It was a day like any other in the life of Amelia Wil Tesla Seyruun, Princess of the city which bore her name. The days had begun to blur together since she and her friends had broken up at the end of the Darkstar incident, a long march of diplomatic meetings and all the many and varied lessons that were expected of a princess. It was all very important, she knew that, but it was also all very boring. She missed the ability to wander off with nothing but the clothes on her back. She missed the adventures. She missed the unique brand of craziness that followed Lina around.
Her beloved daddy, Crown Prince Phillionel de Seyruun, felt her pain like it was his and he shared her free spirit. He tried to alleviate her boredom by sending her on diplomatic missions to neighboring countries, but it wasn't the same. She had to watch her every word and gesture to avoid possibly giving offense and creating a diplomatic incident. And she wasn't the only one who watched her every move; even Seyruun's allies analyzed her every action, trying to discover if she was a worthy heir to the powerful Seyruun nation. And most princelings were actually pretty poor conversationalists. Too self-centered, some of them prettier than her, and they didn't want to listen to her thoughts on advanced magical theory or Justice, at all.
It seemed like just another day, in any case, until she came down for breakfast and found that the number of occupied chairs around their breakfast table had increased by one sometime during the night. She stopped dead in her tracks like a deer caught in headlights.
"Mr. Zelgadis?" she asked weakly.
The white-swathed figure at the foot of the table smiled at her, his smile reserved but warm. He'd removed his mask and had his hood down so that she could see his handsome - albeit rock-strewn - blue face, pointed ears almost hidden by his wiry purple hair. Practically every other inch of him was covered in his cream travelling cloak except for the very tips of his fingers. "It's good to see you again, Amelia." His voice was as deep and mellow as she remembered. Soothing. In fact, he didn't seem changed at all from when she had last seen him almost two years ago.
She all but flew down the stairs and tackled him where he sat, only to reign herself in at the last moment, remembering that he had issues with being touched.
She settled for hand-holding as she babbled. "Oh, wow, it's so good to see you again, Mr. Zelgadis! Where have you been? How have you been doing? What are you doing here? Why were you gone so long? Gourry and Lina kept in touch," she added somewhat reproachfully.
"Now, now, Amelia, let the poor man breathe," came the booming laughter of her father, Prince Phil.
She finally noticed that her daddy was also at the table, along with two other men, one she recognized as the head of the Seyruun White Mages Guild. Amelia blushed. She hadn't meant to spaz out on him, but it had been so long! She really wanted to hug her chimera friend, but she restrained herself, knowing he wasn't a fan of affectionate greetings.
Hopefully judging from the smile on Mr. Zelgadis's face, he wasn't already regretting his return. He answered, deadpan, "To answer your question, I thought I'd drop by for some of that famous Seyruun soft-serve ice cream. And maybe cure my curse while I'm at it."
"What!" she squealed, ecstatic. "You found a cure, Mr. Zelgadis? That's amazing! Not that you aren't really cool-looking as you are," she added, seriously. She loved how he looked. Though it had taken her a while to become comfortable with it, now it was just another thing about him, like his skill with a sword and how good he looked in a dress.
His thin smile broadened at the mere thought of his ultimate goal, what had driven him for as long as she'd known him: the chance to return his body from a golem-demon-human chimera to being merely human again. He withdrew a thin leather-bound book from within his cloak.
"This book, and the man who gave it to me, assured me that the procedure contained within it has the power to break any enchantment short of one placed by the Lord of Nightmares herself. It's the best lead I've had since that whole Clair Bible mess. I was hoping I could use one of the rooms in the palace to try the experiment: it's a complex process with a lot of delicate parts, and it would be best if I could be certain of not being disturbed."
"Of course it's okay, right dad?" She'd bring out the puppy eyes if she had to. No one did 'cute' like Amelia Wil Tesla Seyruun.
"Naturally!" Phil boomed enthusiastically. "For a man who has helped to save my kingdom, and is such a good friend to my daughter, no favor is too difficult!"
Of course, her daddy's selfless nature prompted her to initiate one of the Seyruun family's patented bear hugs, which he returned with gusto, her smaller body all but vanishing into the Crown Prince's massive arms.
Kain, the surprisingly young, bespectacled leader of the Seyruun White Mages, did his best to politely ignore the extreme hugging action going on a few feet away. "I wouldn't mind speaking with you at length later, Mister Zelgadis. That experiment of yours seems like it might have applications in my own speciality."
Kain was the city's foremost curse-breaker and was extremely knowledgeable about illnesses mundane and magical.
Zelgadis dipped his head in response, always enjoying the opportunity for intelligent discourse, although there was a little tightness in his eyes that said he wanted to be working on his cure right now. Still, if nothing else, traveling with Lina Inverse got one used to detours and delays.
"Of course, Mister Kain. I'd need to verify it's usefulness on myself first, but if it proves fruitful, we could always talk an exchange of information." The multi-talented chimera's shamanism was his strength, but he knew enough black and white magic to get by, and he was always looking to increase his body of knowledge.
"Okay," Amelia said, only a little out of breath from her daddy's crushing hug. "Let's go get you set up, Mister Zelgadis. This is so exciting!"
Amelia dragged the chimera out of the room, her five-foot-nothing frame pulling the taller Zelgadis along by the hand with ease. Prince Phil, Kain and his silent bodyguard were left alone once more.
She was her father's daughter, after all.
Zelgadis took over one of the out-of-the-way sitting rooms that didn't see much use and promptly vanished. The only time he came out at all was to take a wagon and a tarp, go out into the city, and return hours later with a full wagon of parts for whatever he was building. It was like playing host to a ghost.
A few days of this unusual behavior, and Amelia was ready to try bringing his meals herself (the other meals had been returned uneaten, sometimes with the maids who had delivered them in tears, when Zelgadis could be bothered to notice them).
So she'd headed down to the kitchens, made sure the cooks made what she remembered of his favorites from their travels together - and coffee, of course, the chimera was a bit of an addict when it was available - and headed down to the room Zel had barricaded himself inside. As she got closer to her goal, the foot traffic of maids and other sundry servants dwindled and finally died. It was like he'd erected a force field keeping out undesirables by his presence alone.
"Mr. Zelgadis, dinner time!" she sang out as she entered. Her voice trailed off as she saw what had become of their third-best sitting room.
Glass tubes were everywhere, piping colored liquids from one station to another. Mixtures and philters she couldn't identify simmered on hot copper plates or set to boiling with blue flame. Zelgadis was in the center of the nest of tubing, staring at one of the potions boiling merrily away, leaving behind a gross green precipitate.
"Mister Zelgadis?" she asked, more timidly than she'd intended. She wasn't entirely unfamiliar with such contraptions - she knew that the process to create chimeras was similar to what she saw here, and it was hard to forget her visit with Lina and the others to the Seiraag cloning facility - she was still making payments - but she'd never seen something quite like this. It was either the work of a genius or a madman, and though she wanted to give Zelgadis the benefit of the doubt she wasn't entirely certain it wasn't the latter.
"Yes, Amelia," Zelgadis said shortly, his attention obviously captured by something else.
His own few-syllable response prompting a similar answer in her: "Dinner."
"I'm fine."
"You should eat, Mr. Zelgadis," she said primly.
"Just leave it, I'll get to it eventually," he said, moving over to stare at a brass contraption whose purpose she could only guess at. But Amelia wasn't the type to just give up, ever. For any reason. Neither threats, harsh words, reason, nor logic had any effect on her when she got in the mood to contest something.
She summoned every erg of cuteness she could muster and pleaded, "Pleeease, Mr. Zelgadis?"
"Amelia -" he turned towards her, exasperated, and was hit with the awesome power of her puppy dog eyes. Before her adorable pout, his arguments crumbled. He resisted the inevitable for a few long moments, mostly for form's sake, before finally grumbling, "Fine."
"Yay!" she cheered and handed him the tray. He dropped to the ground right then. Amelia idly wondered what had happened to the very handsome sitting room table. Whether it had been removed, reduced to spare parts, or something else, she couldn't guess.
She joined him on the floor, primly drawing her legs up beneath her. He had just dropped like a stone, but a lifetime of a princess's lessons on manners and comportment were hard to shake. She'd managed to adopt Lina and Gourry's table manners - or lack thereof - on the road, but here in Seyruun the memories of a long line of stern-faced tutors were stronger and more vivid.
While he dug in with the air of someone who desperately wanted to get back to what he had been doing, she studied the floor they were sitting on. A massive and fiendishly complex geometric shape had been drawn in the open space in the center of the room where they were sitting, partially obscured by Zel's alchemical tangle of tubes and other things.
"Mr. Zelgadis," she said, a little nervously, "Is this a monster-summoning circle?"
Black magic wasn't illegal, per say, even in Seyruun, the city of white magic. She herself knew one of the highest-tier black magic spells, drawing on the power of the Mazoku lord Deep Sea Dolphin. But mazoku-summoning was always dangerous, even for experienced magic-users, among which Zelgadis certainly numbered. He looked contemplatively at the summoning circle, not noticing or not caring about her unease.
"Brau demon summoning, yes. I'm surprised it never occurred to me before." That wasn't so bad. Brau demons weren't particularly fearsome, not the way a mazoku - a true monster - was. They lacked the dire strength of the greater monsters as well as their immunity to most magic, yet retained a form composed of astral energy rather than physical, as the mazoku did. As such, they could sometimes be bound to a physical object as sentries or guards. The director of the Atlas City sorcerer's guild - one of them, anyway - that she had met in her travels had done just that to produce a pair of talking, spell-casting shoulderguards for his favored underling.
Then she finally processed all the nuances of his sentence, and understanding came to her quickly. "Brau demon, is that-?"
"Yes," he said grimly. "One-third of my body."
"What are you using it for?" she wondered, fascinated.
Zelgadis's face became more animated as he spoke, his excitement plain. "The book details a very complex and variable spell designed to split a thing into its component parts. The details of the spell change depending on the composition of what you are seeking to divide. But if you notice, I've turned the entire room into a magic-amplification zone, designed to channel power to the primary circles," he pointed at one of the walls, which was also covered in writing and designs. She didn't doubt that the other walls held the same. It was similar to what she'd seen in the rooms the white mages of Seyruun set aside for the workings of great magics that required group casting.
"I've always tried to find a cure-all spell like the Claire Bible. I've never thought to remove the unwanted components separately," he went on, his eyes on the circle beneath them.
"Brau demon."
He looked skyward. She followed his gaze and saw a different figure painted on the ceiling: squares and rectangles and more esoteric shapes bounded by three circles that were themselves at the points of a triangle. This, she knew, was an old form of shamanism. Ancient, really. Shamanists these days invoked their magic through words and gestures, but the first shamans used such runes to work their magic. It was a slow and unwieldy practice, and not well-suited to the frenetic pace of battles, but it offered exceptional precision for ritual-type magics. His voice startled her out of her reverie:
"Rock golem."
He was looking at the second of the three circles on the ground, which mimicked the ones placed on the sprawling figure above. "And human." The longing in his voice was thick enough to choke her. "I suspect that if I am successful I will lose much of my magical reserves; those came with the brau demon. And my impenetrable skin is the golem third, of course. But it's little enough price to be human once more."
"Using what I've read from this book, it will involve three simultaneous steps. Focusing shamanist spells used in the creation of clay golems through the ceiling array should be forced to use the nearest components in order to form a new rock golem, thereby removing them from me. Black magic would draw forth my demon half into the summoning circle and trap it there. And the white magic amplifiers on the walls will be used to keep me alive through what I believe will be an extraordinarily painful process. Once the other two halves are gone, my humanity should expand to fill the gap, leaving me wholly human."
Amelia winced. "Mr. Zelgadis, that sounds really, really... dangerous."
Zelgadis shrugged indifferently.
"Dangerous, certainly. And likely desperate, and perhaps even crazy. But it has to be tried. It's the best lead I've found in two years, and... well. Did you know that I already knew of a method to make me human again, Amelia?" His voice was gentle, but oddly frightening. "And all I'd need to do would be to condemn another human being to life as.. well.. me."
"That's -"
"Terrible, I know. It's why I won't use it. But if the years passed, if no cure was found... I know myself well enough to know that I'd start to consider it, Amelia. I'd convince myself of the necessity, find some poor fool, use the switching spells… And then I would truly be the monster I seem to others. It must not come to that. I'd rather die trying."
Amelia took a deep breath, and threw out her chest proudly. It did interesting things to her anatomy. She might not be as ridiculously stacked as her older sister, but it was a considerable amount of chest for such a small girl. "Then I'll help you, Mr. Zelgadis."
"Amelia..." he began to argue.
"No, Mr. Zelgadis! You need me! Or were you planning on powering all these arrays at once, trying to use white magic, shamanism, and black magic at the same time?" From the look of the expression on his blue face, she knew she'd hit the nail on the head. "You don't need distractions for something this tricky; I could take over the white magic aspects - I'm good at this, you know I am! I'm better than I was two years ago! Maybe I'm not as good as Miss Sylphiel, but -"
He held up a hand to stem the torrent of words. She fell silent.
His thin lips quirked in a tiny grin. "All right, Amelia. All right. You know I'm not very good at asking for help, but… thank you."
For the next several days, Amelia played lab assistant as Zelgadis worked, first on potions and philters whose purpose she could only guess at, then on little test runs of one part of the complex arrays after another. It wasn't until he'd ensured each part of the whole worked that he was ready to try it, despite practically vibrating in place with impatience.
She nodded off regularly, but when she awoke (covered with his cloak as a blanket when he noticed, and not when he did not) he was always working. He lived on coffee and what food she could guilt him into, which didn't happen as often as she'd like.
It wasn't good for his health, but the spell - if you could call it that - was ready faster than she would have thought possible thanks to Zelgadis's driven nature. The mechanical bits were swiftly disassembled, removed and tossed out into the hallway.
Zelgadis sat cross-legged in one of the circles, in his underpants, his palms resting on the lines connecting his circle to the other two. In front of him a trio of innocent-looking vials were clustered. Zelgadis had bottled them during one of her catnaps, not that she'd have known their purpose and function if she'd been awake. She'd taken up her post behind him, clutching a tiny but intricately decorated wand topped by a rose quartz crystal as big as a small fist to her chest. It served as a magic focus much like the magic runes scribed on the walls. She'd borrowed it from Kain.
She'd be sure to let him know she'd borrowed it right after they were done here. She really hoped that all her exposure to Lina and the rest of the group wasn't warping her into a horrible person who just took things without asking. She tried not to think about it too much, honestly.
She shifted nervously, hopping from one foot to the other. This was it.
Zelgadis took a deep breath and let it out in a slow sigh. Then he knocked back the first potion - an unpleasant pinkish-green color - like a sailor on shore leave during a drinking contest. He shuddered and let out a breath that came out as a cloud of multicolored vapor.
"Vile," he announced in tones of supreme disgust. He might have somehow seen her inquiring look through the back of his own head, because he answered, "Norton's brew, to facilitate the process. It makes affecting its recipient with magic easier and should nullify the slight spell resistance my demonic attributes grant me."
That made sense, Amelia knew. Brau demons were much weaker than Mazoku, for whom ordinary weapons and almost all spells were minor annoyances at best, but they were part of the same family tree.
He quickly chugged the final two potions one after the other. She guessed they were potions to increase his magical capacity or painkillers or something, but he didn't offer an explanation. He slapped his hands against the floor array, and the whole thing lit up like it had been inked in golden light.
Zelgadis was as still as a statue but his power filled the room, magic raised but not bound to a spell, not yet.
"Vu vraimer," Zelgadis incanted simply. The runes above them also began to shine as well, a red light.
That was about when the rocks that covered Zelgadis's blue skin decided to tear themselves out of his flesh, fly to another corner of the triangular array, and begin stacking together to form a crude new golem.
Amelia had been given a basic overview of the process, but was a little unprepared for the gruesome reality. The reason for him stripping out of his all-encompassing white clothes before they began became apparent; the stones had emerged accompanied by a cloud of blood that was staining his blue skin purple.
Her white magic immediately got a workout in an effort to keep her friend - now with dozens of holes in him - from bleeding out on the floor. Finesse was abandoned in favor of shoving as much raw healing magic into him as she could manage.
The white magic runes on the walls gave no obvious signs of working - no light shows - but her little rod was shining, and she was drawing more magic than she ever had on her own. She was controlling and directing more white magic than she could comfortably hold, like a river about to overflow its banks. She felt uncomfortably stretched somehow, metaphysically. She wondered if this was how Lina felt channeling her Dragon Slaves.
Though the overflowing power could only be a good thing, with Zel's impenetrable skin deciding it didn't need him anymore and going off to do its own thing. Her magic began closing the horrendous rents in his flesh even as more and more rocks erupted from his skin.
This was really a job for Sylphiel, or a dozen white mages, but she - she, a stick, and some scribbles on the wall - were what he had. What could she do but try her best in exchange for that kind of trust?
After what seemed like a minor eternity but was probably less than a minute, the rocky areas in Zel's skin were gone, leaving smooth blue skin… and a three-foot-tall rock golem in the corner.
Zelgadis stood tall, blood dripping, strength flagging but determined. He turned his attention to the demon-summoning circle.
Where the golem-forming aspect had been a near-silent expression of will, Zelgadis kept up a constant stream of words, syllables tripping from his tongue in a constant susurration. These were Chaos words, the underlying base upon which black magic was built.
Taking power from the Mazoku lords to use for their own destructive ends was the most common form of black magic but there were others, like the demon-summoning Zelgadis was using now. If you were an expert like Lina Inverse, changing the chanted Chaos words just slightly would be enough to alter the outcome of the cast spell, increasing the power or shape or other variables. Zel wasn't at that level of proficiency, but he was competent enough.
As he spoke, Amelia began to see a distortion in the air, a heat distortion like a mirage. The air around Zelgadis sort of.. thickened.. until it looked like he was giving off smoke. It leaked from his mouth as he spoke, his ears, bled from his eye sockets, from his very skin. The smoke-like thing began to funnel together and was soon channeled into the 'demon' circle of the array.
It was surprisingly horrific to watch.
It looked a lot like a standard ghostly possession, actually, only in reverse. It seemed Rezo had bound a demon in spirit form to the host body, Zelgadis. They had become interwoven at their most basic levels, entwining ever deeper with the passing years, and removing this part of him was a lot like draining his very essence. It might yet kill him; his life force was trying to keep two life forms alive simultaneously, and that was never a good idea.
She could only sense it because she had also bound herself to him. She'd had to; a simple cure-all Recovery wouldn't have been enough to keep Zelgadis alive during the golem removal step. Unfortunately, her white magic wasn't going to help much here.
White magic worked best when it had a target, a wound to heal or a virus to expel. This was more like Zel fighting himself. She had all this healing energy at the ready, and couldn't really use it without being afraid that she would be strengthening the demon part that was still bound to him.
The smoky demon was gaining mass and form. She hoped it didn't have sentience, too, or this would be far worse than it already was. A part of Zel that could battle him for control of the whole would be a very bad thing indeed.
The demon looked like a miniature thunder cloud, a tiny tornado sporting a pair of red, slitted eyes. To her oversensitive senses there hung about it a palpable aura of menace and evil, obvious in a way that a true Mazoku like Xellos rarely was. The Trickster Priest disguised his true nature all the time. He lied like he breathed. But this little demon had no desire - or ability, maybe - to appear to be anything but what it was.
She snapped out of her trance when Zelgadis drooped further, exhaustion writ in every line of him. Damage to the spirit was, if anything, more dangerous than the equivalent physical injury.
She was surprised. She'd always heard that a sorcerer needed a demon's true name for a demon summoning, or else it was like dropping a fishing line into the ether and pulling up whatever they happened to find. What Zelgadis had done was grab the single, particular, nameless brau demon within him and drag it into the circle.
She didn't know why she was so shocked, really. Zelgadis likely knew that particular demon intimately, for one. And for the other, this was Zelgadis. She shouldn't be surprised when he turned out to be good at something, whether it was playing the guitar or navigating, safe-cracking or pinpoint demon summoning.
His bag of tricks was pretty much endless.
The eerie brau demon smoke stopped leaking from Zelgadis. The shaman and the demon stared at each other in silence from their respective magic circles.
"Mister Zelgadis, should I…?" she began tentatively.
"Do it," he said tersely. She obeyed.
Anxiety and a surfeit of power was apparently not a good combination, though, because her demon banishing spell hit with all the force and fury of a Ra Tilt. It smote the demon like the fist of an angry, Justice-loving God and wiped it from existence.
Amelia blinked white-magic-induced flash-blindness away.
She beheld the new Zel: changed, and pink, and human... she cried out in joy, and she thought she might be crying, knowing that it was the realization of his dream, the quest that had consumed him since long before she had known him. Zel himself was staring at his new - old? - body with a fascination bordering on reverence, mixed with a certain trepidation. As though it were a dream that could vanish at any moment. She leaped forward and tackled him, not caring about consequences - the Seyruun family was like that - squeezing him with all her strength and burying her head in his chest. Until she paused, and backed away a short step, and looked at Zelgadis more closely.
"Huh," Zelgadis said thoughtfully, looking down the newly-formed protrusions attached to his chest. They weren't huge, but they were unmistakably breasts. "I forgot about that."
Amelia blinked. Then again. Then a few more times. "What the heck?"
Zelgadis was apparently now a woman. And neither was Zel particularly surprised by this turn of events. Amelia wondered if this was the part where she was supposed to wake up.
"Well, you try remembering what you used to look like after a decade of being a sexless golem!" Zel grumbled, folding her arms over her chest.
"But.. but I saw you!" the Princess shrieked in bafflement. "During the... the healing thing!" Not that she would ordinarily be admitting she'd been sneaking peeks at his bare, well-formed chest.
"Yeah, without my shirt. Like I said, sexless. Nothing under the hood, if you know what I'm saying." The girl-turned-chimera-turned-girl grinned as she remembered something. "Wait until we tell Lina! I've got more on top than she does, not that that's difficult. I'll show her 'always hard.' Like I haven't heard that joke a few thousand times."
A/N: This idea was conceived when I saw Zel's very pretty sailor suit in his flashback to his human days; this whole fic, just because I wanted to do that gender bender joke at the end. Then it just kind of snowballed from there. Might be a one-shot, might be part of a series, I dunno. Haven't thought it through very far.
Norton's brew is my little homage to a quite excellent Harry Potter fic called 'Black Comedy.'