Commissioned by  Mallardent

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A blue-feathered demon in the form of a duck considered the mug in his hands as he floated cross-legged off the empty cafe’s floor. His mortal friend, the wolf Karina, had taken such a liking to the creamy tan liquid within, and he wondered why. Finally, he shrugged, and gulped the stuff down. Its effects took hold at once as Felgar felt a surge of energy rush into him, and he flew through the wall behind him like a caffeine-fueled cannonball as ideas raced through his mind, leaving a Felgar-shaped hole in the side of the cafe.

The demon soon came to a halt near a small dock, looking around and immediately spotting someone. “You there!” A mouse anthro stopped and slowly turned around, away from the small boat that she was about to board, to see Felgar directly behind her, and he appeared to be shaking. In his high-pitched voice, he spoke very rapidly much like his wolf friend when she had taken in too much caffeine. “I have a riddle for you, if you dare to answer!”

The mouse looked Felgar in the eyes, which didn’t hide that she was slightly intimidated. “I accept your challenge,” she declared.

“I come once in a second, twice in a week, and once in a year. What am I?”

The mouse considered this, then shook her head. “I don’t know,” she admitted, putting her hands up defensively. “I really don’t know.”

“The answer is: I am the letter E!” Felgar reached out and snapped his fingers, then loudly clapped his hands together. The mouse girl started to flinch as Felgar reached towards her, only to freeze for a brief moment when the clap happened before her body collapsed into a compact metal wedge a little larger than her head, which was kept floating over the ground a little lower than Felgar himself. The demon reached out and started moving his fingers about as though typing something on the air itself, and a keyboard formed on the nearest face of the wedge in the standard QWERTY layout. Felgar wrought his hands next, causing all the internal mechanisms of a typewriter to form within the wedge, as well as a good amount of blank paper, and then he let the newly-made writing device gently float to the ground. He admired his work for a minute, then he snapped his fingers and flicked his wrist, sending it off to some museum where it would stay until the spell wore off, and then he flew off to find his next victim.

A news crew that was in the area continued its report on a building whose construction had to be halted due to a material quality problem. “The appropriate departments and agencies are conducting an investigation as to how a lower-quality steel than was ordered made its way to the construction site. We will bring you more updates on the story as it-” Felgar zipped behind the reporter at the speed of a caffeinated demon, and a sonic boom knocked everyone over half a second later.

The next person to enter Felgar’s crosshairs was a Tibetian fox who had just stepped off one of the buses that continuously ran through the city. He gave the fox a moment to notice the demon’s presence, and he turned as soon as he did. “Can I help you?” He asked testily, unaware of the nature of what he was facing.

“Yes, there’s a riddle I want you to solve!” This prompted a raised eyebrow from the fox. “I’m spotty and speedy, but don’t play cards with me. What am I?”

The fox answered immediately, “Oh, I got this! You’re a cheetah.”

“And you’d be correct!” Felgar initially thought of sparing anyone who guessed correctly, but now he changed his mind, at least somewhat. Reaching forward, the demon made a flicking gesture that turned the fox’s snout wider and shorter, leaving it with a feline shape. Realizing what was happening, the fox tried to turn and run, but Felgar snapped his fingers and he froze mid-stride. A pulling gesture lengthened the fox’s tail and thinned it out, turning the fur on it tan and covering it in black spots. This was followed with a pinching gesture that caused the fox’s increasingly feline figure to become slimmer, better suited for running at a high speed. Finally, Felgar gestured as though he were pulling two small objects out of the ground, changing the fox’s ears to the small, round ears of a cheetah. With his work finished, Felgar snapped again, and the newly-made cheetah bolted away, unaware of what had just happened, as no time had passed from his perspective while he was frozen.

The demon only needed to look slightly to the left to spot his next victim. A koala anthro had his back turned towards the duck, so he didn’t notice his approach. Felgar stopped just above his next mark, flipped upside down, and floated into his field of view, grinning like the Cheshire cat. The koala froze out of fright. “I come with a riddle,” Felgar began. “I hop with a skip and stand when I sit. What am I?” The koala stammered for a moment, managing to put his hands up as he racked his brains. “Too late, time’s up!” The demon declared just a few seconds after asking his question.

“Wait, hold on, hold on! I got-” Still upside-down, he snapped and pointed his fingers with both hands, aiming directly at his latest victim’s feet, which swelled into enormous three-toed paws. Prompted by Felgar spreading his hands apart, the koala’s body from the waist down expanded significantly as his legs and hips gained a large amount of muscle before the former obtained more bend at the knee, and a pulling gesture made his tail grow and swell behind him into something almost as long as the rest of his body. A few pops and cracks were heard as his torso lengthened and rounded due to the demon pointing one finger up to the sky and slowly raising it, which was followed by his arms and hands shrinking as Felgar brought his hands together and closed them rightly. His snout was the next to change as Felgar ran his hands down the length of his beak, pulling far out as his nose changed from almost circular to nearly rectangular due to , after which his eyes moved apart and his ears became deeper and stretched out when the demon pressed his fingertips against his cheeks and then moved them apart. The newly-turned kangaroo had no time to react before Felgar snapped his fingers and drew a line in the air with a finger pointed at the ground beneath his newest victim, and the scene around the former koala instantly changed to that of a large, well-made zoo enclosure. Felgar stopped his search for more mortals to abuse his powers on, the caffeine rush was beginning to wear off. He started to look around, surely there was some place that served coffee close by! He didn’t see any right away but- wait, why did he have to physically go to such a place, he was a reality-warping demon, he could do anything!


A few kilometers away, a snow leopard anthro set down his cup of coffee and opened his laptop, pressing the power button as he put the machine in his lap. Once the laptop was fully booted up, he reached over for the cup, and the very instant his fingertip touched the handle, the cup and its contents fell through a hole in space that suddenly appeared in the table, then closed once the cup had fallen all the way through. The cup came back not long after, but it was empty.


With Felgar fully reinvigorated, another sonic boom echoed through the town as he resumed his search. He spotted a few candidates here and there, but then he stopped as he noticed two humans coming towards him with defiance in their eyes, seeming oblivious to the danger they were walking into. He floated down to eye level with them, and smirked as they approached. “Your rampage ends now, demon!” one of them declared.

The other one raised their head slightly and spoke up. “Shoo! We damned it of you- shoo!”

Felgar’s smirk widened into a grin. “It’s only over when I say it is, now answer this riddle: We’re keys that can see, but no locks can we breach. What are we?” The duo kept approaching him and split up to flank him. “The first half of the answer: a donkey!” The demon said after a few seconds. A snap of his fingers and a point to the sky froze both of them in place. His eyes moved from one to the other for a moment, pondering to turn which of them into what, then he turned to the one that was on his right. He held up four fingers and then pointed toward the ground, forcing them onto all fours, and then he closed his hand, which forced the human’s digits to curl up, fuse, and blacken before their hands and feet into hooves. Right after that, while the other human watched in horror and unable to do anything, Felgar stretched one arm out and brushed it with the palm of the other, causing a tail to sprout from the transforming human’s tailbone, bearing dark brown fur with a darker tuft on the end, and the same brown fur quickly spread outward and covered the human’s body up to the nose and hooves.

The other human tried to say something as he watched his friend turning into an animal before him. The demon turned his attention away from the mostly-transformed human, and smirked. “I’ll give you this time to figure out the other half of the answer, if you can.” He looked back to the current mortal that he was working on. He pinched his beak with three fingers on one hand, then moved his hand outwards as if pulling, which pulled the part-donkey’s human nose and mouth into an equine muzzle, and a pinching and vertical pulling gesture made with both hands stretched his ears into those of a donkey. Finally, Felgar clapped his hands together and then pulled them apart with his hands spread, and the donkey’s body grew to the appropriate size as his neck and head stretched outwards and his torso rounded out.

The demon turned around, a casual flick of the wrist over his shoulder sending the donkey away to somewhere else. “Now, do you have your answer?”

“A monkey!” He blurted. “You’re talking about a monkey!”

“Right you are!” The human’s hopes that he would be spared were dashed an instant later. Felgar clapped his hands together and then pointed each at the corresponding foot, which changed the human’s feet to be more like hands. He repeated the hand-across-arm gesture from earlier, and the human sprouted dark gray fur all over his form except for his hands, feet, and face. With one hand, Felgar pointed a thumb towards the ground to shrink his current victim, while the other hand pointed right at his nose, which caused it to shrink into a small, almost triangular pink button while his mouth pushed out. Felgar grabbed the air and then moved that hand upward like pulling a plant out of the ground, giving his target a monkey tail, then moved both hands to touch a thumb to the spots on his head where his ears were, then flicked them upward, which caused the target’s ears to grow somewhat, completing his transformation into a monkey, which Felgar allowed to flee. “Don’t go stealing someone else’s body!” Felgar called after him, then he resumed his high-speed flight through the city.

An anteater anthro stepped out from a flower shop just as Felgar came around the corner and instantly spotted him. He slowed as he closed the distance, and his next riddle formed in his mind. “Hello, mortal, I-”

“Oh, go away, I don’t have time for this,” the anteater waved a hand dismissively. He turned away from the demon and proceeded to head somewhere else.

Felgar was suddenly floating in front of him, arms folded as he looked over the anteater. “Too bad,” he began. Answer me this: Don’t disturb me! I’m busy, can’t you see? My job is important, if nature’s to seed. What am I?” The anteater rolled her eyes and turned away again. “Time’s up! I’m a bumblebee!” He snapped his fingers then extended his index finger towards the anteater before flicking it upwards towards the sky, pulling him off the ground as he shrank to about the size of a dollar coin. Following this, Felgar pointed one finger towards the other, and then moved them around each other, which caused shirt but thick fuzz that alternated between black and yellow to appear around the shrunken anteater’s body in a spiraling pattern. Felgar paused for a moment when he noticed that several bystanders were now recording him and one was even trying to interfere, only for the latter to run into some invisible barrier. He smirked at one of the recording witnesses and went back to the task at hand, pointing to the ground with an index and middle finger, causing the anteater to form two thin, black legs from the bottom of his ribcage, while his arms and legs turned into more of the same, insectoid limbs. Felgar then traced a circle in the air with one of his feet, and thus the anteater’s skeleton disappeared and was instantly replaced with an external shell, and a flicking gesture made with both hands turned the anteater’s camera-type eyes into large, black compound eyes, which was followed up with a pinching gesture that compressed his body into a bean shape, and his tail almost completely retracted into him, what remained becoming a barbed stinger. Felgar then pointed towards the ground with both hands, then flicked those fingers towards the sky, and the anteater’s new bumblebee body was adorned with a pair of wings.

With another transformation out of the way, Felgar allowed the terrified anteater to fly off to somewhere else, then the demon himself did the same in a different direction. “Maybe just one more cup,” he decided as he looked over the town.


The snow leopard was making another attempt to get coffee, carefully looking around the kitchen as he placed his cup on the counter, then pulled the pot out of the coffeemaker. He scanned the room again as he poured some more of the dark brown, almost black, elixir, then added some creamer to it and gave it a few stirs with a metal spoon that had been sitting by the coffeemaker the whole time.
By the time the coffee creamer was back in the fridge, the cup had been moved a little to the right, rotated almost completely around, and it was empty.


The demon was shaking again. Directly beneath him, he noticed that one of the local filming studios was setting up something on an outdoor set. He opened a small dimensional window, one that would not have been observable from the other side, to look around and noticed that a number of the actors were going over their script one final time. He shifted the window and saw that it was the script for one of those game shows - a rigged one, obviously. He closed the window with a flick of the wrist, pivoted in the air, and dove towards the center of the stage.

Several actors and crew shouted in alarm, partially at the intrusion, but also because a number of them recognized the demon who had appeared on a game show - one of his own design - almost two years before. He looked around with a very wide grin. “Hello, mortals!” he spoke with an even higher pace as the riddle he intended to deliver and what would follow came together. Simply for the drama of it, he snapped his fingers and pointed toward the sky as he began, floating cross-legged above the ground. “One of me has three. Three more when my twin arrives. Together, we’ll change the world before your very eyes! What am I?” A few nervous looks were exchanged as some of the mortals backed away. Others simply froze. “My feet!” Felgar declared. His toes began to move about, channeling his powers throughout the stage as it started to change. A circular concrete wall sprouted up all around the demon and his captives, whose forms were becoming increasingly avian and barrel-chested as their mouths or muzzles turned into yellow beaks and their arms into flippers. With a motion like a downward kick, the demon prompted his captive’s fur to change into black and white feathers with yellow around the front of the neck, or for those feathers to sprout for those that had none. Following that, Felgar made a thumbs-down gesture that shrank everyone around him to their now-correct size, save a few who were shrunk down to half that height, simply because he could. Felgar moved upward, as did his captives, as a sheet of ice nearly a meter thick formed underneath them with the props and equipment either becoming a part of it or turning into a pool that ran around the perimeter of the rapidly-forming exhibit, while the latter’s feet had by now become black three-toed clawed feet on short but sturdy legs and their torsos subsumed almost all of their bodily length. The demon then pointed forwards and slightly upwards then moved that hand in a circle to create a plexiglass wall over the concrete wall’s inner perimeter, marked with evenly-spaced information placards about the Emperor penguins that the newly-created enclosure now held.

Felgar floated there, looking around and waiting for the shock to wear off, and when it did, he relished in the sound of dozens of panicked penguins and the sight of them running around as if willing themselves to wake up from a nightmare, but their situation was all too real. Some of them scrambled towards the walls attempting to look for a spot to climb out, only for Felgar to make another typing gesture, this time with his toes, changing some of the information on the placards to specifically mention the intelligence of the Emperor penguin, and all of the flightless birds instantly forgot the concept of escaping. “Farewell, fellow feathered beings!” Felgar bade as he floated upwards and then sped away.