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 —

[alaire]

[align=center]

F a o d a i l. n.
"Mademoiselle!" The boy nearly tripped over his paws, scrambling towards the friendly rouge who found him the other day.  Pure fascination illuminated his amber eyes as he realized an essential piece of information about the badger.  She shared his ability to change her shape at will.  Alaire grinned wildly, pleased in a place of indifference to the other druid's fear of the ability and her failure to shift into her originally intended shape.  "Mademoi- Breena, Miss Breena, I can do that too!"

"Je peux le faire aussi!" Bubbling over in excitement, the youth focused for a moment on the memory of feathers, wings and talons.  Alaire remembered flying as a young merlin for an immeasurable amount of time to escape the fire in his home.  With a triumphant flutter of feathers, the boy shifted, practically launching himself into the sky immediately afterwards.

"Voir? I try really hard at it." The ability to shapeshift happened to be Alaire's only power at the time; he recalled vividly his father's talent of manipulating the air but neither himself or Aine seemed to share it.  He enjoyed the change immensely however, finding the ability to morph entertaining and useful all at once.  "I never knew anyone else who could," he admitted, scuffing the ground with a talon.  After a moment, the faerie breathed and let himself return to his true form.

"My sister can, I think.  She wants to be a druid, so I'm sure she can, or she'll learn." Surely, he believed.  "Miss Breena? Are you a druid too? Or do you just like to shapeshift? I know others have that ability too, but it's something cool I know some druids can do!"

[redvox.]

REDVOX "VINNY" ABRAMO - cis male - goat-bat hybrid - harbinger

Shapeshifting. It was certainly an interesting and useful power, and it was also one that Vox most definitely did not have at his disposal. Hell, he wasn't entirely sure how he had ended up going from domestic feline to his current strange hybrid form after the fire anyways, but he knew it wasn't shapeshifting, or his body would have been hopelessly charred and useless at this point. When he had brought it up with others once or twice before, they had said that it sounded like he had possession of some kind, but honestly he wasn't so sure. He didn't remember taking control of this body, not to mention the fact that whenever he attempted to possess some other creatures, – just prey, nothing sentient – it never actually worked at all. Did he envy others with the ability to shapeshift? Maybe a little bit, but truthfully the harbinger of the group envied anybody who wasn't stuck in a strange bat goat hybrid form like him. Sure, some had insisted that his current unusual form was cool, and that he should be grateful, but he didn't quite feel that way. He still missed his old red furred domestic form. Sure, he hadn't been all that big or impressive, but he had been able to fight just fine, and he hadn't scared anybody just by looking at them when he had been a cat. Just thinking about it made his eyes darken as he slowly approached where Breena and Alaire were, but he quickly shook it off, not wanting to worry either of the younger members of the group with his sullen facial expression.

Settling down beside Alaire and watching as the boy shifted back and forth from a merlin back, the gat let out a soft chuckle of amusement, feeling proud of the young Halls member even if it hadn't been anything all that impressive. He couldn't help it, he had gotten attached to Alaire quickly, and seeing the boy happily bouncing and showing off was pretty nice. Turning his eyes back towards the druid's matter at hand, Vinny tilted his head to one side and looked over Breena's new red panda form, a soft appreciative noise leaving him before he settled on all fours. He mumbled, flashing his sharp fangs as he spoke, Shapeshiftin', eh? Sounds like y'two are all special 'n' shit! I don't have anythin' like that. Just got this form 'n' nothin' else... your new forms pretty nice, Breena! Very cute, very soft. It's called somethin', right...? Red panda?" He'd never actually met anybody who was a red panda before, so he had forgotten the name of the fluffy creature for some amount of time, up until now, of course. It was a little less intimidating than the rogue's former form, considering he knew badgers could be mean little bastards, but that didn't mean that he would end up underestimating Breena, however. He was sure whatever skills she had before had carried over to this form as well, since she was still the same old druid he had met a couple of weeks ago.