All of a sudden, Joel wanted to go find Chris and to get out of the soaking-wet clothes and warm up at the fire. He was shivering hard, and he knew he'd be coming down with something because getting chilled did that to him. The pictures were surrounded by a sort of draft, which made it worse. He looked at them again.
Joel shuddered, the chill running up his spine and down his arms and legs and out through his hands, making his neck clench as he realized that the pictures really did depict HIM in a lot of detail. There was a birthmark on most of them that matched the one he had on the back of his left hand. The tuft of white hair above his left eye, another birthmark, was depicted on even the filthy-haired jungle boy.
It was very pronounced on the painting of him as an orc, and he paused, shining the light from his phone on the picture -- the light from the lounge and the front hall was dimmer here. Yeah, it was an orc, not the strange gross ones from the movies of the Lord of the Rings, but rather, something taller, more massive, more like that videogame. Though not really the same as that either.
It looked like it was breathing, almost. The orc had green skin, of course, the same curly dark hair with the white lock, the same jagged eyebrow, and strong, gold-capped tusks from its much broader and wider lower jaw, and the nose was wider but still had the high bridge that Joel had. Otherwise, the head was well-shaped and the face was handsomer than his, if you don't mind tusks. The shape of the eyes was the same. Joel grinned in the middle of his shivering, noticing that unlike his too-thin and too-small self, this orc was jacked and stacked with pure muscle. Obvious enough to tell, he had no shirt on, just a pair of fur-trimmed leather pants that ended above his knees, and not even shoes. Everything showed and it was all competent strength.
The orc's hands and feet were very large, his shoulders broad, his neck backed up by a ridge of trapezius muscles that made it almost look as though he didn't actually HAVE a neck, and the shoulders, chest, and arms were ridiculous, covered in what appeared to be a light webbing of veins, but also heavy blocky symbol-like tattoos in darker green and pale yellow and even red in places. They weren't letters or runes, at least not the ones Joel knew, but there was a handprint on the chest in red, distorted as it courved around the thick, striated muscles. The markings ran down his arms, and were echoed on his legs. He wasn't hairy at all. Some orcs were shown as hairballs, others as smooth. This one had hair on his head, he had eyebrows, but perhaps strangely, no beard.
Orcs don't have skinny waists and narrow hips -- that would be their cousins the elves -- but this orc-Joel in the painting didn't have a gut. He had a core worthy of a tower. He had a four-pack of giant abdominal muscles and a shield wall vee pointing down to what appeared to be a metal shell "codpiece" over the vulnerable bits.
He was a warrior, clearly, based on the huge axe leaning against a rock in the painting, and the two smaller axes dangling from his belt, and a huge bow and a quiver of arrows next to the big axe. There was a hint of a fire in the painting behind the orc, who was posed as if he had seen something odd and was leaning forward to inspect it, was staring directly at Joel.
Joel laughed, a bit nervously.
"Man you're big. Too bad I'm not you, nobody would have given me a hard time in Gym class ..."
He turned his back to the painting, pointing the camera on the back of his phone to try for the Perfect Selfie, him and Orc-Him. The flash went off and there was a surprised noise from behind him.
Joel found himself hauled into the air by a giant green hand, and found his cheesy grin met by an orcish version of the same grin that somehow looked MUCH more menacing.
"Too bad? No, not any more," the Orc said in Joel's voice if it had been spoken by someone who had gotten a much better visit from the Puberty Fairy.
Joel felt the orc's other hand slap against his still-damp shirt. It should have stung, but he didn't feel it.
There was a soundless explosion, a blinding sensation of being burned by something that left stone behind instead of ashes.
The sensation of exploding went on for a long time. Everything in him was being forced apart. There was pain, of course, but every other kind of sensation as well. He felt heavy and light and strong and weak and there was a constant whispering that was somehow as loud as thunder, telling him what his past had been, what his future could be.
He was dizzy and felt more grounded and stable than he had ever felt.
His bare feet touched the floor, and he could feel the wood creaking under his weight. He no longer felt cold. He knew he was still damp and the room wasn't any warmer, but he wasn't affected. He felt himself stand.
"You are Cho'l of Raven Clan," he heard himself telling himself. "You are a hunter, a warrior, an adventurer in your youth. You have slain the enemies of your people. You are son of a shamaness and a war-chief. You hear the spirits and you know which ones are your clan friends and which ones are their enemies, and which ones are too silly to bother with. You failed to kill the wizard Skreth, and escaped to seek the help of allies to stop the lizard-mage from enslaving your family. The spirits set your path to a place where you could find help, but then you were ensnared by his spells and marooned outside of time."
He had to accept it. Joel Ravensberg was short and skinny. Cho'l of Ravenclan was taller than the frame of the picture, if he stood straight, and by the way, he noticed that the picture had faded to a bleached-out sketch. The axe and bow and arrows were leaning against the wall. Cho'l was happy for that. He took a cloth from a pouch that hung on the back of his belt and wiped the blood away from the red mark on his chest -- it only bled when he did a hard magical working.
Cho'l considered his options for finding help, and considered that he was in another world, and had come to this place with a friend.
Now. Chris would probably scream when he saw him. And Joel was not all that useful when it came to finding help. But this place had magic, he could SMELL and TASTE it, and the paintings around him were no longer paintings of the short pale human. They were someone else. He could feel that they were magical, that they carried a change in situation within them. Something rather like the one he'd felt himself.
"Chris?" Cho'l called out, trying to pitch his voice higher so it wouldn't alarm him too much. "I need you to see this."
He slid the ... phone ... thing into his pouch along with the cloth, and stood in front of the painting, and whispered "Blend me in" to the spirit of air that was watching him curiously.
The familiar fuzz wrapped around him, disguising him as something that belonged here, and he waited for the human to come. The twisty webs of fate were already trying to lure the fellow and if Cho'l could push them in the right direction, he could get some of the help he needed.