Artefact Hunters: Ikimono's Mirror

     The next morning, Brynn found herself lying stiffly and more than a little awkwardly on a low table in the workshop of Ryuji’s small home. The Hissi wizard looked her over with a keen eye as he poured a second dose of a sweet-smelling topical healing potion over the wounds she’d sustained in her fight against the wild Biyako. She tried to focus on the soothing sensation of her bites and scratches fading, rather than his intense gaze.

     Ryuji let out a low hum. “And you say she has the same physical traits and patterns as her normal Kougra form?” he asked Hanso. “I’ve seen pictures in the papers, of course, but not enough to easily identify either of you.”

     Hanso started to nod, then suddenly blushed and reached up to rub the back of his neck. “I-I mean, it’s not like I’d ever seen her back before,” he said. “But the stripes on her face and arms are the same. So’s her eye colour.”

     Ryuji nodded. “I can understand Lady Min’s caution, then. This mirror artefact’s choice of Petpet seems far too meticulous to be a mere coincidence.”

     Brynn craned her neck to face him with a quizzical grumble, and she saw Hanso’s ears perk up. “Yeah?” he asked.

     Ryuji nodded. “Most transformative spells can be thought of as a kind of ‘brute force.’ The target is changed into something specific, and while a few relative features might stay more or less the same, the body otherwise changes completely to fit the new mould. That’s why morphing potions always specify a colour as well as a species. Anything less specific would be far harder to pull off, as the magic requires much more finesse. And that’s when most morphing potions are advanced enough to carry over more of the target’s original features.

     “But it looks very much like Ikimono’s Mirror has that finesse. Not only can it change Neopets into different Petpets with the same spell, but it can also ‘choose’ what they turn into based on what they already are. And that lets colour and other specifics follow along with the transformation. But because it isn’t a brute force spell, attempting the usual counterspells would likely result in either failure or… unpredictable changes to the target.”

     Brynn’s ears pinned back, and she let out a distressed groan. ‘Let’s not try that, then.’

     Hanso winced. “Guess that explains why Min wants to see the mirror before trying anything,” he said, echoing her thoughts. “So, what have you got for moving it?”

     Ryuji turned and slithered over to a cabinet that seemed to hold most of his supplies. Hanging off of a peg on one side were several satchels like the one he’d carried with him the night before.

     Rifling through the bags, he said, “My line of work requires bags and containers that can block magically potent ingredients so they don’t react with their surroundings. Based on its power and your description of its size, your artefact will need something like… this.”

     He pulled down one of the larger bags, a sturdy leather satchel with an equally sturdy silvered clasp and thin silver wire woven into the seams.

     “This should be large enough to hold the mirror, and its enchantments will protect it in the water and aid the silver in warding against any leaking magic. So long as the artefact stays in the bag with the clasp shut, it will be harmless.”

     He handed the satchel to Hanso. After a moment’s thought, he turned to look back contemplatively at his workbench. “If you have the time, I can also make a potion of water breathing so that Brynn has an easier time manoeuvring in the pool.”

     Hanso and Brynn shared a look. She grumbled approvingly, and he nodded.

     “That’d probably be a good idea,” he said. “I need to find someone who can go on ahead with the Alkenores so we’re not walking them all the way to the capital anyway. And we can hire a carriage instead. How much will you need for the potion?”

     Ryuji had already started gathering ingredients, but he shook his head. “Consider it a service to both Shenkuu and the Faerie Queen’s champions,” he said, turning back to face Hanso and Brynn. “All I ask is that you send my bag back once you’ve finished with it. But I can tell you now that you won’t find any carriages for hire here; Kasuma is too small a town for that service. When I’m finished with the potion, I’ll help you find another town on the way to the Imperial City that will have them. Chiaki should work, I think.”

     Once Hanso and Brynn had left the workshop to start on their morning errands, he leaned down toward her with a playful smirk. “If I’d known hero work came with this much free stuff, I’d have found a crazy sorceress to take down years ago!” he stage-whispered.

     Brynn just gave him a flat look, but that only caused him to snicker.

     For a time, the day went on in an almost ‘normal’ fashion. Hanso got the Alkenores taken care of, refreshed their food supplies for another couple of days of travel, and called with updates for Lady Min, Queen Fyora, and, for some reason, the explorer Gamal. He also popped his head into the local guard station and let some guards who’d apparently been out looking for the poachers know that he’d at least managed to get his own Petpets back.

     Brynn wished she had a way to report the additional information she had from that night – as far as she could tell, the poachers were still at large despite the rampaging Petpets thoroughly ruining their day. But aside from that, she had to admit that Hanso was handling his tasks fairly smoothly. She usually handled reports and negotiations for the two of them, but it seemed that Hanso could be respectful and responsible when he needed to.

     Around them, the people of Kasuma Village kept busy with their routines of farming, fishing and keeping shop. Most of them gave the ‘foreign traveller and his Petpet’ curious looks, but nobody seemed to recognise them. Whether that was from a simple lack of exposure out here, or whether the villagers would have expected Hanso to be with a Kougra rather than a Biyako, Brynn couldn’t say.

     And, no, not just because she still couldn’t speak anyway.

     By the time they’d made the trek back to the cave – taking a different route than the one that had led them to the poachers – it was well into the afternoon. Hanso lit his lantern at the cave’s mouth, sending firelight bouncing off its slick stone walls. Brynn trailed in close behind him. It wasn’t long before the lantern’s light caught the edge of the mirror’s pool.

     “Ah, yes, back to the spooky hidden cave that turns unwary travellers into Petpets,” Hanso said dryly. “My favourite vacation destination.”

     Brynn let out a sympathetic grunt.

     “This looks like as good a spot as any,” Hanso went on, setting the lantern on a flat boulder that kept it high enough for its light to reach across the pool. He set his pack – the only one they needed, since Brynn couldn’t use her equipment and they’d sent the Alkenores ahead with their excess supplies – down next to it.

     While he was getting the supplies they did need ready, Brynn padded up to the water’s edge. The pool was glassy without wind or nearby cave creatures to disturb it, its surface only rarely broken by the dripping of water from the stalactite-studded ceiling. She could see her reflection clearly.

     She kind of wished she couldn’t. It was eerie, unsettling, to see a Biyako staring back at her with facial features that were almost but not quite right and mirroring her movements. She felt the fur on her shoulders prickle at the sight, and after a few seconds, she let her gaze drift out further into the pool. She didn’t exactly relish the idea of going back into the water that changed her like this. Still, it wasn’t like Ikimono’s Mirror could do anything to her that it hadn’t already.

     With a little huff, she turned back around to see Hanso tying one end of his rope to the strap of the satchel Ryuji had lent the two of them. “Almost ready, sweetheart,” he said when he saw her eyes on him. “Just one more knot and – there.”

     He held out the secured bag for her to inspect. “I put a couple of rocks in the bag to help it sink down,” he explained, pointing out its sagging lower end. “You can take them out when you put the mirror in if you need to. After it’s ready, give the rope… let’s say two good tugs. That way, I’ll know I’m good to pull it up. Sound like a plan?”

     It was refreshingly straightforward, after all the nonsense they’d had to deal with over the last day. Brynn nodded.

     “Perfect.” Hanso stood up, a few loops of the rope’s other end in hand, and tossed the bag out to the part of the pool where the mirror rested.

     Next, he grabbed the flask of water-breathing potion Ryuji had made for the two of them. “Ready?” he asked.

     Brynn nodded again and hopped up onto the rock next to him. She felt a little ridiculous having someone essentially feed her, but she couldn’t grip the potion bottle with her paws as they were. Hanso held it out to her and tipped a little bit of potion into her mouth.

     The sensation of it taking effect was… strange. Brynn wasn’t really a magic user. Grateful faeries had thrown ability spell blessings at her, and Hanso left and right just after the Fall of Faerieland, and it had honestly driven her nuts because she’d never found occasion to use a single one. She was at least familiar with healing potions, and Ikimono’s Mirror wasn’t the first artefact whose magical properties she had directly interacted with. But this wasn’t quite like either of those scenarios. The magic buzzed in her, not changing any physical part of her or settling into a pool of borrowed power that might hypothetically let her use some spell. It just gave her the sense that, so long as the potion’s effects lasted, something was different.

     Brynn shook her head in an effort to banish some of the strangeness and trotted back to the water. Hanso held tight to his end of the rope and nodded, but still she hesitated at the shallow edge just before the pool dropped into a deeper sinkhole. It was one thing to be told that a potion would let you breathe underwater, and quite another to test its effects for yourself.

     Finally, she decided to just get on with it and pushed out into the dropoff. Water enveloped her, and she tensed for a moment in the paranoia that something else might go magically wrong.

     The moment passed when she realised that everything looked and sounded clearer than it should have. Granted, there wasn’t much to hear besides the slosh of the waves she’d made above her, and the lantern’s light just barely reached the bottom. But her night vision was more than enough to pick out the gold-ringed mirror resting by the wall and the satchel just a few feet from it.

     Taking that as a sign that the potion was working – Ryuji had said it would make navigation easier – Brynn went against her instinct and took a small breath. To her pleasant surprise, air filled her lungs. The potion didn’t simply let her breathe water; it somehow caused the water to magically convert into a substance her lungs were built to handle.

     Right, enough testing. Brynn let her breathing return to a steady rhythm and started paddling down toward the waiting items. Like with walking, doing so with all fours took some getting used to. But Biyakos were natural swimmers, and it didn’t take long for her to get the hang of it and reach the bottom.

     She got her first good look at Ikimono’s Mirror when she grabbed the bag’s strap in her teeth to drag it closer. The mirror was oval-shaped and a little bigger than an average Neopian’s head. Its golden frame was intricately wrought, with a pair of feathery wings sweeping down from the top and the fins of a fish tail arcing up from the bottom. Its sides were scaly and layered like a serpent’s coils, and the shapes of invertebrates barely larger than Petpetpets were scattered throughout the frame.

     The mirror’s reflective surface was faint in the low light, but Brynn thought she could feel a slight tingle from its leaking magic when she looked at it. She tried to avoid that.

     After scooping out Hanso’s rocks with her forepaws to make room, she got to work pushing the mirror into the satchel. It was easier said than done. The bag was just large enough to fit the artefact, but working with teeth and paws underwater made leverage tricky even with the potion’s help.

     She gradually found a rhythm of inching the heavy mirror into the bag’s opening with her head and paws, then reaching over to pull the bunched material back over it with her teeth. After a few minutes of the frustrating work, she had the mirror secure and pulled the satchel’s thick flap over it to clasp it shut.

     With that done, she looped the rope around a forepaw a couple of times and swam back until it was taut. She gave it two quick yanks to signal Hanso, and then dropped it. After a second, the rope went taut again and started to pull toward the pool’s edge with the satchel in tow.

     Brynn let out a sigh of relief, a singularly bizarre sensation underwater. She watched the secured artefact go, ready to return to the surface once she was sure that nothing else would go wrong.

     Of course, that was when something went wrong. As the satchel bumped its way over a sunken boulder, it twisted around, and its securing flap came loose and snapped open. Brynn could only watch in dismay as the mirror slipped back out and hit the rock with a muted thunk.

     She growled softly to herself in annoyance. She must not have gotten the clasp completely secure with her Petpet paws. Swimming back down to the rope, she grabbed it again and gave it another yank to signal Hanso to stop.

     The rope kept moving. At this point, he must not have been able to tell one source of resistance from the next. With another annoyed growl at the whole ridiculous situation, Brynn swam upward until she broke the water’s surface.

     ‘Hanso!’ she roared, treading water and shaking her head at him. ‘Stop pulling, I need to get the mirror back in the satchel!’

     Not that he could hear the actual words in her head, but her sounds and gestures for him to stop should get the point across. He seemed to have been doing okay at getting her basic intent so far today. At least, he’d be able to tell that something was wrong.

     Something was wrong.

     Hanso didn’t like how long Brynn had been underwater, but he supposed that was kind of the point of the water-breathing potion. He could barely see what was going on out in the dark pool, but the orange smudge seemed to have been moving around the other smudges, and he’d taken that as a good sign.

     Getting the signal that he could pull the artefact up had been a relief. There were a few bumps and tugs as he pulled the rope in and its load hit fallen rocks, and he couldn’t really see what was going on down there now that the water was moving again, but progress was progress.

     But when Brynn suddenly popped up to the surface, his relief at seeing her up quickly turned to concern. She was roaring and growling, her head shaking as she splashed around. She looked hurt, or worried, or –

     Had the potion stopped working? Ryuji had said a small dose would last a long time, but she’d been down there for a while. If she’d gotten a lungful of water that she could no longer breathe, she could be in real trouble!

     Hanso didn’t know if that’s what had happened, but it was clear she was in some kind of trouble. He had to act fast. And, well, the pool itself would be safe now that the mirror was nice and secure in the satchel.

     “I’m coming, Brynn!” he called out, dropping the rope and grabbing the potion. Even if the problem was it not lasting as long as it should, he wouldn’t be in the water that long. He took a quick swig for the extra boost and jumped into the pool, Brynn’s distressed cries ringing in his ears.

     The first thing he registered was that, in the moment between his body plunging into the water and resurfacing, he could see a lot more clearly than he normally did underwater. Specifically, he could see something golden and glinting that very much should not have been visible right now.

     The second thing he registered was the sensation of magic, far more powerful than the potion he’d just taken, seizing hold of him.

To be continued…