Werewolves of Knicknik

by Atuhor Name

CH. 09 Physical Therapy with a Spy

Physical Therapy with a Spy

Naudia woke up in a hospital, and something was wrong, because Naudia was still asleep in the hospital bed, she was watching herself sleep in an unfamiliar form. Naudia got up to go over and wake herself up and noticed she couldn’t move the same way she used to.

Adapting to this new form of strange bipedal movement she walked over on two legs and woke herself up, she was sleeping in a pile of herself. It was the strangest feeling waking yourself up to open your eyes and look at yourself.

The rest of her woke up in short order and she needed to decide what to do with herself, but Naudia needed to get a good look at all of her selves first.

Naudia looked like some sort of big eyed kangaroo rodent with a rat head and longish ears and a bottlebrush tail and long dark black fur with a strip of red down her back and an extra set of bat-wing like arms that were missing any kind of wing membrane to fly with. She could hop or walk around like a raptor.

Naudia could not get over the feeling of looking at herself while she was looking back at herself as well as looking in 48 other directions at once. She wasn’t used to being this spread out, like a hive mind of only one pony.

No, that wasn’t exactly it, she herself was one, there was nothing else in her head except the typical changeling hive mind, but her body was split up. She had no idea how the continuity of the hive mind was maintained considering she was currently 50 rodents, but it was still there.

She looked around at the room she was in, it was a hospital room of some type but she was in a pen, for animals, like you’d keep a rabbit inside of. Instantly searching for an exit Naudia noticed there were tons, and that instantly told her what she needed to know about the facade this room provided.

Naudia finally picked up on what was wrong, what was truly wrong.

Naudia realized that she wasn’t hungry for emotions.

Naudia sat down, all 50 of her.

Naudia began to cry.

It was over, finally, truly, over.

That was when Gwynn Hall stepped into the room, Naudia assumed it was from a dead end room, they wouldn’t leave an exit unlocked in this death trap. She could still feel the emotions from Gwynn, she was still passively siphoning emotions directed at herself back into the hive mind, but she, Naudia, was the first changeling since they were designed and built to not need emotions as food.

Maybe she and Twilight could go and have a hayburger after this, Twilight loved hayburgers.

That was when Gwynn stepped into the hospital pen in an attempt to soothe the pile of crying rats. She sat down and opened her arms for a hug and Naudia hopped over.

That was all that happened for a few minutes as Naudia’s shock subsided.

“Now, tell me what’s wrong.” Gwynn said

“My hunger, the craving to eat emotions, is gone, the cursed design we were engineered with is finally gone.” Naudia said in a squeaky voice, but surprisingly only from one mouth.

“Oh.” Gwynn said clearly not expecting that reaction.

“They put that in assuming that we would never again go hungry.” Naudia gave a hollow laugh. “Perfect soldiers engineered by unicorn science, paid for by earth pony coffers before the unification. Do you know what they did to the unicorn that created us?”

Gwynn shook her head.

“They stoned him to death for the abominations he brought to life.” Naudia was practically beaming with pride. “It’s been so long since then, but I can see the way ahead, the darkness is over and changelings managed to claw their way through to the other side.”

Naudia gave a laugh that if she were not a small rodent would have been a good evil sounding laugh.

She instantly turned to Gwynn and asked:

“So, what else do I get with all this, can I turn back into my old self or is this split up rodent thing permanent?”

Many eyes looked up at Gwynn expectantly, and with none of the emotions she was expecting, there was hope there, there was the happy glow of a brighter future. Even as 50 rats and without the context of actually being an yunguaq that Gwynn knew.

“Well the first thing on the table is teaching you how to reform into your changeling form, then a big version of all these rats.” Gwynn pulled a clipboard out to get at her notes. “You are technically a slime creature like Twilight is, but instead of being a wereslime like her you’re an itumeyuk. The thinking was that being able to split into a bunch of smaller rodents would help you more than a werewolf form.”

“So how do I transform back into my normal self? I’m assuming it’s not like normal changeling magic.”

“You need to concentrate on your body, ever done a dance?”

“Twilight had us practice a slow dance for some big event.”

“That’s not gonna work for this.” Gwynn said, thinking for a long moment. “Okay here is how we’re going to do this. You need to think about scratching your left side with your right hoof, remember that your right HOOF not your paw.”

Naudia got what Gwynn was trying to do and decided to try her own, changeling specific method for this. Focusing her mind she brought herself into view in her minds eye and concentrated on it, she could feel which parts of herself were which rat and from that she managed to put herself back together over the course of a couple minutes.

The effect was strange, watching herself come together like some sort of solid but also maleable creature forming a changeling. The effect was not unfamiliar entirely as creatures born entirely of magic they changed themselves when they disguised. Naudia merged herself back together as one creature and almost got everything exactly right the first time.

“You still need some practice at that, but I’m seriously impressed you barely needed my help with that.” Gwynn said. “How about you take a quick rest, take stock and maybe you can ask me some questions.”

“What else do I get with this body?” Naudia asked.

“You should be able to have an omnivorous diet, lift about 15 tons with one hoof, immunity to most maladies you’re familiar with, oh yeah and you get to learn Yunguaq magic which holds dominion over the vast energies contained within quintessence.”

Before Naudia could even ask the question that was forming on her lips Gwynn answered it.

“Looked it up, planck distance.”

Naudia pumped one of her hooves in the air at that, she was getting pizza, and this time she would be able to taste the cheese, not just the emotions contained within and the “emoti sprinkles”.

“Okay I think you should try and split up again and see if you can reform faster and more accurately this time.”

Naudia did that, she could already see uses for this combined with some of the illusion magic she knew about. There were even thoughts of how this could be useful busking for love as these strange rodents before she realized that was old thinking.

Naudia reformed three times as fast this time but her accuracy didn’t improve as quickly as her speed.

“I have a question for you Gwynn, being familiar with some of the other races of the world who do wear clothes, why do you dress like that, with so little?” Naudia asked looking at Gwynn’s basic loincloth and chestwrap clothes.

“It’s a bit of a funny story actually, I wasn’t always a spy working for the first administration, as a kid I wanted to be more confident in myself.” Gwynn was looking back across who knew how long and in to ancient history, literally as it turned out. “It was a little over a hundred thousand years ago when I was about thirteen and I was watching a lot of spy thriller game shows, you know where they try and sneak something in or out of a habitat, typical white hat spy stuff.

“As I was watching that show one part of it got stuck in my head, a particular werewolf spy by the name of Frida managed to bluff her way through a security checkpoint with the goods through sheer confidence alone. I told myself at the time, that’s impossible, I could never do that, but I kept watching it, kept watching her and I decided,” Gwynn paused for dramatic effect. “I would BECOME that confident, and the clearest way I could see to that was to present confident until you just exuded it from every pore.”

“It almost reminds me of myself in some ways.” Naudia said.

Gwynn tilted her head at Naudia.

“I was never confident in my appearance, I always assumed changelings were ugly.”

“Why would you assume that?” Gwynn said looking Naudia up and down, “You seem to have a ‘dark tall supermodel’ kinda thing goin on. At least for the pony people’s standards.”

“Changelings always disguise themselves to gather love, always, and like I told you earlier the ponies who created us drove us out. That left an impression on me, that was the way things were…” Naudia looked off in the direction where she could still feel a trickle of Twilight’s love even now. “Until Twilight came along.

“She accepted me for who I was, what I was, what I looked like, with open hooves and saved me from the bitterness that claimed my mother. She broke the cycle, and helped build who I am today.”

-------------------

A couple transformations later Naudia had mastered splitting up and reforming herself. She had even learned how to split part of herself away to walk through a little obstacle course while reading the benefits of her new body.

“It says here I can transform into a singular rat form as well.” Naudia pointed out as part of herself rung the bell at the end of the impromptu obstacle course clearly meant for dogs. “I would like to learn how to do that as well, with some changeling magic that sounds useful.”

“Well the first thing you need to do is think about the limbs of one of your split up forms,” Gwynn looked at Naudia’s wings. “It’s helpful that you don’t have the same wings on both as that is a difference you can exploit until you learn the transformation.”

“Wait, those are wings? I thought they were just an extra set of arms with some strange extra fingers.” Naudia said looking at her smaller rat form’s supposed wings as they spread out without any kind of membrane to provide lift.

“Yeah, see those little spinnerets next to the wing joint there?” Gwynn said pointing at Naudia’s split off self. “That’s the replacement for a wing membrane, it’s a massively parallel setup that allows you to make, and then store thin wispy wings on your extra set of arms.”

Naudia instantly started to pull silk out of the spinnerets but Gwynn stopped her.

“Wait until you learn enough magic to cut them then we’ll teach you how to fly with them, otherwise you’ll just end up wrapping yourself or somebody else up in wires about 200x stronger than steel.” Gwynn’s hand glowed and she clipped the silk strands without asking Naudia. “You don’t want to accidentally garrote yourself without a way to cut the strands, even as a slime it’s not pleasant.

“Anyway, merge yourself back together and think about those arms, try and feel your wings being those arms reaching out to grasp something, once you can do that you should be good to go.”

After her first failed attempt Naudia realized something about the conversation she just had.

“Gwynn, you just cut something that’s supposed to be 200x stronger than steel like it was nothing. What is this magic I’m going to be learning?”

“Yunguaq magic is stronger than you can possibly imagine, you already know how we’re tapped into quintessence,” Gwynn demonstrated her magic but summoning in a clear glowing cup, “The things we can summon with this magic is made of mag-matter, it’s stronger than you can imagine.”

“I’ve been thinking about that wouldn’t it just float right through normal matter though?” Naudia asked. “We’ve theorized that it exists and atoms are so spread out it would just ignore normal matter no matter how strong it is.”

“Ha HA!” Gwynn exclaimed. “That’s where we are ahead of the game! And this is more around my level, something I can actually explain to you this time! Thirteen billion years ago we ended the first annihilation war by causing a vacuum catastrophe and that created magic, modified to suit what we wanted to do with it. Magmatter operates on modified physics we designed to suit US.”

“Well that just raises MORE questions, how the hay did you or anything for that matter, survive a VACUUM CATASTROPHE?!” Naudia exclaimed back.

“Our FTL drive blinks in and out of the universe to move between places.”

“Oh.” Naudia seemed a bit cowed after all that. “I suppose I should go back to learning how to transform.”