Play it safe and sleep the first night
You decide that it is probably best not to go out low on magic. The last thing you want is for your disguise to break and your secret to be revealed.
You head up the stairs to find a small loft. It seems like your magic was involved building this room. While the bathroom is small, it is definitely made for humans. There appears to be a single electric light in the roof, though no light in the bathroom. No bed, either, but she did say you would need to magic up a hammock.
You imagine the hammock up following her guidelines before heading into the bathroom for a shower. You hang the clothes on the hook and step into the shower. The shower fills with steam. You wonder for a moment if this is magic or if there is technology in the stables. Probably something to look at in the morning.
You step out of the shower and find your clothes have disappeared. Your hammock is still there but your horn is now showing. You must be running very low on magic. Well one job for tomorrow will be setting up a non-magic source of shower. And a light that doesn’t need it to run, too.
You look over in the mirror seeing the human you almost as you pictured her(well except for the horn in the center of your forehead). Trying to save magic you stop maintaining the disguise. As you change, you head over and lay out on the hammock
Your dreams leave you with a sense of worry. You imagine the magic of the earth itself running out and just the two of you left looking over a dry,dead wasteland of a planet.
You wake up in the morning, the hammock has gone, and you are laying out on the floor quite uncomfortably. Well first thing to find out, how do I make permanent items. Second thing, what does your dream mean.
You look over yourself. Right new first thing, restore human self. Perhaps even a male human? You try to picture your old body but you find yourself unable to keep the image straight. Giving up you try the female one but find out that is too hard as well.
You check downstairs to see that no one has snuck in to see Launia waiting for you at the bottom. She sees you and calls up "Come on Nokomi , the morning is wasting away"
"My disguise is gone" you call down " and I can’t restore it."
"I can fix that for you" she says " just come down."
You have to be careful on the stairs, thanks to your hooves, and in fact you’re holding the rail in a death grip all the way down. But you make it to the bottom without breaking anything, most importantly your neck. "I think I’d better move my bed down here," you say ruefully. "Especially if I’m going to keep draining myself each day."
"Or you could learn to create the disguise yourself. You could create a hammock and clothes yourself right?" She asks you before coming over and placing her forehead on yours.You feel her stabilizing the image and you let it flow over you. Of course the clothes were not part of the image and you are standing there naked. That is quickly fixed and you make sure that you include the underwear this time.
"See you can do clothes easily, living things are only a little harder"
"Speaking of which, all the things I created disappeared." you ask
"Of course, they are constructs of magic. Making things that are real are much more taxing on your magic. There was a story of a baker who paid a unicorn to make sweets and sold them as non-fattening."
You nod "I was hoping to get some modern conveniences up in my loft without having to rely on magic, but it seems like that would take just as much magic"
"What did you have in mind?"
"Well, gutter to collect the rain, perhaps a solar heater for heating the water."
"I see. Well the water system here does not take magic to run"
"What? then why did I lose so much magic for my shower?"
"You had a hot shower right? That combined with all the other magic was too much for your first day."
"Oh." you say.
"If you want a solar shower though, it will be a good lesson for today though."
You nod "Thank you. Oh , I had a dream of the planet being a wasteland!"
She nods. "We keep the balance, the Earth has it’s own magic. The humans take the fossil reserves and she tries to rebuild them. That is draining the magic from the other areas."
You gulp. "Should we be using our magic then? If it is draining from the Earth itself..."
She smiles "No, our magic comes from us and the Earth cannot use our magic.So do you want your solar heater?"
Written by Catprog and Xodiac on 21 December 2014