This was originally a quick Livestream sketch for  xreklaw , but naturally I couldn't help myself. It was refined and colored, and I even developed a story as I worked on it.

The work is based on one of Reklaw's character ideas, seen in this piece, about his teleportation power and how it can sometimes go out of control.

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One rainy afternoon, a kimera and a masked unicorn were playing a video game. This part of the story is clichéd and uninteresting, so we're just going to skip right to the part where Cobalt asked Reklaw about the teleportation overflow problem he recently encountered.

"Rek, can you tell me more about that teleportation overflow problem you recently encountered?" Cobalt asked after they had tired of their generic multiplayer console game.

Rek sat back in the couch with a smirk. "That interests you? I am shocked."

Cobalt looked sheepishly out the window at the gloomy day. "Yeah...what was it like to have all of that burden? Did you really put up with it for months?"

"Sure did...it had something to do with the way my mind had changed. We both like long hair and all that," he said in an obvious way, gesturing with a wave of his hand to his floor-length hair and Cobalt's own knee-length locks. "So that helped me from being frustrated, but things just...seemed different to me then."

Cobalt listened with disturbing intensity. "Different how?"

Rek scratched the back of his neck. "It's hard to describe to someone who hasn't experienced it..." Then his eyes slid to the side as a thought occurred to him. "Why don't I give you a little demonstration?"

Cobalt's goat-like but pointy ears perked up. "Yeah, okay."

"Cool!" Rek hopped off the couch, his unicorn tail swaying playfully behind him. Without giving Cobalt another chance to speak, he pulled him off the couch and grasped his shoulders. He focused his magic energies into Cobalt, twisting his face in concentration.

Cobalt gulped, and began to think he had made a terrible mistake. But he didn't have much of an opportunity to dwell on that thought, as he suddenly felt his body dissolve into billions of fragments. The image of Reklaw disappeared and he experienced a numb floating sensation. This, too, happened suddenly and then was replaced by even more new feelings as his body recombined. He felt Rek building his body from scratch, using materials from the world around him to do so. But he used too much, as per the conditions of the original mishap. Cobalt could feel the energy mounting within him, ready to burst. Instead, the energy was redirected at the last instant, being pushed out of his body in all directions.

Cobalt's body responded by growing more of itself. His rear pushed back into a feral goat body, turning him into a goat-taur. His tail grew to three times its length, and from nearly every follicle on his body, hair grew out in droves. His goatee, kept relatively short these days, exploded from his chin, and the hair all along his jawline grew with it, creating a massive beard that would have melded seamlessly with his thickening hair had they not been different shades of blue-gray. His hair grew the most, spilling over his taur back and pooling on the ground in a massive pile. Even his horns grew bigger. They took on the appearance of an ibex, with tremendous arcs and thick ribs that would win any headbutting contest.

Now fully reintegrated, Cobalt shook off the daze of teleportation and looked around. He was in a village that seemed right out of a medieval fantasy. Huts and villagers lined the cobblestone streets. Horses pulled carriages of food and well-dressed passengers, while the poorer folk wore somewhat dirty rags and walked along the side of the streets and sold produce and bread from carts. Cobalt realized his taur body was about two heads taller than the average passer-by. People gawked and pointed at the strange new arrival.

Cobalt brushed thick locks of white hair out of his face and tried to straighten out the part of his beard that wasn't dragging on the ground. "Whe-e-ere...," he said with a gargly bleat in his voice. "Whe-e-ere a-a-am I?"

A "window," if you could call it that, opened in the air in front of Cobalt and Rek's head popped through.

"Heya, CK! Glad you made it."

"R...Rek?!"

"I sent you to a pocket dimension. Medieval times, with some magic. Good ol' D&D stuff. You'll love it. Enjoy the changes! I'll pull you out in a few weeks."

"A fe-e-ew we-e-e-eks?" Cobalt bleated, aghast.

"Time goes faster here. You'll only be gone five minutes in real time. Don't worry, everyone's really friendly. Well, most everyone. Just avoid the dragon." And with that, he closed the hole between universes, leaving Cobalt to fend for himself.

After Cobalt had gathered his wits about him, he explored the town as best he could. His size prevented him from entering any buildings and going down narrow streets, and he tried to avoid the dirtiest roads for fear his dragging hair would get messy. He quickly realized, though, that his hair seemed to stay perfectly clean, straight, and shiny no matter what it got dragged through.

The people were awed at his appearance in their hamlet, and while Cobalt expected a welcoming committee armed with pitchforks and torches, they instead greeted him with curiosity and kindness. They asked him all sorts of questions about what he was and where he had come from. Several girls braided his long hair and beard...it took them the entire evening. Meanwhile Cobalt ate and drank with the head of the village, learning about their way of life and watching their entertaining dances a short comedy play.

As the first week went by, Cobalt found himself growing tired of drawing out his sentences with so much bleating getting in the way. He compromised by reducing his speech to the most necessary of words, making it easier to get his point across at the cost of sounding less eloquent. His thoughts became simpler, as life in the hamlet was slow and required less complex thought. His body seemed to reject attempts at grooming. Cut hair regrew to its original length within seconds. Clothes felt intolerably hot and itchy, and his hair shrugged off even the tightest of braids after only a few hours.

In the second week, Cobalt decided to explore the wilderness beyond the village. His goat instincts for the wild country became too great to ignore. Seeing as communication with the people was growing tiresome and repetitive, he regretted being such a burden on their resources, and he had been sleeping outside in hay bales anyway, he bid farewell to the kind people and slowly trotted off, dragging thirty feet of hair with him.

The weeks passed, and Cobalt lost all interest in communication beyond bleating. He foraged daily, living off the land. He encountered no one else like him, and even the indigenous animals of the forests and grasslands rarely lingered near him. His mind became focused only on eating, sleeping, and exploring the countryside beyond the next hill.

Every day his hair and body grew. Every day his burden became heavier, but his muscles toughened to deal with it. The shaggy goat-taur was a comical sight, but even more bizarre than his appearance was the fact that he truly enjoyed his new body. The massive, powerful legs that somehow retained their goat agility. The proud fifty-foot mane of hair he sported may have slowed his pace to a crawl, but he loved the feeling of the pull on his follicles, and the way the wind whipped through it when a strong gust kicked up.

Finally, on a warm sunny morning, Cobalt relaxed in the shade of a tree, nibbling on an apple that he had knocked out of the branch with his tall horns. He had no thought of using his hands...he was in fact eating it off the ground where it fell. That's when he heard an almost-forgotten voice from a past mostly forgotten.

"Having a nice meal?" the voice snickered.

Cobalt looked up with uncomprehending eyes at the unicorn's face floating in mid-air. His body instinctively rose to its full height of fifteen feet (including the horns) to defend himself.

"Relax, Cobalt, I'm just here to remind you your time's up. Coming home in three...two...one!"

The world around Cobalt disappeared in an instant, and he felt the same odd feeling of being pulled apart and put back together. He reappeared in Rek's den on that same rainy day so many weeks before. His mind slowly pulled itself out of its feral state and he shook his much less-hairy head, trying to process everything he had experienced.

Rek put a strong hand on his shoulder. "Now you know," he said with a nod. "So...pizza?" He trotted off to the kitchen, presumably to find where he had left the delivery menu, leaving Cobalt to flop down into the couch and stroke his old seven-inch goatee, smirking as he pondered his extradimensional adventure.

END

Cobalt owned by me.
Reklaw owned by  xreklaw