Finishing what has been started....

But what we do ‘bout them?" Fre' asks, pointing a hairy finger at the still slumbering evil Amazons and their queen.

"What about our old forms?" Centauress Fred asks, "My own mother wouldn't recognize me like this!"

Several of the Freds and Belbozes echo that question.

"What are we to do about this?" ghostly Belboz asks, pointing at the amber jewel recovered from Elaine's body (right before they'd burned it....no need for his ghost to come back), "I do remember being told that with the destruction of the Slipgates, all Crystallics that make their way here have a tendency of being snatched up and deactivated by the Rules and Agents of yours."

"Huh?" the newcomers asks, perplexed.

After explaining what a Crystallic is (a powerful magical artifact able to amplify spells, transform people at the most basic level, and teleport people to any point on Terra Prime) and what a Slipgate is (a magical mass transport system able to transport people to various points on the globe....and to other worlds, even), the newcomers looked....excited.

"Well, returning to your old forms should give you back lost powers and abilities," ghostly Belboz thinks aloud, remembering his studies of the scarce surviving records and notes, "But it'd be harder to instill those olden abilities in the new forms of yours.....I would need months of research before I even attempted it with that Crystallic."

Powerful artifact or not....I'm not going to risk your lives with such a risky operation, the ghostly necromancer finishes to himself.

"That's it!" Amazonian Belboz smiles, "we just use it to return to normal before these Rules come and....."

She then falters, smile fading......

The other newcomers also are no longer smiling.

"I....don't feel like returning to my old form," Centauress Fred says, awed. "The thought of returning to being a male....and two legged is.....not very appealing. I mean I....like how I look and.....the power of this body!"

The others say similar things about the new bodies they find themselves in. That is, all but the nymph that was named Belboz.

"While I agree with you up to a point," she says, gesturing at her body, "and while I..... really seem to like this body I now wear, I don't like the short leash it comes with! But.....why should I, born a man, feel like being a lovely woman is what I should be now!?"

Ghostly Belboz just looks at his nymphly analog, open mouthed in amazement.

"You don't know?" Jack asks, amazed as well. "Even I learned about that in preschool."

Jack, before Fre' can even think to admonish Jack for bad manners (an unlikely possibility since Ogres aren't noted for good manners), the boy explained that a Matrix was the very thing that was one of many things. It determined one's ultimate shape...and also due to being something as a translator between the physical world and the para-physical world of the soul also determined....in a way....how a person acted and reacted to the environment around them.

"So....basically, since you are now females and haven't gone insane," Anina concluded for the precocious child, "you now act and react as if you'd been born thus. You are still you....."

"....but you now react and act like the new species you are....albeit with human quirks for those no longer human." a calm but somehow chillingly powerful male voice.

The others turn and see that a Rule had arrived.

1. "But please, finish your business here before I take the Crystallic," Rule 1 continues, being polite, "I know that Anina and a few others have things that they actually do want to do with it.... to certain evil ones."

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