#i cant believe im actually gonna math this out on how much i can spare for halloween while still having enough for bdays jfkdd | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

strigops · 7 years

Text

i wrote a Thing for a story i’ve been kicking around since february. i recently overhauled most of the characters and some of the plot so it makes a bit more sense, and decided to play around with their new characterization to get familiar with them. it’s a bare bones prototype, but i had fun with it so im posting it!

Warrah stands on the river bank beneath the bridge, peering into the water at a face that is not her face, trying to choke out words that, no matter how hard she tries, are not words. She panics and coughs and tries to scramble away, nearly ends up in the river for it as her legs struggle to work the way they used to, the way they should. She didn’t even go that far back, she recalls, only slipped back in time roughly a hundred years. She’d only just said goodbye to a man she’d met there, a young shifter named Pol. Warrah tries to think back to what had caused this, but suddenly everything is shifting and being rearranged again. She’s bigger than she was a second ago. Face down in the dust, normal face and hands, she notes, groping her head. Herself again. She feels chewed up and spat out, like the spirit of whatever form she’d just taken had mauled her. Warrah pushes herself up on hands and knees and glances behind her. Her footprints go from shoes, to meandering paw prints scuffling against themselves in the dirt, to the shoe-prints beneath her now. Her tongue catches up with her now, letting out what she hopes is a mostly human yell before heaving into the river.

Time travel be damned, this isn’t the kind of weird Warrah signed up for.

Warrah gets to her feet and heads home, not really sure what else to do. She considers sending a hopefully-not-as-panicked-as-she-feels text to her Patron, but thinks better of it. She doesn’t need her mentor seeing her like this, the always capable Warrah, blubbering into the phone because of something she doesn’t understand. She walks all the way home this time; she looks enough like a wild animal on her own right now, she doesn’t need the added attention of suddenly turning into some dog-thing on the bus. She’s jamming her hand into her pocket the second she gets through her door- oh god dammit wouldn’t that be perfect if she left her phone on a café table in 1908- and is relieved to already have several messages from Holly. She briefly thinks about calling, but decides against it. Texting is easier. Texting leads to less noticeable panic attack-induced crying. Warrah reads a few messages telling her to let Holly know when she gets back to the present before spilling her guts.

warrah

hey hol

hollyhock

Hey! You back?

Not that you could respond while you were still where wherever you wandered off to :P

warrah

yeah it was fun, up until the end

uh listen hol?

something weird happened and im still hoping this is some really godawful dream but you gotta believe me

and you cant tell helianthe

hollyhock

Woah, what happened? You ok??

warrah

ok is kinda subjective. mentally, no im a little freaked out. physically uh. also subjective.

im like ALIVE but something real fucked up happened when i tried to trip back

hollyhock

Are you hurt? Did you get messed up in a rift? I’m coming over

Warrah swears and before she can send a strongly worded “NOOOO”, Holly is tumbling through a black hole in the middle of her living room. Her lack of usual grace just makes Warrah feel bad for scaring her.

“I was really hoping you weren’t gonna do that,” Warrah sighs with a tired expression. Holly’s expression goes from concerned to peeved.

“The last time I didn’t do that when you freaked out, you stopped talking to anyone and disappeared for a week,” Holly is standing in her space now, annoyed but obviously still worried. Warrah groans, they could have the bottled up emotions talk (again) some other time.

“Ok, but this is, like, a thousand times worse,” and Warrah stops herself right there and kicks herself again at the way Holly’s face drops, “No, no, no, don’t get worried. Yet. Fuck, just don’t get freaked out, I’m FINE.”

Warrah sits down on her recliner, because she’s not fine, and she can feel the atmosphere around Holly crackling with so much uneasy energy that she’s afraid she’ll either explode or accidentally project a rift into space on her living room wall. She starts over. Holly continues not blinking.

“Everything was fine when I tripped back. It felt weird, because I kind of forced myself out of time, but it was all good until I got back to now. I promise I’m not actually hurt.” Holly’s gone soft again with the reassurance that Warrah is absolutely sure she’s not dying, and she uncrosses her arms.

“Then what happened,” she says quietly.

“I don’t know. I- I really don’t know, I just, one second I was walking home by the river, and the next I was on the ground and I wasn’t… me, everything got all weird and I wasn’t human-“ she stops abruptly again to stop herself from rambling, tries to stop the way her voice is quivering. For her part, Holly looks entirely confused.

“What do you mean ‘not human’?”

“I don’t know! I looked into the river and it wasn’t my face! It looked like a dog but different, I don’t know what the hell it was,” Holly dodges a hand that Warrah flings into the air. She’s yelling now, having given up any pretenses of being calm.

“Are you saying you… turned into an animal?”

“YES! I couldn’t even talk, like my mouth wasn’t right, it wouldn’t work, I don’t how what happened!”

Warrah flops back dramatically onto the recliner, hands clutching her face, and Holly spends a good several seconds trying to convince her pry them away and continue talking. Her attempts are futile, so she speaks instead.

“There’s no way you should be able to shift-“

“No shit,” Warrah’s muffled reply cuts her off.

“- but you play both sides of the fences as far as space/time is concerned. You obviously shifted, there’s no other explanation for that. You’ve got a lot power spread out over different fields,” Warrah’s removed her hands from her face in favor of gripping the sides of the recliner like she’s strangling them, and Holly doesn’t even want to suggest what she’s thinking.

“Maybe you’re a shifter too?”

“That’s literally impossible. Like, that’s literally never happened. Ever.”

“Shifting is weird. The rules change all the time, maybe you’re the first one.”

“Yeah, they change a lot, but you can’t have both, that can’t happen. You can’t double dip, it doesn’t work like that.”

“Well apparently it does work like that, because unless you had the most vivid hallucination anyone’s ever had, you turned into an animal RIGHT after time traveling back from nineteen-whenever!”

Warrah’s hands return to her face, and nothing else is said for several minutes because there really is nothing to be said. The powers don’t work like this, it’s one of the first things they’re taught. You may be born bending space and time or shapeshifting, but never both. Warrah is lost staring at the ceiling in a dissociative state that, at the moment, is a grand relief, until the prickling of Holly’s nervous energy starts making her ears itch. She looks at her pointedly, and Holly removes her knuckle from between her teeth and says the last thing Warrah wanted to hear.

“We need to see Helianthe.”

They’re both seated nervously on the recliner, Holly perched on one of the arms, staring at their phones.

“You text her,” Warrah says.

“What? No, you’re the one with the problem.”

“Ok, yeah, but… please text her.”

“Nope.”

“Hol, she is gonna skin me alive without even having to look at me if I bother her right now-”

“No! What makes you think she’s going to be nicer to me?”

“Because she actually likes you.”

They go back and forth a few more rounds, before Holly snatches Warrah’s phone off her lap and warps across the apartment through a small wormhole in a fraction of a second. She ignores Warrah’s cry of “Not faaaaaiir!” followed by panicked running as she tries to find her, quickly sending the text to Helianthe. Warrah hears the muffled whoosh of an outgoing message from the closet, and skids to a stop to yank open the door. Holly shoves the phone back into Warrah’s hands like it’s going to bite her, and teleports back to the living room. Warrah clumsily tries to find the message she’s sent.

“I’m gonna die. You killed me,” she says flatly.

“Oh no, I’m pretty sure that blame will be placed on me,” Warrah startles, whips around, and stumbles against the closet door just in time to see Helianthe appear from around the corner. She looks past her at Holly, who makes a “peace out” gesture and makes to warp the hell out of dodge. She’s intercepted by Helianthe in half of a second.

“You’re not getting out of this either, I know that text was from you,” she looms over Holly, who skips out of the way in appeasement.

“That’s quite the vague message, by the way. ‘Warrah needs your help’. Are you dead in a ditch or do you need help with your math homework?” She growls, and the air crackles. Clearly they had gotten her from something.

“In my defense, I wasn’t the one who worded it that way,” Warrah backs up as far as the wall will let her and ignores Holly’s betrayed expression.

“Stop throwing each other under the bus and get to the point,” Helianthe sighs.

Holly and Warrah spare a few glances. How were they possibly going to explain this?

“Spill it,” she growls, and Warrah thinks she feels the air around them shake a little.

“Ok, ok, um. Something… weird happened when I came back from my last trip,” Warrah starts.

“Weird?” Helianthe’s eyebrow quirks up.

“Something that shouldn’t have happened,” Warrah gains courage at Helianthe’s apparent interest, “I got back and was walking home and. Uh. I think I shifted?”

“What,” Helianthe says.

“I turned into a dog. I think. Dog-thing,” Warrah blurts out. Helianthe’s eyes narrow and she stares at her.

“What the hell kind of old-timey drugs did you get into back there?” she huffs a laugh without smiling.

“Wha- Nothing!” Warrah sputters indignantly “I fucking shifted! It happened!”

“That is literally impossible.”

“That’s what I said!”

“No, that cannot happen. You know that.” Helianthe gives her a weird look.

“Alright, fine, what’s gonna convince you? Do I need to go get a drug test? Breathalyzer?” Warrah stops waving her hands around when she remembers the ground by the river.

“Wait,” she says, “When I shifted, when I turned back I looked and there were tracks. Mine, then not mine, then mine again. I bet they’re still there.”

Helianthe just looks at her, and Warrah can hear what she’s probably thinking, “how dare you drag me all over town in the middle of the night, what a complete waste of energy, you wasted dumbass”, but Warrah just crosses her arms and stands her ground. Helianthe knows what’s expected of her. Caves. She owes it to one of her best students.

“There better be something there,” she sighs, and tells her to lead the way.

“I don’t think I can ‘port that far,” Warrah confesses. Holly looks up the address, and in the next second is dragging her by the hand through her own portal. Warrah flops into her back as they exit, head swimming, distantly aware of Helianthe’s offhanded praising of Holly’s portal work.

Warrah wobbles over to the bridge, inner ear screaming, and starts swaying for another reason once she gets to the bank. There are the footprints. Hers, then not hers. Helianthe appears beside her, eyebrows shooting into her hairline.

“Well, those certainly are shifter prints alright,” she doesn’t sound one hundred percent convinced, but she’s getting there and Warrah isn’t going to let up.

Warrah stomps one foot on the ground, stamping the impression of her shoe into the dust. She removes her foot and looks up at Helianthe almost in a pout.

“Well,” Helianthe draws out “That’s the same shoe. And the same size of shoe. And the tracks…” She looks back, walks a few yards to see the tracks begin from nowhere. Either they’d dropped out of the sky, or they belonged to a time tripper ‘porting back to her own time. She lets out a frustrated hum, looking back at the animal tracks.

“Say these are yours,” she says “And this did happen. Say you suddenly shifted out of the blue. Never mind that is absolutely not supposed to happen, say these are yours. Shifters are supposed to be able to shift at will, even when their abilities first appear to them.”

Warrah doesn’t like the implications of where this is going.

“If you did shift, you can do it again. So, do it again.”

“What! I don’t know how, I don’t even know how I did it the first time!” Warrah yells in confusion.

“You can do it, if you did it once it won’t be too hard. I’m no shifter Master, but just listen; think about what if felt like when it happened. Just focus on that, your body will know what to do from there.”

Warrah doesn’t like the idea of her body doing anything unsupervised. But she listens anyway. At first, she tries to ignore the sick feeling from before, but then guesses that that was part of it too. She tries to think back, and she wonders if this is what having a flashback feels like, it’s so much different than whipping through time. She focuses and focuses, even when she really starts to feel not-so-good again, and doesn’t stop until she hears Holly’s boots scuffling back, away from her, and Helianthe’s exclamation of “Jesus!” as she steps back. Warrah opens her eyes, and she’s closer to the ground than she remembered. Oh god, she thinks, I was closer to the ground before. She looks down at her feet, now paws, and yelps in a voice that scares her more than her appearance does. She panics and looks up at her mentor again, desperate for any instruction.

“I didn’t think that was actually going to happen,” Helianthe breathes out. Holly looks frozen behind her, speechless. Warrah lets out another panicky noise akin to a cat being stepped on, and Helianthe straightens herself out.

“Alright, don’t panic. Think about yourself now. Just do what you did before, only the other way around, ok?”

Warrah does as she says, and the process of turning back is so much less traumatic, she thinks, flopping into the dirt for the second time that night. She lets out a weird whining noise that reminds her too much of The Animal, and she doesn’t realize how long she’s been laying there, no one speaking, until Holly comes over to peel her off the ground. She lets her haul her up, and thinks about throwing up in the river again. She’s pretty sure she’s crying in front of her near-omnipotent mentor, but she also doesn’t think she cares anymore. Helianthe just tries to mask her shock and sighs.

“Ok. That did happen,” she says, “And… don’t freak out any more than you already are, but you have more than one rule to worry about breaking.”

Warrah isn’t sure if she even has the ability to be shocked anymore. Why the hell not, she thinks.

“You didn’t turn into a dog,” Holly says slowly.

“That was a thylacine,” Helianthe says.

Warrah’s pretty sure she blacks out for a second. She isn’t sure if it’s the physical or mental shock, but there are several seconds of conversation she mostly doesn’t remember, but the snippets she does catch are somewhere along the lines of “this can’t happen”, “supposed to be dead“, and “affront to nature”. She gets the idea, she knows the rules of shifters without being one. Though, she laughs humorlessly in her head, that seems to have changed.

She comes back to the present and Helianthe is still ranting, Holly trying to help her puzzle it out while still holding Warrah up.

“This isn’t right, I have to talk to Diana,” Helianthe whispers quietly, and THAT gets Warrah’s attention.

Master Shapeshifter Diana, oldest Patron aside from the original “deities”. She knows that Helianthe is her acquaintance, all the Patrons know each other, but the thought of Warrah’s name coming up in front of someone so insanely important makes her want to dissolve into the ground.

“Uh, can you not,” Warrah says a little distantly, still on the verge of leaving this plane of existence to wherever her brain thinks it’s safer.

“No, I need to speak with her. Holly, take Warrah home, I need to wrap some things up before we figure this out.”

Helianthe disappears into a disk of swirling black, leaving them to sort that out themselves. Warrah slides her feet along the dirt until she’s sitting, bringing Holly down with her.

“I need to sleep,” Warrah says plainly.

Holly takes Warrah back to her dorm, ‘ports her in so no one sees how much of a mess she is (and Warrah does throw up this time, the bodily confusion of flinging yourself through a wormhole finally pushing her over the edge). Holly’s room is dimly lit and all star motifs and shades of black and purple, and Warrah climbs into the nest of blankets under her bed. There’s still a bag of cheese curls under there from the last time she was over. Holly is obviously trying not to think about what just happened too hard, and forgoes sleep for continuing to work diligently on some comic project. Warrah falls asleep to the sounds of her pen scraping against paper, hand still shoved in the bag of cheese curls.

If she’s going to meet another god, she doesn’t care if it’s with cheese dust all over her sleeve. The world can take or leave her, time traveling and shifting and bad snacking habits or nothing.

#this is all over the damn place but im still in the process of redoing the plot so #also fun fact warrah was originally the antagonist and making her more likable and sympathetic is Hard #also also: names are weird cause they're not their actual names #THIS IS SO BAD but im having fun with this dumb cliche story

0 notes