"I, Louise Françoise Le Blanc de La Vallière, shall now perform the Springtime Summoning Ritual!"
"That's why we're all WAY over here," pointed out Kirche Augusta Frederica von Anhalt Zerbst. "Outside of the blast zone."
"Any time now," said Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who was anxious to finish this up and get back to his research.
Swallowing her nervousness and trying to look much more confident than she felt, Louise raised her wand. "My name is Louise Françoise le Blanc de la Vallière. Pentagon of the five elemental powers, heed my summoning... and bring forth...my familiar!"
A spark formed in the air, a brilliantly glowing mote that simply hung in the air about eye level to Louise.
"It's going to explode!" declared someone in the mass of students, causing people to duck and cover.
Louise slowly peeked out from where she'd covered her eyes, the light was still there and showed no signs of exploding. However something was happening.
"Is that... a bone?" asked Montmorency from her position in the huddled group of students.
Louise narrowed her eyes and stared. It was a bone, and it was getting larger.
The sternum hung there as ribs formed bit by bit, arcing away. A spine began to form.
"This is so weird," said Louise. "This isn't how the spell is supposed to work."
The skeleton finished forming and was complete, hanging in the air for a moment before the hands came up to cradle the skull and it dropped to its knees, mouth opening in a silent scream.
"What did you DO, Louise?!" asked a horrified Montmorency.
"I cast it the way everyone else did!" protested Louise.
"Stop it," demanded Montmorency. "This is... this is..."
"I can't!" protested Louise. "I don't even know how this is doing that!"
The head snapped up, eyeballs having formed in the empty sockets since the skeleton had collapsed. Little fleshy bits were building themselves at a feverish pace, but everything was laid bare to vision. Eyes seemed to flick at everything there, then locked onto Louise.
At least four students ran off at this point, horrified and nauseated by the spectacle.
More bits of flesh rebuilt themselves - becoming internal organs and supportive tissues. Muscles and tendons and ligaments all formed as they watched, lines being knitted together in seconds.
"Human," said Colbert, eyes narrowed as he watched the event. He guessed gender from the skeletal structure and was proven correct a few moments later when the flesh had built to that point.
The figure shuddered, collapsing to hands and knees, skin forming in its own turn. When it raised a hand towards Louise, there was a brief moment where the blood system was visible and then it was concealed. Hair and nails formed last of all.
The figure screamed as the process finished. Or, it might be better to say that it finished the scream that had begun when it had first appeared and was only now allowed to voice. The wet-sounding gurgle when the scream ended and the figure slowly collapsing just added to the effect.
The courtyard was then silent except for the sound of three first-years who were being audibly ill in the background.
Noting that the form had collapsed and was laboring to breathe, Colbert cleared his throat. "Miss Valiere. Complete the ceremony."
"W-w-what?!" asked Louise, pointing. "But- that-"
Colbert knelt next to the figure and checked for a pulse. Barely there, but it WAS there. "Contract Servant should stabilize the individual."
Louise gulped, about to request a "do over" because this was NOT what she had wanted.
"It's some sort of peasant?" asked Montmorency.
The spectacle was whispered about, speculation as to the identity of Louise's familiar was rife. Guiche pointed out that while that had obviously hurt a LOT - the individual had managed to crawl slightly forward towards Louise before collapsing. So, he was guessing some sort of soldier plucked from a foreign battlefield. Someone used to suffering and pain. Perhaps some mercenary.
Kirche was of the opinion that this familiar was actually a commoner, perhaps a farmer or something along those lines. They toiled long hours, endured great hardship, all for the benefit of others. Truly that was the most likely. Though frankly she thought Louise ought to go easy on the fellow for some time, as that HAD been a bit much.
Phillipe had gotten a dachsund as his familiar, and was well pleased with it, and so had some argument against the whole common=worthless theme that many of those with magical beasts seemed to espouse. Had things not been so dramatic, he would have hesitated to speak up before more well-connected and higher-ranked classmates, but did so because everyone else was talking about it. He offered up the theory that the familiar had been summoned from so far away that the summoning had only been able to do it piece-by-piece. He further theorized that the familiar was actually going to turn out to have magical talent, making him the perfect familiar for a mage who couldn't cast a spell to save her life.
That idea actually found some who went with the idea. After all, it WAS Louise who'd done it. Didn't the nature of the familiar have something to do with the spellcaster's nature?
As it was, it turned out that Louise's new familiar was:
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(Posted Sun, 11 Nov 2012 20:19)
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