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Karen and Bubalo

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Here's a jolly commissioned tale courtesy of :iconpaulrevere1991: who asked for something featuring his lovely Karen in a situation with some of my characters. When it's a high fantasy setting and a recurring character, though, there's really only ONE option: Bubalo the bumbling mage! Watch as he tries to cure Karen of her equine affliction.

The art is a collage of pieces from :iconjanexas: used with permission.



Karen and Bubalo

Day 1

The Tipsy Rhino was a cross-section, a petri dish, of the Pauper's District. The poorest of the poor and the richest of the poor alike stumbled through its door looking for a stiff drink or something that would strip the paint off of worn furniture. Often both would come in the same glass. The capital of the proud nation of Licornia had its share of high-class bars, and even higher-class dives, but the patrons of the Tipsy Rhino kept coming back because the drinks were strong and cheap, and it was a boisterous place to spend a weekend eve.

A Tuesday eve, not so much. A Tuesday morning even less.

Outside of regular drinking hours, the Tipsy Rhino's meager clientele were loners, the unemployable, and the occasional wannabe fortune seeker or huckster. Bubalo Shiptar was all of the above.

"Give me something forget-your-problems strong," Bubalo said to the bartender upon regaining consciousness. When he'd passed out face-down, there had been another bartender present; waking up with a start and with peanuts stuck to his pasty face, it took him a moment to realize there'd been a shift change.

"Well, we have the Dragon's Morning Breath too, and the Griffin's Belch, and the Sphinx Snot, and the Pegasus Dander." apparently deciding to treat waking up the same as he did someone stumbling through the swinging doors, the bartender said the names deadpan. He was either completely ignorant of or simply resigned to the Tipsy Rhino's habit of giving its drinks thoroughly unappetizing names.

The Conjury hadn't paid particularly well, but Plenty O' Potions Outlet Stores--the only place that would hire Bubalo after he was fired for stealing material and immaterial potion components, potions themselves, and official The Conjury stationary--paid even less. The only thing that made it bearable was the steady and free supply of buffelblossoms, Bubalo's favorite flower. The Blossomery in the Park District always sent them over by the truckload to be used in simple Potions of Minor Free-breeze. Free-breezing potions were popular for giving tattered clothes like those Bubalo was reduced to wearing a less offensive odor, but there were always plenty of spares.

"What will this buy me?" Bubalo deposited a handful of buffelblossoms on the bartop, along with a travel size stoppered Potion of Minor Free-breeze.

Cocking an eyebrow, the bartender swept them up and deposited a glass from the slurry bucket before Bubalo. "Nature's Goodness," he said drily. "Drink up."

Bubalo did so...and promptly spat it out in a volatile misty cloud all over a fellow bar patron. In keeping with the Tipsy Rhino's policies, apparently a drink with a pretty name tasted like secondhand sludge from the River Licorn.

"Thanks," said the other patron, a young woman, wiping the fluid off with a bar-cloth. Fair-eyed and brown-haired, the lass wore leather armor and a prominent pendant with an equine head and shoulder around her neck. "Nature's Goodness is just the sort of thing I always wanted to shower in."

Stumbling over himself, Bubalo tried to sop up the fluid with the worn edge of his Plenty O' Potions robe, though his fingerless potioneer's gloves wound up doing the lion's share of soaking. "Sorry, sorry," he said. "I guess it's a little strong." He followed his meager efforts up with a spritz of Free-breeze potion.

"Yeah," the woman said. "I'll say." Though her affect was grumpy, she didn't seem about to beat Bubalo to a bloody pulp like the last few creatures to cross his path.

He noticed her taking special care to clean around the pendant but not lifting it up. "Why don't you take that off?" he said, trying his best to sound helpful rather than hungover. "I know a good jewelry-cleansing cantrip with this Potion of Minor Free-breeze as its material component."

"I'm not about to take it off," said she, sipping pensively from a jug of Sphinx Snot Premium Malt Liquor. "Might lose my mind!" She followed it up by taking a small something from what looked like a bag of dried tobacco and slipping it in for a thoughtful chew.

But Bubalo's keen nose for potions and material components detected a far different odor about it. "Is that...buffelblossom you're chewing on?" he asked.

"No. Dried azuchroma. Maybe it's related, I dunno." The flower-talk seemed to make her nervous, and she abruptly pushed back from the bar, plunking a gold coin on it. "Gotta go."

-

Day Two

"How about a drink for the gentleman?" said the bartender. "How about a Unicorn Piss? Tipsy Rhino specialty."

"Bleargh," said Bubalo articulately. "Unf. No. No more equines of any kind, ever again, forever."

"It's just a drink, buddy," the bartender said. "If it was the real stuff, you can bet we'd be charging more than we do for it."

"No more...anything...with hooves for me," Bubalo said. "Bubalo Shiptar hereby swears all of them off forever, with the patrons of this bar as his witnesses."

The bartender sniffed at Bubalo's very Ukssarvik name, reflecting the prejudice that all Licornians had against them. Nevermind that the Shiptars had once been proud Ukssarvik kassocs, come to Licornia to apply enchanted tar to the planks of vessels in the shipyard to make them watertight. It had been enough to get Bubalo into The Conjury despite his late father's destitute job applying tar to model ships, but since being fired and beaten and ten rehired just so he could be fired and beaten a second time, Bubalo didn't feel particularly proud of his heritage.

"I'll hoist a glass to that." It was the same young woman Bubalo had seen earlier, only something seemed to be...off...about her. There was a definite point to her ears, a flared length to her nose, that suggested some distant Elvish heritage. There was also a lot of body hair that seemed to suggest quite the opposite. "No more anything with hooves." Bubalo also noted that her fingers seemed unable to grasp the glass properly as she toasted, stiff and with an odd-seeming manicure.

This time, Bubalo was careful to spit his Nature's Goodness in the opposite direction after taking a sip. "Well, it's the person who wouldn't give me the buffelblossom time of day before," he said good-naturedly. "And apparently the only other person in Licornia who isn't rushing to open a stable."

"The name's Karen," said the young lady. She didn't extend a hand in greeting, simply draining her glass with a flourish. "Pleased to meet you, Mr. Shiptar."

"Karen...?" Bubalo said.

"Just Karen."

"Well, Karen, what happened to your material components?" said Bubalo. "I don't see them here today."

"Saving them," she said. "Hard to find."

"Oh, I hear that," bubbled Bubalo. "I hear that. Why, the last potion I tried to make--on my own that is, not for work--I had to get a dragon barnacle scraping. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a dragon that drowned of natural causes?"

"Hmph," said Karen, not even feigning interest.

"But it was the most important part of the emulsion, you understand," Bubalo continued. "You need that to soften hooves into fingers, you see."

At that remark, Karen perked up, her ears visibly twitching. She seemed to be doing some kind of mental arithmetic. "Besides, didn't you just say you were swearing off everything to do with those?" she said. "Hooves, I mean."

"Oh, that." Bubalo sighed. "Sort of! Not really. I've just had...bad luck...brewing potions along those lines. I still have to try, I owe it to somebody, but believe me ma'am, I'm sick of it and I've taken my lumps for it."

"Potions, huh?" Karen said thoughtfully. "Potions that soften hooves?"

"Ugh," Bubalo shuddered. "Soften them into hands that still slap and punch like a mule's kick…I don't want to talk about it."

"I see," Karen said with a smirk on her now-wide face.

Day Three

"Barkeep! Another Griffin Bile for my friend here!" Karen cried. She scattered a handful of coins--unmistakably gold but of ancient and unknown manufacture--on the countertop to keep the libations flowing. "Amazing the kind of service you get here when you're not paying with buffelblossoms," she added when the drinks appeared almost immediately.

For his part, the strong liquor--Bubalo had never known anyone other than that backstabber Sulivo who could take one without being three sheets to the wind--made the conjurer and potionmaker forget all about the questions he had meant to ask Karen upon seeing her again. Why her ears were so much longer and prehensile, what the squirming nub just visible beneath her trousers was, why her face seemed almost half-orcish in its snoutiness today, why she seemed to be tottering about on uncomfortable tiptoes despite wearing the same boots, why her clothes were visibly tighter and clinging in all the wrong places with the stitching standing out in clear relief.

Instead, it was Karen asking the questions.

"So, this potion you brewed," she plied him. "What was it meant to do?"

"It's a very powerful emulsion meant to reverse an unintentional polymorphic dysphoria," said Bubalo.

Karen slapped a fresh Griffin Bile on the countertop before Bubalo and guided it to his mouth with one hand that was all thick and partly fused nails--something the barkeep looked askance at but Bubalo failed to notice from deep inside his cups. "How about telling me that again in the King's speech," she said.

Swallowing the fiery liquid, Bubalo belched in response. "Of course, how silly of me," he hiccuped. "It restores human form to them...those...whose...been changed."

"Into something equine, wasn't that it?" Karen's eyes were shining in intense interested from her oddly snoutlike features, beneath the faint outline of a starburst on her brow.

"Unicorns, mostly," Bubalo said. "Oh, Nyati! Why did you have to bamboozle me so? I just wanted you to accept my buffelblossoms with love!"

Karen nodded and set a fresh drink in front of her drinking companion. "Could it work on reversing, oh, say, a normal horse? Returning them to human form?"

"In theory," said Bubalo in a singsong voice. "Oh, Nyati, I just wanted to make your wish for purity come true! I never wanted you to be all...horny...at least not in that way..."

"What would it take?"

"Rearranging material components," Bubalo said. "A few substitutions. Might even be easier since horses are a lot less magical than their cousins."

Karen, excited, moved to ask another question. Before she could, Bubalo passed out, snoring, on the countertop.

Day 4

"Ahh...my head..." Bubalo moaned. Once again, he had woken up at the Tipsy Rhino bar instead of his hovel in the Thieves' District.

"Glad to see you're with us again." Karen, having slept like a baby in her own rented rooms upstairs, was seated beside him with some "hair of the griffin" to take the edge off.

Bubalo, his vision clearing, got a good look at her features. "I've heard of a horse-faced woman," he said groggily, "but that is ridiculous."

Karen flipped her hair back with an inadvertent whinny. Her outfit was now so ill-fitting that the gesture popped an inch-wide hole in one of its seams. "Really now? I'd have thought your lady friend Nyati would have taken the cake for that."

"Ugh," Bubalo moaned. "How much did I tell you?"

"Everything," said Karen. "You spared no embarrassing detail, mate."

"Lovely," the conjurer said. "Barkeep, how many buffelblossoms will it take to make you forget everything I've said over the last day or so?"

"No charge," the bartender muttered distractedly. "I've already done it."

"Let me guess," said Bubalo. "You'd like to see if I can brew up an emulsion to take care of...this..." he indicated Karen's unmistakably equine features with a sweep of his hand.

"It's a curse," Karen said, toying with the horse-pendant about her neck. "Treasure hunting has its downsides, and the azuchroma flowers that I need to keep the change at bay are hard to come by. Haven't found any fresh ones in weeks, and these dried ones don't work very well. Still, if I weren't nibbling on them every now and then, I'd be sleeping in the stables tonight."

"My potions aren't any good against curses," said Bubalo. "You'd need a augerer for that, or maybe a necromancer.

"I'm talking about heading this curse off at the pass," Karen replied, slamming a hoof-hand on the table. "Your potion sounds like it can treat the symptoms. That's good enough for me."

Bubalo swirled his finger around in some spilled bartop liquid. "That;s brought me nothing but awful luck," he said. "What's in it for me?"

Karen dropped a bag full of gold on the counter. "Treasure hunting has its upsides."

Day Five

"Thanks for meeting me in the stables,"  said Karen. "I'm running low on my blossoms, and something tells me that the bartender would have some expensive questions for me."

The Tipsy Rhino had remarkably clean stables, helped by the fact that nothing was quartered there at the moment; Bubalo was thankful for that, at least. "Seems like this is just in the nick of time," he said.

Karen was standing unsteadily on a pair of quasi-hooves, the middlemost toe of each foot swollen and dark and thick with the other digits reduced to vestiges. Her hands were in the same state, their shriveled thumbs barely opposable. A considerable tail crested her pants, flicking impulsively, while her body was now covered with brown fur. She'd discarded the pieces of her outfit like gauntlets and greaves that no longer fit, and the rest was stretched thin with runs and warps, tears and parted seams. "Tell me about it," she muttered. "Is the potion ready?"

The conjurer set a case down on the soft hay of the stable and opened it, revealing a series of stoppered bottles filled with angry-looking liquid. "It's my best effort so far," Bubalo said. "I recreated an earlier mixture. Well, mostly recreated. But it's an emulsion that I tested successfully! Well, mostly successfully."

Karen raised an eyebrow. "There'sh an awful lot of mostly shpread on that toast, mate," she said, the words slurring through her snout.

"Well, it was tested successfully in that the unicorn I tried it on immediately turned into a human girl," said Bubalo. "But then she kinda attacked me and put me in the infirmary for six weeks."

"Uh huh," said Karen, snorting a little despite herself. "And moshtly recreated?"

"Well, there was a bit of a concussion. But I'm 99% sure I've got it. And it really does work! That unicorn is still a human girl. She's a bard now, sings angry songs at Rock's Tavern and Roll's Pub."

"Oh, the one with the pink hair?" said Karen. "Her lyrics are filthy and she shmokes like a chimney when she ishn't drinking."

"That's what happens when you're pure for your whole life and then suddenly not," Bubalo said sadly. "At least she's happy, I guess."

Karen snatched the bottle of emulsion from Bubalo. "So I jusht drink thish then?" she said.

"Well, yes," said Bubalo. "I'd recommend taking it in small doses over the next few days to-"

He'd barely begun before Karen had popped the stopper and downed the entire contents. She let loose with a loud belch and tossed the jug to the ground where it shattered.

"...or not," said Bubalo. Protectively, he slid his case closed.

"Oooh...OH!" cried Karen. "I can feel it working!"

Sure enough, changes began to sweep over the quasi-equine standing before Bubalo. The brown fur that covered her from head to toe began to sink away, retreating into its very follicles. Patches of pink appeared on Karen's legs and arms, while the muscles beneath squirmed into a more humanoid configuration. Her ears trembled into smaller, rounded shapes, settling to the sides of her head rather than the top.

"It does seem to be working," said Bubalo. "Maybe there's some hope for the mixture and Nyati yet..."

Karen stumbled as her hooves began to soften and shrink. The withered toes on either side suddenly squirmed and regrew with vigor, cracking as the bones settled into a more humanoid stance. Her hands softened and pinkened with their own quiet pops. She gasped and clutched her sides for a moment, wobbling and wincing as her face was sucked in and the snout settled back into a fine nose.

As human as she had been the first day in the Tipsy Rhino, if not moreso, Karen did a little dance amid the straw. "Yes!" she cried. "It works! I'll take fifty bottles and the recipe."

"Well, we need to be sure to run a proper trial," said Bubalo. "Wait a few days, watch for side effects..."

Karen had already pranced out the stable door. "Or not," Bubalo said again. "No one ever listens to me...

Day Six

With his fresh pile of gold and a relatively mild drink in front of him, Bubalo was in the Tipsy Rhino again out of habit, sketching out possible revisions to his formula based on Karen's reaction to it the other day. He had been wallowing in despair about it for some time, about Nyati and Hollypine, and that had clouded his ability to do any real work. That and all the poverty and drunkenness, anyhow.

But now he was feeling better about a lot of things. Maybe he could make a go of the whole Plenty O' Potions Outlet Stores thing. Maybe The Conjury would take him back. Maybe, maybe, maybe! Hope was something he wasn't used to feeling.

And, like the air being let out of a hogbladder balloon, it was quickly gone.

"Morning, miracle worker," Karen said, sliding alongside him at the bar. She was once again wearing her complete set of leather treasure hunter's armor, walking a gold coin across her knuckles before flipping it to the bartender. Her good spirits, though, didn't stop Bubalo's from plummeting.

"Uh," he said. "Looks like a little problem you're having there with your...complexion," he said.

Karen looked up, crossing her eyes, and then laughed. "You mean this little zit?" she said, tapping a reddened spot on her forehead. "Nothing to worry about."

Bubalo, though, couldn't help but notice how centrally placed it was, how it was right in the center of where Karen's white equine starburst had emerged. And he couldn't help but see the slight pointing of her ears, the paleness of her skin compared to the day before, and a few stray white hairs that were all but invisible to someone who wasn't looking for them. "Are you sure?" he said. "I mean-"

"I'm sure, and I'm sure that I'm sure," said Karen, kicking back a full glass of Unicorn Piss. "I haven't had a nip of my flower in over a day. Do you know what that would usually mean? It would mean sleeping in the stables with a bag of oats strapped over my mouth! But thanks to your genius and your genius potion, here I am with only a zit, drinking human drinks with human hands like a human does. Human, human, human!"

Bubalo bit his lip, sensing some of his old bad luck reemerging right before his eyes. "Are you sure?" he said. "Unicorns often feel beatific and optimistic about things...lights and rainbows...that sort of thing..."

"None of that now," said Karen, laughing. "None of that. To us, and to your cure!" She foisted a fresh glass of Unicorn Piss on Bubalo despite his protests and insisted that he drink it to the dregs.

"All right," he said, with more reservations than a swanky inn at coronation time. "If you say so."

Day Seven

The note that had been slipped under Bubalo's drink by the bartender that morning only said "STABLE NOW" but it had been written in red and underlined and there was also a frowny face.

Fearing the worst, Bubalo lugged his potion case down there. Karen jumped upon him almost immediately. "LOOK AT THIS!" she cried. "LOOK WHAT YOU DID!"

Bubalo, startled, took a moment to focus on what Karen was pointing at. "It's a horn," he said. "The barest nub of one." Indeed, what had seemed a bit of acne the day before had now erupted into a tiny bony nub with just the barest suggestion of a spiral twist. It was less than half an inch, all told. Karen's ears were also noticeably pointier, but not to any great extent. Anyone looking at them-and not the horn--would probably assume she had an elven grandparent.

"Give more more of the potion," Karen snapped. "I need to nip this in the nub."

"A-are you sure?" Bubal said. "I-I don't think that's a good idea! We haven't tested it, and as you said normally the curse would have you a full equine by now, so-"

Karen lashed out, grabbed Bubalo by his lapels, and hoisted him in the air. "NOW." she said firmly.

Trembling, Bubalo opened his case and held out a flask of his emulsion. "M-maybe just a sip for starters?" he said.

"Nip it in the NUB," Karen countered. As she had the previous day, she drained the potion in a single chug and hurled the glass at the stable wall.

Bubalo watched through half-closed eyes, fearing the worst even as the horn and ear points melted away.

"There," said Karen. "Now, was that so hard?"

She turned to leave, only to pause in mid-step.

"What the hell?" she said. Bubalo saw it too a moment later: a lump in the back of Karen's trousers.

And it was swelling madly.

"Oh dear," Bubalo said.

The fabric of Karen's trouser seat strained at the sudden appendage, and she abruptly gripped her head as if in the throes of a terrible migraine. The center of her forehead reddened anew, poked, prodded...and erupted. No nub this time, the horn spiraling from the crown of her head was half a foot long quick as blinking.

"What did you do?" Karen cried. "I'm…I'm backsliding!"

"Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear," said Bubalo.

"Not a deer, can't you see the ruddy great horn growing out of me like a headache carved in blinking bone?" Karen shouted. "Do something!"

Fumbling, Bubalo seized a pinch of the flowers from Karen's satchel and held them out. "Here, take it!"

Ignoring her earlier protests, Karen reached out a hand trembling into a hoof and stuffed the pinch of floral goodness into her mouth. A moment later, with a fresh cry, should doubled over and the seat of her pants split, releasing a tail quite different from the one that she usually grew. The horn on her brow spiraled out another half a foot as she clutched at it.

"It's making things worse, you idiot!"

"I...I told you to wait!" Bubalo cried. "I told you n-not to drink the whole thing! Who knows that kind of reaction you provoked!"

Karen's ears were growing, her face snouting out. Seams popped, straps strained and burst, fabric tore. "I think it'sh bloody obvioush…what kind of reaction..." she snarled, her nostrils flaring in more ways than one.

Her skin seemed to pale at this, but it was just white hair pushing out of every follicle on her body, great tufts of the stuff poking through every widening gap in her clothing. Strangely, her middlemost finger--and, presumably, toe within her swelling and creaking boots--were the only ones sprouting large and rough, though of a pure white hue instead of her normal dark brown.

"S-see?" Bubalo said. "Look at that. You've mashed your curse and my emulsion together, mixing and matching who knows what!"

"ARGH!" Karen cried. The back of her armor split apart, framed by a writhing leonine tail with an emergent tuft of her head's brown hair at its tip. "Shut up...and...make it shtop!"

"I can't!" Bubalo said, hopping backwards to avoid being pinned as Karen toppled to all fours.

Her thickening hooves bore her weight as her other fingers shriveled away, while the change in stance blew out the soles of her boots, causing a similar pair to emerge. While the build of the emerging form was slighter than most horses, it was still more than Karen's outfit, which hugged her slim feminine form quite closely, could bear. She writhed about, snapping and splitting, growing and furring, as Bubalo watched.

The whole process slowed considerably as time went on, from the initial explosion of horn and hoof to the final shudder that cast off the remains of Karen's human clothing. The sun was rather low in the sky and casting stark shadows into the stable as she rose on equine hooves to confront Bubalo.

"Fascinating," Bubalo said. "Equine hooves, and a patch of dark fur around your horn...musculature in between the more delicate monocerine and robust equine...but the definite spiral horn and leonine tail of a wild Licornian or Cerosian specimen...you've become quite the hybrid, Karen."

In response, she stared daggers at him and leveled her horn like a jouster's spear. "And you're going to do shomething about it!" she slurred.

In response, Bubalo backed away quietly, easily, with his hands up. "Don't worry," he said. "I know just what to do."

"Do you? Do you really?" Uni-Karen said.

In a flash of sudden movement, Bubalo pranced outside the stable door and shut it tight. He backed away just in time to avoid being skewered by the horn that pierced the door like a speartip. "No warranty was made or implied on my emulsion," he said. "Especially since it was coerced out of my at the point of a drink!"

"LET ME OUT OF HERE!" Karen howled.

"Soon enough," Bubalo said. He trotted back into the bar, leaving Karen's recriminations behind him.

"What'll it be?" the bartender asked.

Bubalo laid a few gold coins on the table from the pouch he'd been given. "Here's an advance to look after my unicorn," he said. "See to it that she gets the best care while I'm out of town.
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