Day 15 of the 25 Days of TF-Mas (Contains girl to snowman tf)

Kat’s moratorium on distractions was short lived, at best. It was difficult to focus on one single thing when surrounded so thoroughly by desire and conflicting levels of energy. For a creature like Kat, such an enticing meal was irresistible. It was the entire reason for it coming to this city and taking the form of an adult human woman. Kat tossed and caught the shoddy tree topper it had made from an equally shallow girl. The guise with which Kat drew motivation for its manipulation of the human form came mostly from wishes. This time of year, wishes and desires were running rampant and provided plenty of fun and interesting prompts for the magical being. As part of this little game, it had been holding itself accountable and fulfilling each and every wish as best as it could. Every so often, though, it went out of its way to be a little vindictive. The furred boots that Kat wore crunched on the salted sidewalks down a residential street. Originally, Kat was heading for the home of Vanessa, the first wisher it had come across, and the catalyst for its current game. Kat brushed the long, dark hair it wore from its face, and mused over the past several days. It would be lying to say there wasn’t a sardonic pleasure for Kat in reducing foolish people into forms more fitting of their stature and usefulness, but as time went on during this little spree, it felt as though something were missing. Something to make things just a little more interesting.

“But big sis-!” A childish voice cried out, on the verge of breaking into tears. The sound wrenched Kat from its thoughts, and it paused to watch the altercation in the front yard across the street. The one yelling was a little girl, probably not older than five or six. She was bundled up in an absurd number of layers that left her arms incapable of being pressed down to her sides.

“You’re acting like I have a say in the matter,” The older girl standing over the girl retorted in an annoyed tone that indicated this back and forth had been going on for some time. “Feel it yourself, the snow isn’t packing, we can’t make a snowman.”

This direct method of bad news delivery broke the dam in the little girl’s eyes, and she wailed, “You’re so MEAN Chrissie!” she cried.

Christina, or Chrissie as her little sister referred to her, shook her head with her hands on her hips. Every single day her brat of a sister had been begging to make a snowman, and she supposed that was fair enough. The activity was fun and exciting for a kid, but it was really starting to grate on Christina the way she seemed unable to grasp the idea that it was physically impossible right now. Even still, she sympathized with the little girl. Here she was, outside with her big sister surrounded by snow, why should it make sense that it wasn’t the right kind of snow? She knelt by her sister, “Hey, now, tell you what, why don’t you go inside and take off your coat and we’ll come check on the snow later,” she offered. The little girl was still sniffling, but agreed and shuffled inside, very obviously disappointed. She sighed, “Trust me, kiddo, I wish I could give you a snowman… if for no other reason to get you off my back about it…” She muttered under her breath. She didn’t hate the girl by any means, but the kid was getting to that ultra-pestering age that timed perfectly with Christina’s age of coming into independence in the worst way.

Normally, this was where Kat would pop up from the periphery to offer an effective, but misleading solution to the problem at hand, but this time was a bit different. This time Kat felt different. No jovial face or devious double entendre. Kat simply marched towards Christina with increasing intensity. A chill shivered down Christina’s spine even before she realized Kat was approaching. When she eventually did, she nearly jumped out of her own skin.

“Good god! You scared the crap out of me,” Christina complained, turning fully to look the older woman over. She didn’t recognize her, but she looked like she’d fit in at a PTO meeting filled with disgruntled mothers about the subject matter of which books their kids were being allowed to read. “What do you want?” She asked pointedly.

The question rattled Kat more than it had any right to. What did it want? Want. Desire. It spent so much time focused on devouring the desires of others that it never really occurred to Kat to have its own desire beyond the base urges that drove it ever onward. This level of retrospection was something Kat did not appreciate. Angrily, the self-appointed wish granter retaliated without saying anything.

The cold chill returned, but then spread throughout Christina’s whole body, causing uncontrollable shivering. “Wh-wh-what-“ She stammered through chattering teeth. Kat stared on with an intense, angry look in its eyes that gripped Christina’s heart with fear. She suddenly had a feeling of kinship with the hopeless travelers and exploring scholars in the Eldritch Horror media she loved to consume. The thing before her – this being in the body of an average woman coated her so thoroughly in a miasma of mesmerized terror that she could not properly put to words the sensation, nor could she explain anything currently happening to her. Her skin prickled with the nerve-shocking pinpricks associated with a limb waking up from falling asleep. Christina was hugging herself tightly, feeling utterly insignificant before the anger of this… this woman! What was even happening? Her body was getting rigid, but also crumbling into nothing. Her voice cinched itself shut before the horror she felt. Her arms had gone numb. She dared not look away from Kat, whose expression had become one of smug self-satisfaction, as though it knew the terror going on in her mind and was happy to put her in her place. If she had looked, though, she would have seen her arms had turned a deathly pale white and then vanished into her torso. A torso which itself was beginning to bulge unnaturally. Her body began to form segments, one of her head, one of her torso, and one below the waist. Each segment shifted and became more and more bulbous. All Christina could feel was the biting cold and the overwhelming fear. Her sight had become tunnel visioned onto Kat. Her legs, already a frightening white color, collapsed a bit under her weight, growing wider to compensate for the loss in length. They bulged and grew into a round, cold mass of packed powder, supporting her orb of a torso, which in turn caught her head as it grew into a sphere that devoured her neck. Wide eyes were replaced by little pebbles, and her clothes had long since been consumed by her body’s growth. There was Christina, now a simplistic stack of three snowballs in ascending size from top to bottom.

Kat was about to turn away from the useless lumps Christina had become, but was caught by the little girl running outside, “Hey Chrissie! Where did…” She trailed off, caught by surprise when she saw the stranger lady. Her confusion was overrun by excitement when her eyes fell on Christina, “A snowman!” She cheered with utter delight. It was enough to make Kat laugh aloud. How completely blind humans could be.

"Why are you laughing lady? Who are you, what do you want?” The little girl demanded, feeling like the laughter was directed at her. To be fair, she was accurate in that assumption, however it was the wrong thing to say. Anger overtook Kat’s body again. It was inexplicable, really. It felt utterly irrational given the situation, but Kat’s hands were quivering with this rage. Kat lunged at the girl, whose yelp was silenced quickly. Her body molded like putty in Kat’s hands, and the magical being stretched her out from end to end before twisting and compacting her body into a vaguely conical shape with a twisted ridge to it. From a distance it wasn’t dissimilar in shape to a small, gnarled root or a slightly off carrot. With a shout, Kat drove the thing into where Christina’s face had been, punching it into the snowman to give it a nose. The force caused a bit of snow to slough off. Kat didn’t care. Breathing heavily now, Kat released its grip on the crude, almost abstract shape it had made of the girl and started to calm down.

The walk back to Vanessa’s home was spent in quiet contemplation for the mystical creature. It had never been overwhelmed by such a barbaric emotion before. Had it spent too long in a human body, or were the questions of who it was and what it wanted really that upsetting for Kat to contemplate? There was a lot for it to think about and consider. With the tree topper and its hands stuffed into its coat pockets, it trudged up to the door and opened it.

Elliott looked up. Having lost track of time, deep in her own thoughts, she now found herself face to face with a rather surprised looking Kat. The two stared at one another for a while, as though the silence between them were some kind of barrier preventing all other actions. It was Kat who broke the silence first.

“What do you want?”