Book 5 - Chapter 41 - Interlude – Clover – Blind Trust II (Patreon)

AN: Whoof, this one ended up chonky. I'll probably cut a bit off this one to add to 40 when RR gets here, to better balance the two.

Actively working on the chapter afterwords as we speak, they should both be up shortly.

Okay, so, she might have made a few mistakes. That was fine, it was an inevitable part of any research or experimentation—and mistakes often led to greater things!

Less so with social mistakes, apparently. There was no improvement or trying again—her human had become stubborn about the issue, which meant that every attempt to bring it up again, even indirectly, only resulted in wildly unhelpful anger.

Unless the anger itself was a useful human benchmark? Eh, probably not.

Ranthia just flatly refused to work with Teacher. Was there another reality where a more socially suave Clover might have convinced her otherwise? Probably! Maybe. But that wasn’t her reality, so it didn’t get to count.

But the one good thing is that Clover never got a chance to bring up the fact that she had allowed Teacher to study her own biology whenever he asked! She had even donated both tissue and ova and let him heal her afterwards. It wasn’t fun, but it was for the good of Biomancy! Given her mood, Ranthia would have probably forbidden it, but what her human didn’t know couldn’t get Clover yelled at. Again.

For better or worse, Clover understood stubbornness quite well. She probably understood it better than most people, even. Her [Companion Bond of Clover and Ranthia!] gave her an extra helping of the very annoying mental state. So, she knew when she needed to give up on convincing Ranthia.

It may or may not have taken three attempts before she got past her own stubbornness.

She was still grumbly about it though. Her human was the only human in the Tympestshard Council’s territory, at least as far as anyone knew. The Medical Manuscripts were great and very detailed, but they were words on paper—there was still a lot that everyone could learn from studying an actual human. Every other mammalian creature they studied gave them some insight, but none of it came close to the potential insight that was so close at paw.

Clover wished that she could claim she found a stopgap solution immediately, but it took her five days to realize something that was kind of obvious. Ranthia had refused to cooperate with Lumornor—with Teacher! She never said anything about refusing to let another scholar study her.

As tempted as she was to recommend First—Ranthia liked pretty women, First was a pretty woman, it might have worked—she had a better candidate. A scholar that Ranthia could trust, a scholar that was growing increasingly respected and could use the exclusivity of access to help prove her usefulness to the peers that still doubted her. And her name was… Clover!

Of course, their bathroom was hardly a workshop equipped for serious research, but it was the best compromise that Clover managed. The fact that she couldn’t get permission to retrieve blood or tissue samples—let alone intact ova—from her human was unsurprising, but still unfortunate. At least her gruesome and crude research promised to help her gain some Skills to help mitigate the problems in the future. And, as Teacher pointed out, any data was useful, even if it wasn’t perfect data.

Ranthia’s vitality was a significant impediment though. Clover wasn’t a [Healer], so a frustrating number of her Skills just leveled without accomplishing anything when she directed them at her annoyingly high-level subject. The innate vitality defense kept them safe from villains like the Masked Bonestealer from one of her favorite storybooks, but as a [Biomancer], she often wished that it could be selectively disabled!

Still, she just needed to do what she could, where she could. Like a proper scholar should!

“I see that everyone that I invited has arrived quite punctually. I apologize for the short notice and my own tardiness.” Teacher finally entered his workshop, followed by First and Second.

It was just after midnight, but Clover wasn’t the least bit drowsy. The same was true of the seven others that’d waited alongside her. They couldn’t be drowsy. They were far too nervous. Each and every one of them had been summoned with nothing more than a slip of ominously pink paper to meet with Teacher well after normal research hours, with specific instructions to mention it to no one else that worked alongside them! Something was afoot and they were worried—they had seen the aggressive cuts that Teacher had made to the ranks of prospective [Biomancers] for years by that point.

Clover thought she was doing good. She’d even been praised by Teacher! …Months ago. And she knew Nyria was a great [Biomancer], as was Emethic. Except Emethic was a jerk and Nyria was razor-focused on her own niche. So, it was hard not to be worried—Biomancy meant everything to her!

Being dismissed by Teacher wouldn’t erase the Biomancy she possessed, but it would make her future growth stagnate terribly!

“The hour is late, so I shall get to the point—I hereby invite the eight of you to become my direct apprentices, just the same as Evanera and Relvarith. I do ask you to keep this to yourself for the time being, until I decide which of the remaining students are worthy of being involved with anything more than directed research. Should you accept this honor, and I expect that you will, you should expect additional summons outside of our customary hours when I have tasks to assign or theories that would benefit from discussion.

“And, of course, as full apprentices under my direct supervision, you are each hereby authorized to class up your true [Biomancer] classes as you achieve the levels necessary to do so. May the System acknowledge the weight of my acceptance. You each have the potential that I seek, and I will hone that potential to the best of my ability and make each of you into [Biomancers] of great renown. Together, we shall be the pioneers that will shape what Biomancy can become.” His words radiated pride and Teacher even offered them a rare smile once he finished speaking.

Through his words, fear transitioned into relief, then promptly flared into joyous excitement—and Clover was hardly the only one that was visibly giddy!

Truly, there was nothing better than acceptance.

Clover had classed up quite a few times in her life. She knew what to expect. Except, when she opened her eyes, her class up space was all weird and wonky and dumb.

The familiar field of towering and tasty grasses with hidden holes to hide within was still there, sharing the exact same space with other worlds. There was Teacher’s workshop, the snow-covered mountain where she decided to be just like Ranthia, and a vast library filled with more books than Clover ever knew existed. Sometimes one world became a bit more detailed and crowded the others out, before it receded while something else replaced it. Honestly, how was a girl supposed to work under these conditions?!

Her guide—a bunny of biologically improbable size that represented the mother figure Clover had barely ever known—appeared at her side. Like she did with Xaoc, they communed through intentions rather than words. It was faster and better, but it wasn’t something she could do with anyone else. Unless she felt like bothering other gods or goddesses for no reason, at least.

Unfortunately, her guide was probably right. It was Clover’s own fault that her class up space turned stupid. She had reached something of a personal crossroad. The old space had been decent enough, but it hadn’t really suited her for quite some time. And she was finally mature enough to admit it. She wasn’t really a bunny that hid in holes when she got scared anymore, no matter what her extremely rude instincts tried to make her do. She was more than that!

She was a [Biomancer]. She was Ranthia’s bonded companion. She was a scholar. And she was death. Each of those labels was very cool, but they were also competing in her head and her heart. Which was silly, she wasn’t one of those things, she was all of them! She was an adorable and fluffy bunny. And through Biomancy she was a scholar that could bring death alongside her human.

She had helped to kill a wyvern, even! She was done with hiding in holes!

Clover closed her eyes and willed the world she desired into existence, hoping it would replace the nonsense that had greeted her. And it worked! When she opened them again, she found herself in the Biomancy lab of her dreams. Layered equipment, research notes, and bookshelves that were designed for both bunnies and people. All stored in a building with plenty of natural light!

Her new class up space wasn’t quite as obviously intuitive as her old, admittedly. In her old space, classes were represented by the holes hidden in the grasses. The tricky bit had been that the deeper holes were the worst classes—those that would have kept her as nothing more than a mundane rabbit. But every time she denied her instincts, she was rewarded. That was something she discovered by accident when she ran for the first hole she found after the whole thing with the wolf, wishing for nothing more than the power to run away from any danger. She’d been too young and too terrified to even care that her rump and adorable tail were completely exposed. It’d felt like shelter at the time. And it changed the trajectory of her entire life.

The new space was less rational at first glance. Each experiment, biological sample under observation, book, and pile of notes was its own class. And if the type of thing had some bearing on what kind of class was on offer, Clover sure couldn’t suss it out. Class color was obvious on most things, which was kind of hilariously unhelpful given that she couldn’t really see reds. The elements were a bit more abstract, but she could hear sounds connected to the element when she was close enough to a class. And as she explored, she found that some of the experiments or records were familiar—changes she made to herself or research she had done. The familiar classes were generally better, closer to what she was looking for.

But Clover was pretty sure she knew exactly what her class would be. She hopped along the rows of tables, displays, shelves, and desks until she reached the heart of her dream lab—the place where the wyvern (intact, as it had never been for their research) floated in a tank of green preservative fluids and stasis enchantments.

She pressed her nose against the clear crystal and learned what it represented.

[Bioneer!]. You’ve joined the respectable ranks of the true apprentices to the father of Biomancy, Lumornor. The System has acknowledged Biomancy—now help make sure the entire world acknowledges it. Shape the art and lay the framework that will be used for thousands of years. And never forget your vision, Clover. +3 Dexterity, +10 Vitality, +100 Mana, +62 Mana Regeneration, +100 Magic Power, +68 Magic Control.

Ooooh! Not only was it perfect, but it was also a green class! She’d never qualified for anything higher than yellow before!

The class did everything she needed it to. The quality was unexpectedly high. And more personally, she just liked the message of its description. Sure, there were probably other [Biomancer] classes that she could have considered, but she knew when her mind was made up.

Clover committed herself to the research project it represented and found her class up space fading away while her new class connected itself to her System.

She was still young by the standards of, well, pretty much everyone she knew, but she still felt as if time was flying by faster than she knew how to handle. Ever since her class up, her research had proceeded far smoother than it had beforehand, and with her human out hunting again, she was slowly regaining the levels she had lost.

With every day that passed, she came closer than ever to being ready… when she hadn’t even decided if she wanted to use Biomancy to become a human! Each day, her indecision weighed on her more and more heavily—bringing her usual cheery mood down with it. The transformation wasn’t permanent. If she didn’t like it, she could undo it as soon as her mana recovered. Sooner, if she borrowed access to Teacher’s arcanite.

But White Dove’s curse was permanent, and she was more than a bit scared about that. The elven curse was a mystery that no one was allowed to share, but Clover had read a book of known curses that the Academy—the elves’ great place of scholarly pursuits—put out. A few of them hadn’t sounded so bad. Most were like her human’s curse where they had minimal day-to-day effect, yet they could get their bearer killed in a crisis. But others…

The sphinx lost the ability to communicate, the treants had to be completely certain before they could act, dryads became trapped in one place, and trolls outright died if the sun’s light touched them. Individual curses were seldom recorded just because most people tried to keep their unique affliction secret, but the chapter on them was often horrifying. Flesh that that increasingly turned to bone each time they were healed, flammable blood, prevention from naturally recovering from any disease or illness, and a total inability to taste food were recorded within those pages!

But Clover chose to keep her indecision to herself. It was probably just because of stubbornness, even she knew that. It just felt far too personal for her to want the insight of others. She needed to make up her own mind! And fortunately, she was very good at hiding her feelings. Practically a professional, even.

“Hey Clover, welcome home.” It was a rare evening when Ranthia got home before Clover, yet there she was.

Clover clucked a greeting at her human and hopped her way inside. It was still a bit early for dinner, but she was kind of done with reading for the day. A nap sounded like a perfectly acceptable use for the extra time.

She was barely four hops across the room before she found herself snatched by a very rude human that never even asked!

“Come here, sweetling. We need to talk.” Ranthia’s tone was serious, but she still carried Clover over to the couch—where her ink caddy and paper were already prepared—so it must not have been too serious. Super serious conversations were relegated to the table.

Her ears drooped just the tiniest bit, but Clover supposed she could listen to whatever her human had to say. Even if the nap sounded much better.

They had a weird relationship in a lot of ways. It wasn’t like anything that Clover had read about in books. Ranthia wasn’t her mother. They weren’t siblings or any other sort of conventional family. But they were more than friends. And they certainly weren’t mates (gross). Their Bond made them something more than any of that, yet sometimes it felt like there was a lingering distance between them too.

“I know you’ve been feeling down lately, even if you won’t tell me why. I’m not going to force you if you don’t want to talk about it, just remember that whatever is going on—I’m here for you. And hey, if anyone’s giving you a hard time, I’ll take care of it.

“Now, with that said, I have something that might cheer you up a little. You asked once if I could show you some other humans, using [Twisted Reflection], and I think I’m finally ready to do it. Just… forgive me if I get a bit sentimental, okay?” Ranthia favored her with a slightly lopsided smile.

Ugh! Clover really only needed that if she decided to take on a human form, so the timing kind of burned. Buuuuut (drawing it out was very important, due to her mood), it also sounded kind of fun. Clover had read how human skin tones, builds, and structures could vary through the Medical Manuscripts, but knowing what was theoretically possible was very different from seeing actual people. And unless a bunch of additional humans showed up in the City of Arts—which would be so helpful in so many ways—it was an irreplaceable insight.

Not that it mattered, since her human began before Clover settled her heart and found her resolve.

“Tatius.” Ranthia nodded to the first image. “And Pupius. My fathers… Gods and goddesses, it’s weird to see them like this, out of my memories. Sorry, just…”

Her human trailed off, removing her fingers from Clover’s fur as she wiped at her suddenly damp eyes.

“I’ve told you a lot about them, so I won’t linger long. Tatius… he always did everything in his power to see me well-fed. In Remus, we barely had any notion of what proper nutrition meant, but he discovered it by accident. ‘The gods wouldn’t have created different types of food, like vegetables, if they weren’t all important.’ And he had always seemed so strong… But I’m not even in the same world they understood.

“Where Tatius nurtured and sought to protect me, Pupius wanted to make sure I was ready to face the world. He probably understood better than any of us just how perilous being an Adventurer could be. He wanted me to be tough and scrappy, able to fend for myself, no matter what I was doing. Through him, I learned to brawl, gamble, drink, and more. He wasn’t much of a father by conventional logic, but I don’t know if I could have become the woman I am without him.”

Sweet and sentimental, but… also kind of useless. Sure, Clover supposed that there was some use in knowing what men looked like, academically, but she was a woman. And even if she took on a human form, she fully intended to keep herself a woman! Not that she’d told Ranthia the reason that she wanted to see more humans, admittedly.

And there was no way she was going to interrupt her favorite person’s emotional journey just to be selfish!

“Hexara. I can probably honestly call her my first love. With the benefit of hindsight though, we definitely weren’t right for each other. She loved me as the heroine that saved her life, but once we were together, the risks I undertook each day weighed on her heart and soul. I couldn’t be what she wanted me to be and make her happy. And I’m glad she found someone that could. She was the one that pushed me to become a Ranger. Kinda have mixed feelings about that, yeah, but it’s hard to imagine my life would be any better had I never gone through all that I have.” Thankfully, Ranthia seemed eager to keep things moving.

Clover took a much closer look at Hexara’s image than she had with the two that the pretty lady replaced. She had a light dusting of freckles—which looked nothing like what Clover had imagined they would. Her build was also shockingly soft, even by the standards of the most idle of elves. Humans truly just… wouldn’t put on muscle without putting in the effort? Weird.

“Sunrise, a brothel worker and friend.” Ranthia’s smile became just a touch uncomfortable, as her human relished in memories that Clover hoped she’d keep to herself!

She was, admittedly, very pretty. For a human.

“Julia and Elainus, along with their son, Themis. A family formed by bonds without blood, just like mine. Had I never met them, I don’t want to know how long it would have taken before I realized Tatius and Pupius were my fathers.” The parents were Clover’s first experience with humans that had aged beyond their prime. Both wore their years with grace, and the men undeniably had the posture of [Warriors].

But Clover was mostly focused on trying to etch Julia’s features into her memory with [No Forgets!]. There was some potential there.

More faces came, one by one. Some Ranthia seemed to barely acknowledge, like Pibius—a Ranger she’d worked with. Others came with (comparatively) prolonged stories, like Statia, who was a very useful benchmark because Ranthia shared her at two different ages, over a decade apart!

There were a few standouts though. Lysia, a friend from Ranthia’s second round as a Ranger, was tiny as far as humans went. Her proportions were an incredibly useful benchmark for the low-end. Ranthia herself was useful as a high-end benchmark, since she was taller than any of the women she revisited for Clover’s benefit. Other women were plumper or had larger chests (seriously, why were those so variable?!) or were otherwise different, and every data point was very useful!

But it was Green—a mentor of Ranthia’s—that truly captivated Clover. The woman’s darker skin tone was beautiful, and she found herself drawn to the physical maturity of the woman. She had read about wrinkles, but Elaine had done a terrible job with describing them! She made them sound like flaws. But they were as beautiful as any work of art! They were like engravings that showed where laughter and other emotion lingered. Julia had a few, but Green’s were even better than those were!

Sentinel Solace and the eight women that protected her were the final set that Ranthia bothered to show her. Though Clover was pretty darn certain that Ranthia had met more humans than she’d shown. Even she knew more people than that, and she only knew the people that lived in the City of Arts, which wasn’t even very big! Still, what she had seen helped. Immensely, even.

By the time they sat down to dinner, Clover was feeling much braver. The idea of facing White Dove’s judgement no longer sounded impossibly scary.

And the idea of being a human—at least sometimes—appealed more than it once had.

Even if she made up her mind, there were preparations to make. Clover needed to wait for Vivincea to confirm her own findings about increasing a subject’s size safely, she needed to give Teacher an opportunity to take more samples before her transformation, and she had to do a lot of rehearsing to decide just how she wanted to greet White Dove to try and stay on her good side. But more than anything, she needed to design the human body she wanted and then learn how to create it using Biomancy. She couldn’t just paint a picture in her head and drop it into a Skill. She needed to research how every choice she made was expressed within the body and figure out which biological processes needed to be invoked to achieve it. Skin tone was determined by melanin—eumelanin, specifically—but she needed to know just how much her epidermis had to produce to get the color she wanted.

Human skeletons were the easiest part. There was variance, true, but the skeleton had comparatively minimal impact on someone’s build, aside from their height. And thanks to the research of her peers, she had a decent understanding of how to develop a desirable musculature, but she still needed to calculate fat stores and allocation to get the build she chose out of the musculature. Even beyond that, there were so many additional things to figure out, down to how warm she wanted her hands to be (a question of blood flow, mostly).

Fortunately, Teacher met with her every other day to assist her with the process. He had some great insights too, which proved that he was putting just as much thought into it as she was! She might have taken an eternity—three years, at a minimum—to come up with her plans without his help, but with his help, well…

Just after Ranthia’s birthday, in the spring of 4909, she was ready.

Pretending to hop her way to the workshop while she waited for Ranthia to depart on her day’s hunt with Neyvern and Solareon was one of the hardest things Clover had ever done. She was nervous! But if she behaved too irregularly, her human would stick around, and Clover didn’t want that. She needed to face White Dove one-on-one. She owed White Dove that much for the trespass she was about to commit.

There was something to be said for doing the Biomancy with at least Teacher present, just in case something went horribly wrong and she blacked out, but if she did that, Teacher would know exactly what curse she received. White Dove wasn’t going to wait for her to be stabilized and comfortable and alone—she never did.

Clover just needed to trust herself. Teacher and her own Skills had verified her plan. Everything was foolproof! …Probably.

She was nervous enough that she was tempted to revisit her ethics. Capturing another giant field rabbit and inflicting humanity on him or her no longer sounded quite so egregious. But no! That was silly fear talking.

And she wouldn’t be alone. Xaoc had promised to watch over her while she made her attempt successful transformation.

Once Clover was convinced that Ranthia must have departed—and once she’d forced herself to stuff her tummy with the bounty of her favorite snacking park—Clover hopped her way back home. That way, even if something went horribly wrong, Ranthia would be able to find her and get her to Litil or Teacher. Unless things went horribly wrong for her too, during her hunt…

No! No more dark thoughts!

Clover scratched at her head until she cleared it of terribleness, then hopped her way in front of Xaoc’s altar. That was probably the best place to do what she needed to do.

Her mind cast about for more excuses to prepare—did she need towels?—but Clover refused to indulge in them. Instead, she had her temporary appendages set down the apple and other tasty plants she’d brought to offer hospitality to White Dove and tried to remind herself that she was brave.

She was a scholar. She was a survivor. She was death. And she was ready.

Ranthia kept her backup arcanite next to Xaoc’s altar, which was kind of perfect. It would be enough for Clover to do what she must, with a bit of wiggle room just in case she somehow messed up a step. Not that she expected to have any issues, [Change, Iteratively!] already carried every single step of the plan she and Teacher had created.

Arcanite, check. Offering, check. Subject, self-check. Xaoc’s altar, check.

Nothing else was essential. She had everything that she truly needed. And even if trusting herself was kind of scary, Teacher had also checked everything—more than once. And she trusted him implicitly.

Clover dutifully informed Xaoc that she was ready and, the very instant she received His response, she activated her Skill.

Steps one through four were size increases to her usual adorable form. She wanted to surpass two-thirds of her final target mass before she started to change anything, just to make the adjustments easier. Like Teacher said, a larger size made everything easier when it came to biology. …At least so long as the breathing mechanism continued to support the body.

As part of each change, she selectively blanked or hampered specific nerves to mitigate the pain and discomfort that she felt. Her Skill was largely autonomous once she began each stage, but she needed to keep a clear head as she assessed her own condition and made the decision whether or not to continue. That and she needed to keep a clear recollection of her experience so she could record it for posterity! Her first-hand account would probably be read by every single [Biomancer] for the foreseeable future.

Four minutes to recover and recalibrate herself between the first and second size increase. Two minutes for the ones that followed, though she found herself lingering for far longer after she had reached the maximum size that she planned to take herself to as a pure rabbit. Being so much larger was both weird and surprisingly mundane, but her heart rate had spiked. She wasn’t even sure if it was the demands of her form or her own nerves about what she knew was to come.

Due to that, she lingered for almost fourteen minutes, communing with Xaoc until she felt calm and ready enough to continue. Step five was in many ways the easiest step—she just needed to blank all of her nerves, because steps six through nine would heavily reconfigure them as her anatomy shifted. No one expected that to be a pleasant process! Once she was ready, she was forced to delay a bit longer as she pulled mana from the unattuned arcanite to recoup what she had already spent. In retrospect, she should have probably attuned it first, but the delay wasn’t too bad.

Step five completed with ease, leaving her uncomfortably numb. She didn’t even try to linger like that; she just tried to relax her body and triggered step six immediately.

With her nerves blanked she couldn’t truly feel pain, but her body still did everything it could to register its discomfort with her brain. She was used to the sensation of her bones and muscles shifting, but she had never attempted anything on that scale. It… kind of was absolutely awful, she wasn’t going to lie to herself or Xaoc. Everything just felt horrendously wrong.

Yet her diagnostic Skills told her that she was within the parameters that Teacher had calculated. Blood pressure was a bit too low, but that was expected. That was why Teacher was amazing—it was almost like he’d already done something similar beforehand! He was even right about how she needed to move her heart slowly with each iterative step, focusing on her lungs first.

Step seven was almost anticlimactic after how awful step six was. Her stomach—not quite human, nor fully rabbit—roiled angrily, but that was about it.

Life was going to be just awful when she reactivated her finalized nerves, but there was no helping that.

After step eight, she was left dizzy and her diagnostic Skills reported an alarming increase in her body heat. Teacher had warned her about that, but it still forced her to pause while she waited for the room’s sweet air to cool her back off. In the space of a second or two, her body had transitioned from a rabbit’s heat management to a human’s, and it struggled a bit with the difference.

Sweat felt so gross. Sure, she could sweat a little as a rabbit, but that was limited to her lips. All around, it was a much nicer experience. But having her entire body drenched in sticky moisture? Gross! Worse because she wasn’t completely rid of her fur yet, that was a near-final step! It was just kind of patchy because she was larger than her furry form had been.

Step nine was in a lot of ways the largest single step. No one aspect of her body changed severely, but almost everything changed at least a little. Once it was completed, her beloved ears were gone—necessary because she finished altering her skull into a human-typical structure. And their audial canals were placed far less conveniently. Her tail was still there, just inert because human tailbones were kind of weirdly useless. She had fingers, but there was no point in trying to manipulate them until she finished altering and restoring her nervous system.

She rolled onto her back and spent exactly six minutes forcing her bizarre musculature to relax, then began steps ten through sixteen. One step enhanced her minimalistic musculature. Another created the body fat she desired. Breasts formed as her secondary sexual characteristics were fully expressed. Her fur fell from her fully human dermis. Her beloved tail ceased to exist. The wrinkles she desired formed on her face, unfelt. Teeth grew to fill her mouth, forcing her to open it—which caused a delay when she accidentally inhaled several loose pieces of fur.

Coughing felt weird, but her incomplete body seemed to know what to do to clear its airways. Sure, she knew rabbits could cough, but per Litil’s books, that was only when they got sick. And Clover was far too healthy to have ever gotten sick!

…Okay, that probably had more to do with frequent check-ups from the animal [Healer] and the general elven tendency to ensure any disease is healed out before it could properly take root.

Steps seventeen through twenty-four were mostly minor things. Like growing her hair, eyebrows, eyelashes, and the body hair that she wanted to experiment with. She blew through them sequentially and topped her mana up one last time.

Because the next eight steps were going to be the hardest. She needed to reactivate and reconfigure her nervous system to ensure that everything was connected as it needed to be. There was no rushing that process, no matter how terrible it was.

But she had come that far!

Clover gritted her teeth and once again triggered her Skill.

And from there, things became hazy. The pain was hard to describe. It wasn’t the sharp pain like what she caused whenever she pinched a nerve with a careless application of a temporary appendage. It was more like… a general wrongness that felt so terrible that it completely overwhelmed her. It was all that she could do to focus on each step of the process and what she needed to do. She was going to be clumsy with her form so dramatically altered. Nothing could undo that, except maybe a new Skill from the System. But there was a difference between clumsy and making a mistake in how her nerves connected. She needed to find every instance of the latter and fix it.

Thankfully, she had a Skill for that.

Unthankfully, she needed to test every way her new body could move, one bit at a time, escalating how large a movement she made with each stage of the test. She had rehearsed the list of tests with Teacher over and over—it was practically second nature to roll through it, no matter how out of sorts she felt.

With every problem and mistake she fixed, things became easier. The mistakes were important and she knew that she needed to carefully record each one, but… Well, she was counting on [No Forgets!] to handle that. She just couldn’t make her head focus on the scholarly pursuit. Everything she had left was dedicated to tracking which movement came next, which nerves would be involved, and what the signaling should ‘look’ like to her Skill.

By the time Clover finished, she was a mess of sweat. She was pretty sure the foul taste in her mouth meant that she’d vomited at some point too. She ached and was struggling not to regret every choice she had ever made. Significant, substantive changes to the core of her being were hard in a way that changing her limbs or putting an ocean-dwelling fish’s maw on her belly never prepared her for. Even with the System, she felt faint and weak.

She might have passed out on the spot, if not for one not-so-tiny reason.

Around the same time that she finished her transformation, she became aware of another presence in the room. She was shaky. She was weak. She was naked and disgusting and not at all ready. And she really, really hadn’t expected her guest to arrive until after she recovered and de-aged her human form a bit.

But ready or not, she still forced herself to roll onto her side to look up at the bird that was staring down at her.

Opening her eyes nearly overwhelmed her. She knew that humans saw more colors than she did as a rabbit, but she had no idea that their home was so garish! Everything was so bright and colorful! White Dove seemed especially beautiful in contrast, with her pristine white feathers.

Feebly, Clover tried to indicate the offerings she had prepared. She should probably say something, but her tongue felt like it was crafted out of lead. Had she messed something else up? She was pretty sure that everything was connected as it should have been.

White Dove flew closer then—somehow maintaining her altitude in the process—reached forward to lay a wing soothingly against Clover’s forehead.

“I do wish I could give you the time to recover, but my time is precious. Can you hear and remember my words?” Her voice was far more tender than Clover would have ever imagined. Almost motherly—which was a strange thought when she had never possessed a frame of reference for such a thing until that moment.

Clover forced herself to nod. It was sloppy, but she did it.

“Very well. You are the first of your kind that I have ever condemned. Such firsts are bitter. There will be a day when there are no more to be had, as more creatures like you follow immortals that you have grown fond of into your own defiance of my wishes. Listen closely. Know my hatred. And know your sin.” With those words, the wing left Clover’s forehead, as White Dove flew a bit higher.

She opened her beak with a far weightier presence than she’d possessed a moment before.

Except, she wasn’t the only one. Clover felt herself relax—just slightly—as Xaoc’s own presence became more intense. He had watched over her through every step of her process, just as He promised He would, but He was giving the two of them His undivided attention.

“No. Not even you have the right to interfere in this! You know what will happen if you do!”

It felt absurd to read emotions off a bird’s largely impassive features, but White Dove looked absolutely furious.

Except, she was wrong. He wasn’t interfering, Xaoc just was bearing witness to what was happening! Clover wanted to protest for Him, but He conveyed the sentiment to White Dove before Clover could figure out how to communicate.

She really should have prepared paper and a pen or something.

Except, Xaoc didn’t leave things there, no matter how much Clover wished that He had. White Dove’s beautiful plumage turned absolutely black, losing all trace of color. For a horrible instant, Clover thought she had swapped out with her counterpart, but no. The truth was stranger than that.

White Dove had annoyed Xaoc by standing up to Him, so He reminded her of her true place in the divine pecking (sorry!) order. For an instant, they became White Crow // Black Dove.

But only for an instant. Then White Dove was restored to her usual form and was allowed to seethe through her disgruntlement. Which probably wasn’t doing Clover any favors! Still, a moment or two later, the divine bird once again spread her wings.

“Clover. [Sudden Escape!]. [Tricky Bunny!]. [Bioneer!].”

Why did she sound judgmental? They were great class names!

“A rabbit that should have lived a brief, contented life amongst your home fields. Bonded Companion to the Cursed human, Amaranthia. I was content to turn a blind eye to your theft while you remained a beast, but you willfully chose to infringe upon me a second time. Stealing what was rightfully mine was not enough for you—you chose to shove your disregard for me in my face.”

That… sounded bad. She wanted to apologize—to explain herself—but White Dove wasn’t about to give her the time to do so!

Also, that was not her human’s name! Rude!

“I curse you. You have fought against your instincts. You have done everything in your power to become something more than you are. You even weaponized the System to twist your form in an effort to leave your true nature behind. No longer. Your instincts and fears shall forever be a part of you. Their intensity shall never fade. In your heart, you shall forever be what you hoped to rise beyond.”

White Dove Spoke, not with fury, but with utter hatred so intense that Clover found herself desperately trying to scoot away from the deific bird, heedless of the trail of urine she left in her wake.

“You called yourself ‘death’ while forgetting a simple truth: you are prey.” White Dove sneered one last time, before she dove with her talons outstretched.

Clover had no defense. Even if she still had [Blinkies!], it wasn’t like the Skill had ever possessed the mana to move an adult human. She still tried to trigger the Skill that she lost, of course. But when it failed, she had nothing else to try.

She accepted her fate and hung her head.

Only to watch the bird streak past her downturned eyes, seize the bunch of tasty clover (the plants!), and vanish.

With White Dove gone, Xaoc’s own presence filled the room. Comforting. Warm. He assured her that she was safe.

Instincts weren’t everything, He reminded her. White Dove’s curses could be fought. She could still learn to live with the unwanted terror. She had never truly escaped her instincts, but they had gradually become dulled as she learned that she was no longer so vulnerable. White Dove had just undone that. But she had already learned to act, even with every instinct telling her not to.

She just needed to reconnect with that mindset. And when it was put like that, the curse didn’t sound… quite as bad. It was still awful and even with Xaoc’s reassurances, she still felt skittish in a way she hadn’t in years. But maybe she could learn to live with that.

“Besides, if she’s going to curse you to have the instincts of a rabbit, let’s make it the truth! May the System forever acknowledge you as what you truly are, no matter what your current form is. But only for your own Skills, of course.”

Xaoc had never Spoken out loud to her. Yet His voice filled the room—possibly the entire tree, given the tremble she felt. She swore that she even felt His touch in the form of fingers gently passing through her hair, as if it was still fur.

And with that, He withdrew as well. He was still there, of course, just as He always was. But He no longer had so much of Himself focused in one place.

As much as she appreciated the sentiment… it was too much. She was already at her wit’s end with her body. Then White Dove sent her into an absolute panic. And while Xaoc tried to help her, He had only thrown more fuel into the figurative fire. She wanted to stamp and hide, but her stupid body didn’t move like she wanted to. Instead, she uncomfortably dragged herself across the floor as her emotions built and burned and swirled and other verbs that she lacked the patience to list!

She never consciously decided to try out her voice. But at some point, when her thoughts and moods became too much to keep contained in her stupid, clumsy body, her mouth fell open. And noise poured out of it.

That was the last straw. She had always found people to be excessively loud. As a rabbit, her own sounds were sensibly subtle, intended to be heard only by those in close proximity. Even her thumps were more about localized vibrations for the most sensitive and skittish creatures. She hated loud noise.

And no one had ever warned about her how people noises rattled through their bones and horribly conveyed themselves directly to her inner ear.

Her eyes rolled back as she struggled to keep a grip on her consciousness. Becoming insensate was bad enough, but she felt as if she’d choke on the thick saliva that was overfilling her mouth.

And that was about when she heard the front door crash open.

Because life just wasn’t going to stop overwhelming her.