Chapter 2

Xou Xi read over the unfamiliar characters she had auto-trance scripted, then brushed in some notes in her own more familiar style about using frame shifts to trance-form physically were-style, inspired by Fred’s comment “invest its proper avatar”.

-just a form of shift-adjusting, not much different than the healing she had taught the dream outlier, in exchange for his skills in return.

Dealing in dreams with outlier entities is chancy, if potentially rewarding, and luckily he had been an enthusiastic if naive dabbler and not some vampiristic power predator.

Part of her own rite-of-passage into personal power was somehow fighting off a mental siphoning attack by a parasitic sort of power collector, and in fact defeating them, and intuitively confiscating and sealing their power.

Xi had learned a lot in the handful of years since that awakening, and she had discovered hidden knowledge and found lost powers, and had traded skill for skill, and defended and assimilated when attacked. Fred would say she had ‘climbed Darwin’s ladder’.

The town was pretty safe, in three out of four quarters, within the walls. The eastern quarter and outside the Eastern Gate (which was presumably stuck open, as it hadn’t been shut within the memory of anyone yet living) wasn’t safe for the corrupt watchmen to walk through in full daylight, let alone attempt to shake down residents of this quarter for their fortnightly ‘protection money’.

This was the quarter Xi chose to make her den, it was safe enough for someone of her reputation, besides, Healers were neutral ground, so to speak. It was worth the extra precautionary measures needed to live there, in order to avoid the petty vain town functionaries from sticking their greedy beaks in her business and interfering and trying to peck out an advantage or favor somehow for some crony or blackmailer.

The Thief’s quarter, as it was vulgarly known, among other nastier names which shan’t be printed here, and also more politely as the traveler’s quarter.

Where strangers who didn’t know any better went to get robbed and swindled, conned, kidnapped, suckered, hoodwinked and honey-trapped. The ones who made it out alive, that is.

Also, healed, courtesy of Xi, healer and herbalist. Except almost all of her business was with the locals, since there was no sign to demark her healers squat from any other denizen or predators domain unless the blood drench stained linen from her psychic surgery was hanging to dry from the balcony. A stranger to the shanty-town wouldn’t be able to tell her blood-crossed banner from a kill shop’s or a torturer’s den.

Ever since Xi had been a little girl growing up on the farm, running Summers wild and tan when ever she could escape the seemingly endless chores; she had imagined she was dragonkin. Her costume wings grew thread-bare and tattered but she never outgrew them.

She even role-played as a dragon or dragonkin, and had an elaborate self-image, and dream imagination as full dragon form, detailed to nearly number of scales and certainly their color and pattern.

She had imagined flying so often it seemed she could almost feel the phantom ache of overuse of nonexistent wing muscles. The yearning for sinuous motion through the air, physical exertion and wings clawing dominance over the sky, wresting freedom from the third dimension.

It was as if she had been born into the wrong shape, and every time she saw the rare dragon sighting, (for the most part they abided by the treaties) her entire being yearned to launch into flight and join them, climbing and striving and grabbing for altitude.

Now she had the tools, just a slight adjustment to her healing overlay. She already self-identified as dragon, and had her self-image ready to invest it’s righteous avatar. Since she couldn’t even wait, Xi decided to start. Achieving what she imagined was a dragonish mental state, she shifted the mental frames of self-reference.

The beauty of self-shifting is that at some level, everyone decides who they really are for themselves, and it isn’t (much) affected by the objective reality consensus, as it is internalization of self.

And it was done. Painless, as every intermediary frame step of the transformation was stable, and she could have stopped at any one of them, and she did pause at a few useful humanoid ones. That one there, it was perfect as her dragonkin natural-form.

It took very little time, and she evidently could control (at least on some level apparently) her size and mass, because while her mass was greater, and while she still fit in the room (barely- although admittedly it was a rather small room) she was not the size or mass of a full grown dragon by a long measure.

Although her shape if scaled up (a simple frame manipulation) would be more than fine.

Since she had chosen her own dragon-image form when she was a child it had a my little pony sparkle (that darn echo of Fred)- it did have a figurine perfection and ideal-ation that bordered on, nay verged on and merged with, romanticized. In short, she was a Goddess among dragonkind. Admittedly, for now, a very small dragon goddess.

She spent a little time getting used to her new shape, learning how to wiggle and waggle her ears, practicing fluttering her luxurious eyelashes, hm retractable talons imagine that, she played a quick little dexterity game of protracting and retracting each finger’s talon in turn. (yes, dragons have fingers. Also, language, art, culture, names, social status and they usually form life-long committed pair-bonds.)

To speak out loud, now -that would take practice, as would controlling her extraordinarily long prehensile tongue with its two tentacular fingers, which after she extended and examined, took more attempts to draw back into her toothy mouth without injury that she cared to admit. Even so, she tasted a trace of blood before she succeeded.

No wonder dragons were not ones for long speeches or even much social interaction, and always sounded like they had a speech impediment. They did, it was very long, and always in their mouths. Perhaps Dragonish was easier to speak with a dragon’s mouth. Only she didn’t speak Dragonish.