TWLA 16

Willing himself out of the shelter orb, Jeremy found himself standing on drying mud once more. Bits and places were showing the resilience of the grassy rolling hills of the surrounding area. Tufts of green sprung up to shake off caked brown with the help of a light breeze. Opening a slit in the mouth portion of the suit, he could smell a mild tang of saltiness in the air that hinted at future struggles of surrounding plant life to overcome and thrive again.

Scanning around for dangers or possible stragglers, Blue Jay was interrupted by a jarring trumpet-like sound in the near distance. Scrabbling to the top of a hill, he cast a small cantrip into a circle made by his index and thumb and looked through it. A dump truck sized monster that looked vaguely like an elephant through distorted and alien features was being surrounded and attacked by a pack of insectile dogs.

On an instinctual level, he sensed that the trumpeting was a desperate cry for help. It was holding its own for the moment but was growing fatigued. The assailants were simply too agile and coordinated for the monster to deal with.

Feeling an impulse too difficult to put an easy name to, he sprinted off to help. On one level, it was an opportunity to cut loose and exercise his new prowess away from intelligent eyes that could cause him problems. Individually, the insect dogs were fast but manageable. And, if push came to shove, he could at least outrun the monster elephant long enough to call for help, should it turn on him after the fact.

On the way, he tried to call on his training. "The soul is a forge."

Half focused inward, he sifted through the small handful of patterns he had mastered enough to temporarily summon out. The image of a weapon vaguely similar to a chunky handgun formed in his mind's eye as he filled it in with spirit and eldritch essence. The first time manifesting his creation into the corruption filled air, failed.

A bit of advice to allow the world's 'laws' to have their say echoed through his consciousness. On the second attempt he tried to relax the pattern so that the world around him wouldn't resist the manifestation but he relaxed it too much. As the twisted environment stamped the manifestation in its own image, he ended up wasting the essence. What emerged was warped and unusable.

He stopped and took a deep breath. With a great deal more inward focus, Jeremy tried to find the delicate balance between the pattern that worked and the manifestation that the world wouldn't destroy with oppressive passive resistance. What appeared was still alien and warped but usable.

Taking off at full sprint again, he approached close enough to see that the monster elephant was on its last legs. An insect dog had latched onto an ever growing wound in the monster's trunk as another was biting and clawing its way to the creature's throat for a final crushing bite. Five more slightly timid insect dogs milled around the thrashing monster, occasionally darting in and out for a quick nip to leg and haunch.

Taking aim at the one going for the creature's throat, he muttered "Lucky Strike."

The image of a four leaf clover on the bone/tumor gun, flashed in a sickly green glow as he pulled the tooth trigger. A vaguely bullet shaped molar propelled itself out while a ghostly image of a goat eye appeared at the end of the barrel, looking at the insect dog the molar bullet was intended to hit. Jeremy was a bit speechless at just how different the end result had been to the clean and nifty image he had built in the symbolic soul forge.

Instead of homing in on the heart of the target, as it should, it shot into the insect dog's mouth, replacing one of its teeth. Aside from a surprised yelp of pain, it hadn't done much, at least at first. Jeremy was starting to wonder if he'd made a mistake.

Two of the pack detached from their harassment to run towards the new threat. In a growing panic, he pulled the trigger while muttering, "Stunning revelation."

Mental fingers crossed, he was relieved to see a completely normal looking bullet discharge along with a cyan glow from the dragon image on the other side of the freaky gun. That relief was replaced by a heart thumping scare when the bullet exploded before reaching it's intended destination. With a deafening crack, spiderweb fingers of white electric discharge spread across the ground towards the two insect dogs rushing towards him.

The two creatures instantly became smoking char as every monster on the scene looked his direction. The moment of stunned silence was interrupted by the 'retoothed' dog dropping to the ground. Its violent convulsions ended nearly as fast as they started. Its carapace skull burst in a spray of gore to reveal a malformed clover unfurling from its emptied head.

Monster elephant and dogs alike backed away from it warily as it opened to reveal a demonic goat's eye at its center. The wariness lasted all of two breaths. In a puff of vile, nausea inducing smoke, the brain sprouting clover dissolved and dispersed into the air.

Nervously and with more than a hint of reluctance, he pulled the trigger a third time. "Trick shot."

His perception blurred. Drawing on the small amount of void power he had stored, instead of shooting a bullet influenced by the dark glow of a skull image under the pommel, the gun had shot him. He was roughly yanked through a small distortion in front of the gun and into the backside of the dog on the monster elephant's trunk at high speeds.

Helmet and canine rear connected with a sickening crack. Absorbing the recoil, the helmet shattered like ballistic ceramics. Both insect dog and human rolled with one another to a stop a few feet away.

With ruined hid quarters and a broken spine, the pitiful creature low crawled with two weakened front paws for a bit before blood loss and pain caused it to pass out. Jeremy sat up dizzily as the reinvigorated elephant-like creature 'stomp scared' off the remaining pack. Under the effect of losing their pack alpha, beta dying and two pack mates dead, the rest fled from the angry monster's bellowing tantrum.

That fit ended with a fire hose spray that sent them sprawling. The distortion that Jeremy had been spit out of, grew in size for a mere moment, shooting salty and clean essence rich water onto them before it closed. Both elephant monster and Blue Jay looked at each other in wary shock.

Under the absurdity of it all, Jeremy laughed. The monster elephant twitched nervously and then let out a trumpeting blow from its rapidly mending trunk. It took a moment for the startled Blue Jay to realize that it had been a returned, triumphant sound of joy from the creature.

Taking advantage of the situation, Jeremy reached out a touch of his fixing power towards the creature. Redness retreated from it's main set of eyes under the amplifying effect of the 'clean' salt water. In dim understanding, the creature swallowed down the two charred and one still barely alive insect dog, then settled itself down closer to Blue Jay, inviting more of the 'feel good'.

Muttering to himself, he said, "Are they a nixed? I haven't been around long enough to tell the difference. Well, I guess there's only one way to find out."

He didn't want to startle and possibly get attacked by the creature by delving senses past the surface of it's aura envelope but he could vaguely feel a warped inner nature underneath. That was good enough for Jeremy. He doubted anything born native would seem anything other than uniformly weird inside.

Bolstered by the rapidly polluting water, he drew up the cleanest of it and went to 'fixing'. He felt strong resistance in trying to establish the assumed human pattern underneath corruption twisted flesh. Without some outside aid, he'd run out of material to work with and put himself in a bad way before he could reestablish some humanity.

"Maybe they've been a nixed for too long or maybe they've been twisted so much that the humanity was kind of lost. Well, there's still some lingering echoes of Hiidan imprint and Theo inside me I could sacrifice to establish a frame with. If I did that, they wouldn't be who they once were anymore. But, at this rate, I won't be able to pull them back anyway.

"A kind of people's better than no kind of people, right? I needed to purge that stuff out anyway and it would grant them most of the stuff needed to be a people thinking person. They might even get a little magic knowledge or something."

Delving deeper, he could feel a moment of inner retaliation from the creature until it saw what he was doing. As simple minded as They seemed to be, They realized he was trying to give Them a 'people' pattern inside. A moment of uncertainty was followed by an excited kind of happiness. In Jeremy's mind, that meant there must have been something of the original person still left within that wanted to be human again.

With the lingering remnants of Theo and Hiidan sacrificed to the work, he could feel a spiritual semblance forming but still no physical one. With a rudimentary form of thought sharing, Jeremy tried to get the creature to recall what They looked like. It couldn't remember ever looking like a people but it did have a sack of bone pieces it had been trying to find a place to put.

Having fallen out of a disappearing armor plate grown from the effects of twisting, where the creature had wedged it, the rotting sack displayed a small collection of gnawed on and splintered people bones. Hidden within that bone was a human pattern Jeremy's magic could latch onto and the creature was more than happy to accept that pattern.

"Did the original person lose a leg or something? Well, whatever. This place is usually all to happy to fill in missing pieces with something... Whether a person wants those somethings or not..."

The vague pattern of a somewhat short and thin Southeast Asian boy buckled and warped as Blue Jay tried to set it. His fixing power didn't wholly accept that what he was doing was 'right' but he was convinced enough that it mostly cooperated. In an act of supernatural compromise, the form grew much larger and somewhat inhuman in build and girth.

Pushing as hard as he could, Jeremy strained to reign in the warping and make the most of what was available. Without the supplied assistance of Hiidan and Theo's echoing impressions to provide strong frame at the most important core of things, the task would have been impossible. As it was, the task proved almost more than he could handle, even with the pacified essences made available by the dimensional spill of 'mirror world' water.

Collapsing back into the mud, Jeremy huffed and puffed as he drew in the last bit of relatively clean essence to keep from sucking in corruption filled versions. As empty as he felt, he wouldn't have been able to stop some intake otherwise. He didn't mind having overly dark eyes with overly bright white parts but didn't particularly care for the snowy/sooty static dots that floated in them when he reached first threshold.

As he watched the sturdy and hearty young man amble around a little unsteadily, both of them had nearly matching faces of smiling accomplishment. Although the guy was a little too much in a lot of different areas, the overall effect put him well within the range of human. And if he was a little too intimidating to be described as handsome, he certainly could be called impressive.

While Blue Jay admired his exhausting handiwork, there was a mild ripple of dimensional disturbance close to him. The 'new' guy looked not too far past him and smiled. Making his gradually more steady way towards where he was looking, the 'impressive' young man flailed a hand in slight in coordination.

"Tasty snack boy! Do you remember me?"

Wearily, Jeremy tried to get his feet back under him and look too. Strained and torn muscles, tendons and compacted vertebrae in his neck had healed while he worked but they were still stiff.

"Um... not really?" Caesar's voice said.

Suddenly the deep bronze toned and sturdy young man's gaze turned tense. "I was following snack boy because he was a friend of my two leg walking family and I remembered that he's nice. I'm not trying to find new territory, 'Branch Head' smelling man."

A snort answered the sturdy guy as two strong and calloused hands lifted Jeremy out of the mud.

King said, "These people ARE my territory... my family, now."

"I lost my strange family. I wanted to see if snack boy wanted to be a part of my family," the sturdy guy said before sounding uncertain. "But, I can walk on two legs now. So, can I be a part of your family? You're older and stronger than me. That would be good."

The tyrant sneered and said, "You tried to take my territory from me, Thunder Foot. How long would it be before you challenged me again?"

With a look on his face like a light bulb clicked on in his head, Caesar said, "Oh my god! Are you Peanut!?"

The sturdy young man's face brightened back up. "Yes! That's the sound you would make when you wanted my attention. You do remember me!"

The grape vine crowned guy turned to King and said, "Peanut was an adolescent elephant the operators sent with Shins... Uh, a mahout's son from Thailand. We exchanged pointers a lot before... well, you know how things are."

Looking back at the sturdy guy with an eager but slightly shy appraisal, Caesar added, "How did you get a human form, Peanut? Looks... good, by the way."

The sturdy guy looked a bit confused on that and turned to stare questioningly at Jeremy. It didn't take long for three other sets of eyes to join them.

"I-I did what, now?! Wait, you weren't a nixed? I thought he was a human to begin with. He had a twisted inner nature like you guys did. No wonder it was so hard. If I had known you were an elephant to begin with, I wouldn't have been able to do it. My power wouldn't have let me. Barely did anyway."

With an intense and hopeful look, Rainmaker asked, "Could you do it again?"

Jeremy shook his head. "Unless they actually had a human origin, no. There was special reasons I could pull it off this time and... I'm thinking there was some serious luck involved... Oh god! That clover! I could do it because of that nasty clover!

"I thought you were a nixed and wanted to help you 'turn back human'. Seems like you wanted to as well. That weird, demonic clover messed with chance or something."

Both he and Peanut looked towards the busted skull corpse.

King said, "Less than a short time's cool off and all this crazy sh*t happened!? What exactly happened out here?"

While Jeremy gave king the breakdown, Caesar chatted happily with Peanut. Over to the side, Rainmaker patiently waited with burning eyes to ask Blue Jay a few questions of her own.