Grim Views

It started the morning after they slept together.

Okay, it started before that. It hadn't been the first time that Inzema had realized exactly who she was, but it was close to then. Nights and early mornings sitting sleepless in his laboratory, trying to get her out of his mind. Trying to think of a way to control his hunger to keep her safe. Or maybe it was that she simply brought out the guilt of being a monster that he never felt outside her presence.

It started with dissecting the recipe to an elixir that hadn't worked exactly as intended and had only been recreated once. For her, before...no matter. Were he someone else, his half-sister, for example, he would have referred to a library of notes, recipes, and errata. He had never been the scholarly type, however, content to experiment until he got the effect he was looking for and simply remembering the recipe. The base had been the ashes of the scales of a bronze dragon mixed with the blood of a druid. Neither were exceptionally hard to acquire. Several of the original ingredients had to be substituted, not being available in worlds that weren't dead the last time he had checked, when he was making it for her. He'd found substitutes here, though he had not really had the time to observe to ensure that the substitutes had actually worked before... Yeah, he wasn't going to think about that either.

Stupid interfering...whoever that had been.

So! Back to coming up with a reversal, or maybe... No, it had to be a full reversal. Anything that would alter the change less than completely was bound to fail.

What would it be like to be human again? Boy, that'd be weird. He'd have to be more careful about everything. He'd have to be less willing to take a stab, just in general.

Eating plants would be a thing again, and no more eating bones to...This would be really...really weird.

Stop thinking about it and do it.

The first attempt at an antidote had...side effects. Okay. Inzema vomited all his guts onto the floor, literally. Liquefied insides everywhere. He waited as his body ate away at his non-vital everything to restore the vital digestive system that had been turned into black mush and pushed out of his body through agonizing spasms.

Fun.

Attempts two through twenty-four didn't have positive results either. Inzema decided to step out for a drink and a bite to eat while he left try number twenty-five simmer. Maybe cooking the potion for a while would do something...

Inzema returned to his lab late at night to the smell of something burning and blood. The blood was nothing new or unexpected. He'd caught himself a new toy for the moment and had kept the thing in a cage in a puddle of her own blood while he was gone. What he hadn't expected, but probably should have, given how long he had been out, was the smell of burning. He sniffed the air as he walked into the lab, his mind still on the conversation from earlier. "I like you the way that you are," she had said, urging him to abandon the project that would have stripped him of his alchemically induced immortality to make things safe for him. Upon further reflection, he did realize that there had never really been any incident that had really endangered her during their screwing before, so why should now be any different. He tended to keep himself well fed and though she liked it rough, it wasn't enough for him to lose his mind or anything.

Inzema stopped at the burner that had held the potion that he had been working on. Number twenty-five. His mind told him that he should see the vial still resting in the stand, probably full of charred potion. Instead, the stand was empty. Inzema checked for signs of shattered vial or something explaining the absence of the potion, and stumbled over a leg on the ground. He came around the corner of the alchemy table to find the corpse of the worgen woman he had caught earlier in the day, her body contorted so that her head was nearly touching her hips, her back clearly broken. Her arms and legs also showed unnatural contortion, as if her muscles had suddenly gained immeasurable strength and decided that they wanted to bend all her joints backwards. The vial lay nearby, having rolled from her grasp probably about the same time her hands decided to turn backwards. Inzema walked to the front of the woman, saw her eyes tracking him as he moved, and cackled gleefully. "Oh, you're still alive! Wonderful!" The common tongue came as easily as orcish. He crouched before her, putting his shark's grin right by her muzzle. "I wouldn't have touched that, if I had been you, but kudos for actually managing to escape your cage." He whipped a knife from its sheath and across her nose, then frowned as the light left her eyes. "Well that was a letdown," he muttered, then was wracked by a coughing fit, his body still not fully recovered from his experiments. "And now I'm going to have to eat leftovers, too. Fucking lame."