Baa-Ram-Ewe!

by Darkonshadows

144. The Dolly Variance.

-Equus, Airship Mauled, The Witch’s Fare, Jade-

“Bringing work home with you huh?” I queried jovially as I saw the Lambkin delegate tied up to a chair and gagged.

“You have no idea what we had to do to get the delegate out of that bunker.” Fizzle had a haunted look in her eyes and one of them was twitching violently. I was sadly going to make that twitch far worse in a minute for the beautiful mare. “Order anything you’d like Maud, Gallus, it’s free on my family discount. One time use, until your next visit… this includes fully loaded takeout boxes.”

Both the mare and the griffon nodded while perking up immensely, or as much as Maud Pie could perk up anyway, and they hailed my mom over to the table.

An amount of free food from Kuril La Perm was worth a lot in some people’s eyes.

“Guess what I taught Silvers?” I grinned innocently as I turned to Fizzle and held up our chimera child.

“Jaaaade…” She said slowly while rubbing her hooves against her head, she could already detect the oncoming headache she’s about to have for an entire week.

“Meow.” The four of us mewled at the same time.

“Oh no…” Fizzle groaned out and then Maries walked in, the three of them looked curiously at me and Silvers, then to Fizzle with several raised brows. “Please tell me you aren’t going to join them in mewling at me!”

“I would never!” Declared Marie the snake head of Maries in a gentle tone.

“Fizzy you should know we are nowhere nearly as cruel as Jade can get.” Stated Maria the goat head of Maries.

“Meow.” Mara stated with an evil and rather predatory grin, the tiger head tended to enjoy cruelty every once in a while.

“Its official, I hate and love all of you at the same time.” Fizzle groused out aggressively.

“Hey guess what happened this time boss!” Grubber, her hedgehog head of the Storm Creature nation, was coming in not to long after Maries with several Storm Creatures looking cheerful.

Fizzle immediately started slamming her head against the table in an effort to knock herself out, she really didn’t want to hear what stupid thing Grubber ‘might have done’ this time.

I was going to leave her wondering what she did to deserve all this, but I wouldn’t interfere with the dimensionally lost if she didn’t want me to… she could just have just told me and avoided all of this.

Besides that, I already had enough issues putting the world’s economy back in order with help from unsavory sources to figure out a way to help rescue Pom, Ocellus, Smolder and the goat named Shanty if my pirate sources are to be believed.

Of course I would tell her what I now knew after the week long ritual of meowing at her, never let it be said that cats can’t be petty together as Mara and our little Silvers were going to join in on my fun too!

I idly wondered how badly Fizzle was going to maim Luna after all of this, she was the one that spilled the beans and would be a direct target of my beloved Fizzy’s total ire.

“This is going to be a fun week Lingo.” Drip the plumbing thestral stated from a nearby table.

“You said it Drip!” Lingo responded and was the local language teacher, helping kids to learn how to read and write.

-Earth, the world-

Something unique was about to take place and the world was almost thrumming with eagerness to see what would come of this.

-Duckberg’s local park, Pom-

We had finished a quaint lunch together using the money from the account Lena’s cousin Hunter gave me access to. We got Ms. Shuttle some repair help in the form of Scrooge’s scientists and were now preparing a place to train.

Ocellus was in her wingless dragon or lizard biped form, Smolder was hiding her wings and I was sitting with Dolly waiting for Lena and Violet to finish warding off the area.

The sisters Lena and Violet were here to help with Dolly’s magic training by making sure the surrounding area was protectively warded to prevent unforeseen massive accidents that usually came with trying to figure out magic.

Usually said magical accidents involved unicorn children, dangerous magical surges and ice cream raining from the sky. The lord of chaos, Discord, loved watching out for unicorn foals for a reason.

As for the others that were here…

“Don’t you guys need an adult to chaperone you?” I asked of the six children of the duck family as they were resting off the bruises from their latest escapades.

“You’re an adult.” The two sets of duck triplets said simultaneously as if it were already rehearsed.

“You should have honestly seen that one coming. Also, I think you guys are forgetting just how old my mind is compared to my appearance.” Lena rolled her eyes, she was older than she looked. Her story was interesting, she didn’t apparently physically age until Webby and Violet gave her a fully functioning form. “Seriously, I was stuck with Magica for way too long. At least I have two families and friends now.”

“That you do best friend and don’t you ever forget us! Besides, we really want to see how you’re going to teach a Dalmatian like Dolly is going to learn to do magic Pom.” Webby, the pink wearing duck, exclaimed vibrantly while swinging her left arm about in excitement. Her right arm was currently in a sling, she apparently only sprained it beating up a large number of the gang known as the Beagle Boys. I’m glad my charges personally avoided trouble with them. “We already know how Lena can do it, she was quite literally born for it and it was easy once she found her focus.”

“Yeah, yeah, friendship is magic. Can we not compare me to an animal barely trained in the mystical arts here?” Lena muttered with her arms crossed while floating into the air with a faint glow. “I’m still not an expert myself, but I’ve got a handle on the things I can do with pure willpower."

“Hey, I thought you looked cute as a wolf in that shared magical dream we had.” Wasn’t even going to ask or even think about Webby’s statement too hard.

I did not want to know if Lena would be attracted to me through quasi-representation of herself as a wolf, that way lies madness with my canine magnetism and I wanted to avoid that as much as possible… so why were we already heading straight for a different kind of madness today.

I looked at Dolly’s brightly smiling and expectant face. Oh right, I promised Dolly I had an idea on how to help her with learning magic.

“Okay first off, I don’t know how the magic of our worlds will interact if mixed. I also have very little idea how this is going to affect you Dolly, especially given the circumstances surrounding our familiar bond… well it’ll be strange.” Receiving a determined look, I sighed. “To start, I want you to recall the feelings when you did that bark blast back in New York and try to get a grasp on the energy you unleashed there.”

“I feel kind of bad that we missed you when you were there.” Mumbled Ocellus quietly as she sat on a bench nearby with Smolder.

“It’s alright Ocellus, it led to me helping a dog find their person, a cat finding a home and apparently a hamster being happily kidnapped. I also rescued several people from a fire and met a team of heroes in San Fransokyo, even met some nice people.” Not that many positives really, but I did save some lives. I also endangered lives too, I mean I did give those mercenaries a reasons to attack that train.

Dolly suddenly barked and nothing happened.

“Yeah, I’m not feeling it despite recalling how it felt.” Dolly obviously had this world’s magic in her, but I now had a reason to believe that she couldn’t functionally do a bark blast without me.

“Okay… so you can’t find your personal magic, so let me try something.” I knew for certain why Dolly was capable of doing a bark blast now. Using our bond, I did what I did during the Nimnul incident, I started sending her my strength. “Now try and pull ‘your’ magic and recall how it felt.”

Dolly closed her eyes and concentrated, I felt it build up and… eyes snapped, energy formed at the open mouth and she devastated the top half of a fairly tall tree with a loud bark and resulting blast of energy.

Thankfully nothing was living in it… aside from possibly a few insects.

All the ducks, along with a hummingbird, a dragon and one changeling, just stared wide eyed at what Dolly just did and slowly turned to glance at me.

I had even gave Dolly only enough to perform a weak bark blast, could she have amplified it subconsciously? No, there were other reasons why it could be so powerful. Probably because she already had extremely powerful vocal cords that came with yelling loud enough to attract even a half deaf Dalmatians attention among her ninety seven younger siblings, Dylan being the only sibling as old as her.

Dalmatians with larger patches of black fur are less likely to be deaf and Dolly’s family had plenty of black fur patches, even then at least thirty percent of Dalmatians suffer from hearing problems and Dolly had to make up for that somehow.

“Dolly… do you believe that was your magic?” I stated calmly.

“Uh… yeah?” Dolly tried while raising an ear in my direction in curiosity. “Isn’t that what we’re doing here?”

“It isn’t… let me explain what happened. Apparently our familiar bond allows me to transfer my magic and the ability to use it to you. Your magic is what was used to forge our familiar bond, you haven’t really done much else with it aside from the instinctive use of it. We’re here to figure out how to get you to use your own magic and not mine through you, though we’re going to do another test to make sure. If I’m right I can send you power to use three of my abilities and the instinctive knowhow to use them, these abilities would be my bark blast, bark breaker and the one ability I’m loathe to actually use in a fight, magic wolf claws. I however cannot give you the ability to mimic my fluffmancer abilities, which are unique to me.” I had to admit that Dolly doing a bark blast was far more pronounced in power than it was for me. “To further test this, and please be careful with what I’m giving you Dolly, I will now have Dolly try and do magical wolf claws. After I demonstrate for everyone here what they are like.”

Feeling bad about the tree, I went and dragged a fairly large stone over to our training exercise. I took a step back from the stone and slashed my right hoof down. Three claws marks etched themselves into the stone on one side in a controlled manner.

“Uh… how dangerous is Pom again?” Huey asked while staring at the claw marks.

“Yeah, she’s pretty amazing.” The pride shined clearly on Smolder’s face as she crossed her arms and glanced my way. “She couldn’t be a guard in Huoshan without having the talent to protect people.”

“I developed the magic claw in the last world we were in and learned it quickly by basing it on Shanty’s magical blade hoof technique, I thankfully have to actively concentrate on it specifically to do it.” Stating this bluntly, I didn’t bring up how I had the ability to boost my senses to match a canine’s smell or hearing either. I really didn’t like having the ability to eviscerate someone at the tips of my hooves. “Okay Dolly, leap and mark the other side of the rock with your claws when you feel me sending you strength through our bond.”

Dolly, nodded and waited, I sent her energy through our bond and she hopped and slashed her right paw at the stone.

It didn’t get marked with claws digging into its surface, it instead split into three pieces and gouged out a bit of the ground beneath it too.

“Well that just confirms my fears.” It didn’t take a genius to figure out that I had immediately stopped sending my strength to Dolly afterwards. “As a familiar I can give her my personal magical strength and have her know how to direct it. However this is my magic having an effect on Dolly, not Dolly’s magic itself. Apparently despite how little I gave her, she’s able to use it at far greater strength for her size. Any observations Ocellus?”

“A bond made with local and foreign magic from two very different worlds like yours, no matter how similar, should not have such a powerful effect.” While she couldn’t use her horn, Ocellus could still feel emotions, shapeshift and more importantly give her observations on magic. Feeling emotions was a magical ability and as such was logically able to feel how magic flowed. “Still, this is interesting study into familiar dynamics with the world record holder for most familiars.”

“Bow-wacka-whoa…” Softly stated a shivering Dolly looked at her right paw and the cute little purple nails with disbelief at the fact that they cleanly tore through solid stone and the ground beneath it. “So… my magic?”

“Try sending me how you feel about your family.” I waited and she gave me images of comfort, home, warmth, snuggles, excitement and a nice warm place to sleep. “Now do it again, but feel out how you are sending it to me.”

“Give me a minute Pom, I need to figure this out…” As Dolly was doing this I turned to the others.

“Now does anyone know why Dolly could use the attack better than I could, even if by all rights they should be equal of the same amount of energy is used?” Asking this as if I were teaching my own class of students I waited for someone to pick up on why when Dolly used the ability on the rock it cleaved through it. “At the moment Dolly is currently figuring out how to pull on her own magic and that could take a while.”

“I think I can see where you’re going with this.” Lena stated as she glowed blue and floated. “Dolly is smaller, so the energy would be more concentrated in her compared to you. Also it’s going to be less controlled.”

“Exactly, there’s also the fact that Dolly has incredible strong vocal cords and actually has claws compared to my hooves. There are plenty of factors at play here.” Nodding as I pointed a hoof to the hovering Lena as she dropped back onto the ground. “Though I’m a bit worried about something involving magic.”

“Like what?” Lena was more alert than she had been a second ago.

“Well the magic Ocellus, Smolder and I bring to this world is still foreign, even if our worlds share similarities as far as magic goes, should it really be interacting so well with a local like Dolly? Our familiar bond could be having an adverse effect on her ability to use her own magic or there’s a possibility the magic from our world overwriting it, as unlikely as that sounds it is feasible.” It was a concern of mine and Ocellus was starting to mirror my concern as we looked at Dolly with a scrunched up expression on her face. “There’s also the concerns of us possibly… maybe… feasibly… we-might-be-infecting-this-world-with-the-magic-of-our-home.”

The Dalmatian for her part was trying to concentrate as she kept focusing on ideas, images and feelings to send me and seemed to be having problems grasping at the thread that was her own magic tied into our familiar bond.

Dolly still wasn’t going to let go of what we had and I was going to give up on trying to get her to do so, because at this point the bond could only be broken if it snapped by me ending up in another world completely separated from her or if something quite tragic happened.

“Wait… our magic could be… well that’s a disturbing thought.” Ocellus seemed a little more awake in this moment and was somewhat terrified of the implications.

“And that’s a bad thing?” Innocently asked Smolder.

“Smolder, why do you think chaos gods like Discord or Veles exist in the first place? Also, can you guess exactly why it would be an exceedingly bad idea for anyone to find a way to permanently end them?” I decided to focus more on Discord than Veles the god of Confusion. “Discord is quite literally made of chaotic magic, he’s probably our world’s saving grace in the case of foreign magic from outside our world causing issues. Said magic could be harmlessly loosed into the chaos dimension, it’s like our safety valve. With that in mind, tell me, does this world have gods?”

“Yes, we’ve met some of them. From Ithaquack we’ve met Storkules, Selene and Zeus… but nobody likes Zeus.” The blue wearing brother Dewey stated with clear intent on not being left out of the discussion.

“We kind of got to test drive some god like powers once. It was fun while it lasted, but also terrifying.” Louie the green wearing brother shuddered. “We really weren’t cut out to be even temporary gods.”

“Are you telling me that the gods of this world have physical representations of their power that, should they lose them, someone could accidentally cause an apocalypse with by stumbling onto them?” I received no answer from Webby, Huey, Dewey or Louie. Violet, Lena, May and June all looked at them while becoming a little bit shaken up.

“That almost happened once or twice… one was during the mentioned incident where we were given a chance to be gods for a few minutes.” Huey muttered crossing his arms and pulling his cap down over his face. “We crashed and burned pretty quickly.”

“Valhalla was nice… as long as you have someone that can continue to prevent Ragnarok from happening every ten years.” Almost everyone looked to Dewey, the ones that didn’t were notably Louie, Huey and Webby. “To explain, our family has been apparently preventing the end of the world for a while now. Well at least Uncle Scrooge has until that last trip to Valhalla, I actually saved the world that time and now we have ten more years before one of us has to do it again!”

“Heh… our world is kind of dangerous like that.” Webby stated through a weak tooth gritting smile.

“Hah, I finally got it!” Announced Dolly who started to glowing a strange faint violet color and giving off sparkles. “Whoa, I feel weird and kind of… light. Bouncy maybe… like I could go anywhere…. everywhere? Something just feels…”

-The world-

It would be sitting on the edge of its seat if it had one and it was watching the dog intently, since the little thing had just discovered how to grasp the magical potential within itself.

The dog would carry with it the signature of this world with her wherever she went, she would always be of this world even if she found a new home in another.

It was like watching a child taking its first steps… by accidentally falling into the deep end of the pool.

Only in this case the child wouldn’t drown, but they would be overwhelmed.

Now what would happen once that magic mixed with the otherworldly magic brought by the friendly foreigner within their bond? Both sides would be affected greatly, while the world really did not want to harm the fluffy and repeatedly beleaguered foreigner, it didn’t seem like it would have a choice.

The one foreigner that might feel what would happen, the loving shapeshifter, might feel the weight of the entire world in one instant falling upon both those of Strength and Fortune.

This world watched as those with dreams worked towards them, sometimes failing or falling, at other times finding different dreams to be content with. The biggest dreams, provided that you were willing to work towards them, were usually the ones that always seemed the simplest from the outset.

Never let it be said that dreams could always be easily reached and the simple little dog seemingly dreamed small at a glance, as all she wanted to do was have the power to help people and was willing to put her heart fully behind it.

The issue was that she wanted her family to be safe and happy too, even knowing she might never see them again. She at least wanted to make sure they were safe before she left, her family in turn wanted her to be strong and safe as well. These intermingling wishes were going to have an effect on the coming moment.

All the circumstances behind what was happening… they were nowhere close to the definition of being normal in a describable manner.

A single light in the collective unconsciousness of the world just leapt into the swimming pool’s deep end without knowing how to swim in it, but that it did so willingly was the key to it all. None of the one hundred sparkling dots it left behind would go nearly so deep or nearly as far, but they would remain connected.

A dream was coming true... and chaos would follow it,

-Dolly-

I blinked as I felt a sudden change, something weird was going and my heart thudded loudly in my chest just once.

“Pom… I think… something is…” I tried as it felt like I was dying for a moment, then I tugged on the bond for some support and got a little magic from her and…

The world seemed to blur and everything slowed down, it was as if the whole world flowed differently or was I just noticing the flow in the first place?

Things got really bright.

-Location: ???-

I was blinded by a powerful light for a few seconds no longer where I was, Duckberg Park had disappeared and I found myself on a strange glowing platform that seemed to be made of brightly lit colorful glass.

There was no light or dark here, just a massive grey void. It was seriously weird, I moved to look around. I could hear the sound of a guitar playing, it sounded upbeat.

Looking down at the… stained glass?

It depicted… me? Above my smiling face that made the center of the circle were mom and dad, the start of the circle below those two was Dylan backed by a star. I slowly turned a circle looking at all my brothers and sisters each in a circle of their own, something shifted when I completed looking at all of them and I turned to see a strange sight that wasn’t there before.

There were now three pedestals, on top of them were a small one pup trampoline, my skateboard and a… a rubber chicken? The last one reminds me of my favorite toy I left to Dee-Dee and Dizzy.

“Where… am I?” Further outside the circle her family created were her friends, of which Pom was one of the pictures depicted and glowing brightly. “What is this place?”

Walking to the edge I looked out into the void and then down to see I was on a single giant pillar of stained glass. I moved back over to the three things and looked at them.

“Air, motion and… flexibility?” The world cracked, Dolly blinked her eyes open to several fairly worried looks.

Author's Note:

No Dolly doesn't get a key blade from a 'Dive to the heart', but what she does get will improve upon everything she could already do without Pom. Pom was still the catalyst for this particular growth.

The chaos that comes from this is going to be a disaster zone that Duckberg usually is whenever Scrooge's family does something unusual.

Comments

[Herald of Opera]

Yeah, the difference in "stats" was something of a giveaway that this wasn't going to go exactly how it did in the game.

[Shadowshame]

Damn