Story #171: Brown Magic and Its Power

Story #171: Brown Magic and Its Power (Part 2 to 'Curse of the Poobrain') (Content Tags: Messy diapers, magic, light scat and general ickiness, humiliation, bullying, bully victim, fantasy setting, ongoing story) Robin had buried the loaded diaper in the dirt out in those woods. While he felt invigorated by the thought of destroying his bully so utterly, he was also filled with a guilty shame that had persisted throughout the entirety of the ritual. Not guilt or shame for some misguided notion of sympathy for the devil, but for the type of magic that he'd had to use to do it. When he'd been covering the soiled garment up with a less personal soil, he'd been forced to look more closely at the arrays he'd etched with the muck that he'd made. Every spell was like a fingerprint, and every array or rune could be identified like authenticating a signature on an autograph. He couldn't simply destroy the diaper, as he had learned from the instructions of the curse. The conduit of the curse had to stay in relatively good condition until the curse had run its course, lest their be the risk of a rebound. If there was any spell or curse that he didn't want to discover what a 'rebound' looked like for, then it was this one. For the types of vile magicians who would utilize poo-magic in the first place, who could cast a curse like this, it would've been no struggle to keep their conduit of caca in tip-top shape. For someone like Robin, who wanted nothing to connect him to this deed at any cost, he had to hide it like how a lich hid his phylactery. He obviously couldn't bring it back to the academy to hide in his dorm until this was all over. So he had to bury it, with a protective charm to keep it safe, and a nearby marker to remind him exactly where it was. While it worried him to leave evidence behind like this, he reassured himself that nobody would come looking to dig around the woods for something they didn't know they were looking for. Piero was left without a clue as to what horrible thing had been done against him; the curse wasn't instantaneous by any measure, at least not at the level that Robin was casting it, so it would take a couple of days for it all to come to a beautiful fruition. Whenever Robin had successfully completed his ritual, the only immediate effect was that Piero had farted too hard and sharted in his briefs. A shart was embarrassing, but hardly the end of the world. Minor cleanup, undies into the laundry, and Piero could get on with his day. Right? Wrong. Oh so wrong. He left stains in his undies three more times before it was even time for dinner. It was as if his sphincter was on a hair-trigger and his bowels were deceiving him by making it feel like only gas wanted to come on out. Piero stupidly chalked it up to a stomach bug or a food allergy, but he had no other symptoms to speak of, at least not yet. The haughty boy had proudly graced the 'rich kid' table with his presence for dinner, and as was their right, they were served the best that the academy had to offer. A perk of being born with the right last name; one that Robin had never known, as his own surname was irrelevant to magical history. For kids like Robin, who were here more on merit than on legacy, the food was a little less bougie. Not that Piero would get a chance to really enjoy his meal in peace. He'd been cutting into his steak and discussing the upcoming promotions with his fellow socialites; an average topic for those who were so confident that they'd be reaching the next level in their studies. Much like Piero, these were the kids that looked to rig a system that prided itself in being honest. They used a similar mechanism to cheat the game, though not as specifically and extensively as Piero had. No, these kids wouldn't dare intentionally put themselves up against someone of actual talent like Robin, but they also didn't have that extra connection that made Piero so confident. These kids would instead be bribing just the right people to make sure that they were pitted against students who didn't stand a chance against them; it was like the opposite of calling in a ringer. They didn't have a family friend on the committee that could go as far to put a thumb on the scale during the actual promotion evaluation. While they had their vapid discussion, with Piero outlining his plan more fully, there would be another little accident. Or perhaps, it would really be something a little bit bigger; something a little more consequential than a haphazard shart. "Why? He's a nobody that tries to act like a somebody. His family is probably just a bunch of dung farmers or something and the academy just plops him down here with the rest of us!" If there was any honesty to be had at that who's-who table of nepotism babies, then someone would have brought up the fact that Robin was genuinely very talented for his meager background and that he'd never acted with anything more than humility. Whatever aspersions spurting out of Piero's mouth were more indicative of his own feelings of inadequacy, rather than anything resembling the boy he despised so unnecessarily. "He's got stricter guidelines, since his tuition was waived by the school. I bet I could get him expelled for losing the promotion." Piero cackled. Snobbish chortles led into a quaking gut, and before Piero knew what had hit him, he was befouling himself at the dinner table. His raucous laughter could hide the sounds of his release, but no noise in the world would veil the smell that would almost immediately follow. This hadn't been another small slippage; this was a full-sized pantload, as if he'd just sat on the toilet and let loose. Piero promptly excused himself from the table with lies of needing to finish an assignment and his little chums had been none the wiser. In fact, the only one who seemed to understand was the boy that had caused it in the first place. Sitting at a table near the exit, enjoying his own meal while he studied, he'd turned his eye to see Piero making a hasty, awkward retreat. Dining in more casual attire, rather than the robes that they attended their classes in, it'd been a little harder for Piero to hide. Robin could *see* the lump, though just barely. It was almost imperceptible to the naked eye, but Robin felt as though he'd been able to catch it pretty quickly. Was it because he had been expecting something like that to happen? Or had there been alterations to his insight, due to the dangerous forces he'd used his will to direct? That was the kind of question that Robin hadn't asked himself yet. He'd considered greatly the social consequences, and he'd appraised the active risks of casting from the tome he found, but he hadn't thought much about what may passively come to haunt him. To use great magic, a spellcaster had to use just a wisp of their soul to give life to the power they hoped to wield; if one were to learn more advanced theories of magic, such as what Robin would learn at a higher grade, then there would be the realization that without the proper training, their own 'kiln of creation' could be corrupted by the figurative backwash of the magic they used. Like a controlled floodgate that was supposed to only let things out, but without that control, then things could seep in. Piero wouldn't be the only person who started to see changes in their life. Robin didn't know it yet, but the cost of his curse might end up higher than he could have imagined. Whenever Piero returned to his dormitory, he'd had to carefully strip himself to survey the damage he'd dealt to his undergarments. His briefs weren't just stained like earlier, they were positively devastated by the mudslide they'd endured. The brown stain started from the middle and grew exponentially as it veered downward, but even above that starting point was a brown bloom. It was more a blow to his ego than what had happened prior in the day. Standing in front of the ornate mirror that captured his whole form, he was able to look at himself and be ashamed of what besmirching he'd inflicted on his family name. In that moment, with his underpants barely containing his foul droppings and his bottom lip starting to quiver, he looked every bit the little boy that he actually was. Not a hotshot upstart with a divinely ordained destiny, not the next in a long lineage of legendary men that bore his family's crest, and not even just a talented student who was worthy of praise. A little boy. One with poop-caked underoos and eyes on the verge of childish tears. Piero had to ask himself why this was happening to him, now when he was so close to showing his greatness. Now when he was on the cusp of proving his superiority over the worthless urchin who'd had the gall to get higher test scores than him. This wasn't something that a Pasqualino was meant to endure. He did seek out help; he beckoned a magician who specialized in ailments of the body and another who could identify possible curses, hexes, jinxes, and the sort of targeted spellcraft that could be utilized against him. Piero didn't believe it could be his own fault that these accidents were happening; there had to be an explanation that placed the blame elsewhere! There was, but his helping hands weren't able to find it. The medical mage gave a clean bill of health and the curse expert was left shrugging his shoulders as he came up with nothing out of the ordinary. As it would turn out, that expert had knowledge in all forms of traditional and untraditional magic, but not in the one he needed to be looking for; the kind that came from the workings of a brown mage. The most that could be done for Piero was a 'strengthening' spell cast on his gut, to allegedly enhance the boy's sense of control and to make accidents 'impossible'. It sounded like a great guarantee, did it not? Piero pooped the bed. He woke up to a softball sized lump in the back of his briefs. With his room smelling of dung and shame. As soon as he acknowledged what he'd done, and once he'd had time to clean himself up and throw away the soiled underpants, he made another summons to get his medical mage back up there. The mage was baffled. He was a long trained white mage, a diviner of health, and his 'impenetrable' spell had fallen flat. Unable to take the brunt of the spoiled brat's angry tirade, he offered to try something a little more extreme to act as a temporary stopgap. The idea he had was to completely halt the ability for the boy's bowels to evacuate. In rough terms, it was as if he was opening the code to them and disabling evacuation as a possible prompt. Piero was fine with the idea, though he accurately questioned the health risks of essentially constipating himself; with a professional smile, the magician grinned and gave his client a 'password' that would allow him to go again. That way, Piero could choose when to go find a toilet, and then a mere string of words would be the only thing standing between him and needed relief. Effectively, it was a cure for incontinence. What Piero still didn't know was that the curse afflicting him was beyond whatever defensive measures he could muster. It'd taken the most shameful form of magic to cast, and it could only hope to be defeated by that same type of magic. It couldn't even be identified by someone ignorant to the 'intricacies' of that school of magic, let alone defeated. Oblivious to any of that, Piero would get dressed and head into his classes as if it was any other day. He was confident that his problem had been deftly handled, and so he was instead focusing on returning to the things that mattered most. While he knew that his promotion was promised, that didn't mean he didn't want to show his competitor up; without the stress of possible failure, he could focus on being as flashy and impressive as he knew he could be. The first class of the day was on 'array construction', which was also a course that introduced various other concepts on runes, glyphs, sigils, and any other physical scripting component to a spell. It was a core class, and not the most interesting, but unquestionably fundamental. It was also one of the classes that Robin fared much better in than Piero. It took a certain artistic touch to create physical scripting, and that was an area where Piero lagged behind his peers, while Robin had a particular knack for the craft. So it made sense why Piero was nonplussed to be there, when it was a rare class that showed his faults, but Robin should have been chipper and attentive for something he excelled so greatly in. But he wasn't; Robin was feeling a little strange to be in there. The thoughts of how he had most recently put his talents to work had tugged at him; guilt and shame returned to him, as he wondered what the other kids in here would think if they knew the kind of 'physical scripting' his icky fingers had willingly etched onto a diaper yesterday. Worse than how he worried about how his peers would perceive him, was that he'd been thinking a lot about the script-work that was recorded in the padded tome he'd used. He'd been more disgusted than curious at first, but the two feelings had been slowly switching places since he actually cast that curse upon Piero. The forbidden spellbook, a maddening foray into the mind of the self-proclaimed 'poobrain', which was touted as the 'perfect form' in its writings, had been beating on all the doors in his brain. Very simple arrays and glyphs, that actually held more impressive complexity than anything he'd ever seen; it was as beautiful as it was repulsive. As fascinating of a read as it was, he'd been blocking himself from flipping too many pages. Besides being a little hard to fully comprehend, he was afraid of his own growing interest; to even be caught with such a grimoire would lead to swift discipline, but to be caught *studying* it? Nothing would kill his fast track to the future faster than to be known as someone who studied, or worse, practiced that kind of stuff. His only valid compulsion to keep the book was to insure that he could solve any problems with the curse, if they so showed up. Once Piero had fully transformed, and there were no negative effects to Robin to be seen, then he could burn the diaper-bound tome for good. A little later in the day, the pair would find that they were being partnered up in their 'Intro to Alchemy' class. It was just by happenstance, but Robin thought it to be a fateful sign, as if the cosmos was giving him a thumbs-up for what he'd done. Piero was as haughty and disagreeable as ever, but Robin was too pleased today to be burdened by it. Forced to work together, things grew more silent as they weighed ingredients on the scales. Much like in his earlier class, Robin felt a flash of memories from the alchemy he'd used the day before. That legendary laxative he'd brewed to fill his 'cauldron of power' that had been taped around his waist. It was another subject he was fantastic in, but he'd used that talent to demean himself. "Just a few more days." Piero suddenly spoke up, looking over at Robin with a grin. He was speaking of the promotion evaluation of course, and blatantly referring to the fact that he already knew Robin would be his competition, when nobody was supposed to know until the evaluation had started. The same competition that Robin had been told was being rigged. "Yup. Should be a pretty easy promotion." Robin replied with a small smile of his own. "Uh, yeah. For me. You remember what I said, don't you? You probably shouldn't even bother showing up." Robin poured a pink solution into the Erlenmeyer flask and watched as it bubbled, "You shouldn't rely on cheating so much. Sometimes that's not enough." Before Piero could scoff at that naive idealism, he'd felt something happening down below. It was a bubbling, just like in the flask, but it was in the depths of his bowels, and it was growing in pressure rapidly. Piero didn't think it could mean anything, since his ability to go number two had been seemingly disabled completely, but then it got stronger and stronger and-- **BBBRRRAAAAPPP! PHBBBTT!** In an explosive exit, though a suspiciously muffled one, a cannonball had been fired square into the seat of his briefs. Large, dense, and smoldering. Only, it hadn't hit his briefs. He no longer had briefs. At some point when he'd started to fart, his underpants had transformed into something else altogether; the undergarments had thickened, expanded, and shifted. His briefs were a diaper now. A thick one too, and a thick one that'd just been strongly soiled while in front of the student he'd just been mocking. Piero didn't know he was wearing a diaper yet, helped by the shock of dropping a huge dung-pie, but he did know he should be embarrassed anyways. The robe hid the giant lump he knew he must have just made, but it wouldn't shield the odor. Just like at the dinner table last night, he needed to make an exit. Meanwhile, Robin didn't need to see a lump. He could immediately tell that Piero was diapered and that he'd just messed himself; the many sounds of it happening had become extremely sharp in his ear. He could differentiate the sounds of a dump hitting undies versus a diaper, and could even calculate how large of a pantload it must be; he had no idea where this sudden burst of insight had come from, but he just *knew*. Robin *knew* Piero was on the right track to becoming a poobrain, and soon, Piero would know it too.