Despite falling asleep in the late afternoon, Frank slept until way past the crack of dawn. To his momentary surprise, he awoke to a pain across his chest the moment he attempted to move. Then the memories of yesterday returned, and he groaned at his own stupidity.
As he slowly but surely got up and started reheating yesterday’s stew, he went over his actions yesterday. “I managed to track an animal, so that’s one point in my favor. I survived my own overconfidence, so that’s another point. I was overconfident and forgot that I know jack shit about this world. That’s at least minus two or more. I Leveled up [Warrior] and got [Tracker] as a Class, so I suppose that a point up.
“Now, what can I actually learn from this mess. Despite how many plants and animals seem the same or very similar to ones from Earth, I should not consider them the same. It’s probably fine to assume they’re similar, but until proven true, I should keep in mind that it’s an assumption. And even if I thought more about the rabbit part of it, it was dumb of me to think of herbivores as less hostile.
“What was I on yesterday when I threw those rocks? I know that hitting a moving target is much harder than a static one, and I can barely hit a static one consistently. Discounting the fact that I thought it was a good idea to provoke an unknown animal, I should’ve just chucked the rocks and had my spear ready.
“Lastly, the fight went alright, I think. Even if through luck, I believe I’ve avoided any permanent injuries. The cattit’s speed surprised me more than it should’ve, but that’s back to assumptions. But I did remember to use [Smack] despite it being my first fight with it, so I’m counting that as a win. Though more than any specific situation from the fight, I think the biggest takeaway is just that I lack practice fighting animals – or live opponents in general – with a spear.
“All in all, I think I’ll call the encounter an overall upside. I managed to hunt something and lived to learn from my mistakes. And unlike back home, I’d say that what doesn’t kill me actually makes me stronger.” Thinking of the Level-ups brought a smile to his lips.
Frank took extra care throughout the morning to not overexert himself, even if the wounds from yesterday had mostly healed and were just hurting. The first thing he did was to get a few of his pots boiling the bark he’d prepared. This would extract the tannins, should they have any, and allow him to get his hide tanning. Second, he went down to the creek for both more water and to rinse his blood-stained clothes. When doing so, he also checked his cut cuff for the piece he had cut out and burned a while back. It had regrown. After that, he finished handling the cattit before preparing more wood for the boil.
He had all of that finished just in time for a late lunch. His next plan of action thankfully involved him sitting still; he wanted more practice using [Person of Many Faces]. While it didn’t seem particularly useful during his stint in the forest, he wanted to be decently proficient with it by the time he left.
As he remained unaware of the world’s level of technology or communication, he intended to leave the forest using a one-off appearance. That way he could ask whatever questions he wanted without risking it being tied back to himself, and he did want the option to stay as himself whenever he wanted.
But in the interest of improving his skill with the Condition as a whole and not just turning into Alisha, Frank spent the next few hours picking a random limb and anime character or person he knew and changed into them. It was a slow and mentally draining process, but he could feel himself improving each and every time, and at a greater pace than before at that. To end it, he turned everything back to himself.
Following that, he went and got the tanning process started. All he had to do now was to pour the tannin-filled water into the basin he made some days ago. The pot filled it to about one third of its total volume, which was about half of what he wanted. As such, he refilled the pot with water after exchanging some of the wood pieces with the freshly prepared ones.
To actually start the tanning, he put in the cattit and fawn skins first, seeing as the former had yet to fully dry and would have the hardest time surviving without treatment and the latter was about the same size as it. Besides, they both also needed the longest in the solution, based purely on size. To make sure they didn’t just float to the top, he weighed them down with a few stones. Now, he’d just need to check on it about once per day and wring the solution out of it, to allow more fresh tannins to fill it.
As he went down to the creek to gather more water, he noticed that something in the air felt different in a familiar way, though he couldn’t quite place his finger on what. When he looked up, the canopies covered the sky, so he couldn’t see if clouds were gathering in the distance or if anything else had changed. Still, considering that it could be rain approaching, he decided to hurry up.
By the time he was making his way back, not only had the feeling strengthened, the light reaching him through the canopies had also dimmed unusually fast. A few minutes from home, he heard the first sign of rain starting to fall. From there, it did not take long for the drops to reach him as well, so he hurried home.
The rain was both better and worse back at the Tree, though definitely weirder. On one hand, there was only a single, incredibly wide, canopy over him, so a fair amount of water got straight through. On the other hand, the incredibly thick and many thin branches caught a lot of water, so it was a lot of in and out of the rain on the way back.
That, however, was far from the weirdest aspect of this area. Back when he made the mud-wall of his hut, he had been surprised at how the dirt in this area specifically behaved. It started by rejecting the water for a bit, before suddenly draining all of it. This behavior was clearly visible here as well. Instead of the ground becoming moist, the water just stayed in a thin layer despite the constant rain. The water was clearly being removed at about the same rate it appeared, which was good to hear.
Along with that, it was equally weird how much water was in each drop. They felt like pretty heavy rain. However, compared to how they felt, the amount of water they deposited seemed ludicrous. Despite the rain having just started, not only had he been drenched at least an order of magnitude faster than expected, but there was far more water on the ground than what made any degree of sense.
Curiously though, the ground itself didn’t feel wet in the slightest. Frank could only point to the Tree of Life as the reason, since not only was this the only area where this happened – the ground on the way back had started to become moist – but the dirt could clearly become wet when separated from the ground. As seen with his hut’s back wall.
He soon reached his hut and was able to relax a little more, seeing as his drainage canal was preventing the water from making it inside despite the weird behavior. The right wall from the front also appeared to hold up against the rain well, while the left barely looked to have been touched, but that would only be a matter of time.
With haste, he put all of the meat that had been left to dry or smoke into separate pots and carried it into his hut, followed by all of his other pots, including the basin. The only exception was the pot currently boiling wood, as it was too hot. It was thankfully covered by a lid, so he would just deal with it either after the rain or after it had cooled down enough.
Once he had brought everything he could think of inside, not only did it feel more cramped, but he was absolutely drenched as the rain had been growing in intensity. To his relief, the walls were still holding tight, and the drainage ditch continued to work wonders. With some extra effort, he got a fire going, not just for the light, but more so the heat.
As he took a seat on the ground near the campfire, he wanted to kick himself for not having prepared properly for the rain. While yes, he had made a basic hut to stay dry, he had for instance not stored firewood inside. Now, he just had to wait out the rain, which he hoped wouldn’t last more than a couple of hours or a day at most.
However, despite feeling exhausted, he did not want to sleep just yet for three reasons. First, he wanted to dry off. Second, he wanted to see if the rain got bad enough for him to need makeshift repairs. Third, he wanted to pour the pot of tannin solution into the basin.
Thus, the first thing he did was cook a meat-heavy stew of that which hadn’t had a chance to dry properly. He had, over the past few weeks, curiously found himself able to eat a lot more than back on earth without feeling overstuffed, even when accounting for his increased activity. He had yet to figure out why, but if it would allow him to eat more meat before it went bad, then who was he to complain. He just hoped that this increased stomach capacity wouldn’t backfire with him needing to eat more to get by, though it thankfully had yet to feel like that.
He had a few ideas on what it might relate to, but he did not feel like doing much about it at this moment in time.
For the next hour, the rain continued to fall in increasing amounts, and he had already given up on getting his pot back before it stopped; at least he had had enough forethought to store his dried hides inside, so they hadn’t gotten wet. While his stew stewed, his time was spent on more general shapeshifting practice. His exhaustion was part of why he did it; to practice under imperfect conditions.
After eating more than he felt should be possible, he put a lid on the pot and pulled it off the fire with a pair of sticks; this was one of his later pots, so he had actually remembered to put basic handles on it.
Before hitting the sack, Frank took another look outside. The rain had continued to grow in strength, and the layer of water had deepened, but his ditch still seemed able to keep up. Too mentally exhausted to really do anything else, he decided that it was good enough for now.
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It was still pouring cats and dogs when Frank opened his eyes. ‘Maybe it’d be more fitting to say lions and wolves, though that doesn’t sound as good.’ As he looked at one of the walls, he noticed that it looked incredibly damp, which was well within reason after a night of such rain.
However, his happiness at his hut holding up mostly faded the moment he looked at the rest of it; his entire floor was covered in multiple centimeters of water. ‘What the fuck. It’s this bad despite the ground drinking it up like crazy, what even is this rain.’
Upon further inspection, Frank was relieved to find that all of his important pots remained upright. However, as one would expect, all of his firewood that touched the floor was soaked. This included his fireplace. ‘It’s good that the walls survived at least. I doubt I’ll survive the rain without them. As for the water floor, I should be able to fix that. That is of course assuming that I’ve understood the ground’s behavior properly.’
With a frustrated groan he got up from the bed and his feet were immediately drenched. He was mostly annoyed at himself for not preparing for rain beyond what he was used to. And it wasn’t even because he was lost on what to do, he just hadn’t thought it’d be necessary; now he was forced to do it in the rain instead.
Since the drainage trench clearly wasn’t enough, he chose to make an actual barrier to keep the water out. To do this, he needed to do two practically identical things. The first was to make barriers of mud and sticks along the foot of each wall on the inside. The second was to do the same, just across the floor a bit in from the entrance.
That led to the next while being spent putting short, thin sticks into the ground and using the excess willow branches to make a rough weave between them. He was almost able to finish both walls with his remaining willow, though he ran out halfway through the final section. His solution was to take some of his thin pieces of wood and use one of his sharpened rocks as a wedge to split it into very thin strips. He continued with this approach as he made the final barrier.
By the time that was made, the water-level inside the hut had already dropped significantly from the reduced flow; to the point that the area beneath his bed was practically bone dry. It was uncanny how it reminded him of water in games like Minecraft where the water flow gradually lessened until it fully disappeared without leaving a trace.
As for the mud he needed, he was satisfied using the ground inside the hut for the wall barriers, as they were so close to the foot of the walls that he didn’t risk tripping in them. The crossing one was another matter, as he’d much prefer not to have a hole, even if small, in the floor where he walked. That went double for something he would be constantly stepping over. As such, it was time he got completely drenched.
He went and got the required dirt from the trench, which he just dug even deeper. Digging up this dirt was a weird experience, given how it behaved as if it was without water until he got it loosened, and then it became mud in a short span of time. As with the back wall, from the moment he covered the woven barriers in mud, it took less than a minute for it to harden.
The one upside of being drenched was that he didn’t have to worry about getting drenched, so he grabbed the pot with tannin solution from the long-extinguished fire. This was quickly poured into the basin followed shortly by his remaining hides. Then he put all of his empty pots out into the rain to fill up with hopefully clean water.
With the water already drained by this point, he got a fire going with some of the wood that hadn’t absorbed any water. The main purpose of this fire was to dry him and the soaked wood, though he did also use it to heat up the food from yesterday.
As he now had little else to do other than wait out the rain, he decided to try to do a bit more with his shapeshifting. He had so far not done much beyond changing one limb at a time. This time, however, he wanted to change his face to look different; the ability was after all called [Person of Many Faces], and doing so called quite heavily to the actor and cosplayer side of him.
Through his experimentation, he had gotten to the point where he felt like the ability helped him make the changes safely, so there was only really to rip off the band-aid. He had until now been avoiding his head and chest because of vital organs, but no longer would that be the case.
With that said, he still intended to take it in small steps at a time; he really didn’t want to lose focus in the middle of a big change. As such, he decided to start with the second character he had been preparing a cosplay of, Lancer from Fate/Stay Night.
To begin, he turned his attention to the most expendable part of his head, his hair. To his surprise, the hair turned out to be a lot harder to deal with than initially expected. Unlike practically every other part of his body where he found it relatively easy to imagine the polyhedra of his body mapping to those on the body he was changing to, that couldn’t be said for the hair.
Where he for everything else could just imagine it as a Blender object being transformed, the sheer number of hairs made it hard for him to conceptualize. He was largely used to hair on 3D models being bigger lumps with a texture to give it the appearance of hair. But that wasn’t something he wanted to imagine for himself.
Instead, what he found to get around it was to just focus on a single strand of hair. For that strand, he imagined three different scenarios. The first was simply transforming it to match one of Lancer’s dark blue hairs. The second was how it would split into two hairs, while the third was the reverse. The latter two cases were to deal with different people having differing amounts of hair strands and follicle placements.
With that done, he found it easier to just project the concept of that visualization onto each strand of hair and then connect them all along the scalp at follicle-depth. Then, through a lot of mental strain, he gradually shifted all of his hair to be slightly longer, more styled towards the back of his head, and a deep blue color.
The process sparked a question in Frank: “Actually, can I make the hair longer even if I don’t use a reference?” So far he hadn’t really changed anything without a reference because of how complex everything was, but each individual hair seemed relatively straightforward, so it was worth a shot.
In a short time, he found that he could indeed lengthen his hair, and in two different ways at that. The first was simply to stretch the polyhedra of the model’s hairs, while the second was to extend it with my polyhedra. “I think I’ll stick with extending the models, stretching them gives me a bad gut feeling.”
Compared to his hair, every other change he made to his face went much more smoothly. The only hold-up came just before he was about to change his head-shape to match Lancer’s. “Will this affect my brain? If so, then I probably shouldn’t do it.”
To check this, he focused his mental view inside the heads of both his own and Lancer’s head. There, he did the comparisons on just the brains, and after a moment’s confusion discovered how exactly they differed. Where everything else changed not just the shape and whatnot of the polyhedra but also the amount, the brain was made up of the exact same polyhedra, just altered in dimensions to fit in the head. Just to be sure, he checked his brain against a few other models, and all results were the same; only the dimensions had changed.
“Does this mean that stretching squishing the polyhedra doesn’t actually change that part of my body, but only the appearance, while adding or subtracting truly changes my body?” Though his confusion about his Condition had grown, so had his confidence that altering the shape of his head probably wouldn’t mess with his brain.
“Gods, this feels insane to do, but I think I may as well try it. It would be an absolutely stupid ability if using the seemingly basic functionality risked my mental state.” Despite not previously being a man of faith, the knowledge that gods were real and how insane he knew his current actions were, gave rise to a small prayer from Frank.
The change itself was as easy as everything but the hair had been. “I don’t feel any different, but I suppose that’s the scary thought, what if I’m unable to notice what has changed and just think it’s always been that way.” With a few horror movie concepts and stories of the False Hydra from the D&D fandom being pushed to the back of his mind, he went to check his new face.
Frank grabbed one of the overflowing pots from just outside of his hut and brought it inside. It was a little hard because of the poor lighting, but he was able to see his reflection once the water had calmed. He now sported Lancer’s blue hair, red eyes, sharp chin, and more. Even if he had been able to see it clearly as a metal image, seeing it for real brought him a wide smile.
But that wasn’t to say that he was done for the day, not in any way. Though he still needed a bit of break from active shifting. Instead, he spent the next few minutes inspecting a few of the different mental images he’d made of fictional characters. He wanted to see if he could figure out why they all had an uncanny feel to them. It wasn’t uncanny in the near photorealistic CGI or video game sense, but more in how they all felt familiar in some way; he just couldn’t put his finger on how.
Next on the list of alterations was Alisha’s head. She had been the first he experimented on with the power, so it felt fitting to give her some time to shine as well. And between her and Lancer, he had been looking forward to cosplaying her a fair bit more before all of this happened.
The second alteration of his face went noticeably faster. He had not only grown more comfortable with the process as a whole, but he was as a result more willing to combine smaller steps of the process. Within an hour, Frank had some platinum-blonde locks obscuring the edges of his vision and more reaching down his back, before he tied them into a basic ponytail with a bit of cordage.
It was far more interesting to inspect his reflection this time around, as his facial structure had changed more than when he became Lancer. “Damn, it’s weird to look this different without being able to feel the make-up,” He pulled slightly at his hair with a smile. “The same goes for being able to actually feel the hair, and it’s so much nicer than any wig.”
“That said, there is one thing missing,” he cleared his throat before speaking to himself once more. “Now this is much more fitting. It was a little off to look at my current face speaking with my regular voice.” For the first time since arriving in this world, Frank made use of his skill in speaking in a convincing female voice. It had taken him forever to learn, so it still being relevant made him smile.
Seconds later, a realization struck him like thunder from a blank sky. “I can just do this with [Person of Many Faces], can’t I?” Now that he had the idea, he couldn’t not try. Like he had found everything else, changing his larynx into another specific image was really straight forward by now.
“Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3. Gosh this is so weird,” Despite deliberately trying his best to speak like normal, the sound that left him was in the softer and brighter voice of Alexis Tipton, Alisha’s English voice actress. Though, even if he didn’t immediately notice it, his voice didn’t sound wrong to his ears. “Even if I don’t need to manually make a female voice anymore, at least I can still use my experience with more feminine speech.” Without even intending, he had dialed that part up when doing the test; some habits were hard to break.
As he sat there afterwards, thinking of what to do next, he got the idea of rehearsing some of her lines from the show; he did already look partially like her. There was not a whole lot of purpose to this exercise except entertaining himself and doing something that wasn’t work. After going at this world for full force for well over two weeks, a day of mostly just messing around felt great.
It was already starting to get dark in his hut by the time he ran out of steam, even though Frank was certain it wasn’t that late yet; the ongoing rainstorm made sure it got dark early. Throughout the day, he had casually been keeping track of it, and while it didn’t seem to grow stronger, the rain also showed no signs of stopping anytime soon. So, as darkness rolled in, he decided that he should prepare for this lasting quite a while. After all, he had no clue how much it usually rained in this world, or at least this area of it, so he should expect the worst.
If it were to continue for a while, he expected that he would be getting better at shapeshifting much sooner than expected, but that was something for tomorrow Frank to worry about. So, without changing back, he went to bed early.
[Class – Actor obtained]
[Actor Level 4]
[Skill – Quick Change obtained]
[Skill – Loud Voice obtained]
