((Just Alida today. Tooru tomorrow.))
(big doggo)
(Well, wasn't expecting that. It certainly should help in a lot of situations. I'll do my best to make it effective and hopefully efficient.)
This could be good. It wasn't what I expected, but if I was like this before, that last witch would have had a much harder time stopping me.. maybe Mina wouldn't have died.
"It's okay. It was just me in there. When I was all wolfy it was just me. There's no creature in there, it's just my body that was different." "Is different."
"I do think I need to practice with the new body some, but don't worry, I think you did good."
.."Thank you again, Sasha. And thank you, Asha for helping me out."
As for the timeskip, basically I want to try and mend things with my family, keep up with my friends, and spend a couple evenings practicing with this new form. Perhaps get inside a junkyard, or another closed business with a fence, and see if I can figure out exactly what counts for changing forms, and running around and such, to get a feel for how the new body works, and what it can do. Can I speak in it or just growl? Also try to figure out in what way is it growing stronger.
After I've got a handle on it, I think I could confront the survivor of the boat wreck, and see if that guy was an asshole or what. Maybe involve some giant wolf stuff?
If I've got time, there's one last thing to test. What is Duet with Reality like in wolf form? I'm pretty sure I can only howl. Try an isolated area for that, like out of town or an industrial site on a weekend night. Use the minimum amount of power, and maintain it for no more than one additional turn after the start.
Over the next few days your life proceeds relatively normally; you're too busy dealing with school and your family to spend much time dwelling on magical matters. It isn't until Wednesday that you find yourself with an entire evening free. You decide to spend it on testing out your new werewolf powers. Once it gets late, you tell Eva that you're going out to meet some friends, then you leave and head to a junkyard on the outskirts of the city.
You spend a little time looking around to make sure nobody's still around, then you leap over the fence and start wandering around the yard. It's... not as large as you had hoped, really, just a bunch of rows of old ruined cars, none of them stacked, with no giant hills of garbage, like you've seen in movies. Still, there's nobody around, and the vehicles should provide adequate cover even if someone does come wandering along. You think.
The transformation comes as quickly and easily as it did last time, requiring nothing more than a quick flip. You experiment a few times, and find that
any kind of flip seems to work; frontflip, backflip, a roll, even a side roll, any kind of rolling motion works, just as long as your feet pass over your head at some point; the transformation always happens just after that point. You can even hold position in a handstand for awhile, then slowly let yourself tumble over in any direction, and the transformation begins just after, as long as you're focusing on it. Returning to human form works much the same way, though it's a little easier to do it by rolling sideways rather than forward or backward.
Once you're confident you understand how to change shape, you start running around as a wolf, getting used to moving around on four legs. It's a little difficult at first, but you learn quickly, and soon you're dashing from one end of the junkyard to the other, turning on a dime, then dashing back the other way. You can run
extremely fast as a wolf, and the junkyard is way too small to even begin to test your limits; you can barely start to trot at speed before you have to start slowing down again. It's a bit frustrating, and you start runnning laps around the perimeter of the junkyard, hoping to reach higher speeds. And then you start cutting the corners, running in a circle and sprinting over vehicles with ease, but you still feel like you're mostly limited by the need to
turn. You need a bigger field to test out your maximum speed, although... even then, you'd need a better method to measure your speed. You're pretty sure that you're already traveling faster than you've ever traveled in a car, but you're not used to this area, and have no frame of reference for precisely how fast you're going. You sit down on your back legs and as you think, your tail wagging. You're not tired at all, despite all the running. Being a wolf is pretty awesome!
Eventually, you start testing the next trait on your list: your biting ability. This is pretty straightforward; you pad over to a ruined truck, open the door up, then bite down into the metal of it. It crunches under your jaws like particularly tough cardboard. You bite down harder, growling in satisfaction, then give a hard yank, twisting as you fight with the metal. The entire door flexes and groans as you pull, and after several seconds of tugging, you can feel it starting to give way--and then you tumble backwards, a large section of twisted metal locked in your jaws. You spit it out, then inspect the hole in the door. You tore out a wedge of metal about a foot long! You had been
trying to rip off the entire door, but this is pretty impressive too! You excitedly spin in a circle, then jump up on top of the truck's cab--the structure groaning under your weight--and lift your head up to the sky,
letting out a powerful howl that echoes into the darkening sky.The sound is
exhilarating, primal and full of power! It fills you with energy and clears your mind, opening the world up to you. Sounds and scents are already extremely powerful as a wolf, but everything becomes just a smidge clearer as you howl, a touch more
intuitive.
The sensation only grows as your howl drags on, but as your senses continue to sharpen, you feel like something's missing. There's a pit of loneliness in your stomach, nobody here to hear you howl, or to answer it. You stop, your ears perking up and listening to the echoes as the sensation of clarity fades. There's a powerful hope inside you that you'll hear an answer, from a real wolf, or from
anything, really... but nothing comes. All of a sudden you feel very embarassed and foolish; someone is going to come to investigate that. Wolves shouldn't be howling inside cities, even on the outskirts. And even if you
could talk as a wolf, you doubt anyone would accept any explanation you could give.
You transform back into your human form, and leave the junkyard immediately, rushing home as fast as you can. That's enough magical adventuring for today...
Your next free evening comes on Friday, and you decide to pay Mr. Takeda a visit. Unfortunately, you have absolutely no idea where he lives, or even where he works, beyond a vauge understanding that it's probably somewhere near the docks, being an engineer who works on ships. Or... something like that. You feel a little guilty, not remembering all of what your father said about his work, and the people he worked with, but you're
pretty sure Takeda was a ship engineer. So you head down to the docks, and for lack of any better method, start blindly asking people if they know where he is.
[Love]
You spend a
long time doing this, and the vast majority of people either ignore you, or say they have no idea who you're talking about. The sky is dark by the time you get an answer, from a drunk sailor who's stumbling around aimlessly. Upon hearing Takeda's name, the man starts angrily ranting about... something to do with a woman, you're really not sure
what. The man has a short attention span, keeps switching between topics, and doesn't stop walking along as he talks, seemingly only half aware of you interrogating him. You have to constantly redirect him back to the subject of Takeda, and repeat every question over and over, to get any kind of coherent answers. Worse, you get different answers to the same questions; by the end of the conversation, he's given thee different addresses that Takeda lives at, and
five different companies that he works for. The addresses, at least, are all in about the same area, actually not all that far from your own house, but the companies are all in entirely different places. You write everything down on a piece of paper you brought along, but you don't expect much, resolving to come back tomorrow and try again. Maybe next time you'll bring one of the other magical girls to help...
...The next day, you manage to avoid any weekend duties by telling Eva that one of your friends
begged you to come visit her, because of some emergency, and get out of the house shortly before noon. You don't like lying to your sister, but you feel that if she could actually believe what you were doing, she'd be entirely supportive, so it's justified. Mostly.
Since they're close, you check out the three addresses you were given before doing anything else. The first house you check isn't it--nobody's home, and when you ask a neighbor when "Mr. Takeda" will be back, the lady who answered the door says that the
Redfields live in that house. However, to your great surprise, she
does know Takeda, and tells you where he lives, without you even having to ask; apparently she thinks you have a delivery for him or something. It turns out, the other two streets you were given are wrong, though one is right next to Takeda's actual home. You thank the woman profusely, and she just smiles, happy to help, then asks you to say hi for her.
It's only a three minute run for you to get to Takeda's house, though you think you may have broken the speed limit on the way there; a lot of emotions are bubbling up inside you, and you don't know how to feel. Excited, afraid, angry... it's complex. When you finally reach his house, you pause and have to take a few breaths to calm down. The house doesn't seem right, it's just another old building, small, and largely indistinguishable from every other house on this street. Nothing special. There's two cars in the driveway: an old beaten-up brown sedan, and a clean white van that's parked
extremely close behind it. The windows have curtains over them, and you can't see or hear anyone.
A small voice inside you says that you should just leave now, go back home, then come back at a better time. Maybe with the other magical girls. You don't know
what a better time would be, but standing here, you suddenly feel very anxious. You had a jumble of vauge expectations for what would happen now, but all of them feel silly and childish now.