Dammit.  It was so annoying and frustrating in almost every way possible.  The full moon overhead was beautiful but he barely had time to enjoy the beauty at the moment.  A nearly naked D was constantly attacking him with swinging fists and feet.  The only piece of clothing either of them wore for this little spar was practically underwear that vaguely reminded him of the cloth-wrap shorts men wore in the cursed villages.  Any time Marik's gaze or thought began to wander even slightly, D would suddenly get even more aggressive.  The only reason Marik hadn't been completely flattened several times over, he was sure, was that he had spent so much time learning to fight barehanded and D had not gotten truly serious.  

Mer, who was busy laughing almost nonstop, was standing off a little ways in her underwear, too.  She was a pretty attractive woman with all the right curves in the right places and her doing what was nearly a striptease right in Marik's vision almost as soon as the mostly naked sparring had begun was not helping with the frustrated feeling.  Every time Marik dared to try to go on the offensive, D would ease off only slightly but begin insulting him and his attacks.  D sighed, as if to say Marik was barely worth the attention, and kicked hard.  Marik flew a little and finally started to feel kind of pissed off as well.  He was absolutely sure they were both just making fun of him now.

As he started standing back up, he glanced once at the moon and remembered.  A long time ago he had been denied even the chance to raise a chorus to the moon while everyone else had.  Somehow that thought just pissed him off even more.  Just.  Fuck.  Everything.  He howled at the moon and started feeling a little different.  His body started to feel a little warmer and his senses started to feel a little sharper.  He could smell the scent of the light sweat coming from D, who was still a few steps away, and he could hear Mer's feet shifting around on the grass even through her laughter.  He locked his eyes on D and got ready to charge.  It almost felt like he had his old muscle enhancement spell going again, except with less of the prickly pain feeling.

As a rippling power spread through his body he made a leaping charge at D.  D snorted as if Marik were just a brat throwing a tantrum and threw out a leg to intercept Marik's charge with a kick.  Marik flew off to the side again.  As he stood once more he heard and felt a light creaking and cracking from his bones and thought he had broken his arm again.  The expected pain didn't come, though.  The feeling of warmth in his body was now becoming hotter and Marik looked down to see his hand was looking quite hairy and his arm that he thought might have broken seemed a little longer than he remembered.  He smiled a little as he realized what the rapidly growing heat more likely was.  As he looked back at D again, he stopped trying to hold the heat back and let it course through his entire body freely.

There was some pain here and there, sure, but nothing even rivaling much of the pain he had felt even in his own practice and experiments in the past.  He could feel various bones, muscles, sinews, and even some organs begin readjusting themselves.  As his transformation continued he could hear D whisper 'finally' under his breath.  D also began to transform and Marik got to see what a wolfkin transformation looked like at the same time as he was experiencing it.  Mer's laughter seemed to have finally stopped as she watched the spectacle unfold.  As both of the wolfkin finally finished transforming, they looked at each other.

D looked like a bipedal wolf for the most part.  His arms were now almost as long as his legs and ended in wicked looking claws.  His legs looked almost double jointed and slightly longer, but Marik could tell from his own body's transformation that it was closer to having his foot become part of his leg while standing on his toes.  The tail had definitely grown slightly longer and bushier, which made Marik wonder if the tail served some kind of purpose he hadn't yet understood as a passing thought.  The whole body was covered in fur and the head held only the slightest features in resemblance to the previous form while otherwise being a full on wolf's head.

"Ye dun good, lad," D practically seemed to chew through the words.  "Took a while, but ye got there.  Lez 'ave a good run, ya?  I ken guess that yer itchin' all over, and no fight gonna scratch that itch."

"That sounds fun, ya," came Mer's voice from the large black panther that trotted up.  "How 'bout I join ye, boys.  Give ye both some tail to chase."

Mer laughed and began bounding away.  Somehow she still looked sleek and quite beautiful in that form, with her muscles rippling under her fur coat as she ran and melted into the dark night.  Marik watched her for a little bit, holding back the urge to immediately chase.  There was some movement in the corner of his vision and he turned to see D crouching down and getting ready to chase after Mer.

"Ye better hurry, lad.  She's faster 'n she looks."

D started sprinting and eventually dropped down to run on all fours.  Marik finally just laughed for a second.  Most of the frustration and anger seemed to have melted away and he actually felt pretty good at the moment.  Giving up on trying to make total sense of the situation, he lunged after the other two.  He started running like he was normally used to but soon felt like he could go faster if he went to all fours like he had seen D do.  It was a surprisingly natural feeling to run using his arms as well as his legs and he could even feel how his tail helped him keep his balance and assist his movements.  He spent the rest of that night trying to catch up to the other two.  He never did catch all the way up but he did have fun running around and occasionally chasing a small critter here or there.

Apparently someone, somewhere, a long time ago had discovered that using the fur of one's transformed beast form for clothing allowed the clothing to transform with you.  There were, of course, several problems with this idea.  The first problem was that it took quite a bit of fur to make even the smallest amount of clothes since there's no way you could use every strand and the fur still had to be turned into thread or yarn or cloth before it could be turned into clothing.  The second problem followed the first in that it took a long time to turn the fur into usable material and then into clothing.  The last problem was in how much fur it took to do all of this.  Thus the tradition was born where a newly transformed member of the beast race was given one month to enjoy and learn their transformation before getting all but their tails and ears shaved.

Marik could understand now why the twins hadn't wanted to wait to show him their transformations.  He looked like a naked rat or something in his own transformation right now and would have been beyond ashamed to transform for who knew how long if he hadn't been practically alone most of every day.  Marik had also decided to finally get his hair cut and let the tailor they had hired, who specialized in making transformable beast clothing, take his cut hair to use for the clothing as well.  Some natural materials could be added to the clothing, or so he was told, as long as it fell within certain specifications and wasn't used too liberally.  His master had, with hardly a second thought. handed over some incredibly rare and valuable materials, such as arachne silk that had been magically enhance and alchemically treated, and paid an almost exorbitant sum of money to make sure that the tailor made the best and longest lasting clothing possible in a size large enough that Marik would be able to use as an adult.

When he had asked his master about it, his master had explained that the knowledge and insights Marik had been providing over the past few years were well worth all the things his master was providing for him.  Marik reluctantly accepted that after thinking about it and realizing that he would have probably felt worse if his master had just offered money instead, and this way felt more like he just had a rich parent who was engaging in a rare act of spoiling his child.  Unfortunately, since Marik's hair and fur were a raven black color, there was almost no way to add any visibly fancy designs or anything.  Marik was actually okay with that and, considering his probable future of being hunted by those who learned even the hints of his secrets, hoped it ended up looking relatively plain and normal.

Marik now spent several days at a time with D and Mer doing mercenary work but refrained from transforming during any of that which they completely understood, having gone through the same tradition when they were younger, and didn't tease Marik about it in any way.  While he was home, however, he spent most of his time transformed.  He wanted to be able to use his arcane arts as well as he could in one form as the other.  He also gave up on trying to make an arcanistry to improve his strength and speed.  His natural constitution of being from the cursed villages made him slightly weaker, slower, and with duller senses than the average member of the beast race in either form respectively.  However, his transformed state was still faster and stronger than the members of other races and he believed that his current arcanistries could help close the gap with the beast race.  He might not be able to hear quite as far or smell things quite as intensely as the more normal members of his race but after years of training with a blindfold he had managed to sharpen his hearing and sense of smell past what was typically considered normal within that range.

With there being one less arcanistry he felt the need to work on for now, he was able to focus more on the other two he had been researching.  Since both of them fell in the 'mind' category it allowed him to actually work on both at the same time.  The first one he obviously still needed was the mind defense for for a taking on a bunch of attacks at once and the other one he wanted was the arcane version of Rapid Thinking to accelerate his mind.  He started working on adapting Rapid Thinking first in the hopes that it would be able to help or even cover for his missing mental defenses as well as improve his combat capabilities by making time seem slower around him when needed, just like the old spell had done.  That all ended up being a failure.

He did manage to make an arcane version, so that part succeeded, but the arcanistry itself was so effective that it became useless.  His thought speed became so fast that it almost seemed as if the world had stopped for almost five minutes.  During that time he could barely even twitch much less make any movements and as soon as the effects ended he received such a massive headache that he was worried he might die.  After some minor adjustments to make sure it wasn't deadly and a lot of experiments, he found that the arcanistry essentially accelerated his thinking to the point where about a quarter of a second felt like four and a half minutes with the the load on the brain of having the mind accelerated to such an extent causing a severe backlash of pain that only reached the mind by the time the effects were over.  He couldn't think of any real use for it in the end.  Any situation where he could think of it being useful would either require amazing reflexes and timing or just wasn't worth the headache that came with it.  He had spent enough time working on it that he didn't want to just throw it away, however, so he fiddled with it a little more and managed to add a target designation to it, touch being the best he could manage, so that at the very least he might find a use for it by using it on someone else.

Deciding not to waste more time on what he essentially considered a failure, he finally remembered the outdated book Granny Fox had given to him.  Hoping that there might be a hint or clue there, he spent a solid week poring over everything in the old pages to the point where he even took a little time off from mercenary training.  After checking and rechecking everything that was explained there, he actually slammed his head against the wall until his master showed up with a worried look to check on him.  If he had bothered to remember the book and read it earlier, he could have done so much more.  The knowledge was outdated, sure, and these days refinements and advancements in both magic and sorcery techniques for countering or canceling the spells and sorceries of an opponent had definitely been made but since he couldn't use sorcery or magic then the base knowledge this book provided were more than enough.  He tried to get his master to cancel and counter some of his arcanistries almost immediately so that he could understand better how the backlash worked and felt.  After a few hours and many tries, his master finally brought to bear all of the knowledge and skills possible to both counter once and cancel once his taser arcanistry.  Both times were quite unpleasant.

In a new sense of excitement, Marik went to work with this new knowledge and started modifying his arcanistries by applying either a counter method or canceling technique to them.  It didn't work for all of his arcanistries and some of them felt too silly or redundant to even bother trying with.  Making a splash of water fall out of thin air or making someone think really quickly for a split second seemed like completely useless things to even try and counter mystical arts with.  His mind shield might have been more interesting if it had some kind of counter ability with it but he wanted to keep it as a pure, solid, nigh unbreakable defense like it was without messing with it and possibly making it slightly weaker.  His taser was already a quick use thing that was meant to incapacitate his enemies and if they were going to be incapacitated to the point where they couldn't use mystical art anyways then adding something that made it so that they couldn't use mystical arts felt incredibly redundant and silly.  His blur effect with the afterimages might have been a good candidate for having such an effect as a kind of mystical defense but after several attempts and no progress he assumed that either it would never work or that it was merely beyond his current capabilities.

Working a canceling effect into his claw arcanistry, however, seemed to produce some solid results.  The ability to tear through mystical defenses and attacks as long as they were active provided a whole new range of tactics.  He managed to push through a few difficulties to apply a weak canceling effect to his snap explosion as well so that even if it couldn't outright cancel or stop anything mystical, it would at least disrupt it some and likely give the user a good amount of extra discomfort.  The nicely added bonus of making his already natural ability to pierce through other mystical arts with arcane arts even better at piercing through meant his limited attacks would now be even more useful.  There was still the minor problem of his sensing abilities, however.  It was wonderful that he could now deal with more than a few mystical attacks and most if not all mystical defenses, assuming they were around the same strength at least, but being able to sense that there was anything mystical for him to use his new canceling abilities on was still an issue yet to be resolved.  Hopefully he could find a solution soon but for now he didn't even have a good hint about how to go about it.

His last and probably most complex arcanistry, which he had just kind of been thinking of as his mind blanket, was where he poured the most effort.  He tried a few things in a few different ways and finally managed to add a kind of counter to it.  Attacks that were too strong or too quick would probably be mostly unaffected still but that's what his mind shield was for anyways, so he wasn't too bothered by it.  A bunch of smaller attacks coming at him all at once or in rapid succession would be greatly affected, though, which was exactly what he needed most.  Whenever one of the little sections would shatter it would produce a kind of small burst cancel that would help clean up all the smaller attacks almost instantly.  The actual shattered pieces that before were kind of left to fade away were now adjusted to have a countering effect so that most of the smaller attacks that came after the burst cancel would be reflected, or at least deflected, as they hit the shards and give the shattered area time to regenerate.  There was obviously a cost for adjusting his mind blanket like this which made it weaker while also taking more of his concentration and soul's stamina to keep up all the time but Marik was happy enough with the results and figured he would just have to work at it like he always had until it became essentially a natural part of him.

He woke up the morning of his birthday feeling excited over his accomplishments this past year.  He couldn't help but smile at the thought of Granny Fox's face when she tested him and got a surprise counter from it.  He had even pooled together some extra thoughts and theories on some recognition inhibition ideas and mind sorcery techniques he had come up with just to make sure he could make a good trade for the full course test.  It wasn't until he was about to step through the portal that he realized he had forgotten to prepare a present for the twins.