Mike suddenly realized that as a stableboy he would have to spend most of his time mucking stalls and otherwise taking care of the horses. He frowned in distaste. He wanted to transform filthy non-humans, not clean up after them! Luckily, he discovered that his new brain had a way to solve both that problem and the issue of what to do with Brian at once. He would kill two birds with one stone... or rather, one muck rake. He grabbed a muck rake leaning against the wall that he automatically knew where to find and held it out to Brian, explaining, "I can get him for you, but I have to do my job around here too, and I'm already behind since I took the time to do what your friend asked. If you could take care of mucking this stall," and he gestured to the stall containing the large horse that Mike had in fact been transformed into, now freshly filled with manure, "I can find him for you."
Brian frowned and looked reluctant, so Mike turned up the childish charm. "Pleeeease, mister? I would -really- appreciate it." With a sigh, Brian acquiesced, taking the offered rake. Mike smirked to himself. He was getting the opportunity to get rid of two abominations in one day, the elf and the centaur. Wait, no, he had been the centaur and the stableboy and transformed him. The stableboy's mindset was easy to fall into. Well, he was the stableboy now, and if Ty was to be believed he didn't have much choice in the matter, so he might as well enjoy it.
Brian was in the stall now, wincing as he tried to avoid stepping in the manure with his rather fine boots, and looked back at Mike to raise a concern. "I don't actually know how to muck a stall..."
Mike smiled. "Just try, I can promise it'll come naturally to you." Oh, it would be natural indeed by the time he was done. "And you better take those boots off too. Wouldn't want to get them dirty." Because the rest of you sure will be, he thought. Brian complied with Mike's instructions, taking off his boots, setting them aside, and hesitantly beginning to scratch at the manure with the rake. He felt a tingle pass through him, starting in the hand that held the rake and spreading through his entire body, but he dismissed it as being in his imagination. So he tried his hand at mucking the stall, and found that it was actually a lot easier and simpler than he thought it would be. In fact, if he could ignore the fact that he was dealing with something as disgusting as horse manure, mucking could be enjoyable. It was easy, straightforward, mindless work that he could lose himself in, and so he did, concentrating solely on cleaning the shit out of the stall and forgetting about everything else.
Brian was so wrapped up in mucking the stall, not thinking about anything, that he didn't notice himself changing. His pointed elven ears rounded off into human ones. Most of his clothing, including the hat that he had pulled over his now-human ears, evaporated, and that which remained shifted into a tunic similar to what all the other stablehands wore, but quite a bit dirtier. All of him was getting dirtier. He no longer seemed to care about getting manure on his feet, but it was more than that, his entire body caking with dirt and grime as though he had been doing the job for much longer. His build actually stayed mostly the same, lean and wiry but with muscles, and he appeared to stay the same age, but he was actually getting younger. An adult elf looked like an adolescent human and he was becoming the latter instead of the former. His delicate, refined elven features became coarser and more homely. His teeth stuck out and went crooked and his jaw went slack. His eyes dulled and his brows pushed down, giving him a distinctly stupid look. He was becoming a completely different person, a dumb, dirty, homely young stableboy, without even noticing it. He was too absorbed in mucking the stall, furrowing his heavier brow as he set about cleaning it like it was the most important thing in the world, and to him it might as well have been. The final changes set in as his genitals grew and lengthened. His skin paled and grew freckles, and his hair turned red and grew longer, curlier, and dirtier, matted with dirt and filth. A lock of his new hair fell in front of his face, and Brian finally looked up from his work.
Red hair. Was that right? It felt off somehow, so Brian looked down at himself and found pale, freckled skin covered in a layer of dirt and a stablehand's uniform. "Uh..." He tried to think about it, but he had gotten so used to not thinking while he was mucking that it was just so hard to think now. So hard. His head felt heavy and his mind was foggy, thick, and slow. Slowly, he decided that something had changed. He turned to Mike to say something about it but struggled to find the words, as though his vocabulary had shrunk. Finally, he managed, "...Me different."
Mike grinned back at him. "Yep, you sure are, buddy. But don't worry, you're better this way. You don't need to think about that or anything else, I can do all the thinking for you. Now come on, once you get the stall clean you'll be able to groom the horsie!"
Dimly, Brian tried to struggle against the fog in his head, but he knew that Mike was right. Mike was always right, he was so much smarter than Brian, so it only made sense to let him do all the hard thinking. Thinking was hard, Brian didn't like thinking. He liked making the stalls clean. He liked grooming the horsies. He liked horsies. He smiled dopily and nodded at Mike. "Yeah. Clean, then groom. Okay." Brian returned to mucking. He was a stableboy now, happy in his new life and better than he was before. What was he before? Was he different before? It didn't matter and it was hard to think about so he stopped thinking about it and kept on mucking, memories fading to the back of his dull head.
Mike continued grinning evilly at his creation. Surely reducing the handsome and intelligent elf to an ugly, dirty, stupid human boy qualified as cruel and evil like Ty wanted--and his new racist mindset felt that the lowliest of humans was still better than the best of elves. He barely remembered that Brian had been his friend in the real world. And he had solved two problems at once. Not only had he gotten rid of that damn elf, but he also took care of his own chores by replacing the with a new stableboy who was dumb enough to control easily and who would be more than happy to take care of mucking stalls, feeding and grooming horses, and all the other dirty work that Mike didn't want to bother with, leaving more time for him to focus on having fun with his magic. Unbeknownst to Mike, however, making Brian a stableboy had given him magic of his own, just as powerful as Mike's but more unpredictable because of Brian's addled mental state.