Valentine
patreon
Impish Intentions - Kathalia
🕑 Added 2021-02-09 00:52:24 +0000 UTCLast month, I was inspired by a wonderful fanart series that the ever-talented https://www.deviantart.com/ivanksmw drew of the Kroashent cast, transforming them from heroes into mischievous imp-like gargoul: https://www.deviantart.com/ivanksmw/art/Fanart-Kroashent-Imps-Transformation-831484923 . I've been wanting to try my hand at a similar sequence and finally had a chance last month. These were a lot of fun to work on, so I hope you enjoy them!
-------------------
Bottles clinked across the flagstones as the door pushed them aside. The wood was heavy from weeks of frequent rain pummeling against it, the alcehmical treatments meant to prevent such damage having been clearly neglected for much longer than the current cycle of storms. Kathalia peered inside the darkened lab, her eyes quickly adjusting to the dim light. The tower seemed to sway uncomfortably in the winds, and Kathalia swore that some of the empty bottles littering the floor moved of their own accord, as if the whole stone precipice was tilting and about to collapse. Though her eyes needed no additional light to make out the room in clear detail, Kathalia turned up the glow-orb suspended in the center of the room. The bluish-white light filled the room, revealing much of what she had expected.
Tour Trévézel was an unstable looking spire of stone buttresses, wooden walkways and metal rods, all meant to prop up the clearly decrepit structure overlooking the university island of Enez-Naoned. According to Marie, it had been built by some eccentric Arkanist whose name Kathalia had never bothered to remember. Kathalia was of the opinion that it was built by some overambitious gargoul, and the fact that the Alptraum had instantly taken a liking to it only served to confirm her suspicions that the tower had never been meant for Bediz to access, full of narrow openings between the scaffholding and places where there was no walkway, only open roof. Still, the university, already staffed by madmen and crackpots as far as she was concerned, had probably made the correct choice in sequestering the deranged little gremlin far away from any other part of the campus.
Alptraum's lab was as much in disarray as the tower that housed it. Bottles and scraps of bronze littered the floor and shelves. Alchemical mixtures, started and then clearly forgotten, bubbled over into a frothing mess. Books and loose notes were scatted everywhere from the floor to the rafters with no particular order to them. The amount of reading that the Gargoul seemed to do somewhat astounded her to the point that she expressed surprise that imps could read, earning her a withering stare and surreptitious kick from Gwae earlier. The small teal inventor was no where to be seen. One note, posted at her eye level, had clearly been left for her.
"Gone to catch a duck." Was all it said. Kathalia decided she would rather not delve into what that entailed and looked around the room. She didn't want to make the climb again and decided to wait. Quickly growing bored, she began to wander around the room, observing the unfinished gadgets and abandoned experiments. One caught her eye, a crystal orb that resembled a glow-orb, but instead of a ball of light within, the orb seemed to contain a swirling vortex of clouds and lightning, the colours ever-shifting as they rolled across the crystal surface. A small note, written in Alptraum's tiny hand, was pinned to the side.
"Beachtung! Nicht Tasten! Instabile magische Energie! Lass das Gebäck auf dem Tisch!"
"That's not much help either." she muttered. "Let's just assume it says 'Crazy imp stuff, do not touch' and leave it be. She moved towards the table.
The thunder cracked as the tower shuddered, causing Kathalia to instinctively grab for a post to keep upright. The crystal ball rolled off the table with a loud crack and the energy stored within exploded outwards into the small room. Kathalia threw up her arms to shield her face as she was thrown backwards.
She regained her senses in a pile of books, having smashed directly into the shelf and causing them all to fall down to the floor with her. She blinked, dazed, and stared up at the swirling cloud above her, now a slow moving wheel of cracking energy. It towered above her. She pushed herself upwards, her clothing, blackened from the burst, slipping off of her body. She made an instinctive grab for her shirt, but stopped suddenly, staring at the green claw at the end of her hand. She looked down in confusion and surprise at her tiny body, all the same green hue. "Wait? I'm a gargoul?!" she squeaked in surprised and frustration. "Mallozh Alptraum! I knew I drew the short straw with this errand." she muttered, kicking off her now massive boot, giving a wiggle to the three clawlike digits on her tiny foot. Kathalia turned to a mirrored surface, looking at her distorted image in the round pot. Sheepishly, she picked up her tail, tipped with a spearlike point, and held it awkwardly in her claws as she leaned into to inspect the horns poking out of her hair. She opened her mouth wide, inspecting her jagged teeth. She caught herself in an involutary smile as she thought about paying back Alptraum's negligence with a good prank. She pushed back from the pot, surprised that she was now a few centimetres above the ground. She looked at her spread wings in confusion and mild annoyance.
"If I can just float, why do we have wings?" She mused to herself, pushing the wings to rise in the air and cross the room, quickly satisfying her own curiosity. The storm-orb, as she had decided to call it continued to emit a constant stream of coloured clouds, rippling with electrical power, which swirled at the top of the room before disappating.
"Hmm. Seems to be some sort of... bottled wyldstorm?" she turned the crystal in her claws, her new features warping and distorting in the curved crystal. "I didn't know you could do that... "I could wait for that demented little gremlin to get back from her duck hunt, whatever that is about." Kathalia was somewhat relieved that, for all the other changes, what went on in the mind of the mad inventor was still something she had no insight into.
"Alright!" she clapped her hands together with enthousiasm. "So, I need to seal the storm-orb, grab my clothes, and go find Gwae. She'll figure out how to reverse this interesting little predicament... Orb, clothes, Gwae." she recited her checklist aloud.
"Dagda's cauldron, what did ye doooo?" Kathalia found it hard not to giggle with her unconvincing impression of the sidhe, adding a judgemental draw to the exxagerated accent. "Well, my dear Dame Dethemir, that little nightmare creature left an unsecured Wyldwstorm on her side table in this death-trap of a tower. It cracked and here I am...'Ye were actin' the maggot again and touched somethin' ye shouldn't 'ave, were'nt ye?!' No, no, cross my wings, it wasn't my fault. 'So ye grabbed a dangerous magical artifact and flew here in the nip?' No, I put on clo..." She stopped, looking at the smoking pile of cloth on the ground and then at the orb, a mischevious grin crossing her face in the reflection. That would be a much more amusing reaction. "Hmm. This whole thing has got to be very rare from an arkane standpoint... I wonder if I can repeat the results..."
To be continued....
-----------------------------------
Learn more about the World of Kroashent here: https://www.worldanvil.com/w/alvez-kroashent
Learn about Kathalia's home city of Naoned, where the story takes place here: https://www.worldanvil.com/w/Alvez-kroashent/a/naoned-282B29-article?preview=true
Learn more about the Gargoul here: https://www.worldanvil.com/w/alvez-kroashent/a/gargoul-article?preview=true
Kroashent on Discord: discord.gg/MZjc3Gg
