Here's a short story I decided to write while I wait for Matt to make a final decision on an idea I'm running past him (*hint**hint*). It involves an idea I had mentioned earlier. Due to its potentially long-reaching consequences, I'm going to be pretty flexible with the dating, and perhaps with details if need be. For now, however, enjoy! __________________________ /January the 23rd, 708 CR/ Alan Faust had been special from the time he was a young child. When other children were out playing, he would stare at the walls for hours on end, and nothing his parents could do would get him to stop until he snapped out of it himself. The rest of the time he seemed to be living in an entirely different world, looking about into dark corners and blank wooden walls as though they would interact with him. His friends found it a wonder that he did not fall over himself more often; what few friends would call him such, at any rate. Most of the other people in Midtown chose to call him a freak, and refused to associate themselves with him in any way. Healers had been called in, mages consulted, and libraries searched for the answer to his strange activities, but nothing told them anything useful. Others had been seen with this same problem, but nothing that had ever been tried had been able to fix it. It seemed after ten years of this that all was lost, and so his parents left him in their empty house and quietly left the town, deciding that they would simply act as though he had never existed. He likely would have starved in the empty house had he not decided to wander out into the streets in one of his strange journeys. He could not tell anyone what had happened; he had never learned to speak as he had never paid any attention to anyone long enough to find out, and no interpreter or magician could ascertain the meaning of his grunts. An investigation discovered the reason that he was unsupervised, but by that time his parents were nowhere to be found. With nothing else to do, and no one else wishing to have to deal with him, he was left to the care of an orphan's asylum, sitting on the northwards edge of the city. At one time it had been joined closely to the city, but the threatening look of the building and the unknown nature of its occupants had caused the city to simply stop growing in that direction and, with time, actually creep back from it as though retreating from a sort of threat. The orphanage didn't mind; they simply claimed the abandoned land and added it to their spacious play area. Alan never did take much part in the games his fellows played. He would instead wander about, mumbling incoherent words, swinging his arms about, and looking off into the world that he alone of the entirety of Midtown could see. Occasionally he would stumble over other people's games, but he neither cried nor apologized, and ignored any indignant cries from others. After a few years, his fellows learned to leave him be, and he did much the same. Most of the orphans moved out on their own as soon as they were old enough to assist the local farmers in their work. Alan remained, now sixteen years, isolated in an otherwise vacant room. Experience had taught his caretakers to remove all furniture, even beds, from his rooms, lest he fall from them and injure himself in one of his common moments of madness. If he slept, he did so on a mat in the corner, and often woke himself by rolling into a wall. Whether or not he slept well didn't seem to matter to him, though, and so it mattered equally little to his instructors. Most assumed that Alan was nothing but an empty shell, with no mind that could be traced beyond whatever madness drove his strange activities. Various faiths had conducted rituals to cleanse him of demons or assure whatever spirit occupied his body would go to the heavens rather than below, but otherwise everyone sought to leave him alone. The truth, as it turns out, was that Alan was far from being an empty shell, and, while his body was jerked through his strange routines every day his mind cried out, wishing to be able to stop. * * * Alan woke up with a start. There was no pain to accompany his waking now, a pleasant relief from the norm, but jerking from a sleeping state into full wakefulness felt no less awful than usual. He willed himself to pull himself up, trying to think through the steps of rising to his knees, then his feet, but nothing happened. Eventually he began to roll about, unable to control anything he did as his brain did whatever it wished to do at the time. His flailing motion finally carried him to the wall, and he used his hands to climb up the wall into a standing position. He looked about the room, but found the door closed. If he had enough control of himself to do so, he could have quickly opened the door. As it was he would probably remember how to do it eventually, but that made it no less torturing to have to watch his own body fumble around responding only occasionally, and never exactly as he wanted it to. Rather than opening the door, however, his body decided that he should give up, and he banged on the door with a grunt. His caretakers had probably been and gone by now, he realized as he saw the sun already well off the horizon in his eastward window. Whatever power decided his actions moved him in front of that window and sat down, focusing on nothing as it probably would for the next few hours. It gave him time to think, whether or not he wanted it, but all he had to think about was how much he wished he had true control over his body. If he had that kind of control he would cry, but that only happened on the whim of his body, and it rarely coincided to his own whims. As he sat there, however, he felt dampness on his cheeks, and reached up to wipe it away. It took him a moment to realize that that was what he was trying to do, and his body had not resisted. He sat there for a moment, then blinked and willed his head to turn. It was slow, it was gradual, but it was what he wanted. He looked down at his hand and made a fist; his hands shook, but his fingers obeyed. He began to gulp air, wiping away more tears as he felt a strange sense of relief. No, he thought suddenly, this couldn't be real. He tried to stand, and his body responded. He stumbled and fell back down, but it was more from lack of practice than from his body rebelling. Still trembling, and sitting splayed awkwardly on the ground, he began to will his mouth to form a word. "A--" He stopped in surprise at hearing his voice at his command, then renewed his efforts. "A-- Awang -- A...Awan." He choked, a sob replacing anything else he desired to say as he spoke his name as well as he knew how. "I... I am Awan," he choked. Sobs racked his body, sobs that expressed the stunning relief he felt at finally being able to control himself. He rolled onto hands and knees and tried to stand again. Through tearful eyes he watched as he carefully placed each foot so he would have stability. He stumbled towards the door, bracing himself against it for a moment, then placed a hand on the knob and turned it. The latch worked as he turned slowly, and the door began to open towards him, causing him to stumble back a few steps before regaining control. He stepped out into the empty halls. Evidently everyone else was out doing other things right now, probably in the courtyard area. He started walking towards the stairway, finding the process of putting foot in front of foot harder than he had thought, but far easier than it had been in years past. He held onto a handrail as he descended to the first floor, and ran into one of the ladies that took care of the daily cleaning around the asylum. She drew back from him, with a look of wild surprise in her eyes. He could not think what might be the matter; surely he didn't look different enough between his odd wanderings and his current state to produce such a look in her eyes. He tried to remedy the situation. "I am Aw... Alan. I am Alan," he announced, pointing to himself for extra emphasis. The lady fainted dead away, leaving Alan to stand there in utter confusion. What had just happened? He stiffly moved over to her, bending over to make sure she wasn't hurt. As he crouched there, he caught a glance of his arms again, and drew back a bit himself. There hadn't been hair there before, had there? He brushed at it, but found that it was all attached. A moment later, he realized that it was not hair, but fur! He wanted to see a mirror, he wanted to know what was happening. He couldn't recall where the nearest one was, as he had rarely wanted to see himself before he gained control of himself miraculously a moment ago. When his searching finally paid off, he realized why the woman had fainted when seeing him, and a few moments of consideration brought to mind the very unpleasant implications of his change. Whatever happened when people discovered him, it wasn't going to be pretty. Without a way to run, though, he would simply have to wait and hope that they would understand. * * * Midtown was in an uproar when Alan was found later that morning. He had changed, now a large, mottled dog with gigantic ears. He insisted that he was the same person as the one that had earlier been unable to control his own movements, and after a few days of searching came up empty, everyone began to believe him. They kept him restrained in his room, while the rest of the orphanage was evacuated into the houses of various well-meaning townsfolk. All the while, Alan practiced his newfound potency, strengthening his control even as everyone else panicked about the legendary Curse coming down from Metamor. A Curse, he mused, should have been far less helpful than he found this one to be. This was a blessing for him, one that he felt thankful for increasingly as the days went by. What Curse was it to have fur, claws, and a tail in exchange for the gift of freedom? No one in the town shared his enthusiasm, however, and so he was forced to remain on the orphanage ground while they decided what to do. He had already resolved, however, that he would be going to Metamor as soon as such an opportunity presented itself. It wouldn't be long now; he already had enough control and confidence to make a run for it, but simply decided that he would wait for the time to be right. Perhaps by staying he would help the people of Midtown understand what it was that had happened to him. If he could do something to ease their panic, he would do his best to do it. !DSPAM:4e82929c145261804284693!