Prius-Forma Staff

Emilia picks up what looks like a bit of polished wood with some sort of gemstone embedded within it, pondering something for a moment. "Yes, I think this will do fine. Alice, please take the bracelet and the other items back into storage. Kelly, make sure you are recording everything." Ms. Kensington collected all the remaining magically-charged objects, swiftly departing to leave Emilia and the robot-girl alone with you two, shutting the glass door so nobody could leave while Emilia ran her experiments.

"What is that?" You asked curiously. You and Tori watched Emilia cautiously, as she held up the object in her palm. The wooden stub began to grow, spiraling into a longer wooden staff with the gem seated at the top.

"This is what is known as the Prius-Forma Staff--better known as the 'Former-Form' Staff to others under my employ. It's very useful for those who had been altered in some way to revisit previous versions of themselves in life. My Coinbearer Society enjoys it in particular, given that their particular magic might put them in a difficult spot as they swap between men and women--you'll have to ask one of them for details if you want to know more later. Or an elderly person might return to their youth with the magic of this wand, as was the case of the previous owner before I acquired it. For a channeler, however..."

Emilia taps Tori's shoulder with the staff, and then pulls the staff sharply away as if she was tearing something away from Tori. Tori stumbled forward, bracing as a dozen silhouettes encircled all of you, lined up around the border of the room. Some stood tall and muscular, others shorter and lanky, but more than one of them reminded you of shapes of bodies that Tori had previously been! The shapes followed in chronological order, so the slightly shapelier Tori from your prior channeling stood closest to her, followed by the muscular Naomi, her even larger mother-orca shape, a slimmer attempt at your channeling with her, Leo's sporty look, the incredibly busty Lucinda, and so on down the line with even more channeled forms you didn't recognize. Rabbit ears, a centaur shape, versions of Tori that looked slim or heavy-set or with a mermaid's tail or whatever else, they all stood nearby, all looking inward!

Tori looked left and right. Each of her silhouettes did the same. She lifted an arm up, and then jumped up and down once. Each silhouette copied her instantly, to the best of their abilities. "That's a lot of me," Tori said in awe. "It's just a handful though, I've got a couple years' worth of shapes that aren't here with us."

Emilia spun the wand slowly in the air, and the silhouettes seemed to shift places, sliding to the left as some shapes disappeared and new ones took their place. "It's not so easy to fit hundreds of forms in a room like this. Channelers have a very unique way of stressing these sorts of magic to the limits, from what I know of them. Which, I must admit, is not as much as I'd hoped. I have known about the Channeler curse for some time from the books in my library, but there is so much more to know than the structure of a spell that can only be uncovered by actually trying things with one. Do you mind if I show you what else the staff can do?"

With a slightly hesitant nod, Tori looked at Emilia. "I'm ready."

Emilia spun around in her chair, looking at the silhouettes that surrounded you and the others. She pondered for a moment, before she reached out to one of the more familiar shapes you'd seen--Naomi's silhouette. Tapping the silhouette with the staff, it vanished, and Tori immediately shifted into Naomi's muscular shape! She even wore the wetsuit from that day--a convenient touch given the size difference would have again ruined some clothing.

Tori gasped, looking down at herself. "It's... it's like I'm back at the harbor, oh wow!" She flexed an arm, touched her face, put her hands on her muscular stomach, and then paused for a moment as something else seemed to surprise her. "...Naomi's in my mind too. How is this possible for me to be Naomi again?! I swam away with my mother in the harbor, I see that memory very clearly from Tori!" She glanced around, feeling suddenly anxious about her surroundings."

"Emilia, you should end this one quick," you said hurriedly. "This one just got out of being contained in a place very similar to this room!"

Swiping her wand back to the empty position in the silhouettes, Tori quickly returned to normal, adjusting her glasses frantically. "Whoa, what a rush. It was just like when you and I were at the harbor, I could swear Naomi was here with us now."

Emilia lowered the staff, and all the silhouettes disappeared. "Naomi, as in the orca that had been 'stolen' recently? How... intriguing, that news story is starting to make a lot more sense to me now. You two pulled off quite a heist utilizing those channeling skills, I could find that very useful in my own organization. As for what you just experienced with a second mind, that's also intriguing. And it's precisely what I hoped to accomplish with the staff! Your past forms are interesting, but I don't care much about the physical state. I have magic ink that could create all kinds of alterations to a physical body. No, it's the state of your mind in those earlier forms that is very unique to a channeler... there's so much to explore there. It could be a full replica of the other being's mind in the exact state it had been during that form, or your mind just might be filling in the blanks from memories of your time as them. I do have one surefire way to know, however."

"What's that?" Tori asked, frowning. "You're not going to go fish poor Naomi out of the harbor to make me channel with her again for comparison, are you? She seemed pretty happy swimming off with her pod."

Emilia shook her head with a chuckle. "There's no need. In order to know if it's a full mental copy being recreated or more like a hypnotic suggestion that you behave as you once did--or, even more intriguingly, if there is some link that is made at the time of channeling that caused Naomi to briefly transport across space and time to rejoin you in the temporary channeling--I only need to move on to phase two of my experiment."

Before either of you could ask what Emilia meant by 'phase two', she tapped the rod to you, pulling out two silhouettes. You'd been channeled into Tori twice, with two slightly varied shapes. Just as you realized what Emilia had planned, she chose the sexier Tori body you had just been channeled into, immediately transforming you into the sexy variant of Tori!

As Tori gasped at seeing you look just like her without looking in the mirror, Emilia upped the ante, using the staff to revert Tori to the precise same shape as well. You looked like identical twins, even dressed exactly the same. You and Tori stared at each other for some time in shock, before an even bigger shock struck you.

Pete? What's going on? The very familiar voice of Tori rang inside your head. Oh my gosh, is that... me? How can we be looking at me right now?

You held your forehead with an arm, and both you, the Tori in your mind, and the Tori across from you yelped in panic as you once again saw a Countercurse Bracelet enveloping your wrist when it came into your sight line. You pointed at the other Tori--she had one as well! Both of you turned to look at a smiling Emilia King.

"Now is when the fun begins," Emilia said. "Let's see just how different you two really are, shall we?"