Nuria Family Lore, or, Bringing Up Rosie

[Graybeard]

Hi, everybody. While Poe is on hiatus from DNPWWO (get well soon!), I'm going to write a few vignettes derived from the Errant Road RPG, and specifically, about the childhood of my primary character there, Sister Rose. They'll be very brief, no more than a couple of articles per story, and not in chronological order, simply because I'm not thinking of them that way. First one will appear in a few days.

This is a pretty feeble substitute for a comic. If anyone still reads these forums and can write fanfiction about any of Poe's comics, this is a good time to go for it.

[Graybeard]

"Hey, squirt," Aron Nuria said breezily to his sister Rose, "Mom wants to talk to you about something."

They were outside working in the family garden, a task that both enjoyed, albeit not with equal success. Rose suspected that the celebrated(?) Nuria blood had given Aron some subconscious magical affinity for growing things that she herself didn't have. Certainly plants and seeds seemed to just jump into the ground when he planted them, and weeds shunned his plot like the plague. She had no such aptitude and had to compensate with old-fashioned elbow grease. Well, that was all right; it was relaxing to work the garden, and after all, she had ... other magical skills.

"Did she say what about?" Rose asked.

Brother and sister had a good, loving relationship, but fifteen-year-old Aron couldn't keep a note of condescension for his twelve-year-old sister out of his smile, and voice, as he answered. "Yes, and I understand it," he said, trying to sound mysterious and failing. "You will too. It's all right, shouldn''t take too long, go talk to her and I'll work on ... oh, crap," he finished sotto voce.

"Arrie! Rosie! I help!" Their little three-year-old sister Margot was coming to take over Rose's plot. Her "help," Rose was pretty sure, would simply consist of scattering seeds randomly for a while, then playing in the dirt. That wasn't exactly the way to tend a garden. Oh, well. Rose rolled her eyes and went to clean up.

=*=*=

Dorothy Nuria was waiting at the house, a fairly standard dwelling place by Veracian standards; the family was actually somewhat better off financially than average, but they'd made the decision to spend less on material goods and more on showing the children the wide world. (Yes, they were considered unusual by their neighbors.) She gave her daughter a cup of her favorite drink, a lemonade-like concoction, then got straight to the point. "Honey, the Healer dropped by today. No big deal, but ..."

"But what?" Rose queried, suspicious; she didn't like the old man very much.

Dorothy ignored the interruption and continued. "He thinks it's time for you to get braces."

This took Rose somewhat aback. She was aware that her teeth were just a bit crooked; most every 12-year-old's were. Some kids in her class already had them; notably, that incredibly dreamy Terry Thundal had just got his, and she thought he was even cuter with them than before, and she was pretty sure that he liked her too, and maybe he'd like her even more if she got her own, but aha!, why should she do that when she could just --

"Honey?" Dorothy interrupted her reveries, having gauged with maternal accuracy why Rose had gone silent for so long.

Rose decided she needed to buy a little time. "You mean those metal things that Te-- some boys in my class have on their teeth?" she temporized.

Dorothy smiled; she knew exactly which boy her daughter was mooning over at the moment. "Yes. There's more to them than metal, though. There's a thaumatic component that guides the wires to the right places so that little by little, they move your teeth around, get them all lined up. And then they take the braces off, and presto! your teeth are all straight and beautiful!" She beamed her own straightened smile like a dazzling light; when she was a girl, she had the good fortune also to grow up in a family that could afford such things. Too many of Rose's classmates couldn't, but she wasn't going to explain that part yet.

"But Mom, I don't need braces to do that!" Rose protested, having decided that Terry would probably find her more appealing without braces but with some -- other enhancements. "Remember, I'm really, really good with Polymorph magic for my age, and I can just --"

This response had been anticipated in the meeting between Healer Milsiel and the Nurias, but that didn't stop Dorothy from gasping. "No! You mustn't! The Healer says that --"

"Just watch," Rose interrupted smugly. (She'd be doing dishes for a week as penance for the paired interruptions.) Her green eyes got the glow that would be her stock in trade for her whole life ...

... And she immediately learned why that grumpy old man didn't want her to do what she was doing.


[End of this post, which is getting rather long; second and last on this subject will follow once my writer's cramp eases... although I suspect that readers may have some idea what's coming.]

[Graybeard]

What followed would be a learning experience that Rose would remember for the rest of her long life, namely that you DO NOT mess with your teeth while shape shifting.

Once she started to study human anatomy in school, as every magic-using proto-Healer did, she immediately understood why. Nerves are packed very closely together in the teeth and gums, including some that are not as obvious as the ones that make a toothache such an unpleasant experience. As the Polymorph magic moves things around to create a successful shapeshift, some of those nerves are compressed in a way they'd never experienced before. Some of them don't like it.

If Rose had followed the normal trajectory for a mage or nun or priest hoping to specialize in Polymorph magic, she would have been learning about this little gotcha at just about her current age. There was no chance of that occurring. Polymorph adepts were rare even in Tsuiraku, the most magically advanced nation on the planet. In Veracia, they were essentially unknown. Even at her age, Rose had more advanced shape-shifting talents than almost anyone else in the country; and furthermore, her capabilities were almost completely intuitive. She didn't need hours of study to be better at it than her nominal instructors; she just was.

Unfortunately, intuition didn't know about nerve endings.

The first indication that something was very, very wrong came even before the magical glow from her shape-shifting cleared. It started as a tingling in her tongue, and spread so rapidly to the rest of her mouth that she thought at first that something was on fire. A fraction of a second later, her rearranged, stressed teeth caught up with the soft tissue, and let her know in no uncertain terms that they did not appreciate what had just been done to them. Rose had always had good teeth, with only one or two minor toothaches when her baby teeth were falling out and the adult replacements were coming in. Those adult teeth made up for this "shortcoming" all at once.

Rose's “GYYAAAHH!" howl exactly anticipated the one she would produce some twenty-five years later while giving birth.

As on that later occasion, the pain passed soon, as her teeth adjusted to the new mouth they found themselves in. Gone, but not forgotten, and she'd never make that mistake again.

On the plus side, she never did need braces.

-FIN-