Fish Person
The speaker's face lights up when you agree to help; he frowns when you state your plan. "My apologies, great one, but… the most strongly marked among us… are unable to move freely. I am not even sure we can-"
You interrupt, stifling his words: "Do not concern yourself. If they cannot come to me, I will come to them." As you spoke, you retrieved Alterations Animalian from your saddlebags. And after a comprehensive review of the anthropomorphizing spell… you cast it.
The magic washes over you in a pleasant tide, reshaping your body into a bipedal form. When it runs its course, you find that you stand about two heads taller than the average person hereabouts. As it has done before, the spell burned a goodly amount of your energy, leaving you hungry and a bit tired; pausing only long enough to put the spellbook safely back into your pack, you grab and eat another chunk of meat.
You look over the food. It would be such a bother to carry it too the houses and you are hungry so you just can't leave it here. The solution is obvious: You gesture at some nearby humans who look decently strong, and say, "You will carry my lunch for me." Then, to the human in charge: "Guide me to the ones I wish to examine."
The human bows, saying "Of course, great one." He takes you inside a hut and motions for you to go inside. "Do you think you won't catch it from close contact?"
"Not if your description of the effects was accurate," you reply. Since these people have been affected over a period of years, you deem it highly unlikely that you'll be affected by a mere few minutes or hours of exposure. You step in... swallow to clear your mouth of the saliva which just appeared in it the instant you caught scent of the thick aroma of fish... and scan the hut's interior. The source of the fishy odor turns out to be a person whose entire body is covered with shining scales, whose legs are mostly fused together into a makeshift fish-tail; you gesture for a foodbearer to come in, and snatch a smoked leg off of him before he's cleared the door. It would be bad form to drool over a human, after all.
Written by Catprog & Cubist on 19 October 2010
