Inari’s Gift

The following morning, Cera decided to stay inside for the day and focus on her magic again.  This time, her focus was entirely on biological manipulation, which she intended to use to hide herself before going to the capital.

While her illusions were quite good by now, they could still be seen through.  What couldn’t be seen through, at least in theory, was actually modifying her body to resemble a human again.  She’d hate losing the tail and cute ears, but it should only be temporary, hopefully.

Additionally, she realized she should try to hide her fangs and eyes.  They were rather minor comparatively, but she didn’t want to risk her whole disguise being revealed due to little things like that.  She did still intend to use illusions as well, to get people used to her having illusions up at all times.

For now, however, her primary goal was to increase her understanding of herself so she would be able to recreate her current appearance properly.  She also needed to learn how to alter hair and bone, as she’d only managed to change her flesh slightly so far.

To start off her efforts today, Cera pulled her tail around in front of her and began to focus her magical sight on it at the same time as she ran mana through it as if she was going to heal it.  This helped her get a better feel for how it was supposed to be.  She spent nearly an hour focused this way, until she was confident that she could recreate the structure mentally.

Afterward, she began attempting to merge the hair on the tip together using her magic.  After nearly half an hour, she gave up, assuming that since hair was dead, it must not react to the same sort of magic as living tissues did.  Wincing in anticipation, she then focused on trying to make the hair fall out on a small patch of her tail.

Sure enough, that worked, and she shortly had a small amount of loose hair falling from her tail.  As much as she hated it, she would have to do that to her entire tail in time.  She was most certainly not looking forward to that, as tails should remain fluffy at all times, in her opinion.

Next, she focused again on the tip of her tail and began attempting to manipulate the bone, attempting to shrink her tail by one bone.  In time, she felt the strange sensation of the bone slowly degrading and turning into various other tissues, which she promptly began to shift around the tail so it wasn’t lumpy, her instincts helping her find how to do so.

Once the bone she had focused on was totally gone, Cera then began to attempt to reform it, finding it much more difficult, even as she shifted the tissues back to where they had been.  Hour after hour passed as she focused, feeling a tiny bit of progress being made.

Eventually, she found herself growing hungry and opened her eyes, finding that it was already almost dark.  She quickly stopped her work and threw up her illusion before going downstairs to get some food, glad that she was fine just eating one big meal per day, as it saved time.

Upon finishing her meal, she returned to her room to continue her efforts to regrow the bone she had dissolved until she found herself too tired to continue and went to bed, hugging her tail while being careful not to put pressure on the tip.

When she woke up in the morning, she got straight back to her work without even bothering to get up, simply lying in bed for hour after hour as she focused on her tail.  Eventually, as the sun was beginning to go down again, she finally had the bone back to the same condition it was in when she started.

From that point, she began to focus on the small patch where she had removed the hair and attempted to speed up the growth of new hair.  Fortunately, this was much easier than creating bone where there wasn’t any already, and by the time she was ready for dinner, she’d managed to get the hair to match the rest of her tail.

After a quick dinner, Cera returned to her room to rest for the evening, glad that she’d managed to restore her tail, though she was disappointed in how long it took for such a small portion of it.

When she woke up the next morning, Cera decided to work on her book some more while she thought.  Ears were going to be an issue, as her head didn’t have enough spare tissue to reshape into human ears, unless she was to remove part of her skull, which was far too stupid an idea to seriously consider.

For that matter, she didn’t want to alter her brain to support human ears properly, as she was far from an expert on the brain, and feared she would cause herself permanent damage if she tried.  As she wrote, she eventually decided that she would have to go with simple superficial imitations of the ears, while leaving her own small fox ears simply pressed down and held in place so they could still hear.

That would seriously impair her hearing, but since they allowed her to hear far better than a human, it should balance out well enough, in theory.  Fortunately, she had the ears of an arctic fox rather than a red fox, which were much smaller, and thus easier to conceal.

With her idea in place, Cera quit writing and began her attempt to attach the edges of her ear to her scalp, wincing again as she had to remove sections of her hair to expose the skin.  She really didn’t like that part of her attempts to disguise herself.

For this, however, it only took a few hours to extend a small amount of skin from one to the other, locking her ears in a folded-down position.  Looking in the mirror on the wall, she found that it did look quite a bit like she just had two shorter patches of hair, which was exactly what she was hoping for.

Next, however, she had to verify that she could still hear well enough, so she put up her illusions again and headed downstairs.  As she reached the stairs, she began to hear voices from below, so she was pleased to note that she still had quite good hearing, though everything was quite muffled.  Her ears also kept trying to twitch, however, which would ruin the effect.

Since she hadn’t needed to go as far as she thought, she simply returned to her room without going downstairs, beginning to focus on her ears again, attempting to sense deeper than before, aiming for the nerves.

Several hours later, she believed she had found them and, after taking careful note of how they connected, she began to disconnect those that seemed to govern movement.  This took surprisingly little time, and she simply left them near the connecting nerves, so it would be easier to reattach them.

This was much easier to test, at least, and she simply walked over to the dresser and slapped her hand on the top of it, finding that her ears didn’t move at all, as she had hoped.  She did, however, still hear it just fine, also as she had hoped.

The next goal was much harder, however, and she decided to put it off until tomorrow, focusing on her writing again until it was time for dinner, instead.

Going to bed felt strange, with her ears not where they should be, but she comforted herself with her tail, sadly reminding herself that it would be gone as well in time.

Cera had no doubt at all in her mind that, at the very least, the teachers at the mage academy would be able to see through her illusions in an instant, and she was not keen on being detected the instant she arrived, so she would have to make sacrifices.

The next morning, the first thing Cera did was fix her ears, finding it much easier than hiding them had been.  She was more than willing to leave them as they should be until she was near the capital.  Her tail, however, would have to be worked on well before she reached it.  Given the time it had taken to remove a single bone from it, it would likely take many days to fully dissolve, but fortunately, it shouldn’t cause too much of an issue when she spread the mass around her body.  Putting it back would take even longer, however.

Cera also wasn’t certain about being able to recreate nerves, so she would just be bunching them up where her tail was attached, to make them easier to put back.  She would also have to be careful to disconnect them, or she’d be far more sensitive than she should.

With that figured out, she began trying to figure out how to make fake human ears.  It would be difficult and unpleasant to try to shift tissues up her neck and around her head, so she wanted to find another way.  Eventually, she came up with an idea, and was unsure if it was insane or brilliant.

Summoning up an ice scalpel, she made a cut on the back of one arm, and the back of her other hand.  Putting the cuts together, she then tried to pass tissue between them through the wounds.  After a few tries, her limbs became attached to one another, but she could feel the movement between them.

It took several more tries before she could disconnect them again, after moving the flesh back where it belonged, of course.  Healing the cuts was nearly an afterthought now, with her increased experience and power.

To avoid having to cut herself again, she instead began to practice forming human ears on the back of her arm, finding it much easier than working on her tail since she just had to shape flesh and cartilage into the proper form, rather than working with bone.

The ear was, however, a fairly complicated-looking structure, and it took many, many tries to get the appearance right.  Eventually, Cera found herself growing tired, and she went downstairs to get a meal after restoring her arm to normal.  She then headed to bed, thinking of what she would teach her students the following day.

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