( fast draft mode )
The folk check Ricks DNA for 6 days,no change.
Then the morning of the 7th,the DNA scanners bleeped that Rick was already 25% changed
into something else
By the hour his DNA rapidly altering,and a mere 2 hours after that first
warning,his DNA was 75% changed into a structure the computer and Philbys
couldn't find a species match for.
A hour hour later the expulsion into the other random dimension occured
in a violent powerful rejection of Rick the Serpent et al
Brendan was knocked out in the chaos,and lay unconsious on the floor.
He woke up 2 days later,a throbbing headache .Of Rick the only sign was
a shed silvery serpents skin draped near the Iris.
Brendan went outside,to find the house perched precariously on a
ruined castle on a hill.Down below lay the lights from the peasant village
in a gloomy dark gothic atmosphere
Brendan went through the logs and computer video monitors,which showed a
furtive hunched figure in brown robes slipping away from the open Iris
into the night.
He checked to see if Rick the Serpent had done any more DNA analysis
before it had been caught up in the throes of its obviously swift transformation.
It hadn't.
However there was black ichor along the inside of the shed serpents hide,which
Brendan ran through the DNA analyzer.
It comfirmed Rick was now 100% genetically a creature called a Night Wraith.
Down to the village Brendan stumbled walked from the ruined castle.
Talk in the village was of the reappearance of the Night Wraith.
There was a mummified one in the village curio shop.
Brendan looked on in horror at a 4 foot tall thing that was all black,had the head of a
snarling cat,the body and wings of a black scaled sheet with dried veins woven in it
and three barb tails dangling from its sheety torso.
Brendan looked at the ancient scrolls on this demonic cat nasty,and it showed a weaving
bobbing cats head with the sheets bats wings entwining its tails around scream maidens and
hauling its prey to the tops of cathedrals,where the screaming victims often
slipped and fell to their deaths.
And the bite of a Night Wraith turned its victim into another Night Wraith.
The medievel woodcuts in the book showed a human victim writhing as the human skeleton
was expelled from its body,then the remaining skin,blood,organs and muscle reshaping into the
dreaded beast.
The final woodcut showed the new Night Wraith,hanging upside down from some slimy underground
hiding place,whilst below it,in a neatly stacked pile,lay the Beasts human bones,the tilted
human skull in a deathshead grin peering at the viewer.
Brendans heart chilled as he realized he'd just walked into a medievel horror
story.
That night the villagers were out and about with their
pitchforks,torches and stakes and crosses,ready to slay the new
Night Wraith before it infected anyone else.
The village constable handed out bottles of Holy Water to the deputized
would be Night Wraith killers.He explained if the thing bit them,they were to
rub the Holy Water on the bite wound immediately,unless they fancied turning
into Night Wraith's themselves.
Which really chilled Brendans heart,as he realized even if Rick somehow transformed
his way out of this horror plot,he himself,if bitten,could become a monster permanently,
doomed to hang around damp underground chambers,his shed human bones lying in a
neat pile below him.
So they crisscrossed the streets,but the Night Wraith made no appearance.
They did however find some cast off brown robes,like the changed Rick had been wearing when he fled into the night,near a cavern entrance tunnel underneath the ruined castle.
Disturbingly,a shoe that belonged to a villager who'd vanished the previous night ,also lay
near the entrance.
Though no one said so,they all feared the missing villager was no longer human.
The next night brought out the two Night Wraiths,both of which unfurled 60 foot
wide bats sheet wings and seized the screaming village constable and a village girl.
With mighty downsweeps of those powerful but unhuman wings,the two Night Wraiths
carried their victims to the cavern entrances,easily sweeping aside the bottle of Holy
Water the village constable was trying to apply to the many infectious bite wounds
the Night Wraith gave him.
The villagers broke and fled ,leaving Brendan alone on the village street.
The terrified teenager trudged towards the monsters lair,and got there perhaps a hour after
the attack.
In the dripping water,he heard the sounds of sticks being dropped onto the ground,and shook violently
that he was listening to the sounds of either of the two new victims transforming,expelling their
skeletons from themselves.
More carefully he trod,and finally came apon the grisly sight of the upper
half of the village constable sitting on his stack of bones.
There was no recognition in those eyes,and as Brendan looked on,there was the sound of stretching
skin and stuff as the fornmer constables chest flattened out,widened,and turned into the
60 foot wide sheety wings of a Night Wraith.
The human skull seemed to briefly push out a snout,then new cartilage forming in the beasts
forming snout expelled the unwanted human skull,which joined the pile of dry bones below it.
The forming cats skull,its skin stretched taunt,began to darken as tiny black scaled pushed
out and covered its hide and swept over the folding wings and already formed 3 barbed tails.
The human village constable was no more,and the new Night Wraith hissed menacingly
at Brendan,but did not attack.Instead it swept up its pinioned new wings,hooked on the
ceiling cracks,and soon hung upside down from the ceiling like a bat,and went to sleep...