On The Symptoms Of Pixie Dust 01 02

[Chapter One: In which a Dropout Wizard discovers an abandoned Wizard's Tower, and proceeds to skip to advanced Alchemy, bypassing the intervening practice]

The utility of the dust excreted by Pixies is remarkable, and all out of proportion to the ease of its procurement, as the creatures shed it constantly as a matter of course. Impregnated by the wild magic of the pixie, it has many peculiar properties in its base state, but the wise alchemist will purge it of these wild magics and temper its nature to one or other purpose before allowing it to make contact with oneself or other reagents.

-Avim Thornrick, PHM,

Natural Reagents in Supernatural Alchemy

, Chapter 12.

[=]

In the north of the great Tuvisian Empire lies the half-wild province of Arcasia, conquered by the empire and its mages but never truly tamed. Two thirds of the expansive province are completely given over to the wild supernatural jungle called The Faewood, the home of countless spirits and creatures.

And Thornrick Tower.

The domain of the great wizard Thornrick the Mad Bastard, so-named, not because of his experiments, which did not push the boundaries of magic as much as he imagined they did, but because he was the only wizard batshit crazy enough to build a wizard tower in a faewood, in which the many and varied fair folk lived.

And the only person not an Arcasian Witchpriestess to do so, and stay safe.

Also because he was such an arrogant, self-absorbed jackass that, by the time he left academia, he had made so many enemies in the philosophies, arts and humanities that there was hardly a scholar of note in the Tuvis Empire for whom his name was not synonymous with a curse.

When Darklight the Great (Timothy Dirket, recently 'on leave' from the Remali Collegium of the Supernatural; nobody called him Darklight, though some of his peers called him Dimlight behind his back) braved the Faewood to seek the wizard, he discovered that the Mad Bastard had finally done himself in, leaving a giant hole in the side of his tower.

Whatever fortune had shone upon Tim, had allowed him to accidentally bypass the Ward of Unfinding that had insured that anyone who might have wanted to seek Thornrick out, would not be able to do so.

Including the fae of the faewood.

Tim was utterly inept at anything that wasn't magic, and as a mage... well, the best thing one could say about his arcane craft was that he always attempted magic well beyond his actual ability, and never let failure convince him to stop. Or slow down, or even review the basics.

As a result, he was cut up from brambles and a few nasty falls, due to his ineptitude at woodcraft, and bled onto the floor of the tower as he entered.

The tower promptly linked to him, draining half his magic in one go as the semisentient self-maintenance enchantments repaired the tower.

[]

Having lucked into Thornrick Tower, Tim decided that maybe he didn't need a master mage to teach him, maybe all he needed was the library.

And the tower.

Oh, the tower.

The Mad Bastard was, for all his many faults, actually a quite skilled mage.

And wizard holdfasts are all, to some extent, works of magical craft that tell physics to get bent in a thousand weird ways.

The tower was of course bigger on the inside.

Water was conjured from a ley convergence beneath the tower's foundations, that also powered the Tower when it was bound to a mage properly, the eating hall had a temporal archive to provide food, feasts conjured up every day on a set schedule, time twisted to simply summon the food as it had existed at that time, then banish it when the meal was concluded, circumventing all sorts of nasty little caveats about conjured food, and the need for living servants.

(Water is so simple conjuring the real deal just requires energy. Food though, is far more complicated, and conjured food tends to run from unappetizing and devoid of nutrition to outright hazardous to consume)

it was paradise for a lazy young college dropout.

Then, in looking through the disorganized books, Tim found reference to the magics that could be done with a Fairy. Dark things of course, but what interested him were what you could do with fairy milk. Or sweat or cum, or the dust from their wings.

He set out to bag himself a fairy the very next day.

[]

A tiny creature flitted through the upper canopy of the immense leafy trees that made up the Faewood. The glitter of pixie dust and her magic made her hard to pick out in the dim forest light, beyond a red glow, disguising her form.

She looked like a woman. A tiny, athletic woman with a pair of large compound eyes, and a pair of tinier ones above them, all of a glittering burgundy brilliant enough to be mistaken for rubies, a face whose features were flatter than a human's, pale pink skin edging towards a deeper red at her extremities, with four iridescent dragonfly wings flickering at immense speed behind her, and a pair of deep red antennae tipped with glittering transparent orbs like drops of dew.

She was naked but for a strap made of woven grasses, holding a bulging pack over her butt, just beneath the buzzing arc described by her wings.

Her flight was steady, but slow, as she zipped through the forest, the innate speed and agility of pixie-kind at odds with the exhausted slump of her shoulders and the faint frown of exertion as she flitted towards home after a long day of gathering, leaving a faint trail of glittering ruby dust in her wake.

She startled suddenly, zipping straight up with a sudden increased turn of speed as a ripple of unseen, but very much felt force shot through the space she would have been a moment ago had she not dodged, and snatched up a bunch of leaves, yanking them back through the forest.

Droseria shook herself, then began flying fast and erratically through the canopy.

No more bursts of magical force came, but she dropped onto a branch thickly overgrown with a creeping, leafy parasitic vine and focused her magical senses, only to find nothing.

Her frown deepened.

She took off and resumed her journey, moving a great deal faster.

[]

Tim Dirket had found it all too easy to move through the Faewood as the enchantments on the tower fed back into him, hiding him from the forest, meaning he did not have to use his own meager skills to conceal himself, and he grinned when he saw a pixie flying near him, none the wiser as to his presence.

Of course, the Arcane Grasp spell he tried to use to catch her failed, sweeping up a handful of leaves, and she zipped off immediately, too quick to try again.

He cursed quietly

That afternoon, he rummaged through Thornrick Tower's library. The door set into the outer wall of the tower lead to an immense space that should most certainly not have fit, crammed full of books piled haphazardly on any available flat space that served as a library, though it lacked any sort of organization, and it took several hours to find anything substantive on pixies.

The original book he'd found in what might have been Thornrick's study had only discussed the uses of the various...

secretions

of the fair folk, not the means of their capture or their natural habits.

Fortunately, several books with that information were located on a pile near the door into the library, and he spent most of the night studying for once.

[]

Two days later, Droseria was buzzing through the forest, haversack hanging empty behind her, when she found herself suddenly caught.

She frantically struggled against the thin threads clinging to her.

Normally, pixies could just fly through the web of any spider with nothing but the usual annoyance of having spiderweb get on you, but this stuff...

then a dark shape loomed out of the undergrowth, raising something up around her, and before she knew it, she was trapped in a prison made of glass, a lid being screwed on with an annoying sound, daylight glinting through holes drilled in the top.

She saw a human face, immense, and smug, staring through the walls, and glowered at him.

The effect of the look was diminished by the way the enhanced spiderweb had tangled her up into a pretzel at the bottom of the jar.

[]

Tim charged into the messy laboratory high in Thornrick tower, making straight for a cage made of panes of glass welded together with lead, with a door made of fine wire mesh, into which Tim had introduced a pile of forest dirt and plants, and a handful of tiny green glowing crystals, which fed magic into the plants to sustain them.

He tugged a leather glove on, and opened a little door in the side, dumped the pixie inside onto his gloved hand, then reached into the cage, dropping her unceremoniously into the transplanted bit of forest floor, grinning madly as he closed the cage and wrapped a bit of wire around the door and the doorway to keep the cage shut.

He promptly left again, leaving Droseria to lie in there, and struggle out of her bonds.

She had spent the whole journey back struggling with the magically reinforced spiderweb, but moments after she was dumped in the cage, the web suddenly reverted to ordinary sticky spidersilk, leaving her free, if grossed out by the sensation of webs stuck to her sensitive wings.

She spent several minutes prying the webs off, cursing volubly, her voice sounding like a chiming bell, concealing the sulfurous cursing she hurled in the direction of the vanished wizard.

Once she had scraped most of the web off, she buzzed into the air in the large enclosure, and made for the door.

She reached out to grasp the wire holding it shut, and yelped as her hand burned on contact, yanking her hand back to reveal a red burn.

Her cursing grew more voluble.

[]

Tim grinned as he stared through the glass cage. Up close and in broad daylight, the red glow coming off the tiny pixie was dim, revealing her form.

She was remarkably human-like, despite the distinctive unnatural features, and while Tim had only been thinking of collecting pixie dust, her realized that maybe collecting samples didn't have to be a chore.

But first, he needed to prepare.

She chimed incessantly at him, and Tim grinned at her. "Don't worry little girl, I'll take good care of ya." he said.

He was not close enough to see the expression on her face, and of course, without magical aid he could not make sense of the chiming coming from her, and thus was the world spared of Tim Dirket, remedial wizard, picking up Droseria's more creative curses.

[]

The 'extraction process' Tim dug out of the mouldering old book was about as fun as Alchemistry homework, involving a layer of weakly enchanted cheesecloth, two glass jars and as little contact with the pixie as possible.

On balance, that was probably for the best, as the book warned that pixie dust, in its raw state, could have potentially dangerous side effects, and also when he opened the cage and used a mage-hand to grab the pixie, she still tried to lunge at him.

He quickly dumped her in the first jar, sealed it with a magical force disc, and set up the extraction process. Having left her bread soaked in an alchemical preparation made of oil and spices meant to promote dust shedding the previous evening, he removed the force disc keeping the two glass jars separate, and then used magehand again to start gently shaking the pixie.

Her chiming increased in volume and frequency as she was jittered about, creating a gentle fall of glittering dust that filtered down into the lower jar through the enchanted cheesecloth.

The volume was greater than she would normally have shed.

Tim didn't stop until no more dust came free, and Droseria's glow had dimmed almost to nothing.

She was a lot less energetic when he put her back in the enclosure.

He spent the rest of the afternoon setting up the purification process, the tools and reagents, and the book with the instructions in it, before he went to acquire dinner.

[]

That night, Droseria, now thoroughly pissed off, buzzed over to the wire door, grit her teeth, and grasped the wire, and struggled to pry it open despite the burning in her hands, which, thanks ironically to her depleted reserves of pixie dust, failed to burn her quite as intensely.

As well, one benefit to being a working pixie was that she had calluses from the gathering she had spent most of life doing and they briefly protected her form the burning.

Despite that, her palms were red and itching and blotchy rashes had gone up both arms by the time the wire came loose and the enclosure door came open.

Droseria zipped towards the nearest window, but stopped, as she saw the book, and the jar full of her pixie dust, now with a proper lid on.

Her glow was still fizzling due to the dust removal, and flying was a challenge as a result, but she descended, dropping to land on the page and puzzle out some of the words.

She frowned.

"This can't be right... it says... a pixie's... emissions... create magic? Huh." she drummed a foot on the page. She wasn't too good at the big people's language, let alone the squiggles the boring oafs from further south used, but repeated incursions by Tuvisi legions had forced the fair folk of the Faewood to learn some of it just to protect themselves.

She grinned viciously, as an idea popped into her head, and she fluttered over to the jar of her dust, glittering red despite the dimness of the night.

She carefully landed on the lid, pulsing her power to stick in place, before buzzing her wings very rapidly to unscrew the lid by wing force.

She nodded with satisfaction as the lid popped off, and carefully turned it back the other way just far enough that Tim might miss that it had been opened.

Then, with a sigh, she returned to the cage, tugging the door closed, and settled down to wait.

[Chapter Two: In which Tim begins to learn the hard way that the Fair Folk ought to be respected regardless of their stature]

Pixies are remarkably powerful and clever, despite their miniscule size. They are invariably female, oviparous, and omnivorous. Their magic is quite potent, and they produce so much of it that they must excrete it from their bodies to avoid destroying themselves. Pixie dust's potent magical content is the result, but caution must be taken when handling, as one of the core principles of Fae Magic, transformation, is quite potent within pixie emenations.

-Carsuss Tritius,

A study of Arcasia and its supernatural creatures

.

[=]

Droseria watched as the idiot mage lumbered into the lab, and smirked.

He was tall, lanky, though even under the ill-fitting mage robes he wore, now torn-up and stained by leaves, he was clearly putting on extra weight from the food provided by the tower.

The pixie grinned, waiting.

He spent nearly an our fussing with the arcane glass jars and tubes set up in one corner, and Droseria could not restrain much of her frustration and impatience, but endeavored to anyway.

Eventually though, he picked up the jar, completely failing to double-check its seals.

Droseria rolled her eyes. She was not by any means a natural philosopher, she left that mumbo jumbo to the great dryads and the tall ones, but even she knew enough to know valuable reagents should be treated with greater care.

As she was about to demonstrate.

Her dust had replenished overnight, meaning she had to bite back a hiss as the iron wire door burnt her hand far more intensely, but only briefly as she flitted out, zipped through the intervening air, dropping low to the ground, and lashed out with a single hand, a bolt of magical force catching the silly human in the ankle and sending him sprawling with a yelp.

The lid of the jar crashed to the floor with a rattling clank, Tim slammed into the floor, the jar flying off to shatter against a wall, and the air was suddenly full of glittering ruby dust that set Tim to coughing violently.

All she had to do now was wait.

And hide.

Tim struggled back to his feet, his effort to do anything else seriously hampered by the violent coughing brought on by the overabundance of pixie dust.

Droseria hid herself amongst some alchemical equipment, watching nervously as Tim hacked and between coughs cursed at her as he looked around.

A faint red glow appeared over his rumpled, unkempt robes as he cleared his lungs of the glittering dust, and began trying to knock the glittering powder off his robes.

"I'll just have to trap you again y'know." he said conversationally, as he dusted himself off. "And then I'll have to replenish all that dust, which means more time in the paaAAA CHOO!" he sneezed violently, lurching backwards.

The faint red glow flared as he did so, and he suddenly shrank, barely an inch, but his robes grew a little looser.

He blinked, and patted his coat, and Sneezed violently again. He lost another inch.

"Dammit, I got it inside my robes!" he said. "I'll deal with you later." he grumbled and stomped towards the door. He stopped, breathing in suddenly as another sneeze came on.

The next sneeze was a doozy, and this time he noticed as he dropped two whole feet and was suddenly eye-level with the door handle.

"What the haaaaaCHOO!" he sneezed again, and again, and with each one, he lost more height.

He rapidly went from his robes being loose to absolutely swimming in them, and as he tried to grab at the door handle, he sneezed again, this time vanishing into his robes.

The pile moved around, muffled cursing and several more sneezes coming from it.

By this point, Droseria had seated herself on the edge of the table, watching the whole thing.

She grinned.

[]

Tim fought his way out of the pile of fabric that had gone from being his worn old school robes into an immense weight burying him.

He crawled out, a warm breeze from an open window brushing over his bare skin, telling him he was completely naked.

He stood up as climbed out. The lab had turned from a cramped, disorganized place where Avim Thronrick had shoved a bunch of vital alchemical tools as an afterthought into a vast cyclopean space, the tables creating a cavernous space that loomed around him.

Then he heard loud buzzing, and the red pixie descended.

He promptly focused his magic, and let out a yelp as a powerful electric sensation blasted up his spine.

His legs went limp.

His clothes were at least soft enough to reduce the impact a little.

His chest hurt.

He looked up. Four glittering ruby eyes fixed on him, and he was suddenly very aware he was naked, and his magic had just backfired.

The pixie grinned. "Well, that looked a little painful!" she said brightly, walking around him.

"Soon as I get up, you're dead." Tim growled. His voice cracked, robbing the threat of any ominousness.

"Oh I'm sure." the pixie said, her bell-like voice suffused with smugness.

Tim slowly stood as the Pixie walked around him.

His chest still hurt, and he looked down, and shrieked.

[]

Droseria studied the wizard. He'd been transformed quite thoroughly.

"Why do I have TITS!" Tim shrieked.

His body was quite fetching. He'd been slim as a human, lanky, and gaining a bit of a paunch from apparently good eating.

Now, he was almost a pixie. Which meant the extra weight from his recent good eating had filled out the hips and breasts the pixie magic had given him, even as it shrank him to a healthy size, and his slim frame had bulked up quite a bit more.

He was now stacked, curvy, with an enormous pair of tits and a broad ass.

"Well, pixie magic is very stupid. When you touch our dust, it assumes that you must be a very sick, or cursed pixie." she grinned menacingly, revealing a mouth full of needle-like teeth, "And it heals you to full health. Of course, you aren't a pixie, and it can't make you one, but..." she reached out, brushing a hand over Tim's large breasts.