wildmage_daine | (no subject)

Daine awakes to a strange, rumbling groan. Her eyes snap open, then blink in bewilderment. There's a canvas roof over her head. For a disorienting moment, she thinks she must be on the road again, that she'll leave the tent and find Numair and the Riders, that Darrow has given her back -- or that it was all a strange dream in the first place. But when she reaches up to brush her fingers over the material, she finds it warm beneath her fingers.

It twitches. And as another low sound fills the room, she realizes it's not canvas, it's alive. It's a membrane, like a bat's wing, but so much larger...

And then its familiar blue color registers, and Daine bolts upright with a gasp. "Kitten??"

Neither the dragon nor the bedroom are recognizable. The weight on her legs that Daine had originally taken for Kit's whole body is really just one scaly forepaw. Kitten's torso fills the room; one wing is pinned shut against the far wall, the other, half-unfurled, covers most of the ceiling before running up against the wall above Daine's head. Her shoulders are butting up against the window, out of which her neck and head have completely disappeared.

And her hindquarters are spilling out into the hallway and Goddess knows what beyond. The doorframe has been all but obliterated.

"Hang on, Kit," Daine says, patting her forepaw before extricating herself from the bedclothes and stumbling towards where the door used to be. The rats' cage, fortunately, is tucked beside her bed in a spot that Kitten's growing body hasn't reached, and she takes a moment to silently reassure them before picking her way out into the hallway. It's almost entirely filled by Kitten's hindquarters and tail, which spills down over the edge of the staircase. The floor groans ominously as Daine makes her way down the hall, having to crawl on poor Kitten's body for a good portion of the distance. It's a little easier to get down the stairs, and by the time she nears the back door, she's broken into a run.

Kitten's neck and head are hanging out the second story window, her neck so long and her head so large that her nose is nearly brushing the ground. She starts to lift her head as Daine approaches, prompting another groan of the farmhouse's timbers, and Daine hurries forward. "Hold still," she begs, taking Kit's head in her hands -- it's nearly the size of a hippo's, too big for Daine to really support, but she has to at least try. "Hold still, and we'll..." she trails off, looking helplessly up at the house, her vision blurring. How in Mithros's name are they supposed to fix this?

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Magnus pursed his lips, considering the suggestions, and decided that just outside the house would be fine for right now. What mattered was making Kitten comfortable, he thought. They could move her elsewhere once everything had been sorted. ...As much as it could be sorted.

Just to be on the safe side, he took Daine's hand. If she was touching Kitten, she should be transported too, but Magnus wanted to be sure the young woman didn't leave the dragon's side, lest one or both of them get upset.

With a snapping noise, the trio blinked out of existence inside the house and reappeared just outside.

Smiling proudly to himself, Magnus started to give Kitten's snout a pat.

...Then he remembered that he never warned them about the heinous nausea that could accompany one's first teleportation.

He took several hurried steps back from the dragon's mouth.

Biffy couldn't help being impressed. Though he was familiar with Magnus' abilities, it was still something else to witness them firsthand. Magic could be, in his limited experience, a messy and demanding thing and, much like shape shifting, making it look effortless and controlled probably came fro years of work and understanding.

He almost wanted to clap, even as he followed Magnus' lead in taking a few steps back. Whatever the reason, if the Warlock of Darrow was clearing the way, it seemed wise to follow suit.

Daine has had a fair few magical surprises in her life, but this is the first time she's experienced anything like this. Their surroundings seem to stretch, and when they snap back into place, they're all outside, standing on the lawn.

Well, one of them is standing. Daine's hit with a horrible wave of nausea, as if it took her insides an extra moment to catch up with her outsides, and she ends up dropping to her knees in the grass. It's as well she does; Kitten, similarly affected, wheels around, her neck passing just over Daine's head as she lets out a ragged, retching sound. Daine hastily closes herself off, not wanting their misery amplified by sharing it, and clamps her eyes shut, struggling not to vomit.

She hears a distant crash that sounds suspiciously like a long, scaly tail passing through the wooden walls of a potting shed, followed by some thrashing in the underbrush and another unhappy groan from Kitten.

Once her stomach has settled a little, she cracks her eyes open and levels a Look at Magnus. "A little warning might've been nice," she croaks. She turns to look for Kitten, and finds the dragonet -- well, dragon, now -- crouched forlornly by the tree line, her scales tinged with gray. A little distance away, the potting shed is a toppled ruin.

Daine sighs. "Well, the shed had a good run."

Magnus had a grimace of regret painted on his face from the moment Daine was down on her knees until past the first comment. He knew -- now -- that he should have said something. But honestly he was so accustomed to teleporting himself that it never occurred to him anymore. Even Baz was probably accustomed to it, and Magnus used to yank him around all the time.

"It can be rebuilt," Magnus said, pointing out the silver lining since he was in trouble and he wanted everyone pushed towards happy (relatively speaking). "At least we got her out before the accidentally took the house down."

Biffy heard the splintering and for a moment, he assumed the worst, looking at the house or its barn for structural damage. Only after checking on those did he remember the shed he'd put on the property. It was meant to be a gift to Lyall, a place like the grounds of Woolsey where he might continue on with his experiments. Except, well, Biffy's remaining creativity and soul had been invested in the making and beautification of hats.

Even when he was mortal with a complete soul, Biffy had never been good at the more rough-handed arts. The shed had been a bit of a botch job from the beginning. Things leaned to one side or the other and some parts had never fit true. Lyall had taken it all with remarkable poise because he was Lyall but Biffy knew full well that it was not his best effort.

Daine and Magnus looked concerned and distressed that he felt bad about the expression of relief on his face, one that he was sure was turning into amusement.

"That shed never had a good run and every occupant of this house knows it," he said as diplomatically as possible. "It was an unworthy but necessary sacrifice."

Kitten slinks over -- or tries to; she's gotten too big for any kind of subtlety -- and carefully insinuates her enormous head beneath Daine's arm. What used to be a trill comes out as more of a deep, rumbling purr.

"She's still sorry," Daine says with a hapless shrug. Truth be told, she thinks the shed would have fallen down sooner or later without Kitten's help; a good storm might've caved it in. But Kitten already looks unhappy about being so much bigger than she ought to be, and destroying the shed probably doesn't feel much better than being stuck in the house had.

At least she's not stuck in the house. "Thanks, Magnus," she adds, nodding gratefully up at him. "You got her out safe, and that's no small thing." She strokes Kitten's snout, marveling at the size of it. "Speaking of no small thing," she adds wryly. "Mithros, even the barn won't be big enough for you."

Even with Biffy's assurance that the shed was meant to fall down one day, Magnus regretted that he had anything to do with its destruction all the same. He would make an offer later to put something together, with magic of course, and see if that wouldn't make Magnus feel better about things.

"I could... try to enlarge the barn?" Magnus offered, warily sneaking glances between the dragon and the structure in question. "But the outdoors is probably a safer bet until this blows over."