Impish Intentions - Kathalia

Last month, I was inspired by a wonderful fanart series that the  ever-talented https://www.deviantart.com/ivanksmw drew of the Kroashent  cast, transforming them from heroes into mischievous imp-like gargoul:   https://www.deviantart.com/ivanksmw/art/Fanart-Kroashent-Imps-Transformation-831484923  .  I've been wanting to try my hand at a similar sequence and finally  had a chance last month.  These were a lot of fun to work on, so I hope  you enjoy them!

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Bottles  clinked across the flagstones as the door pushed them aside.  The wood  was heavy from weeks of frequent rain pummeling against it, the  alcehmical treatments meant to prevent such damage having been clearly  neglected for much longer than the current cycle of storms.  Kathalia  peered inside the darkened lab, her eyes quickly adjusting to the dim  light.  The tower seemed to sway uncomfortably in the winds, and  Kathalia swore that some of the empty bottles littering the floor moved  of their own accord, as if the whole stone precipice was tilting and  about to collapse.  Though her eyes needed no additional light to make  out the room in clear detail, Kathalia turned up the glow-orb suspended  in the center of the room.  The bluish-white light filled the room,  revealing much of what she had expected.

Tour  Trévézel was an unstable looking spire of stone buttresses, wooden  walkways and metal rods, all meant to prop up the clearly decrepit  structure overlooking the university island of Enez-Naoned.  According  to Marie, it had been built by some eccentric Arkanist whose name  Kathalia had never bothered to remember.  Kathalia was of the opinion  that it was built by some overambitious gargoul, and the fact that the  Alptraum had instantly taken a liking to it only served to confirm her  suspicions that the tower had never been meant for Bediz to access, full  of narrow openings between the scaffholding and places where there was  no walkway, only open roof.  Still, the university, already staffed by  madmen and crackpots as far as she was concerned, had probably made the  correct choice in sequestering the deranged little gremlin far away from  any other part of the campus.

Alptraum's  lab was as much in disarray as the tower that housed it.  Bottles and  scraps of bronze littered the floor and shelves.  Alchemical mixtures,  started and then clearly forgotten, bubbled over into a frothing mess.   Books and loose notes were scatted everywhere from the floor to the  rafters with no particular order to them. The amount of reading that the  Gargoul seemed to do somewhat astounded her to the point that she  expressed surprise that imps could read, earning her a withering stare  and surreptitious kick from Gwae earlier.  The small teal inventor was  no where to be seen.  One note, posted at her eye level, had clearly  been left for her.

"Gone to catch a  duck." Was all it said.  Kathalia decided she would rather not delve  into what that entailed and looked around the room.  She didn't want to  make the climb again and decided to wait.  Quickly growing bored, she  began to wander around the room, observing the unfinished gadgets and  abandoned experiments.  One caught her eye, a crystal orb that resembled  a glow-orb, but instead of a ball of light within, the orb seemed to  contain a swirling vortex of clouds and lightning, the colours  ever-shifting as they rolled across the crystal surface.  A small note,  written in Alptraum's tiny hand, was pinned to the side.

"Beachtung! Nicht Tasten! Instabile magische Energie! Lass das Gebäck auf dem Tisch!"

"That's  not much help either." she muttered.  "Let's just assume it says 'Crazy  imp stuff, do not touch' and leave it be.  She moved towards the table.

The  thunder cracked as the tower shuddered, causing Kathalia to  instinctively grab for a post to keep upright.  The crystal ball rolled  off the table with a loud crack and the energy stored within exploded  outwards into the small room.  Kathalia threw up her arms to shield her  face as she was thrown backwards.

She  regained her senses in a pile of books, having smashed directly into the  shelf and causing them all to fall down to the floor with her.  She  blinked, dazed, and stared up at the swirling cloud above her, now a  slow moving wheel of cracking energy.  It towered above her.  She pushed  herself upwards, her clothing, blackened from the burst, slipping off  of her body.  She made an instinctive grab for her shirt, but stopped  suddenly, staring at the green claw at the end of her hand.  She looked  down in confusion and surprise at her tiny body, all the same green  hue.   "Wait?  I'm a gargoul?!" she squeaked in surprised and  frustration. "Mallozh Alptraum!  I knew I drew the short straw with this  errand." she muttered, kicking off her now massive boot, giving a  wiggle to the three clawlike digits on her tiny foot. Kathalia turned to  a mirrored surface, looking at her distorted image in the round pot.   Sheepishly, she picked up her tail, tipped with a spearlike point, and  held it awkwardly in her claws as she leaned into to inspect the horns  poking out of her hair.  She opened her mouth wide, inspecting her  jagged teeth. She caught herself in an involutary smile as she thought  about paying back Alptraum's negligence with a good prank.  She pushed  back from the pot, surprised that she was now a few centimetres above  the ground.  She looked at her spread wings in confusion and mild  annoyance.

"If I can just float, why do we have  wings?" She mused to herself, pushing the wings to rise in the air and  cross the room, quickly satisfying her own curiosity.  The storm-orb, as  she had decided to call it continued to emit a constant stream of  coloured clouds, rippling with electrical power, which swirled at the  top of the room before disappating.

"Hmm.   Seems to be some sort of... bottled wyldstorm?" she turned the crystal  in her claws, her new features warping and distorting in the curved  crystal.  "I didn't know you could do that... "I could wait for that  demented little gremlin to get back from her duck hunt, whatever that is  about." Kathalia was somewhat relieved that, for all the other changes,  what went on in the mind of the mad inventor was still something she  had no insight into.

"Alright!" she clapped  her hands together with enthousiasm.  "So, I need to seal the  storm-orb, grab my clothes, and go find Gwae.  She'll figure out how to  reverse this interesting little predicament... Orb, clothes, Gwae." she  recited her checklist aloud.

"Dagda's cauldron, what did  ye doooo?" Kathalia found it hard not to giggle with her unconvincing  impression of the sidhe, adding a judgemental draw to the exxagerated  accent.  "Well, my dear Dame Dethemir, that little nightmare creature  left an unsecured Wyldwstorm on her side table in this death-trap of a  tower.  It cracked and here I am...'Ye were actin' the maggot again and  touched somethin' ye shouldn't 'ave, were'nt ye?!'  No, no, cross my  wings, it wasn't my fault. 'So ye grabbed a dangerous magical artifact  and flew here in the nip?' No, I put on clo..." She stopped, looking at  the smoking pile of cloth on the ground and then at the orb, a  mischevious grin crossing her face in the reflection.  That would be a  much more amusing reaction.  "Hmm.  This whole thing has got to be very  rare from an arkane standpoint...  I wonder if I can repeat the  results..."

To be continued....

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Learn more about the World of Kroashent here: https://www.worldanvil.com/w/alvez-kroashent

Learn  about Kathalia's home city of Naoned, where the story takes place here:   https://www.worldanvil.com/w/Alvez-kroashent/a/naoned-282B29-article?preview=true

Learn more about the Gargoul here: https://www.worldanvil.com/w/alvez-kroashent/a/gargoul-article?preview=true

Kroashent on Discord: discord.gg/MZjc3Gg