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nothere3 — Raposa's Tale

Published: 2014-02-13 01:54:55 +0000 UTC; Views: 4515; Favourites: 39; Downloads: 43
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Description Sorry this was so long in coming! Here is story #3 for contest winner . As before, art is by


Raposa's Tale

"So we're agreed then?" Miguel Orroz, wealthy Spanish-American businessman, property developer, and Frobz Magazine winner of the "Plutocrat of the Year" award 1997-2001 inclusive.

"We sure are!" yipped Raposa, one of the guardian fox spirits of the Andes. Taking the form of a slightly larger Andean fox with a glowing azure quipu pattern across her shoulders and upper back, she danced excitedly in front of Orroz. He sighed irritably as her four tails (representing the Four Regions of the Tawantinsuyu, naturally) swished across his face at the apex of each jump.

"Very well, then," said Orroz, holding out a gilt fountain pen. "Sign on the dotted line, and I will have your leave to build a ski resort here without the avalanches, banditry, and other misfortunes that befell everyone else?"

"You bet! I'm really curious to see what it'll look like!" Raposa cried in return. Distracted by the waggling of her tails, she chased after them, yapping, for a moment before turning back to Orroz.

"Here you go then." Orroz hunted around in his fancy alpine windbreaker for the contract, and laid it out on a flat piece of shale. A ragged wind from on high threatened to tear the paper away, so he quickly weighted it down with more rocks at each corner. He held the pen out to Raposa, not entirely sure where or how she would grasp it.

"Wait a moment," Raposa said. "Didn't you say that I'd get something in return?"

"Of course!" Orroz said. "This side of fine bacon."

"Yippee!" The guardian spirit did an ethereal dance afresh around the proffered piece of thickly salted fatty meat. "Wait," she added. "I need you to promise that you'll respect the mountain and the spirits of the mountain and the people who live on the mountain and also the mountain itself."

"Of course," Orroz purred. "I even chained myself to a redwood tree on international television to show my opposition to logging in the Pacific Northwest."

"Ah, great! Okay, I'll sign."

As Raposa stepped forward, she shifted in form. Her back swelled and curved outward, bringing her to an upright stance. Her back paws shifted to accept the different weight and balance demanded by the new stance as her hips and chest swelled outward to humanoid, and feminine, proportions. She cracked her forepaws, snapping them into quasi-hands with opposable thumbs, and shook her head. With each shake, her muzzle became more anthropomorphized and the spiky ruffles of hair about her head flowed out like a waterfall into a humanlike head of crimson hair. She grew in size as well with each step; by the time she reached Orroz and his contract, she was nearly as tall as he was.

It was her true form--or as much as a spirt of the land such as herself might be said to have one.

Orroz, his qualms about how the contract would be signed answered, thrust the pen into Raposa's newly formed hand. She signed with a flourish--it was only an X, her true name being unpronounceable and unwritable in any tongues of man.

"Much obliged, Raposa," he said. He flung the salted bacon to the ground; the fox spirit had caught it in her jaws and gobbled it before it could even bend a blade of grass.

The businessman reached inside his jacket and produced a walkie-talkie. "Okay, Ramirez. Tell the construction crew that we're good to go. We can break ground immediately."

"Let me know if you need anything else!" Raposa cried merrily hopping away.

"Oh, I certainly will," said Orroz. "There will always be a place for you at the new Rancho Montaña Ski Resort."

For her part, Raposa returned to her cozy cave on the side of the mountain, a direct link to the stream of lifegiving chi that flowed through the crests of the mountain range. As it was nearly that time of year, she settled down for a hibernative nap, and slept until she was awoken by a squawk at her door.

It was Choique, the rhea spirit of the nearby lowlands. "Raposa! You are called for!"

"Ooh! Yippee!" Raposa cried. She jumped up, instantly awake, and did a joyous foxy dance in the matted clump of leaves and brush that served her as a bed. "What's it for?"

"That is not for me to say," the ever-serious rhea spirit intoned. Like Raposa, he inhabited his preferred form of a human-sized and vaguely anthropomorphic rhea, with a pattern of mystical qipu knots--his in blazing red as opposed to Raposa's cool blue--spread across his back. "But the great Onca commands you to attend upon him."

"Okay! Great! I wonder what he wants? I haven't seen him in forever!" Raposa chirped happily. She followed Choique through the living stone to the dwelling-place of the great Onca in the heart of the mountains.

Onca, the regent of the great and absent Viracocha and the spouse of Pachamama the Earth-Mother, waited on his throne of radiant gold. Dwelling in the form of a great humaniform puma, he was almost as serious as Choique--save for the occasional practical joke like the time he packed 100,000 tilapia fish into the great palace of Huayna Capac. "Raposa," he said. "You have much to answer for."

"Oh goody! Is it a game of twenty questions? Maybe hide-and-seek? I love hide-and-seek!" bubbled the fox-lady.

Onca rolled his golden eyes and pursed his whiskered lips. "Not as such," he said. "Lights!"

The fireflies that lit the great golden cavern at the heart of the mountain arranged themselves into a strict formation, rapidly altering in color and brightness to form a large projection screen, which Onca occasionally used to watch Vilcabamba FC soccer games. The screen showed the construction of the Rancho Montaña resort, which had undergone considerable progress while Raposa had been hibernating. In fact, it was almost finished.

"Wow! Look at that! It's so neat! I wonder what it looks like on the inside?"

"Does it looks so neat after you see this?"

With a flick of Onca's claw, images flashed across the screen. Fields denuded of their alpine grass. Mountains of cut timber. Pools of industrial waste beside snow-generating machines. Callous European tourists discarding energy bar wrappers.

Raposa cocked her head. "Yes. So neat."

Once sighed. "The mountain has been despoiled and you are to blame. Therefore, I must punish you. I must also make things right. As is my wont, I will do both at once."

"I…I don't understand," Raposa said.

"Yes, I expected as much," sighed Onca. "Yours is the free spirit of the mountains, that goes where it will and does what interests it. Sadly, your punishment must impinge on that somewhat."

The great puma waved a claw, and a garment began to spin itself in midair, coalescing from the ley fibers of the universe into woven llama wool. It was a robe, influenced in equal parts by the Incas of old and the latest fashions out of The Robery catwalk in Milan. At another twitch of his clawed digit, the newly spun garment wrapped itself around Raposa.

"C-clothes?" Raposa cried pitiably. To wear a garment of any kind was the gravest insult for a spirit such as they, no matter how fine and fit the cut.

"The very same," said Onca. "And now, I must reluctantly strip you of your divine nature and pour you into a mortal shell, for there is no other way that you will understand and be able to carry out your punishment."

At his command, the spiritual energies of the mountain went about their work. Raposa's large ears twitched violently and began to shrink as her tails which had been brushing the floor began to pull upward in fits and spurts.

"Onca! I'm sorry!" Raposa's hands flailed at her retreating ears and tail. "I…I…"

She stopped speaking, and not because her long muzzle had begun to flatten against her face, or because patches of creamy skin had begun to emerge as her hair thinned. No, a definite change was coming over her temperament as well, and Raposa tried desperately to hand onto the wispy strands of her curiosity, cheerfulness, and guilelessness as they were blown away by the storm of Onca's spell.

"I'm sorry too," said Onca. "But this is the only way, and it is for the best."

Raposa's tails vanished under her new robe, and a moment later she felt--and heard--a pop as they were removed from existence. Claws on her paws took on the same creamy, dead-fish color as her increasingly hair-free skin, and she stumbled almost comically as her lower paws transitioned to what were, in her view, horrible quasi-hands. Worst of all, her long red hair was shrinking away along with the rest of her fur.

"I…I feel…" the words were unfamiliar, pressed against flat teeth instead of Raposa's familiar fangs. She blinked furiously as her bright green eyes became pale, and wobbled as her new, tiny, clamshell ears affected her equilibrium almost as much as the squirming pink worms where her marvelous thick pads had just been. But further sensations flooded her brain: sudden concerns for how her hair looked, an intense desire to get something called a mortgage, the need to buy enough clothes to equip a dozen closets. And--most distressingly--a practical outlook that was serious, introverted, and almost devoid of curiosity.

"I feel…mundane!" Raposa squawked, her voice coming out not as its former melodious singsong but as a more guttural and harsh hiccup. Standing there awkwardly, an uncharacteristically hardened expression her face, she was fully and indisputably now a human girl.

"Yes, that's the idea," Onca said. "Only a mundane creature can reverse the damage, and only by doing so will I restore you to your true form."

"But…but…" Raposa struggled to argue in favor of her former cheeky curious self when her head was a mush of responsibilities and cynicism. "That's just not me! That's not Raposa!"

"Good point," Once said. "We'll have to strip the name from you as well." He performed a further incantation, and the human formerly known as Raposa felt something cold and plasticky thrust into her hand.

"A…a driver's license?" she cried, horrified.

"That's right," said Onca. "I got it from a forger in Medallin who used to make them all the time for when drug barons wanted to go to Disney World."

Garnet Debian--for that was, in fact, the name on the license and, thanks to Onca's powerful magic, now that of its possessor as far as the universe was concerned--wailed at the thought. "What will I do now?" she cried.

"You'll think of something, I'm sure," Onca said. "Don't return here until you can convince me the damage is being undone. I'll set Cawathinyu to watch you and bring messages as need be.

"The mosquito spirit?" Garnet whined. "But…he sucks!"

"Payment in blood is required for all such transactions," Onca intoned solemnly.

"Even…this?" Garnet said, indicating her new, pale, hideous human form with a sweep of one disgustingly well-manicured hand.

"No," said Onca. "Now begone."

Miguel Orroz, wealthy Spanish-American businessman, property developer, and Frobz Magazine winner of the "Plutocrat of the Year" award 1997-2001 inclusive, answered the knock on his door to find Garnet there, shivering in the rain. He arched an eyebrow, this being only the third time that week that a half-naked waif had presented herself at his door.

"I need a job," she said.

"Come right in, my dear!" Orroz said, putting an arm around her. "I think we have just the position for you at the front desk of our resort…"

It wasn't much, but it was a chink in the man's armor. And Garnet was determined to widen it, destroy the resort, and become her old self again--which, among other things, meant no more thinking in such serious, straightforward, and sinister terms.
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Comments: 2

ryu238 [2015-01-18 17:01:40 +0000 UTC]

Wow, I feel bad for her.

👍: 0 ⏩: 1

nothere3 In reply to ryu238 [2015-01-19 05:58:25 +0000 UTC]

She'll be fine, don't worry

👍: 0 ⏩: 0