Chapter II
You weren't always the way you are now. There was a time when you could call yourself a woman only, unburdened by masculine endowment and the base desires that come with it. Now, exhausted and sated in a way you've never known before, sleep takes you quickly. With it come vivid dreams of days gone by...
It had been your first ruins-delve, not six months after your homeland was swallowed up by the Empire. Hunting and foraging had gotten you by this far, but the draw of an old elvish watchtower in the lowlands had been too much to resist. Those old places were always full of treasure: enchanted swords, magic potions, hidden stores of electrum and gemstones. That's what the stories said, anyway. And you'd found just such a place, so overrun with vines that you were sure it had been untouched for a thousand years.
So you'd gone inside, spear at the ready. The tower itself was a ruin, of course, barely ten feet of stone still standing. But what lay below, underneath the secret door you found a few yards away; that's what you'd come for. Letting your tail-flame guide light the way, you dropped the short distance down into a stone passage underneath the tower. Dust and cobwebs and thousands of little bugs greeted you, clinging to the dank stone walls. A shudder wracked your body, enough to make you want to run screaming right back out, but you steeled your will and forced yourself forward.
The dream blurs for a moment, and you find yourself in a vaulted chamber deep beneath the earth. It had taken you hours to reach the chamber, navigating through winding corridors and fending off overgrown spiders glutted on elf-magic. When you found this chamber, though, you knew you'd hit paydirt. Dozens of coins were scattered about the floor from a shattered chest, glistening in the light of your tail, but your attention was drawn to something far more precious.
A single glass bottle had rolled free and safe from the chest, full of a dark cyan liquid that swirled mistily in the dim light. You walked over and picked it up gingerly between two claws, holding it up to your eye. This is what you'd come for: an enchanted elixir, still potent and intact after ages -- the lost magic of the elves at work. You could make a fortune off this in the city-states of the south, no doubt... but such a potion could also work miracles for you, too. Make you stronger, fleet-footed, grant you powers beyond your reckoning... who knows?
The temptation was almost too much to resist.
<<Wisdom Saving Throw: Success (1 vs. 8)!>>
But you managed, for now. Equal chance of this thing being cursed or poisoned, right? You knew better than to knock back random potions. Taking a deep breath, you kicked over the chest and set the potion back down, safe and sound, and pulled the old leather-bound grimoire from your satchel.
<<Intelligence Check: Failure (14+3 vs. 15)!>>
You spent an hour flipping through pages of arcane text, trying to match the color and smell and texture of the potion to anything your teacher, or any in the long line that had held the volume, had ever encountered. Nothing. Perhaps now you'd found a reason to add your mark to its collated knowledge... when you figured out what this potion does.
Only one way, right?
(( I only rewrote this one like 3 times its fine :| ))
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