To a dryad, a Dryad Cordial was simply a sort of rejuvenation potion. If someone had seen a Sailor Senshi using their makeup transformation, they'd have seen a close resemblence immediately. Wounds healed and exhaustion would be dispelled. It would also strengthen and heal the tree that the dryad was bonded to.
The PROBLEM with Dryad Cordial was not when a dryad quaffed the potion. It was when anyone ELSE drank the strange brew that problems began cropping up. One sip would be fine, merely boosting the general attractiveness of the sipper a tiny amount.
A full drink of the brew (which imbibers often described as fairly sweet with a nutty/malty taste that left tingles on the tongue) was frequently sufficient to knock a mortal on their buttocks. Women of just about any race who'd done this would look like a fairly attractive woman of elvish or fae descent. Men of whatever race, well, ended up pretty much the same way.
Which led, in some universes, to college pranks being performed where a student who drank too much the night before waking up with an entirely different problem than a mere hangover.
Even then, that was normally a temporary problem. Not a big deal, as such things went. Certainly being better than attending a frat party at the Tappa Kegga Bru and finding one of your fraternity brothers had come up with a spell that had transformed every drop of water in his body to beer. (Which, for those unfamiliar with such things, was rather messily fatal.) No, a frat prank involving the Cordial normally had the victim going through a few days as an attractive elf girl and then switching back - followed by several years of teasing and the occasional embarassing picture being passed around.
It was when the overdose went into critical ranges that things got less easily glossed over. The victim actually became a dryad, and the transformation at that point was permanent. Which was one reason why magical universities in universes where such things were possible usually banned Dryad Cordial as a restricted substance. Having the star of one's university quiddich or starball team change genders and want to take up residence in a tree was pretty severely frowned upon.
Yzma, of course, could care less. This was about revenge. Once the girl was bound to a nice tree, she'd become a lot less mobile. Less mobile = more easily blackmailed/threatened.
After overdosing the girl in question, Yzma watched as her victim aged to a mature beauty. She'd expected the girl to get the green hair and bark-colored skin of a dryad, but that didn't happen. Her skin felt smoother actually, and the pink of her hair was showing on lips and eyelids and a few other places. Other than that, it was terribly disappointing.
Still, the potion had worked. A touch of cold iron to the girl's skin had produced a burn, indicating she was indeed now a fae creature. It would just require getting her to a tree where she would automatically bond with it and be tethered to it for the rest of her life.
"Yzma!"
"What is it, Kronk?" snapped Yzma as her flunkie stuck his head in the door.
"That Hokage guy is making rounds," said Kronk, moving inside the room and looking for a hiding place.
Yzma froze momentarily, her mind going through and discarding plans. That could be very bad.
"By the way, where's the girl? Did you already finish?" asked Kronk.
"Don't be silly, Kronk," said Yzma, slapping the gurney. "She's right... here?"
"Where?" asked Kronk, not seeing the pink-tressed girl.
"Oh bother," said Yzma.
She'd come just awake enough to feel danger and hostility nearby. She'd instinctively acted, fleeing from that presence. Now she was wandering in a daze, looking around her at blurred and distorted images of places she almost recognized.
Sleep, rest. She needed to do that, and to do that she needed a place of safety. A place that - there was one. That building looked familiar and she could see that there was one place that had some sort of shielding around it.
Yes, that would do.
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(Posted Tue, 01 Jun 2010 17:04)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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