3 min read

A matter of perspective

Prompt

There's two kinds of magical disfigurement. One is trollification, where your magic has gone so utterly WRONG that your body shifts into grotesque shapes just to survive it. It's nasty, but it's usually fixable. The other is Elvenification, which is permanent because you can't fix 'perfection'

Content Warnings

amateur writing

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

Everyone knows that trans-dimensional magic can skew your perspective.

Exploratory casters gets to break the laws of physics in useful yet harmless ways. If you’re lucky, you discover effects such as seeing impossible colors, local gravity inversion, and perpetual mana machines.

All fun stuff, and the reason people take risks to expand the sphere of magical knowledge. The useful stuff gets curated and sanitized into more traditional spells.

The not-so-lucky?

Well… It turns out that trans-dimensional magic also changes the baseline references for magical spells. I should have known better than to mess with the untested spell framework I found scrawled in a dank restroom stall.

Let’s back up a bit. I’m a second-year student at the Academy for Supernatural Sciences. My primary focus is in ritual analysis, with a minor in cosmetic glamors. I’m nobody special. To pay for my education. I moonlight in the seedier part of town, casting temporary glamors. You know, for professionals that needs to look attractive for a night and aren’t too picky about anything other than price.

Agh, who am I kidding? I’m a glorified makeup artist in the red-light district. Happy? Fine.

So. Ritual analysis.

That’s figuring out what unknown spells do by breaking them up into their constituent, harmless pieces, and casting them inside a short-circuiting framework. Part of the spell gets cast, fizzles out, and you can piece together what the whole does without blowing anything up.

Can you guess where this is going?

One of my clients found a spell framework, labelled “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, and brought it to me.

“Heeeeey, Clara! Check this out. Is this like one of your glamors?” she said, giggling as she shoved her phone in my face.

“What the fuck! Wait for me to finish this unless you want those hair extensions on your chin.” I said as I finished inking the spell onto her forehead and activated it. A few minutes later, she texted me the picture, and I shooed her out the door.

“I’ll let you know if it’s anything useful.”

It wasn’t until a few hours later, back at my apartment, that I had time to take a good look at the spell.

To say that the spell framework was strange doesn’t do it justice. Edges and angles turned around and inside each other in what seemed to be impossible ways. Escher had nothing on this spell, and I had no idea how it was possible to project what looks like a 3d image into the space I’d cleared in the middle of my cramped bedroom.

“Well, Clara, gotta start somewhere. Guess that bit in the center is as good as any.”

It looked a bit like a triangle, but also somehow a cube? That should have been a clue that I was getting in over my head.

I sketched out the neutering framework around it, then used a dry-erase marker to trace the projection. I don’t quite remember how, but about 5 minutes later, I had the central shape for the spell contained inside my standard analysis framework.

Then, pushing a tiny amount of mana into the edge of my tracing, I activated it.

Every warning sign I’d glossed over until this point came back and bit me in the ass.

Non-euclidian geometry in a spell framework? Constrained by second-year student’s 2d analysis tool? Yeah, that didn’t go over so well.

The shape gained depth, and as I watched, I recognized other parts of the original spell through it. It wasn’t just non-euclidian: it was a fractal. I’d just activated a whole, unknown spell framework in my living room.

I’m not sure what happened next, and I suspect my mind can’t process it. You’re looking at the results now, though.

The doctors say physical transformations cannot be reversed unless they contain an element of malice in their construction. Whatever made this spell believed that my current form was the epitome of beauty.

One gigantic beautiful eye, and 50 perfect tentacles.

At least I get to float.