>>5198227The deer’s primary purpose is to serve as experimental fodder for Irinnile’s abilities, and for Henzler’s. You still intend to fulfill your half of the demon-pact you made with the farmers, both for the sake of mastering this new art and so that Irinnile doesn't get into trouble by breaking the rules of her peculiar race.
‘Hey, I resemble that remark!’ the succubus protests.
Together, you work to reshape the spirit and the flesh. Henzler lacks the necessary alchemical compounds and facilities to achieve the best results, she informs you, but still you press on. Your objective, after all, is not to make the deer into anything as novel as Hirschel or the owlbear, but simply to make it bigger, stronger, more youthful, more virile. If it can be done for this simple creature, perhaps it can be done for the humans, and from there… Well, the applications are endless!
At first, your results almost seem to be bearing fruit. You have Roth hold down the wounded, panicky beast while you soothe its mind with mesmerism. Then, you place your own hands upon it, insinuating Irinnile’s occult energies into the simple soul of the cervid. Henzler instructs you in how to enable ‘morphic plasticity’, freeing the mammal’s spiritual core to accept and enable changes of its form. Then, together with Henzler, you begin to work at using your magical energies to reshape flesh, to renew and replenish dermis and lipids, to swell and embiggen muscle tissue.
>>5198198Perhaps it is your own inexperience with such magic, or Henzler’s aforementioned need for more professional equipment and environs to affect such deep changes in an adult organism, but it is here that things go deeply, deeply wrong.
>1At first, the flesh seems to accept the changes… But then, they start to occur unevenly. The deer’s eye widens, and it begisn to kick and cry out, thrashing its head. Its skin spills off of it in great rolling waves, as if trying to crawl away while still anchored. Flesh and muscle swell unevenly, growing like great tumours or pustules which threaten to explode. You reel back, pulling your hands away…
>Another 1However, neither Roth nor Henzler are so swift. Jutting calcium spikes explode across the creature—antlers sprouting up on every available surface, turning the by now enormous and swollen creature into a hedgehog-like abomination. One of these structs catches Roth, causing him to groan and curse in pain. He draws his favoured sword, only to catch a massive, malformed hoof to the face. You see his head snap back hard as he is thrown across the small clearing; for a moment, you fear he might be dead, but you see him shift and hear him groan again.
