First, Mike leads you all to the potion cellar. Inside cauldrons, bubbling vats, and bottled potions of every colour and lucidity are stacked and laying on shelves. Unfortunately, none of them are labelled. All of you recalling what happened to Jess when you tried random potions, you decide it's best to not go in drinking random potions. After all, you don't have one that you know the effects of to cure you with anymore.
"Alright, you." Aaron started, crouching down a little to stare at the jarred garter-snake witch that Mike held in her arms. "Unless you want to be turned into friend snake dinner, you're going to tell us which of these potions will turn us back to normal."
The snake flicked it's forked tongue out in a raspberry.
"GRR! That's it!" She grabs the bottle away, securing it between her wings and gets ready to throw it at a wall. "Let's see if you're ready to cooporate after this!!"
"No, wait!" You grab Aaron before she can throw the bottle. "For all we know, she could change back at any time since she can cast spells as well as use potions, but the only reason she isn't is because the bottle prevents magic from escaping, or that she's not changing back because she doesn't want to shatter the glass and be killed by it's shards as she changes back to normal size. Until we have a definite knowledge of what extent of powers the witch possesses, we need to keep her contained."
"Urf... Fine then." Aaron shoves the jar back up against Michael's arms.
Jessica opens a nearby door, wandering into it then popping back out, motioning you all to follow him. Inside was apparently a library, stacked to the cieling with books on the floor, on shelves, on tables and chairs... just a couple were open for sitting and reading at, but even they were strewn with papers and bottles and opened books.
Aaron grabbs a few, and plopped them on one of the open desks. Deciding that there wasn't enough room for four people to read comfortably in there, you and Jessica head back out to explore the rest of the house. Aaron struggles a bit to get them open the books with her feathers, fidgetting around at the edge of the book. Mike walks over and sits ontop of the desk beside her, opening it for her, to which she replies, "...Thanks."
She has a similar problem every time she needs to flip a page, so from the library the words, "Page. ............. Page. ............ Page." are heard echoed, each time Mike reaches over with a finger and, with a flameboyant and excessively playful flick of her finger, flips to the next part of the book for the harpy. Between "page"s, the dryad looked around boredly, before taking a few of the un-used books and started stacking them around the snake's bottle, building a little house around her.
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Jessica and yourself stumble into a rather bizarre looking room in the attic. One large window faces outwards giving a good view. Inside, various maps and sea charts and constellation mappings are pinned all over the roof. In the middle of the room, a massive world globe is seen, with desks and counters surrounding it.
You and Jessica look at different sides of the globe. It doesn't seem to match your world.... You find where the cabin is, marked by a big red dot. The continent it's on, it doesn't match any one you've ever seen. Even stranger, some sections of the globe are totally fragmented, like a perfect square of mountains that lay in the middle of the ocean, or a patch of rainforest that joins up directly beside some snowy mountains.
You ran a clawed finger along the large globe, tracing out the route you remember taking from the shore line back here. While pressing against it, you accidently drag your finger along, and a line on the globe shifts, pushing the shore line further north than it should be. Inspecting the globe closer, you notice there's an array of lines along the globe that forms a grid, each line can be shifted north, south, east, or west, to reposition things anywhere. You look for the northern canyon, and push it south, closer to where the cabin is labelled to be. You rush to the window still, Jessica following curiously. Sure enough, at the end of the cabin's clearingwhere there use to be a forest, is now a huge majestic canyon, stretching as far as the eye can see.
"What... where did.. that come from?" Jessica asked in surprise.
"It's the globe! You can reposition where things are in relevance to the cabin on it!" You quickly dart back, shuffling the globe some more and look to Jess for a response.
"It's snowing outside now! ...Now we're in the mountains! No.. wait, now the sea shore is infront of us...!"
Laying beside the globe, you see an old atlas of earth. You pry it open, turning to a page. Huh, Hawaii. You lay it down beside you, and shift the parts of the of the globe until you've made an island that looks similar enough to Hawaii. "What's it look like outside now, Jess?"
"Looks like we're on an abandoned island now, and the beach is around us."
Abandoned....? That doesn't sound right. Oh wait! One beach was out of place. You shuffle it north a few centimeters... and suddenly everything in the cabin feels strange and somewhat light, kind of like you're in an elevator.
Once the feeling stops, Jessica yells to you. "People! People appeared all around us now, they're looking at the cabin like it appeared out of nowhere!!"
Quickly you grab several lines on the globe and shove them all down into a random mis-mashed order, bringing the woods back around the cabin. That strange, almost weightless, elevator-like feeling occurs again then stops.
"Phew... they're.. gone now." He replies, visably relieved.
Apparently you return to this different, shifting world whenever the area around the cabin on the globe doesn't match the real world. For now, you guess it was prolly for the best that no one else saw you all in the forms you're in. Who knows what they might think, maybe treat you like aliens or demons, or be captured and experimented on. But now you know how to get back to the real world when you're ready! The globe simply needs to accurately portray the topology of a real world location around it. You start making notes on a nearby piece of paper on how to use the globe, taking time to look up maps of Oregon, Ontario, and Minnesota in the atlas and jot down their page numbers. You also take some time to test a few other simple things on the globe, shifting things around to see how topology would mix and if it was safe to do so.
Jessica leaned his hands on the window still, watching out as the land around the cabin phased and shifted from one thing to another. Once content with your discoveries, you walk back over beside him. His tail swooshed occasionally, and he had the strangest look of a mixture of bewilderment and loneliness on his face.
"We're going to be able to go home now," you say. "As soon as we figure out how to transform back, of course."
He looks over at you and smiles.. though it's noticably forced, fake.
"What's wrong?"
"It's just..." He says, then looks away shyly. "I want you all to be normal again and everything.. me too of ourse... but... I just... I don't want to go back to being alone. I finally made friends now, but we'll never see eachother again... I don't even live in the same country as the rest of you... And life was hard and lonely enough before, I don't know how I could readjust to it again, or how much things will have changed... Or what if we can't find a way to change back? Are we all just going to go home in our new bodies, all alone? And see how the rest of the world are going to treat us?"
"Well.. I don't think we'd go back without changing to human first, at least. And I doubt it's been that long.. the sort of blends together here and feels like forever in our new bodies, but it's really only been just a few nights, for me at least. As for being with eachother... well, maybe once we get back home we could keep in touch through phone calls or emails!" you try to reassure him.
He turns his head away even further, not snootishly, but in a sort of lonesome shame. "That's never the same...."
You consider hugging him again... It's still a little awkward, but you've already been affectionate with him a few times now, once more couldn't hurt. So you wrap your arms around his waist and pull yourself close to him. "We'll decide when the time comes, okay? Maybe we can all enter the real world in the same place so we stay together, or something. I promise that when we get to that point, we'll figure something out so you don't need to be alone anymore."
He smiles and whispers thanks, hugging you back with both arms and tail. It's... a strange thing to notice, but you can't help but realize that your slender frames seem to fit together perfectly, as if made for one another.
After a bit, you pull away from one-another until you only hold one anothers' hands. "Come on, lets go see how the others are doing."
You both head back into the library. Aaron seems to be deep in thought reading a large tome, donning the witch's reading classes. It actually looked quite cute on her. Beside here there was what could only be described as a miniature fortress built out of stacked books.
Mike was laid out on her back ontop of a table beside Aaron, she playfully rotated the jar containing the witch, musing and talking to her, apparently trying to get the witch to eat some berries that the snake would have no part of. When she sees you enter, she secures the jar with one hand, droops her head over the edge up the table, upside-downly looking at the both of you and waving her free arm. "Hiiiii, you two~!" The dryad eyes your entwined paws. "Eeee! I just KNEW you two were going to end up together, you are so cute and perfect for one another~!" Aaron looked up from the tome at the two of you as well.
You and Jessica quickly let go of one another's paws, blushing embarressedly. You quickly pipe up, "We, we found out how to make the cabin appear anywhere, in this world or our own! Anywhere on the planet."
"That's good," Aaron said, adjusting her glasses with a wing. "Because I've been reading transformation potion recipes. Seems like they take a lot of little ingredients, some are common, but some are fairly exotic and might require a bit of travel. Rainforest plants, feathers of birds that live in mountains... so on and so forth."
She went back to reading for awhile, you and Jessica pick up and flip some other spell books, trying to read through them as well, finding nothing of particular interest and many books in unidentifiable languages.
"Ah-hah! Aaron suddenly announced in success. You all huddle around her, peering over her shoulder and wait in quiet excitement. "Here it is, Human Transmogrification Potion." She traced her feathers down the ingredients list. "Water, ammonia, frog's legs or a better catalyst, number 5 cauldron..." She mumbled some other ingredients, skimming the list, reaching the end. "And the final ingredient is... two spoonfuls o........." Her voice trails off, shaken, as all of you listen on with utmost intensity. She gulps. "Two cup fulls of... ashes... made from the burning of... l-live human children..." Jessica gasps, covering a his mouth with his paws. Mike's auburn barky skin took on a paler tone and she looked sick to her stomache. You just stand there, mouth agape, unable to do or even feel anything else. Aaron choked out the rest of the sentence, though it was mostly mumbled too low to hear. "...of the race and gender you desire the subject to become..."
It shouldn't surprise you as much as it did... this was dark, unholy magic, after all. No other type of spellcaster would force such forms on innocent people. But still.. for a bit, it really seemed like you would be able to change back. ...but now it felt like a farther away dream than ever. After all, you can't get THAT ingedient ever...could you?
Aaron's wings tense, forming the closest thing to a fist that they can manage. "G...God damn it...!!" With a scream of frustration, she gives the book a smack with her wings, sending it and other papers and trinkers all flying off the table and sprawling onto the floor, looking down and clenching her teeth, "fists", and eyes shut tightly.
You, Jess, and Michael all look at one another despondently. What now....?