When marks were tapped and power channeled, the channel of that power through own body tended to do wonders for the healer as well as the healed. And in this case there was an owl with a very bad eye infection. Kavala had to get the bird calm enough to communicate with it that she was there to make the pain go away so she could in fact remove the splinter that was causing so much pain and infection. The bird responded to her Konti gift and settled. But it was touch and go working around such a large predator’s eye, pulling out a shard of metal from its iris and then covering the eye with gnosis to both clear out the infection and to heal the tear the metal had made.

The Konti was glad she had a healer’s kit with her and large tweezers in order to get a good grip on the fragment. But also, she was glad there was an excuse to peer closely in the owl’s eyes. They were huge, maybe taking up as much as five percent of the owl’s body weight and faced forward. It looked like the vision would be clearer, sharper, especially at long distances by the way the cornea was shaped. Similar to humans, Kavala guessed the bird could see objects in three dimensions, taking into account the height width and depth of whatever the owl was viewing. And based on how the eyes faced forward, Kavala thought the bird had about a hundred or maybe even a hundred and ten degrees of view out in front of it.

Her own vision was about eighty degrees more broad. She knew humans and Konti and everyone like them could see at about a hundred and eighty degrees with about a hundred and forty of it being binocular. Owls maybe had seventy degrees of binocular. Kavala felt the size probably let the owl see in low light conditions far better than humans. In fact, from what she could see and had studied in necropsy while learning medicine, the owl didn’t have eyeballs at all but rather large long eye tubes that connected to the optic nerve eventually. She knew from the past that the eyes were held in place on an owl’s skull by a bony structure called a sclerotic ring which meant the owl could not move its eyes or roll them…. They only had straight ahead vision.

Kavala wondered if that was why owls could swivel their heads freakishly, and in some cases even turn them entirely backwards. Kavala couldn’t remember the number exactly, but she suspected it was somewhere in the range of two hundred and fifty degrees to maybe three hundred degrees of rotation. .. and upside down. Owl skeletons were amazing. Kavala kept studying the bird, knowing it was a great model. They were helping each other… she curing its eye infection and the owl by providing her with a model.

Kavala continued her study, noting details she hadn’t realized before when it came to owls. They had three eyelids. Very normal upper and lower eyelids were present, opening and closing when an owl blinked, but they also had a third eyelid that was more of a membrane that closed diagonally across the eye, sliding from the inside to the outside corner. Kavala guessed it was to help clean and protect the surface.

When asking the animal handler about their range of vision and if they were ‘day blind’ due to having such big eyes, the man launched into a pretty great lecture about how it was a misunderstanding that because nocturnal predators like owls had fantastic night vision, they were blind during the day. The keeper assured her this was not true. He claimed, and she had to agree after examining the structure, that the owl saw just as well if not better than people did in bright lights such as broad daylight or intense sunlight. Kavala was fascinated. And although she could not try a full body transformation into something like an owl yet, she decided it would be her first model for when she could.

But she wanted to be sure the metal was entirely gone.. so she pooled djed behind her eyes, concentrated, and opened up her auristics and looked at the bird. The birds colors were bright and vivid, showing true health and vitality. Metal, Kavala figured, would show up as a discord in those colors as she scanned the bird. She looked closely, especially around the birds face, and found nothing too off about the animals heath and certainly nothing foreign in its system. She did note one place where the bird had dry skin under its wings and made a mental note to oil its skin under its feathers if possible when she was totally done. Kavala checked inside its mouth too, around its ears, and its vent. Then, finding nothing at all, she backed off the auristics and let the magical vision fade..


Kavala had no idea where the metal had come from until she showed it to one of the animal handlers and he’d said they’d had someone working on the enclosure that was a smithy. They’d had to replace some bars that had rusted and were refastening them in place with a lot of hammering and nose. The bird had probably flown in close to investigate had taken a pounded off fragment to her eye.

When Kavala was done, however, not only was the owl’s eye a close study, but the healer thought she had the structure down after the close inspection and healing. That was good news because the personnel at the menagerie left her alone on break during their lunch and that gave her time to practice another form… the low light owl eye.

Kavala loved this part, once she had a firm grasp in her mind as to what she was going to create. She kept her focus intent, her mind clearing, and she closed her eyes and began her meditation. Darkness redoubled, first from the solid black of the room then the solid darkness of her closed eyes. Kavala pooled djed into her face, slightly hesitant about changing her vision, and then went for it, altering the structure of the bones in her head and the balls of her eyes into that of a tube. Her form completely shifted in her face and she lost the look of a Konti and even of a person for that matter, as she flattened her face and her eyes reformed.

Kavala blinked, shocked, as she quietly opened the efforts of her labor and looked around her. Owls saw in monochrome. She recognized that instantly. But in the darkness, she could see so much more clearly than she had been able to before as a Konti. The height, depth, and width of the room flooded her with information and she could see how the dancing glittering low light actually flooded the darkness with contrast and thus transferred images to her mind that allowed her to navigate the darkness perfectly.

In that moment, Kavala felt really close to owls. She almost fell in love with the darkness and its shimmering charcoal glitter that didn’t seem to really let her miss color much. Quietly walking to the doorway, Kavala listened then carefully opened it. No one was in the hall that she could see, and it did indeed confirm to her that the handler was right. The owl could see in high light just as easily as she could. Again, there was no color, but instead of a charcoal glittering world of shadow on shadow, there was a snow filled world of white on white. It reminded her of a person who could see color and texture viewing fresh sparkling snow. And there was an absolute clarity to the vision that made the world bathed in light as lovely as the one shrouded in darkness. Kavala absolutely could not wait for the time she could grow wings and fly, navigating the owl’s world as an owl.

Closing the doorway, Kavala stepped back into the small exam room she was utilizing as a visiting healer and closed the door. She sat down quietly and carefully, not jarring the baby. Then she closed her eyes and focused on concentrating on speeding up the decay of the shift so she could go back to normal before they brought any more creatures in. She cleared her mind, brought djed back up to her head, and forced her physical form to remember its original shape. That process consisted of carefully envisioning her head filling with power, glowing, and that power massaging itself back into the shape it was more than used to wearing.

The experience was heady and Kavala tipped her chin back, feeling the burn of the transformation back to her original form. She loved that feeling, the change deep inside, and then the reversion back to what she was born as. Kavala could see why mages got seduced by the change and lost their forms – forgetting what they looked like and what their original shape was. It was so powerful, so utterly beautiful that Kavala knew she was going to love it even more when she could do full body changes. But first the baby had to come.. and first she needed far more practice than she already had.

[Kavala]

Kavala finished off the day with no more morphing, and instead just made the rounds as a healer, carefully checking a troupe of monkeys and then treating the symenestra infant that didn’t seem to be gaining any weight. The symenestra display was an ugly thing, reminiscent of a prison. The place was pitch black and hung with silks on the walls to mimic one of their great hanging pod homes in Kalinor. The healer read the display information and looked inside to see the pair of parents talking quietly among themselves. They had a defeated look about them, one that spoke of long term captivity and a loss of hope. It was curious to note too that the female Symenestra within the confines looked far more defiant than the male. Kavala read more on the literature of the display and discovered the female wasn’t the original mother – the infant had killed the mother being born – and that she was captured after the fact to raise the baby and supply the male with a mate.

While Kavala was waiting for the keepers to remove the infant from the exhibit and bring it to her, she noted the long limbs of the adults and how long and graceful their fingers were. Hair was pale, eyes pale as well, and Kavala wondered if this was byproduct of living underground so long. The Konti knew almost nothing about the Symenestra, but her personal opinion was that if a race couldn’t give birth to live young, then they probably should have ceased to exist a long time ago. At least the Akalaks had never had females, as far as Kavala knew, so their existence had grown in response to the existence of other sentient populations worldwide. Reading the info etched on the sign for visitors, Kavala learned that the Symenestra didn’t even eat whole food. They drank food that was liquid and if they were given whole food, had to digest it throughout the day breaking it down with the venom in their saliva in order to eat. That made them poisonous biters, both to themselves and to each other. Evidently the baby’s poison killed the mother while it was birthed in the majority of times. Kavala was a bit horrified, especially as close to term as she was.

But regardless, she set her personal feelings aside and examined the infant when they successfully extracted it from the exhibit and passed it over to her. The problem was the infant was overly gassy and having a hard time with bowel blockages. Kavala knew babies, having been a mother herself and also having been a breeder of various creatures. She questioned the staff carefully and they assured her they were using only the highest quality meats and dairies for the infant, broken down of course for the baby to be able to digest.

However, one of the things Kavala noted was that they were using the adult female’s venom to break down the baby’s food, and Kavala thought that might be hindering the infant somewhat. She recommended they switch to only using the baby’s venom and then only feeding the infant broken down food that was soft to begin with, say fruit that was ripe or vegetables that cooked down soft like fall squash. There was nothing wrong with the child, per say, no infections or illnesses, but she could tell the intestinal track was inflamed in what healers would call an upper gastrointestinal irritation. Kavala proscribed yogurts and soft cheeses made from goat not cow because they tended to soften the bowels rather than obstruct them like cow dairy could. Then she promised she’d be back in a day or two and check on the infant again to see if they were doing better.

And in the meantime she got the resident animal handlers to demonstrate how they milked the female Symenestera for poison. It was ingenious even. They had a pole with a rope on the end of it that formed a loop. They caught the creature with the pole’s loop tight around her neck and then bound her hands. Then they forced her to kneel in this apparatus that tilted her head back and forced her mouth open much like a dentist would. Then, inserting a plate into her mouth that drained into a collection tube, they pushed the plate in, pressed it against the roof of her mouth, and dragged it backwards where it hooked her fangs and caused her to leak poison.

Kavala studied the fangs carefully while she was witnessing the poison collection, noting the size, shape and even the soft tissue behind the fangs that most likely held the venom. Kavala was fascinated by the modified mouth structure and found it grotesque and unlike anything she’d ever seen. She never did like spiders much, giving them a wide berth outside of her home and condemning them to death if they were found inside. These creatures, these symenestra, were a lot like Zith. Kavala didn’t know whether to see them as sentient or just incredibly intelligent beasts. Nonetheless they were a danger to Riverfall and Kavala wondered why they were even kept in the Menagerie. But like all other animals, she treated them, though her Konti gift was silent of their emotions.

The Konti took the opportunity to observe and tapped her djed, flared her auristics, and began to watch the energetic process in the Symenestra as she was being milked of venom. The woman's whole body glowed with energy that was definitely concentrated up by her head. As the poison was being released from her fangs and into the glass collection vial, the energy in her body shifted, swirled, and was oozing out of her form along with the poison. Kavala raised an eyebrow at the woman's plight, but otherwise felt no pity. She let the color in her vision fade and nodded her thanks to the zookeeper for letting her observe the harvest.

Not animals. But it was a hard thing to stomach. Kavala was no stranger to prejudice. The Akalak were full of it, hating the Zith and with good reason. The creatures threatened their lifestyles and the happiness of their people often enough. And the Symenestra did the same if the sign about the ‘harvest’ was to be believed. It was in that moment that Kavala understood why they had the Symenestra there. They wanted to drive home the point that these creatures could not survive without their prey and to that end they would always cut them down at the gates if they tried to enter. They were lethal to the men, and as the times had changed, they’d slowly realized that often the women came on harvest just as frequently as men.. so the women too were always suspecting though the Akalak had a deep seated need to protect females of all species. Kavala could see it, and in her own way felt sorry for the three people whose lives would be lived behind the glass and bars of an exhibit. But they were serving a greater good – education – and that meant the world.

Kavala continued on her rounds, but the truth was as pregnant as she was and as big as the menagerie was, there was no real way she’d ever get done with all of the work that needed doing there in one day. So instead she broke it off as soon as she felt a bit of fatigue, headed home via the pony cart, and then took a nap. When she woke up it was late afternoon going on towards evening, and she was feeling refreshed. Cadra fed her, which was a bonus, and then she sat down still thinking about the Symenestra plus the snake she had treated initially. Running her tongue across her teeth, Kavala speculated and then found herself drifting into a meditation to the soft beat of a drum. Aweston was drumming in the commons, providing Cadra and Larik a tune to dance too. The sound was melodic, rhythmic, and put her into a slight trance as she watched her niece and nephew perform one of the Drykas’ traditional dances that Aweston was teaching them. The music swelled as Kavala’s tongue continued to trace the line of her teeth, and she finally could not hold up her eyelids anymore. When they dropped she could feel the djed pooling in her mouth, almost choking her, until she started breathing through her nose. Breath control helped, though she as not consciously fighting to relax. The meditation was music induced and thus her heart didn’t relax but instead skipped and skipped until it started pumping in time with the drum.

Soon enough she felt her teeth shifting, fangs forming, and the sacks behind them as well. She swallowed, flexed muscles that had formed newly made in her mouth, and the fangs sprang forward and dripped saliva. Kavala was a bit horrified, running her teeth over the sharp ridges of her dentition, glad there was no real poison in those sacks. She wondered if it would kill a morpher, to make poison saliva, and then utilize it. Then she thought hard, reflecting on snakes, and realized they were for the most part immune to their own poison. Symenestra would have to be as well or else it would kill them.

It was times like this that Kavala wished she had a mentor hanging around that she could ask these sorts of questions too. There wasn’t one, of course, but some things were too deadly for trial and error.

The Konti played with her teeth a bit longer, feeling out what having long vicious fangs were like. She knew she’d work on poison later, thinking being able to morph a poison bite would come in hellishly handy if anyone ever tried to hold her captive or force anything on her. Relaxing, Kavala continued to run her tongue over her teeth, too tired to recon the teeth back to their normal state. She instead let the magic naturally decay and only managed to bite herself good once while playing with them.

[Kavala]

Kavala finished her work at the Menagerie and headed home for the day. She decided resting would be the best course of action after overdoing it mimicking so much of the animals she’d worked on that day. She ate a hearty meal of clams and crab, seaweed and kelp, then headed to bed for a long long sleep. When she woke up, Tasival was staring at her intently, inches from her nose, trying not to giggle. Kavala laughed, grabbed her growing son, and twisted him around to tickle him on the bed. They cuddled for a while and Kavala ended up telling him a story about the Drykas living on the plains. He asked a few questions and though she couldn’t see him in the dark, she knew he could see her perfectly fine.

“Tasi, do you mind if I look at your inner eyelids? The ones that let you see in the dark?” Kavala asked. Her son nodded, and she awkwardly got out of bed and walked over to light a candle. Then she returned, setting it on the bedside table near Tasi, and looked deep into his eyes while he had his inner lids closed. Tasi giggled at Kavala’s close scrutiny. She laughed too and asked him to blink them. He did, and she blinked back, laughing with him. The Konti was able, thus playing with him, to get a very close look at Tasival’s inner lids, their structure, and how they worked with his muscles. She didn’t know what they were made out of, but in Morphing often it didn’t matter. The intent was just as important in the magic, so long as the structure was identical. Kavala concentrated, pooling djed behind her eyes, and studied her child’s vision with her auristics. Color flowed across his eyelids, all but powering the vision that allowed him to penetrate the dark. She could, being a healer, identify the lines of light traveling from his pupil down his optic nerve and into his brain. She reached forward, grasped his head, and gently tilted his chin this way and that, getting a better look at how the energy flowed through his eyes. She looked for a lot longer, but as the djed pool behind her eyes eased, she blinked and sat back, hugging her son.

“I’m going to try to make myself a set of eyelids like yours, Tasival.” Kavala said, concentrating and bringing djed back up into her vision. She pushed the power across her eyes, coating them, while still being intent on keeping her lids open. She formed it into a thin layer that coated the outside and solidified into an inner eyelid. Then in her mind she drew muscles out from the magic, attaching them very similar to how Tasi’s were. Then she stopped concentrating inwards, focused outwards, and looked.

The room blazed into view, as the new lids across her eyes turned her night into day and flooded the room with hidden light she had no idea existed. Everything looked sharp, colors flooding the spectrum… red yellow orange green blue. Kavala realized the colors corresponded to heat or cold in the dark, and while it wasn’t like her regular vision at all, it was still enough to allow her to move around a space easily at night. She grinned at her son, noticed how warm and glowy he looked in the dark, and then noted immediately how the walls of her suite were chilled in colors of blue from the stone except around where the hearth was burning low. The stone there was warm shades of orange and gold and reds, red being where the embers of the fire actually rested on the stone.

Kavala rose slowly, taking Tasival’s hand and letting the boy swing on her arm. She circled the room with him, identifying items and asking him questions. Questioning someone who was ultimately considered a toddler about their vision was interesting. Tasival knew about bugs and lizards and spiders and how to find them in the dark. He knew what his Brynkil looked like and how to find them hiding in the shadows when they fluttered away from him or didn’t want to sleep in their carry sacks. Kavala listened, fascinated, and nodded when it was appropriate. As they circled the room talking, Kavala noted the trial of footsteps behind them where their bare feet warmed the stone briefly and then faded as the heat was absorbed and chilled off.

It was a fascinating experience, and one she decided merited the investment in the magic and the time spent with her son. And although it was really early, Kavala got Tasi dressed and they both bundled up and went up top to watch the darkness fall and the sun rise while her new morphed eyelids slowly decayed.

[Kavala]

Later that afternoon, Kavala was watching Larik circle overhead when she summoned him downward. Tasi was helping Aweston make more rope, so she had several hours to herself. With Lariks’ vision so acute, Kavala wondered if she could duplicate it as well. She’d already tried out physical features of owls, but having a raptor’s vision would be an incredible thing… if she could do it.

Her nephew screamed in the sky, circled once, and dropped down in his bird form. Because of her Konti gift, Kavala didn’t need him to shift to talk to him. Instead, she just talked and then listened with her Konti gift to his impressions and images, to see if he’d agree to the study so she could see he saw or at least ask him about his eyes.

“Larik, you know I’ve been learning how to shift my shape using magic. You’ve seen some of it yourself. Do you mind if I study your eyes? I need a new model to put things together, and I’m running out of ideas. Can I have a bell of your time to really look at your eyes and learn some things about them? I swear I will make it up to you. I know there’s a amphitheater performance tonight. I’ll take you and Cadra if you’d like. I know you’ve wanted to go.” Kavala said, not above bribing her nephew. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t agree to let her study him. It was more that he would have a hard time standing still for that long without incentive. Kavala knew her nephew, his needs and first things first. She ran to the kitchen, made him a big plate of raw meats, and had him eat while she was studying him… giving him more time to sit still.

And as he ate, he opened his mind to Kavala and her Konti gift, giving her an idea of what he saw. Sunflowers, for example, still hanging on in the Riverfall winter were entirely different in his vision, sharper with patterns she didn’t notice before. When he looked down, she noticed trails in the old gardens, sprayed here and there but clearly marked as if voles had urinated. She had no words for the strange violet vision he housed, but she knew what she had to strive for to achieve. Kavala switched on her auristics, pulling back her konti gift and pooling djed behind her eyes. She concentrated the power, sharpening her vision and looked closer at the nearest eye Larik had. She looked deep into his iris, seeking differences, and causing the auristics to enhance what she was seeing until she noticed structure, tiny structure, that was vastly different than her own eyes.

Kavala kept the auristics in place, watching Lariks eyes function on a microlevel and then began to work on her own, copying what she saw in his and building upon that. Much was hit or miss because the auristics only gave her so much to work on. But she could definitely tell there was a difference and that difference was making all the adjustments to her vision possible. Her eyes stretched, changed, rolled in her sockets, the auristics and morphing blending together until she was all but looking at her own vision and the way it was changing like she’d been studying Lariks a moment before.

Her results weren’t pleasant. Her gaze was blurry though she did achieve the fuzzy purple vision after meddling with it more than a half an hour. She adjusted her iris’ and then started working on eyeshape to see if that made a difference. Larik had a structure deep in his eye called a pectin which resembled a comb of blood vessels that Kavala could see with her auristicas and her naked eye both. She didn’t know its function, but it was obviously attached to the optic nerve and seemed to perhaps supply more blood to his eyes. Kavala concentrated, forming this structure in her own eye and suddenly felt all the additional structures she’d forced into it during the first part of the session come to life. It seemed they needed the extra blood supply or the eye couldn’t function.

Then she started look in at eye shape. There were actually a lot more differences than she’d seen on the surface. Letting her aursitcis drop and just looking with her morphed eyes, Kavala could see the shape of her own were very different from Larik’s just on first inspection, not even looking at the internal structure. For instance, he had a flatter shape that enabled more of a field of vision. She could see that the shape allowed more of what he was looking at to be in focus at a time. Whereas Kavala’s normal more curved eyes, with their narrow field of vision, could only focus on a small range of things at once. Kavala concentrated and flattened out her eyes and then built a more sturdy sclerotic ring of bone around her gaze, stabilizing the orb in its orbit and holding it rigid so it could focus. Immediately more things came into clarity. Kavala frowned in concentration, and looked at Lariks’ eyelids. She’d have to hurry because he was finishing his meal and as soon as he did that, he would be apt to drop off to sleep and that meant his eyes being closed.

Larik’s eyelids were not the type humans and even Konti had. They did not blink like hers. Instead, there was a membrane that swept across the pupil horizontally. The membrane covered the lid when he slept, she’d already noticed, and she suspected that it covered his eyes when he dove underwater. Kavala concentrated, bringing the membrane into being and sweeping it across her eye. She did that several times, getting a feel for how it worked, and then worked on the actual size of her eyes.

Bird eyes were huge. She thought perhaps that proportionally the eyes of a bird were far bigger than anyone else’s in the world of animals. So she enlarged them in her head, restructured the optic nerve in her mind, and kept messing with the eyes until they were seeing clearly the things she had saw Larik could see when she used her gift to see what he saw.

It was hard work and it left her drenched with sweat and tired. But by the time he was dropping off to nap on the fence post he’d perched on for her examination, she’d pretty much seen all she needed to see. Instead of letting her work on her eyes decay, she actually made a concentrated effort to switch them back, knowing from birth how her eyes seemed to feel in her head when they were the proper size and shape. Going back to her normal shape, however much effort that took, was always easier than moving away from her blood’s original design.

When she was back to normal, Kavala reached out and stroked her nephew’s feathered breast. She kissed him on the top of his head, and then headed back in to grab herself a light snack before she went down to the beach to get in a walk before dark.

[Gillar]

SKILLS Drawing 1 Auristics 5 Meditation 3 Morphing 5 Lore: Lore: Seeing the aura of a Symenestra releasing poison Lore: Exterior anatomy of a Symenestra Lore: How to milk a Symenestra of its venom Lore: Symenestra don’t eat solid food, only liquid Lore: Young Symenestra function better with already broken down foods or foods broken down with their own venom. Lore: Symenestra use their venom to break down solid food in order to eat it Lore: Symenestra Display at the Menagerie looks very prison-like. Lore: The female Symenestra in the Menagerie is an adoptive mother Lore: Baby Symenestra poison often kills the mother during birth Lore: Morphing: Experiencing the change of ones senses through morphing Lore: Morphing: Transforming her eyes into those of an owl Lore: Animal Husbandry and Morphing: Seeing how an owl sees Lore: Animal Husbandry: How an owl sees Lore: Animal Husbandry: The anatomy of an owl Lore: Medicine and Animal Husbandry: Removing a piece of metal from an owl’s eye Lore: Medicine and Animal Husbandry: Treating an owl’s infected eye Lore: Morphing: Experiencing light overgiving from morphing a snake tongue Lore: Animal Husbandry and Morphing: Smelling the air with a morphed snake tongue Lore: Morphing: Transforming her tongue into that of a snake Lore: Auristics: Becoming familiar with the aura of an orchard snake Lore: Animal Husbandry: Snake Anatomy Lore: Animal Husbandry: How a snake uses its tongue to track Lore: Medicine and Animal Husbandry: Assessing a medical situation involving an orchard snake Lore: Medicine and Animal Husbandry: Performing surgery on an orchard snake Lore: Medicine, Animal Husbandry and Healing: Healing a seriously wounded orchard snake Lore: Medicine, Animal Husbandry and Healing: Removing a stuffed toy from the belly of an orchard snake through surgery. Lore: Animal Husbandry: Anatomy of an eagle’s eye Lore: Morphing: Transforming her mouth into that of a Symenestra Lore: Morphing: Transforming her eyes into those of an Akontak Lore: Morphing: Seeing with the eyes of an Akontak Lore: Morphing: Transforming her eyes into those of a Kelvic eagle Lore: Morphing: Seeing with the eyes of a Kelvic eagle NOTES: A large amount of morphing in this thread and I love how you approached it. Each instance of morphing was tied to a different event and/or was somehow inspired by a completely unrelated situation. Kavala seems to be one who is always looking (at least in this case) for an opportunity to practice morphing. That is AWESOME! For me, a mage in Mizahar is an odd individual that is always borderline when it comes to some form of mental disorder. By that I don't mean insanity, just not all that stable to some degree. For Kavala, she is looking at otherwise mundane situations as having something magic-related. That to me creates the ever present conflict within a mage's mind (conscious and unconscious); do I keep pushing for the magic and gain greater knowledge and skill and risk overgiving or do I temper my pursuit and take is slow. You've done a great job in showing the evolution of a mage. Mages on Mizahar are all too often portrayed as overly-technical, pseudo-zombies (only focused on one thing with no thought toward anything else) who have no real depth; this is done from the onset of the characters. With Kavala you are giving her depth and definition in her magic which is better fitting for magic in Mizahar and is enjoyable to read.