Karyn felt a thrill of shuddering anticipation as the changes began. On some level she was excited, but much moreso she was afraid. And not just about the actual changing. The alien sensation of magic in her own flesh causing it to tingle and morph was odd enough, but she was much more concerned about what might be in the end.
Muula was meant to be the martial class of the party, the badass warrior lady that kicked ass, took names, and kept the delicate little princess and her friends safe. That meant playing a Barbarian to her, and that meant investing heavily in stats like Strength and Constitution: things to make her into an absolute physical powerhouse with a weapon.
Which meant that all her mental stats -- her Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma, all of it -- were dump stats.
“Okay… I'm okay…” Karyn tried to reassure herself. This part of the transformation wasn't too bad, at least. Most of her excess fat was trimming away to nothing, but her lean muscle was pumping up and toning itself to peak athletic perfection. Karyn was growing taller. She was bigger, faster, and stronger too. She was in the best shape she could ever possibly have dreamed of being in, and still growing.
Not bad. A strange, weird thing to experience so suddenly, but not bad, she told herself.
Horns, a thick pair of big ol' curling cream-colored horns were erupting behind her ears and spiraling protectively around her head, and she could feel her heels starting to rise and toes starting to fuse. Muula was a Minotaur, unlike the human princess Viola, and that meant Karyn would have to take on an assortment of bovine features to fully embody her: the robust curling horns now coming to a point ahead of her mouth to either side, the cloven hooves on heels permanently forced into tiptoe steps, the slender tail sprouting and lengthening just over the crack of her big firm ass, and of course, her huge, milky, round, bouncy, supple, perky, torso-defining stare-drawing suck-inviting milk-producing udders. Karyn's boobs were already pretty big thanks to her wish, but now they were swelling to her silly sapphic sexual fantasy sizes, with nice naturally nubby nipples in the middle of absurd acreages of alluring areolae.
But this was fine. "I'm fine... I'm okay, I'm fine," she repeated like a mantra. Of course her back muscles shared her crazy STR/CON scores, so carrying her minotaur mommy milkies around shouldn't be a problem. She had wanted to be a big badass bovine beastwoman, after all, and play a character with just little enough common sense that she always had a good excuse to start fights and smash stuff for fun. As long as her brain didn't actually become that of a brash, bumblingly barbaric brawl bimbo, she was fine.
"'M fine. 'M good, 'm okay, 'm good, 'm fine," Muula mumbled to exclusion of all else. Muula didn't really want to think about what if she wasn't fine. Muula didn't want to think about just what not being fine would feel like, nor to think about what would tip her off to not being fine. Muula didn't want to think, really. Muula wasn't good at thinking, thinking hurt. Muula was fine. Muula was good. Muula was a big, strong cow. Muula...
"Muula?" asked Princess Viola. With the transformation of her clothes and gear (or more properly, lack of clothes; Muula was wearing a skirt, a belt, a satchel, a few straps to carry her weapons and gear, a few pins in her long, wild blonde hair, and nothing else post transformation), the changes seemed to be finished. "Muula, please, look at me," the relatively puny princess asked, gazing directly into her eyes with an anxiety reflective of that the former Karyn had just had. "That is your name, isn't it?"
"No it isn't," Jay corrected.
"Excuse me," Viola scolded, and asked again.
"Muula," said Muula, experimentally. "Muula. Muuuuuula. Heh heh. Muuuuuuuuuula!" She tried out her new voice and grinned, evidently playing with the sound of her own name rolling from her chest and over her tongue. "Ha ha! Yes, I'm Muula."
"That's your character," Jay reprimanded, matter-of-factly. "You're not your character! You're Karyn! Don't tell me you two are just going along with this lunatic farce?"
"Karyn?" Muula asked. "Karyn. Kar-yn." She scrunched up her face as if she had bit something sour. "Muula.... Kar-yn, Muuuuuula... Muula sounds more good?" Muula scratched her head as if something just wasn't computing, just between her ears and the base of her horns.
"No! Karyn-..." Jay started, but was interrupted.
"EXCUSE me," Viola stopped him. "But I would encourage you to look at our dear friend." She gestured at the cowgirl. "And not merely at her body; look at her face. Look at her eyes. Her expression." Viola sighed, deeply and sullenly. There had been a brightness, a keen sense of awareness behind the old Karyn's eyes, that sadly seemed to have disappeared to Viola. It all but confirmed a fear to her.
"He's changing our fucking minds, Jay! He changed our names! I think he made me smarter, but he made Karyn dumber, because that's what our characters were supposed to be like!"
"You knew the prospective character builds as well as I, perhaps better. We both have obviously physically been made to resemble our characters, but our characters were not merely defined physically. I hope I need not explain what else may have happened behind Muula's new eyes, dear Cherry."
The name sent a ripple of something through Jay, some curious sense of familiarity mixed with goosebumps, and he gasped in surprise. "No. Shut up!" Jay spat back in a very uncharacteristic outburst of emotion.
Viola sighed sadly. "You see it, then. I'm afraid there's no use in fighting this, Lady Chaer'ublisa."
"Shut up. Shut up. SHUT UP!" Jay whined as his composure melted, and he put his hands up to his head. "Leonard's our friend, right? He wouldn't do that to his friends! Not to US!" He pouted in a manner that suggested otherwise.
On some buried level, Jay had some guilt to admit regarding his character's creation, and now he was instantly regretting it, badly. To put it simply, Jay didn't really care for his character as a person. The theater-drama-roleplaying side of D&D was something he tolerated but didn't really enjoy about it; he was much more interested in it as a pure tabletop game, with all its intricate systems and rules and mechanics and math, and his character was to him a collection of stats that reflected what he thought of as being "good" at the game, very strong in most situations and capable of taking on the game's toughest challenges. In a word, Jay was a minmaxer.
And this time, what he maximized was Charisma. What he minimized was Intelligence, and Wisdom.
Jay squealed in what was quickly becoming an adorable soprano as he turned into a woman. His pecs were ballooning into to the sort of boobies that could turn gay men straight and straight women gay, and his hips were thickening into the sort of cake that could cast Charm Person just by wiggling and Mass Suggestion just by bending over. Jay wanted every Charisma check ever to go his way, and he figured the way to do that was to give Chae'rublisa a literally irresistibly sexy body, plus the sort of persona whose raw, flirty sexuality he could always appeal to. She squeezed her thick, moistening thighs together just thinking about it.
"Ooooooh~..." The moan came out almost as melodically as a song, with just enough edge to it to make it the sort of cry for attention that every sexually-developed sentient creature would oblige. It came out just as Cherry was finishing the transition from incredibly attractive human woman to agelessly incredibly attractive half-elf maiden, gaining the pointy ears and big feline eyes. She blushed cherry-red afterward. "This is like, totally not fair!" She whined. "I'm not just a slut! I'm not supposed to be just, like, a sex object! I'm totally a serious build, I like, multiclassed and everything!"
Jay, unfortunately, had specified that she was cute when she was angry, and therefore very hard to take seriously. He reasoned that it was usually smarter to try and get the enemy off their guard, so he made her small and cute, and as weak as he could get her while still satisfying the Paladin's multiclass requirements. Cherry had the sort of pouty, childlike face that teared up easily, and usually a very bubbly, innocent demeanor layered over the subconscious habits that made her so obliviously sexy. She even painted portions of her unrealistically skimpy "armor" pink, trimmed up with some aesthetic white decor she thought was pretty. And it was all to mask that she was in fact a high-damage, durable build. On paper, at least.
In true minmaxer fashion, Jay had cobbled her backstory together mostly as an afterthought, and independently from what her personality actually was. It was some generic tragedy to the effect of vaguely wanting revenge somewhere in the direction of Darkness, mostly there to justify her multiclassing needing an Oath of Vengeance as a Paladin and a Pact with the Hexblade as a Warlock, and it painted Cherry to be the sort of Legendary Smiter of Evil that could fell formidable foes with just a few powerful strokes. It was also completely at odds with the sweet, ditzy little cinnamon roll he envisioned her to actually be in play.
"Well, well, well. Looks like someone's getting what they deserve for rules lawyering so much! A fitting punishment, too, having to actually roleplay your character for once."
Muula laughed. "No, no, not just slut! You are great warrior now, puny elf, just like teenage boy wrote down! Boy did good job, yes?" Muula the big milky minotaur then proceeded to pick Cherry up off the ground, armor and all, and cuddle her into her huge cleavage like a stuffed animal.
I try to escape the grapple.
That'll be a contested STR check... Dice Clatter... You fail.
Just peachy. "Karyn, please. You're making fools of both of us!"
Cherry the adorable half-elf squirmed in the muscle milk mommy's arms and got nowhere. "Muuuulaaaa!" she whined. "We're like, BOTH dumb giggly girls now! Don't be so meeeean!"
"...Fine." I drop her. "But at least I kinda like the character I'm playing! I'm only this way now because of dump stats."
Muula rolled her eyes and set Cherry down. "But you are so cute, now! And I am big, strong soldier: I like! Is good to be character you like, worth some price."
"... Good god, I'm the only character in this party without a negative INT modifier, aren't I? And Kyla and I are the only ones with decent WIS, too. Speaking of which, where is she?"
Princess Viola was poised off to the side, slightly rubbing her temples as she watched Muula and Cherry interacting for the first time. "That will be enough for now, my two vassals. Seeing as I have intelligence enough to lead our host, might I suggest you follow my lead and reign in the horseplay?" She looked around. "Speaking of which, the company seems to be missing a member."
"Down here!" All of their eyes were drawn to a seemingly random part of the deck, and then lower. Much lower. Kyla's character, a Stars Druid named Aiela, was a Fairy, a foot-tall insect-winged pink-skinned fairy, currently in a forest green dress. She was waving up at them, and then fluttered up to eye level. "I changed while I was still curled up and didn't say anything cause I was nervous. Pfft, I really used to be a wreck, huh? But hey, I'm ready for some fun now! Think I should fly into town? I won't go too far, I promise!" Aiela was running her mouth at a mile a minute in a way very much unlike what Kyla might've liked.
"No, no, it seems we're almost at port. We ought to stick together for now, at least until we know what the mayor requires of us," Princess Viola reasoned.
Good, good. NOW you're docked at the harbor in Porttown!
Some hands tied up the ship and lowered a plank for the party's egress. All of them took a deep breath. It looked like they starting the campaign now whether they liked it or not.
