(Serial Novel) Pinkerton’s Bestiary Log 9: Miscellaneous Shapeshifters

I believe I have covered all the major classes of shapeshifters that we typically deal with. The rest of the variants are comparatively harmless, unless of course you consider a man who can turn himself into a chair a threat. You’ll have shamans who dabble, turning into birds and such. Or perhaps there’s some cult who fancies turning into a cat. A few of them might fancy turning into walls, but a breathing bit of sheetrock is a giveaway. Then there are those poor fools who turn into flies, but that never works out well. This is not to say you won’t run into them, but these types are normally involved in reconnaissance, so they’ll be working for someone else, unless you have a stalker.

I dealt with a stalker once. The poor anti-social fool was in love—in lust would be more accurate—with a girl and went to a witch, who gave him a potion that turned him into a coat. He wanted to see the girl unclad, but she found the design of his coat unappealing, rather revolting really, and immediately took it out of her closet and tossed him into a charity bin. The man had to wait for the potion to wear off—unfortunately he’d drunk the whole thing instead of the recommended dosage and had to wait about a week—and found himself falling off a shelf, where it seems everyone frequenting the charity in question got to see him unclad.

It got much worse for the young man. Seeing as he was naked, he was carted off to jail, where the witch found him and demanded payment. Fortunately, this young man’s family was connected to the supernatural. (You’ll see that most of the people who find themselves in such situations are usually connected in some capacity with the supernatural. Victims of vampires and predatory monsters excluded, of course.) They’d worked with an associate of mine on another case, so I was brought in through him.

Now, in dealing with this sort of situation, the problem is two-fold. Number one: You must deal with the witch—or wizard or shaman or whatever title they’re using; it’s all the same, really. Number Two: You must deal with the link that has been created between the user and the witch. You see, if most people were to drink a potion, they’d find that the only thing they’ve discovered is the taste of toilet water. People must have a “hint of magic in them,” as the saying goes. The going theory is that they might have an antediluvian lineage, but this is speculation. Whatever the case may be, in order for the potion to work, one of two things must take place: either the subject must have their own battery, or the energy must be transferred. In the second scenario, this is done in two ways: either the energy is delivered into the potion with a specific subject in mind, or the witch, let’s say, will create a link with the subject. In my perverted stalker’s case, she’d done the latter.

Now, these links can be done in a variety of ways, either emotionally or physically. In my stalker’s case, he’d been given a curse mark, so it was easy to guess the issue. I won’t bore you with the details, but he took me to the witch. I confronted her. A brief spat ensued, and I broke her stuff. She did try to turn me into a frog. I suppose I should bring that up. So, here I’ll only say that in our line of business, we use what are called grounding spells, which are really a collection of runes. I’ve gotten mine from my wizard friend that I mentioned before. My vampire friend from the Order utilizes them as well, but he too must appeal to my wizard friend, and his situation is uncommon.

The Order has a policy of no witchcraft, which is fairly obvious, but this is where the situation gets dicey. The religious means will work nine times out of ten because most of these villains are utilizing the demonic, but every once in a while, we come across one of these clowns who has their own battery. In such cases, we need to use different methods because a human does have the ability to exert his or her own will into reality—to an extent, at least. In this case, we use runes. They’re not that dissimilar from the quilted patterns painted on buildings in certain regions of the American countryside. These patterns are supposedly a part of a folklore that says they can ward off spells. It’s the same idea—something about the shapes deflect or disperse the magic, but I won’t pretend to understand the details. The art is mostly lost because there are few such magical individuals, so the knowledge is relegated to the wizards. It’s one of the few times we interact with them, and once we have the runes, they’re not impossible to copy if one has an ounce of artistic talent, so technically they are not magical because they require no magic, but the Order still frowns on them because they interact with magic. This tension has created a bizarre policy where the Order will allow people in their orbit to utilize such methods, but they won’t create the runes themselves. It’s one of their charming little quirks. If you find yourself in need of such runes, you can try to find a wizard, but it might be easier to look for another hunter because they will likely have the runes and will know how to recreate them.

In my case, the runes kept me from turning into a toad and suffering a variety of mild diseases. I guess she wasn’t powerful enough to summon something more severe. And we were pretty much at a stalemate after I’d broken her things. Now, what to do in a situation like this? This woman had broken no laws, so far as I could tell, and how does one prosecute a man for becoming a coat? Furthermore, there was no demon to excise because the magical talents were her own. I decided that the young man being ogled instead of doing the ogling was punishment enough, but for her, I had to take more dramatic action. I basically knocked her out. I won’t get into how, but it was no small feat given that I require a cane, and when she woke up, she just so happened to have a new shiny tattoo on her back that just so happened to be a rune. I don’t know if such methods would work on a more experienced magical character, but she struck me as relatively new to the business. I also won’t get into how much money I had to pay to get someone to tattoo a woman against her will, but I did manage to sell the whole thing as a drunken prank, and I now require tattoo classes if you wish to join my employ. I’m sure she had the tattoo removed eventually, and normally, I wouldn’t have gone beyond a stern talking-to for minor offenses, but when attacking me, she did show a willingness and perhaps an eagerness to do harm, so I judged that seeing me unaffected by her charms and a painful object lesson, which could’ve been so much worse, would suffice to dissuade her from future mischief. The last I heard, she’d married the stalker.

I did have one other case, but it’s hardly worth mentioning because the moment I found the shapeshifter, he caved and gave me the location of the vampire I was looking for. He was basically a familiar the vampire had kept around because of his talent. There have also been a couple cases where I’ve had to deal with what we call a Mimic. This is a shapeshifter that pretends to be someone you know. This class of shifters is not as dangerous as people portray them. It turns out that pretending to be an individual is a lot easier when simply trying to trick a security camera or when passing someone by. But prolonged reconnaissance in another man’s form is quite a different matter. These types of shifters tend to give themselves away pretty fast. A body might look the same, but the muscles in the face are almost always changed. The posture has changed. The inflection of the original person’s words has changed. The shapeshifter may be wearing someone’s skin, but in my experience, they may as well be wearing another body for all the good it does them.

Once you encounter such impersonators, you’ll see what I mean. Should you suspect that a shapeshifter is wearing a friend, all you have to do is ask a personal question that the original man is bound to know but the impersonator will have no reference for. Now, sometimes the shapeshifter will have access to the original man’s mind, but they still need to know what to look for, so just be sure not to give the shifter any clues to the question’s answer. For myself, I think the best way to handle these creatures is to let them go on thinking that they’ve fooled you, then, after you’ve located the person they’ve been mimicking, I would spring a trap on them. Once you have them cornered, then you can find out who sent them, and that will probably wrap up your case.

As to how mimics are made, there are a few naturals, but most are drinking a potion or using a spell. However, many of these varieties are from the magical realm, and they use a variety of illusionary magics. Some hunters like to carry special glasses, or iron, or crystals to dispel the magic, but I myself have never found these to be necessary because the end result is always the same. The body language and the lack of intimate knowledge are enough to detect a fraud, and I’ve so rarely come across these entities that it seems adding glasses and crystals to my arsenal hardly seems necessary.

Shapeshifters think they are crafty, but a bird or bat flying in a perfectly straight direction, without either descending or ascending or turning, is a clue. Or perhaps a rat sitting perfectly still and looking at you is another clue. Basically, look for out-of-place human behavior, things that indicate intelligence, or don’t go where rats and bats frequent. As for the flies, the spiders will deal with them.