Wonderbox

by GaPJaxie

Chapter 2

For a day and a night, they wandered through the woods on the mountain side. They did not know where they were, if they were any place at all. Perhaps they were on some remote peak on Earth. Perhaps they were in the faerie realm. Perhaps it was all a computer simulation. Maybe they were in hell.

Five changeling drones, each so alike in appearance and mannerisms they could not tell each other apart. With a gold sharpie from Lorin’s toolkit, they tried to write their names on the side of their shells, but the ink burned away with an eerie green light, leaving them unmarked. That made Jaya cry.

Well, not cry. None of them could cry. They had compound eyes without tear-ducts, legs full of holes, ragged wings that couldn’t possibly support their weight. They were freaks, monsters, horse-insects, and when Jaya tried to cry, what came out was a multi-tonal insectile trilling.

They ignored her until she stopped, not out of cruelty, but because they didn’t want to hug the hideous thing that was shrieking in the middle of the woods, and because she didn’t want to be hugged by them. The whole time, Avery kept wondering if the term she’d learned in biology class was “Distress Display” or “Distress Indicator,” as though the exact label mattered.

But there was nothing around them, their wings did not work, and they were all getting hungry. Their attempts to eat the foliage on the mountainside produced no results -- it all smelled vile. So what choice did they have?

They walked downslope, hoof after hoof, single file, and hoped that the mountain had an end.

Until they came to the deer.

It was dead, apparently of natural causes, for neither arrow nor bullet nor wolf’s fang had pierced its hide. It lay over some rocks a few hundred feet from their path, and it was lucky they spotted it at all. The one second in line saw it, and Avery wondered who that was.

She wondered which of her friends that was. She was fourth in line, so she didn’t know.

The deer was like a puppet. It had a deer’s coat, but it was held on by velcro ties. It had a deer’s antlers, but they went on with a chin strap. It had a deer’s hooves, but they were boots. And its face, of course. Its face was a mask.

When whichever one of her friends was in front pulled some of the fixtures off, they could see there was nothing under them, just a featureless torso made of something like ivory, or milky plastic.

“Oh, that’s freaky,” said Cassidy. Avery stuck close to her, not letting her out of her sight, so at least she’d know who somebody was. “Is everything in this world monsters? Us and all the animals?”

“I haven’t seen any animals other than this,” said one of the others.

“I’ve heard birds,” someone else said.

“Yeah,” Avery cut in. “But they’re right. I’ve heard birds and things in the underbrush, but this is the first animal I’ve seen. Which given how long we’ve been in these woods, is actually weird now that I think about it.”

“You think they avoid us?” Cassidy asked. “The animals know to hide when they hear us coming?”

“That or they don’t exist,” someone else said. “Maybe they’re ghosts of birds.”

“Fuck it,” one changeling stepped forward. “It was cold as shit last night, and this is real fur. I’m taking it.” And they stripped the velcro coat off of the dead thing.

“I wonder if these shoes are any good?” another stripped the hooves.

Avery took the mask off its face, staring down at it in puzzlement. It was made of natural materials, wood, leather, deer fur, straw for packing. The design was quite realistic, except for the eyes. The mask came with eyes, but they were two small stones, painted with the shape of open eyes and left in the eye-sockets.

She turned the mask around to look at the back, and was confused to find light shining through the eye sockets. Flipping it back and forth, she confirmed to her satisfaction that the stones should be obstructing the eye holes entirely, but from the back they were evidently invisible.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a high pitched insectile whine, accompanied by the buzzing of wings. “Guys, guys, look! Look!” Whichever one of her friends had taken the antlers and tried them on was yelling with uncontrollable exuberance. The puppet-deer’s tail hovered in front of them, floating in the air surrounded by a faint white glow. The antlers, Avery realized, glowed with the same light.

“I put these on, and then I thought that I wanted the tail as well, and it flew over to me.” With nothing but a flick of their eyes, they made the tail rise, fall, jump left and right. “I’m telekinetic. I can move things with my mind!”

“Maybe that’s what the box meant?” Cassidy asked, her tone faintly unsettled. “It said uh… the top. To whomever opens this box goes ‘the power of every tribe’ or ‘the power of all tribes’ or something like that. Maybe… powers, in this world, are items? And we can loot them? Like, to whomever robs this gun shop goes all the guns in the shop. It’s technically true.”

“Maybe?” The one with the antlers flicked the tail around. “Check if the other stuff has powers.”

The deer’s coat had no obvious powers beyond keeping the wearer warm. The hooves enabled the wearer to grip the ground considerably better, but it was unclear if that was magic or simply the result of a well made set of boots. The tail appeared to be cosmetic.

Then Avery put on the mask.

Her world was transformed. Colors shifted. Space distorted. No longer was she seeing the forest through compound eyes, but through the mammalian eyes of a buck. She lost the power to see in darkness, and became aware of the existence of shadows. Colors became richer, her depth perception better. She could smell again, she could taste again, and while her insect shell was almost entirely numb, her face had feeling.

And she saw her friends, the result of freakish taxidermy. One was an insect with the legs of a deer, one a hard-shelled horse-thing covered in brown fur, one had a deer’s antlers growing out of their skull, another the beast’s tail. And she?

She had a deer’s face.

“Holy shit,” she breathed. “Holy shit. Holy shit. Uh… fuck. Whoever you are, with the antlers. Take them off.”

“I’m Shakti,” said the one with the antlers. A moment later, there was a bright green flash, and the antlers vanished. No corresponding prop appeared before her friend, his hooves were empty.

And when she turned to look down, there was no puppet, just the corpse of a white-tailed deer.

---

An eighteen inch, cantilever folding, cherry red, traditional metal toolbox hit Lorin’s table. He folded aside its left handle, then its right, then undid the latch, then unfolded the left compartment, then the right. The contents were arrayed as neatly as surgeons tools: screwdrivers, spanners, socket wrenches, a hammer, a mallet, measuring tape, pliers, levels, wire, wire strippers, insulator caps, magnifying lenses, a headlamp, a jewelers eyepiece, safety gloves, glasses, a saw, and more.

And more. From one of the five compartments that unfolded out of the dense metal box, Lorin produced a set of X-acto knives. Six blades as thin and sharp as surgeons scalpels were packed separately from their handles. He selected a thin metal shaft as the handle, and the smallest blade as its edge, screwing them together.

“Why do you have all this?” Cassidy asked, a small frown on her face. “You live in a dorm. There’s like, maintenance people.”

“Every man needs to have a toolbox,” Lorin replied, without looking up from his work. Perhaps Cassidy felt the remark was vaguely sexist, or perhaps she found his confidence vaguely attractive. It was ambiguous, and for once, it was Avery who didn’t react. She had no attention for the petty back and forth.

“Don’t scratch it,” she said, biting her lip as she watched Lorin work.

“I’ll be careful,” Lorin assured her, setting the box on the table in front of him and lowering his head to look at it from the side. He lifted his knife, turned it around so the edge faced away from the box, and ever so gently dragged it along the side under the lid.

Lorin was a friend of Avery’s and second of the four people on campus who actually knew her. He was a year older than most of their class, having started college past his nineteenth birthday. His father ran a successful pawn shop, and Lorin had every intention of joining the family trade. His extra year was spent on the job in the relentless pursuit of practical skills, doing everything from appraising items to repairing the building. Only once he felt he had a grasp on the family trade did he want to go to school.

He was studying business, of course.

“Mmmm.” A frown tugged at his face, as the two girls watched in silence. Whatever he was hoping to find with the X-acto knife, it was evidently absent. He reached back into the box, pulling out a cloth and a tube of some white cream. The cloth he kept in his off hand, the cream he worked under the lid and along the bottom.

Avery told him they came over for his tools, but that was only half true. She could have texted him a picture of the box, instead of telling him she had “something interesting,” but she wanted to see his face when first he laid eyes on it. She wanted to see if he reacted the way Cassidy did. She thought of him as an exceptionally level-headed person, and assumed that he’d blow the whole thing off. She thought she’d tell him to stop wasting his time with some stupid prank.

But she saw the gold shine in his eyes, the way it had with Cassidy, the way she suspected it had with her -- that look of naked desire, maybe greed, maybe lust, and instant question: “What is that?”

Avery’s phone let out a soft chime. She looked down towards it as Lorin rubbed the cream in with the cloth.

Jaya: u comin?

Avery: I’m in Lorin’s room. Come over.

Jaya: y? hes in Bowen. the theater is on my side of campus.

Avery: Trust me. This is better than movie night. Come over.

Jaya: ???

Avery: “The power of every tribe and all the treasure in the world.”

Jaya: ???
Jaya: srsly we made plans
Jaya: im going to see a movie let me know if your coming

A soft grunt marked that Lorin was done, and Avery focused her attention on his face. “Well?”

“This container has no seams,” Lorin said, already cleaning his tools before putting them away. “I thought that maybe the lid twisted open so it opened without hinges, or there’s a secret compartment in the bottom, but as far as I can tell it’s totally contiguous. This box does not open.”

“Or maybe there is a secret compartment and you just didn’t find it?” Avery suggested. “I mean, no offense. But you worked in a pawn shop for a year. That doesn’t make you a master…” She wasn’t sure what to call someone who found hidden things. “Investigator?”

“If this container has a seam in it, you’ll need an X-ray machine to find it.,” Lorin replied with casual certainty. “My uncle could probably get the lid off without damaging it too much, but he’d be using glasscutting tools.”

Avery nodded, hands folded. Her eyes kept drifting back to the box, and whenever there was a lull in conversation, she found herself staring down into it once again, its golden swirls, its elegant lightness.

“What’s it worth?” Cassidy asked, snapping Avery out of her trance. Lorin was getting out his magnifying glasses.

“My dad appraised all the art people brought in, and pawn shops aren’t art shops. We… you know. Limited expertise. But this…” He shrugged. “I don’t know. $500? $1000?”

“Someone left a thousand dollar gift on my desk?” Avery asked, clenching her fingers together. She turned to look at Cassidy. “And you’re sure you didn’t…”

Cassidy was already looking off at something else. Avery saved her the trouble of ignoring the question. “I don’t know. It’s weird.”

Lorin examined the box under a jeweler's magnifying lens, and a sudden snort escaped him, an amused sound: “Have you considered it might have been a gift from a secret admirer?”

“What makes you say that?”

“The tiny squiggles in the filigree, they aren’t random, they’re shapes. I see…” He leaned in close with the lens. “Little hearts, flowers, birds, knots, interlocked rings…”

He needed to pull away for a moment, squinting and removing the jeweler's lens from his eye. When he turned to face Avery, her expression had shifted to something close to disgust, which was just the thing to make Lorin laugh.

“Sorry, Avery,” he said. “I think this is a love letter.”

Comments

[swarm chaser]

I don't like the jumping back and forth between before and after, with it starting off with them looting a corpse it looks like it's going to earn that dark tag pretty quick, also their transformative ability is weird and broken in this fic, if it can even be considered transformative at all as it's unclear if this is a everyone wears weird clothes or if that's just something of an abstraction layer between them and their abilities.

[mirmuz]

11570910
I guess that's fair, but the chapter made sense to me. Jump straight into some action, the deer stuff raises questions and gets us wondering how things work for the main characters in this new world. I like the hints that they already had changeling traits before transforming.

[Thought Prism]

11570910
The interesting implication to me is that it seems as if only one changeling can be disguised as a specific creature at any given time. Which makes this an AU, since that happens multiple times in the show.

[Bandy]

This first scene with the deer is a really fascinating deconstruction of changeling magic. We've seen and read countless stories about changelings looking at a creature, going up in green flames, and then boom, they are a spitting image of that creature.

These kids are bad changelings. They have access to the magic but no understanding of how to use it. They're able to take parts from the deer, but can't copy it in its entirety. The language used to describe this fumbling is a callback to the descriptions in the first chapter, when a changeling character figuratively "dissects" a deceased pony and wears their form like a mask.