shapeshifting [★] gold

[breena]

[align=center]— breena | halls of hiraeth rouge | druid —

Dedication made a brilliant student.  Passion.  Enthusiasm.  Of course, in the name of druidic arts, Breena found her preferences.  Traditional druids... Not the romanticized druids though she found herself fitting their skillsets too, mastered the arts of medicine, philosophy, law, astronomy...

The badger knew she could shift.  Accidents happened.  Studying... Mastering... Dedicating herself to the talent... Never felt pressing to her.  Breena realized of course, that the chance of an accident grew exponentially.  Then again, the rogue failed to feel any enthusiasm about a talent she thoroughly lacked despite the logic of 'practice makes perfect'.  And nobody's perfect.

Only Breena feared messing up when she did put the effort to try, so why should she?  She should just continue studying.  Continue exploring the Halls.  Continue on.

But the thought became invasive.  A nagging voice in the back of her head reminding her that if she didn't learn how to shift properly by practicing she might need to one day and fail, or she might simply want to one day and fail.  Her chest felt too pressurized to manage anything, much less a full body change.

Fine, fine.  I'll try it once.  Once.  Only now Breena failed to choose a goal.  What did she want to shift into?  Something simply different?  Something with wings?  Something that swam?  You know what, how about I don't at all? Great plan.

Once again, the thought failed to last.  Critically.  In the rouge's experienced ignoring a thought did seem to make it worse.  FINE.  How about something red?  Like a cardinal? Only plenty of other animals possessed red too.  One that she'd seen a picture of in a book recently, hijacking her memory before she realized what had happened.

The change happened relatively flawlessly.  Sitting outside of the apartment, the badger slowly morphed.  Well.  Relatively flawlessly.  If not for a brief moment of sheer panic practically knocking the breath out of her lungs.  Consequently, Breena opened her usually dark eyes from a lying position on the ground.  Chest stuttering for air.  Stars forbid someone mistakes her for having an asthma attack.  Don't have asthma... I'm fine.  I can breathe.

The paws that pushed her back to a sitting position felt and looked different.  Her somewhat terrifying set of long claws had disappeared entirely.  Short.  "Huh."  Wait.  Birds lacked paws.  I am not a cardinal.

No.  A red panda.

— I WILL TRY TO BE THE BRIGHTEST —