//------------------------------// // Corviboviny // Story: Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me // by DataPacRat //------------------------------// No, having already been turned from a two-hundred-pound human into an eight-hundred pound cow didn't adequately prepare me for getting turned into a two-pound raven. No, the diamond dogs who slept next to me didn't try to eat me before I started squawking in pulse-code. Yes, we actually did have a previously-established set of procedures for what to do if any of us suffered a transformation into a random species, with a sublist for being turned into something that couldn't talk. There was even an actual, physical checklist, amongst the papers I'd extracted from the Dairy. (After I'd noticed that the local laws of physics seemed to include narrativium, I'd tried to think of every hackneyed plot and overused cliche I could think of, and what the sanest things to do in any such situation would be. I had checklists for if everyone started singing and couldn't stop, if we found a genie's lamp or other supposed generic wish-granting device, if one of us claimed to be living the same day repeatedly, and if an evil duplicate from another dimension wandered by.) I was standing in the middle of the big table in the bridge, with just about everyone who wasn't on their sleep shift looking at me, while I looked at myself, experimented with my range of wing and leg motion, tugged at my feathers with my beak, tried pulling on my skin, tried shaping my mouth and throat to make anything like sensible sounds, tried willing myself to change shape again, and went through the whole checklist of things any of us had come up with to do upon finding oneself unexpectedly transformed into a new shape. After a while of that, I took a break to deal with some necessities. Perched on a side-table, I was teaching myself how to peck at some grains Amethyst fed me, when Blanche wandered up the stairs and joined the rest of us. She announced, "There's no sign of that cloak anywhere I've looked. Unless someone threw it overboard, or it's hiding inside a crate that's been nailed-shut... I think you may still be wearing it." I had the oddest urge to swear at that - most likely just because I couldn't. Had the regent switched cloaks on me? Had he kept silent about what else it could do? Had he simply not known it could do anything else? While the others traded ideas and opinions, I found myself annoyed that contributing anything more than 'one squawk for yes, two for no' took up so much time and effort that it usually wasn't worth it. As I thought about that, I decided that what made me most unhappy was that, as a bird, I couldn't safely cuddle up with the pups - and I especially couldn't feed them- In the blink of an eye, I stood in front of everyone, once again shaped as a cow, wearing both cloak and brooch. In about two seconds, I was a cow lying atop the shattered remains of a side-table, and I was struggling to pull off the adornments. After some general shouting and amusement, Amethyst helped me take them off. I tried picking up some of the larger pieces of wood, but was having trouble even with that, until I realized the problem - I wasn't able to hold anything with my hooves. I thought for a few moments about the opals I'd swallowed, and tried drawing on their power as I murmured a quiet "Fiat lux", but there wasn't even a glimmer of light. My body was completely drained of magic. Getting unexpectedly turned into a raven was bad enough on its own; risking brain damage from long-term insufficiency of magic was an outright physical danger. Back in Equestria, I'd learned of two ways to deal with that - long-term standing around in the magical field Equestria was suffused in, or getting my brain zapped with a circle of bovines touching horns. But since then, I'd learned that unicorns weren't the only species who could charge up gems with magic - and there weren't that many who knew that gems could be charged with unfocused magic at all. I was reasonably sure that even the Princesses hadn't known that trick before they'd received the letter from that probably-human sky-pirate. So, I guessed that there might be tricks to moving magical power around that nobody else had figured out yet, and since it was dangerous to leave my body's magical reserves so low - not to mention annoying being clumsier with my hooves now than I'd been with my bird-claws - it would be worthwhile to see if one or another quick trick could re-power me. So we carefully packed up the cloak and brooch, locking them away in the captain's document safe; and Micro and I went down to the lab to try a few things. After a whole bunch of simpler things that didn't work, we did find one rather kludgy approach that seemed to have some promise. Micro filled up a whole bunch of gems just short of cracking, we pressed them against each other in a line; I pushed my horns against the ones on the ends, and concentrated on that odd mental effort I'd used to slowly fill gems with magical power myself. However that usually worked, doing things that way, it worked in reverse - some of that magical power leaked out of the gems and into me. Not much, but enough, it seemed, to keep my brain in good working order, and let me pick things up with my hooves again. For a while, anyway. I'd have to give up recharging gems myself, outside of emergencies; and even then, I might only have enough charge to last for a few days... Well, on the bright side, I could say that I'd been in a worse situation. In fact, I could probably say that for pretty much anything I was likely to encounter that didn't simply kill me outright. Once again back on the bridge, this time with me as a cow again, my burned skin slathered in soothing ointment, and the pups latched on and feeding away. "To get the idea out of the way," I said, "does anyone think we should go back and find the regent, and ask him certain pointed questions?" "You said you truth-zapped him?", asked Blanche. "Yep." "Then would we be able to get anything out of him you didn't, already?" "We don't know if he even has anything to give," I said. "These dragons seem to be resistant to magic - maybe whatever affected me, just bounced off of him and he never knew about it. I kind of got the impression that the cloak and brooch's last owner didn't live long after he got a hold of them." Red shook her head. "Low odds of anything useful, and spend at least a couple of days on it? I'd rather we kept going forward, looking for new magic." We took a few minutes to make sure we weren't missing any important aspects, and when we were done, had a show of hooves - unanimous to leave the regent behind. "Welp," I said, "while we're on our way to the next country - or land, or yarldom, or whatever we want to call it - I'm going to see if I can figure out any good tests to make on our new acquisitions. They're no Star Swords, but if we're lucky, will provide enough info to make the whole trip worthwhile. One piece of good news - I was going through my notes, and the storyteller from the bear village mentioned something that may be a clue - somebody called 'The Lady' is supposed to own a falcon-feathered cloak that can turn people into falcons, and something he called a Glowing-Ornament, no details given, either of both of which she's been said to loan to her family. A raven's not a falcon, but it's still a close enough parallel to ask about." Micro asked, thoughtfully, "So what was it actually like, being a bird of whatever sort?" I considered a moment, before answering, "I felt very, very small - and fragile. Any one of you could have squashed me flat and barely noticed. If I knew how to fly, well, I used to try to imagine what it would be like to fly around as a bat, and maybe that'd be worth it... but without that, it was mostly just an inconvenience." Red asked, slyly, "By the way - were you a girl bird or a boy bird?" "How should I know?" The rest of the afternoon, Micro and I confabbed about what sorts of tests we could try making. Some based on what the regent had told us, some assuming he'd managed to lie through the truth-spell (dragons being resistant to magic and all). Some destructive, some not; some ethical, some not; some silly, some not; some which we actually had the resources aboard the Mikoyan to do, most not. We carefully took the cloak and brooch out of the safe, and did some initial poking and prodding at it - looking at them under Micro's microscope, that sort of thing. Then, when evening came, just as carefully, we rolled it back up and locked it in Red's safe again. The next morning I woke up as a raven again. This raised a few eyebrows, but nobody seemed really surprised. Recalling what had happened the other day, I focused my imagination on how the pups would be wanting their breakfast soon... ... and nothing happened. With a bit of pulse-code cawing, I asked Amethyst to take me to Red, and asked Red to check the safe - it was locked up just as tight as when we sealed the cloak in, and, upon being opened, the cloak and brooch were as missing as if they'd never been put in there. Since it seemed like this might be a regular occurrence, I spent the morning trying to take flying lessons from Blanche and Armina. By lunchtime, I'd progressed to the point where I could frantically wave my wings hard enough to push down enough air to let me jump from the floor to a tabletop - not exactly dignified, but enough that I could hop around the ship with a reasonable chance of being able to avoid getting stepped on. On the other wing, Blanche seemed more than happy to let me ride around on her, and once I got the hang of staying balanced, I didn't really mind it, either. When she saw me, Red raised an eyebrow, and with my new wings, I was able to shrug much more expressively than I'd been able to as a cow. She snorted and shook her head, and said, "We're going to stop at the next few villages, and see if we can find out more about that Lady. I don't really care if you're a cow, crow, or caterpillar - but if you can't control it, I'm going to sideline you from doing anything dangerous... or even getting off the ship. You look just like any other black bird, and even if nothing eats you, we could lose track of you." That afternoon, while some of the crew chatted up the local villagers, I spent trying to figure out my voice. I knew crows were supposed to be smart, and some crow-like birds, like magpies, were supposed to be close to parrots in their vocal range. But I had to work out how to generate each and every phoneme I managed to express from scratch - and even getting out a simple 'hi' was a miracle when I had to consciously shape my vocal tract, and making any significant vocalizations involved exercises close to Tuvan throat-singing. At least as a cow I'd had lips and teeth. By evening, I'd gotten to the point where I could say more than Amethyst, at least a syllable at a time; but was still less eloquent than, say, Stephen Hawking. When Micro came by, I was, with much concentration, able to squawk out, in broken, inhuman syllables, "Hhha-aye. Mye. Ka. Ro." And after that effort, I had to dunk my beak in the bowl of water I'd asked for, to soothe my throat. "Progress, I see," she said. "If you've started talking - can you use your wands yet?" I tilted my head and blinked; I hadn't even thought of that. I opened a wing to point to her sleep-wand, holstered. "Guh. Ivvvv." "Give it to you?" I nodded, and cawed a single time for 'yes'. She dropped it on the workbench in front of me, and I hopped over to it - then onto it, clutching the shaft with one claw and the gem with the other. I thought my way through the syllables' movements, but before I did, Micro said, "Er - let me just lie down comfortably, first, in case you can do it." "Dddddoh. Meee. Rraaayy," is roughly what my first attempt sounded like. I repeated it again and again, getting practice with the syllables, until I could string the whole thing together in a reasonable time, and getting closer to the sounds a pony might make. After a while, Micro said, "Hold on. That last one sounded pretty good to me. Let me see the wand?" I hopped off, she picked it up, and gave a quick sing-song, "Do-mi-re." I tilted my head a few times, still quite awake. "Well, there's the problem - it's out of power. I'll have to have Captain Red ding me - I could have sworn I recharged it after the last practice session. Let me get a different one for you." She dug into the experimental stores, retrieving a fresh sleep-wand. "Here - the log says this one should be fully charged - and you can see the glimmer in the gem." She set that one down, and I hopped on, opened my beak - and Micro interrupted. "Hold on." She leaned closer to me and, as I got an excellent view of her nostrils, she squinted. "It just stopped glowing." With a bit of squawking on my part and rather more legwork on hers, we quickly determined that any magically-charged gem I touched, immediately ceased to have a charge. Micro was able to refill them as easily as ever - but as soon as I grabbed one with a claw or beak, or pressed my feathers firmly against it, it became as magically empty as if she'd never made the effort. "Well," mused Micro, "let's see. When you turned back into a cow, you didn't have any magic. Then you refilled, and when you woke up, you'd changed into a bird. And couldn't change back. Now, I'm going to guess that you're sucking in whatever magic you touch - or, possibly, not you, strictly speaking, but perhaps the cloak itself used up all its magic to change you, and didn't have enough to change you back. When's the last time you tried?" I hadn't, since we'd started fiddling around with the gems. So I turned my thoughts to being a cow, and how I'd be much more useful and productive by being able to talk and feed the pups and pick up things with hooves again... ... and my suddenly massive body tumbled off the side of the workbench and into Micro. Once we'd detangled ourselves from each other, I tried picking up the gem we'd just been fiddling with - with no success. I sighed, and commented, "Well - if I go without magic for too long, I'll get brain damage. If I keep myself magically healthy - I'm probably going to keep on waking up with feathers. Annoying and inconvenient - but now that we know what it takes to get me back, something we can deal with. But there's still room for improvement, if we can figure out how. Hm... say, since this started after the regent gave the cloak to me - what would happen if I tried giving it to somepony else?" "Somepony other than me, please. I'm quite happy to stay as a unicorn - I don't even want to be a pegasus." "Say, that brings up an interesting point; will the cloak transfer its effects to someone else if I try to give it to them but they don't accept it?" Without another word, Micro simply turned tail and started galloping away. Grinning, I followed her, if for no other reason than to stretch my legs. "Aw, come on," I shouted after her, "it's For Science! Mwahahaha!" A long story, tickle-fight, and improvised nerf battle later - I woke up a crow again. Five minutes later, I was back to a cow, had refilled my magical batteries a bit, and was giving the pups their morning feed. "Well," I commented to Amethyst and the Musketeers, "Things could be worse. In fact... it's hard to imagine how things could be better. My fur is starting to grow out and my skin is more itchy than painful; I've got a job to do that's worth doing, and am working on trying to solve a fascinating mystery; I'm surrounded by friends and compatriots, and have a girl back home I'm looking forward to getting back to; I've learned a few cheat-codes to the universe which I may possibly be the very first one to have figured out; and I've got stories I'll be able to tell for the rest of my life. I've got plans for the day, to try measuring how many thaums the cloak needs, and to try figuring out if my cow-body keeps aging while I'm a bird, and how much food I need, and so on. Sure, I've got a few immediate annoyances, and a mysterious threat back in Canterlot who probably still wants to kill me, and I still haven't figured out how to keep Equestria from going the way of Atlantis, and the whole planet could do with being dragged closer to the twenty-first century if not into it, and - um, maybe I should just stop there. I think I'm going to risk a bit of narrative causality, by inverting a trope, and say that it's hard to imagine how things could get any better." I stopped talking there, unconsciously holding my breath as I looked around, half expecting something interesting to result from that statement. The last time I'd done anything of the sort, I'd almost gotten Prince Blueblood and myself hit by lightning. But the morning sun kept shining, the pups kept feeding, the ship kept sailing, and nothing much happened. I let my breath out. Which is, of course, the moment Amethyst chose to say, "I. Want. More. Pups."