Artefact Hunters: Ikimono's Mirror

     Hanso had made a mistake.

     Oh, Hanso had made a huge mistake.

     With a yelp, he turned around and scrambled desperately to get out of the very much magic-transformation-mirror-infested water. He didn’t get far before a hot prickle spread throughout his body, and his flailing limbs stopped working with him as they got all caught up in shrinking and twisting and changing proportion.

     The process was quick and mercifully painless, but Hanso tried not to think about it as his scrabbling fingers finally found purchase on the shallow end of the dropoff. He pulled himself up and forward on what some foggy part of his brain told him were supposed to be fingertips, but he was not thinking about that. Once he’d managed it, he sprawled out at the edge of the now lapping water, coughing and sputtering even though the potion he’d taken had rendered that unnecessary.

     Somewhere along the way, the thought finally broke into his brain that the appendages he’d thought of as fingers were in fact forehooves. Hooves. He hadn’t had hooves since he was a toddler. He’d more or less taken for granted the subtle physical magic that let Neopets make something useful out of their forelimbs. One minute into being a… whatever Ikimono’s Mirror had just turned him into, and he was already missing his hands.

     Loud splashing sounded behind him, and a waterlogged Brynn sloshed out of the pool and into Hanso’s field of vision. Right, okay, so apparently she wasn’t in trouble after all.

     For several seconds, she just stared at him like she didn’t know whether to be more incredulous or furious at the sheer idiocy of his actions. You and me both, Hanso thought bitterly to himself. Not sure what else to do and not yet ready to try and relearn how his legs worked, he just stayed on the ground and stared back at her with his ears drooping nervously.

     Finally, Brynn seemed to settle on ‘furious.’ She broke into an absolute tirade of roars and snarls and other assorted angry Biyako noises, alternating between pacing in front of him and stopping to pin him with heated glares.

     Hanso felt annoyed and vaguely betrayed as her continued lack of recognisable words confirmed to him that petpets did not, in fact, share some kind of instinctive petpet language like the stories said. Still, he got the point of the rant. Probably. He wasn’t sure what to believe anymore, after he’d managed to interpret whatever she’d been trying to tell him when she was in the water as a cue to rush in after her.

     That thought gave him a flash of indignance. He just wanted to help! Wasn’t she the one who had been giving him mixed signals? He raised his head and opened his mouth to shoot back something to the effect of ‘Well, why didn’t you secure the artefact before giving me the signal then?’

     What came out of his mouth was an accusatory bleat.

     Hanso’s eyes widened, and he covered his mouth with a forehoof. Sweet Fyora, he’d just bleated. He was going to die of embarrassment right here, and now, with his partner-slash-girlfriend thinking he was a complete idiot. Probably correctly. And while he still had hooves.

     The sudden noise at least seemed to disarm Brynn enough for her to settle down some. With one last annoyed rumble and a shake of the head, she turned around and jumped back into the water.

     Hanso continued to lie there for a few more minutes, still a little stunned about… well, everything. His desire to argue with Brynn had drained as swiftly as his dignity, and now he dreaded having to face the consequences of his own actions.

     He decided with a low sigh that he should at least get up before she came back. He pulled his hooves under him one at a time and pushed up onto all fours. After taking a moment to orient himself and get a sense of how his new legs moved, he made the last couple of wobbly steps out of the water’s edge and turned around.

     Steeling himself, he peered back into the pool to get a good look at his changed face. Large eyes stared back at him between a pronounced snout and long, curved horns that suddenly felt heavy on his head. Above them, ears that were almost as long as the horns twitched in thought while he studied his reflection.

     Huh. He wasn’t sure Nuks came in Blue. Ikimono’s Mirror didn’t seem to care about minor details like proper petpet colours.

     A yellowish shape appeared before Hanso, and he stumbled back as Brynn resurfaced and hauled herself out of the pool. He hadn’t even noticed before that her colours had washed out to his Nuk eyes, but he tried to set aside this latest strangeness for the time being. Brynn cast him a brief glance as she loped past, but she just leaned down to take the discarded rope in her mouth and started pulling it away from the pool.

     Hanso’s ears pricked. This, at least, was something he could help with. He got behind her, grabbed another bit of rope, and –

     – promptly gagged, almost dropping his length of rope in the process. It was all wet and scratchy and – and gross! How had Brynn managed to be so casual about holding things with her mouth this whole time? Was there some sort of guard training for it? True, he’d held lockpicks and such in his mouth to free up his hands for the delicate art of breaking into places he shouldn’t be. But this was so much worse.

     Hanso fought down the gag reflex, tried his best to keep anything but his teeth from touching the waterlogged rope, and focused on helping Brynn tug it back to haul its catch out of the water. He bumped into a stalagmite after a few feet and took it as his cue to drop his end and head back around in front of her to grab another point closer to the pool. The two of them settled into a rhythm of this, taking turns moving from back to front.

     After a few minutes, the silvered satchel sloshed up over the sinkhole and into the pool’s shallows. Once it had cleared the shoreline, Hanso and Brynn dropped their lengths of rope and moved to get a closer look. Cave water was leaking around the edges of the flap holding the bag shut and dripping from its sides, but it seemed none the worse for wear. When Brynn flipped it over with a paw, Hanso saw that she’d wrapped its strap tightly over the top to keep its clasp from popping open. Was that what had happened earlier, what she’d been trying to warn him about?

     Now, she unwrapped everything and lifted the flap’s corner to check inside the satchel. More water spilt out, but beyond it, Hanso could see a glint of the mirror’s gold frame. His fur prickled, but the artefact had already done its work on him, and the bag was neutralising its effects now anyway.

     Brynn let the flap drop with a sound like a sigh. She bent down to start pulling apart the rope knotted around the strap. Hanso’s ears twitched in envy as he watched her work. She’d adjusted to her transformation so much better than he had. She certainly hadn’t lain around like a stunned Soreen, and that was when the artefact in the pool took her completely by surprise! Nope, she’d climbed out, shaken herself off, and turned her attention to keeping him from going in after her.

     …And he’d repaid her by later going in after her anyway. It seemed that being the level-headed one on the team had its advantages. Maybe that was why she was dealing with the whole petpet thing so well.

     Or maybe it was just because her paws still had something like fingers.

     After a few minutes of Brynn working while Hanso continued to be useless, she was done. She brushed the end of the rope aside and gave the satchel a contemplative look. Then, she slipped her head through its strap and wriggled it around her shoulders the way she’d done with her own pack the day before. The big mirror inside the satchel made it sit more awkwardly on her frame, but she was just large enough to handle it.

     With that, she looked to Hanso and let out a questioning grumble. He studied her getup for a moment, then looked up at the pack he’d dropped off on the big rock. It was similar in size to the mirror satchel, maybe a little bigger, but more evenly packed so that it bulged a bit less. That was good, because Nuks were a bit smaller than Biyakos.

     Hanso placed an uncertain hoof on the side of the rock. Right, climbing. This was… probably instinctive. Brynn seemed to be fine getting around on all fours when she wasn’t in a stressful situation. And Ixis were natural quadrupeds, too.

     Right, then! Enough moping. With a little more bravado than he felt, Hanso faced Brynn, puffed out his chest, and made a short, low bleat that he hoped sounded better than the standard. ‘Check this out!’

     Brynn just watched him with an unreadable expression. He squared up, bunched his hind legs a little, and jumped up onto the rock cleanly and with only a tiny stumble. Ha! Take that, lack of hands!

     With that done, he copied Brynn’s movements to wriggle his pack onto his own back. It took a bit longer – he wasn’t used to his horns being this big. But he managed without too much trouble. He then took a moment to contemplate the lantern. It was too big and unwieldy to just stuff in his pack, at least if he wanted to keep carrying it at this size. But he could attach it to the bag, and in fact had carried it like that on the way back from Kasuma. Could he still manage that?

     Hanso looked back down to Brynn and bleated, ‘Hey, can you lend me a paw here?’

     Brynn, who had been busy gathering up the rope, just blinked up at him uncomprehendingly.

     Right.

     It took a series of gestures and nods and various petpet noises, but Brynn and Hanso finally managed to finish packing up and make it out of the cave. She’d extinguished the lantern with some careful paw work, and everything was as secure as it could be. Now, they just had to figure out what in Neopia they were going to do next.

     By this point, Brynn had managed to let go of her anger at Hanso’s impulsive behaviour that had led to this latest mess. If he hadn’t understood her, which he clearly hadn’t, then he must have thought Ikimono’s Mirror was still safe in the magic-proof bag. She should have just let him pull the stupid thing up and then started over, just to prevent this exact scenario. She still wasn’t entirely clear on why he thought he needed to jump into the pool, but she wasn’t sure she could find a way to ask him right now.

     That kind of highlighted their problem, though. Now, neither of them could talk to each other or anyone else. And that wasn’t the only limitation to what they could do, either. She just thanked Fyora that they’d been able to lighten their load and sent the Alkenores ahead before this.

     What they needed was a plan. That was something Brynn had been trying to work out ever since she’d seen her partner turned into a Nuk. And she believed she’d managed to find one so simple that she was a little ashamed she hadn’t thought of it before.

     First, though, she needed a good stick.

     Hanso trotted up behind her and watched with a quizzical tilt of the head as she nosed her way around the edge of the forest. The leaf cover wasn’t bad at this time of spring, but there was still enough debris and undergrowth to make it – there!

     Brynn knelt down and pulled a small branch from where it was half-hidden in a bush. Hanso seemed to grimace at that, but she paid it little mind. He seemed to be adjusting to his own transformation decently well, all things considered. She had been pretty much running on instinct and desperation when it first happened to her, and Biyakos were a bit closer to her normal state than Nuks were to his. But it looked like he was back to his usual boisterous self, after some time to adjust. He’d get used to handling things with his mouth.

     With her stick in possession, Brynn backed up until she found a grassless patch of dirt near the cave’s rock face and cleared away a swath of fallen detritus. After glancing over to confirm that Hanso was paying attention, she sat back on her haunches and shifted the branch until she was holding it semi-steadily between her forepaws. It took a few tries to get the motions right, but eventually she managed to scratch out the words, “Go to town?” in the dirt.

     Hanso, who’d perked up as soon as he realised what she was doing, seemed to contemplate her writing for a moment. He squeezed in to answer, and she scooted aside and offered him her stick. But he ignored it and instead used a hoof to write, “Yes.”

     Brynn snorted. Lucky. With her stick, she wrote out, “How to get a carriage?” Not the most eloquent phrasing, but writing like this was hard, and she only had so much space.

     Hanso snorted back and cleared the earlier writing to give himself space to answer. “We have NP.”

     Brynn frowned. Would it really be that simple? Would the people they found to hire them a carriage hang around long enough for a couple of petpets to slowly write out explanations of what they were doing and what they needed in the dirt?

     She wasn’t entirely sure, but she supposed they had to try.

To be continued…