A time ago, Cathal Rhongomyniad Whitehilt was done being someone else. When a god offers you free HRT and a job, you say yes. Hobbyist stores are not traditionally bastions of the world order or overturning it. Doing both at once was more than kind of contradictory, but the pay was decent. He'd work on it. If the world order's restructuring was inevitable, divine protection through the transitional period was a nice option alright. It certainly saved on bottom surgery.
The process was swift. Contract, divine communion, the reshaping or transcendence of flesh, a moment of comfort like being hugged or entering a warm room. Perhaps precisely because of correcting the gap between desired self-image and body, it was merely relief before bursting into euphoria. To be given an ideal body is to realize that ideals shift, and so a god-body has the capacity to change as desired. Getting a "Nice cock." from an incarnate god was...something, alright. As was a demonstration on various configurations that body could be changed to. The sex afterward was gay, in both senses.
Less poetically, it was roughly equivalent to two or three Shifts in the Uncommon to Rare tier. What exactly depended on power and specialization, since it was versatile in a way certain transformations rarely gave. One for shapeshifting, a second for intelligence and precision crafting, a third piece for the strength to shape. It was workable as a sustainable level of interleaving and changing foci. He kept some energy boost passives running, but it was mostly independent cultivation.
How exactly it worked (and looked) varied. Broadly, each was still the same Irish guy under the hood. Differences in mentality were mostly mood and presentation, not shift-influence. Cathal mostly took up the shape of a nerdy scientist-professor archetype in that stead. Swirly glasses, labcoat, unkempt brown hair and all: it was mostly the refinement of himself he sought. Enough scruff to be unambiguously masculine, but not enough to call a beard. It wasn't all human all the time: magic nanotechnology was a pretty tendrilled manifestation. Mostly used for the nerd's precision manufacturing of mad science devices, it did express self-control. Height, weight, coloration, and various shape details were easy to remodel in real time. Tallness and distribution were subject to context and cartoon squash and stretch, specifically to prevent any one perspective from dominating.
Cathal was more robust when card forging by brute splendor. For that, he favored using the shape of a dwarf giant to pass as on the stronger wrestler-chub end of human. Being able to decide what he was packing at a moment's notice was useful enough. He fulfilled client fantasies. Much of this was helping them balance their change ideas into affordable cards, and brandishing gear to fill the gaps. Energy confluxes and fursona commissions remained at a reasonable price. Most of that was in currency, but sex work is labor. Particularly when so many rituals were maithuna or kink these days.
Early on, Cathal finally externalized all that femme he was just not into, in the form of a magical woman moreso than a girl. Certain transformations and transactions became more practical to happen to someone else. The Enforcer, he called her, more title than name. She was a punitive principle, packaged into an impossibly aspirational bastion of young adult. Before any further Shifts, she was already impressive. Streamlined, deadly, a freckled and hearty not-quite-pale, a thing of ginger curls and timeless glory. For her favored gear she had a ruffled pink dress, with white trim and a vaguely heart-shaped chestplate. And of course, enough firepower to go beyond gap moe into some form of ridiculous arsenal showcase. The mecha part was still in development. Nevertheless, the beta was a respectable stack of machine manifestation. The Enforcer herself was suavely peppy, content to be a boss fight or standby runner. The right degree of 'Not Cathal', a thin veneer of tropes over utilitarian impersonality. Cathal's proxy, perhaps.
The Enforcer herself was currently idling, lounging about on a couch and reading magazines. The lounge area was good for that sort of thing. She was vaguely waiting for appointments. Not that there were many for her specifically. Few things needed her skillset (over Cathal's or another priest), so that left time to practice loitering between commitments of incredible violence. Maybe watching sports when she ran out of articles, or something.
Cathal still considered himself Irish (along with several bureaucratic records). Portlaoise born and raised, for 'official' purposes he owned the Marhaus Card Shop. Legally, this was a mundane hobbyist store with the permits for a restaurant and hotel, until the cult got certain new permissions sorted. Semi-legally, there were very many pieces of land and construction permits filed in various places around the world by various priests of Sutta. Illegally, several people beat reality with wands and a cardfight until it worked. To the extent this applied to The Enforcer, it meant when she had finished the recent articles she switched to watching rugby on television. A few other summoned mediums and magi were not particularly conducive to what their counterparts were doing. There was something of a mascot club accumulating in the lounge, passing time inoffensively.
Where the Marhaus really lived was more...ambiguous. It was one of several things mixing the secret places of the world, weaving together the liminal and the auspicious. To some extent the shop was its own space, with only certain patios and decks around entrances as worldly contiguous. That meant a lot of floor space in strange configurations. A lot of Internet server stuff had been added, so the digital signal was quite good. The main work area itself was slightly a homage to traditional kitschy magic shops interspersed with industrial science. The broader complex had plenty of amenities: personal and impersonal housing, a whole pub, some dojo space for practice, a dedicated Distortion Wars full-scale arena, even miscellaneous resource-creating miracles to save on outside farming. Some more bunker-y segments had been added just to flex. How much was 'it' rather than 'repurposed' was hard to tell past the bigger segments. A reverse-haunting sketching a community center into the void was one of several ongoing projects. The Enforcer double-checked her calendar for the ETA, well aware that nothing in that project would reasonably need explosions.
It was overkill for how much was currently going through it. Certainly there was the mascot club of semi-people watching and waiting, but that was exceptional. Plenty of people wanted their counterpart on hand to test something psychologically strenuous (or sexy, but not intended for self-application). Mediums, magi, and dealers proliferated around the world...but that rate of growth was slow. While adoption was faster in the formal cult hierarchy, cultists could simply use cult infrastructure. Most of the population actually using the Marhaus was independent upholders of the Turner of Wheels. It was serviced by Sutta's burgeoning priesthood and the mystical creatures that had survived passing into less. Admittedly a lot less secure than an airport, but faster if you needed to reach beyond borders. The Turner of Wheels was indecisive on how he wanted certain networks to work, thinking it adventure fodder to skip the boring parts but different adventure fodder to not simply skip to destination. Planning for the future, maybe.
The list of borders to breach grew increasingly ridiculous. A packet of divine power buried on the magic planar mirror of the moon, a packet of divine power sunk into the ocean, a cult safehouse here, a mountain monastery there, that made sense as somewhere to hide something. At the house of someone's grandma? Okay, maybe if she's doing cult business or it's a cool manor or it's a well-placed shack, Cathal could work with it. Public transport maintenance room? Asking for it but conveniently networked. At this point it helped. Putting things inside dreaming dead gods was probably asking for it, but as long as nobody forcibly resurrected the environment hard enough to stick it was probably fine. Probably. A world-spanning cult using subverted agents kept the inspections to actual health and safety, not asking questions about the other things going on.
Truly arbitrary teleportation was currently actually rare. Both cardwise, and because a nontrivial energy cost was hard to overlook. Sure, the high priests could throw it as a flex, but they were pretty close to gods at this point from the far side. Until power creep caught up, people would mostly be using specific retreat Stratagems to anchor points. Maybe some blink teleports to a safe spot in visual range, maybe a wall-bypassing trick, but those Uncommons were actually uncommon. Fast-travel warps and point-to-point pairs were being set up by what Uncommons could be forged but almost all of it was the cult's proxies making up a technical revolution. Much of the rest was using portal rings specifically for perversion. Since that started by separating paired objects, someone still had to move in a gate for reinforcements. Alligator had decided to shake up nation state forqce deployment once and for all, turning overland battles into secured chokepoints. Bridges in space were easier to turn off and on again than exploded infrastructure bridges, to certain means. There were still certain wards designed to safely prevent the entry of unauthorized portal objects and/or redirect unwanted incoming teleports. So things wouldn't totally become a decapitation strike game, especially in territory anyone had prepared ahead of time. Maybe that was going to change, but things needed time.
The Turner of Wheels hadn't really decided on gamification or long term ramifications. Each of his high priests had outsourced it aggressively in different styles. Sutta was working on it between tournaments, a pile of logisticians and urban planners that Cathal did not envy. Work in progress, meaning the Marhaus was basically along a major highway of the future.
...
Some of that highway work wrapped up. Cathal finally escaped meetings. His nerd aspect walked over to the couch and flopped down next to The Enforcer, aware of the ongoing rugby match but not as sporty as her. The two didn't need to talk externally about it: the thoughts related to score and play by play filtered over to the extent that Cathal was paying attention to that part of him.
Along with that, 'I am going to blow off steam somehow' filtered wordlessly. The Enforcer contemplated battle, Cathal contemplated gay sex: somewhere in the middle landed 'being perverted in Distortion Wars' and 'okay that rugby player is hot though'. Cathal had helped pin down a rugby player concept earlier. It was a common grade Shift, since it bestowed relatively little. Naturally, it came with sports knowledge, musculature, an outfit (set to chosen team colors by default). There was some potential in team coordination and safe tackling, but it was Distortion Wars material in the way most athleticism has sex appeal. It was cheap to stack multibody effects with, especially if someone wanted to play every role on a sports team at once. Maybe it'd be worth doing something like that. Direct the men to Cathal and the women to The Enforcer, see what happens.