Instant Hero Potion

Part 2

Trent, one of the old and scarred higher supervisors of the Grand Vault Library had quite the dilemma on his hands. One of his underlings had undergone a physical transformation and in their panic made a run for it. It wasn't unusual in the library's absurdly long history, but it wasn't all that common for the person to actually get clear of the walls. Loreane's clothes had been found here and there about the place, torn to shreds. At first he thought that maybe something had crawled out of the lower depths and gotten her, but a quick investigation showed that wasn't the case.
Right now he and a few other workers of the library were reviewing a crystal ball, replaying the events spied by one of the Watching Gems installed in the ceiling. There was some clearing of throats as they got to the part where the tall and absurdly curvy dark mage pushed herself on Loreane and the elf onto her own desk.
"We should...ah...speed through this..."
"Leave it," Trent grunted and everyone looked at him with some disgust. Let them think what they want, he wasn't really perving, he was just delaying the response as long as he could. Well, not entirely perving...
After she chased off the beautiful mage Loreane collapsed to her desk and reached over to her tea set. She missed the cup she had and accidentally grabbed a potion bottle of sickly green. Then she downed it. It was a clear accident, and the start of her growing transformation clearly scared the young woman. He thought a situation like this really deserved some leniency, maybe there was a way to reverse the potion, they couldn't be sure without some study.
"Paragraph four of section three," the spindly little ancient janitor behind him said.
"I don't have that code memorized, but I assume that's the section on using any transformative item or potion taken into the library's custody right? The one that says it's punishable by death?"
"Only death."
Trent scowled, fortunately his twisted, marred face made it hard to tell as he thought things over. He could not do anything like call off the hunt on this sort of thing. Administrators that deviated too much from the library's rules, the origins of which were strangely a complete mystery, had a really bad tendency to suffer fates worse than death. He liked Loreane and appreciated that she did very good work, but he just couldn't bring himself to face that for her. He couldn't even really throw any major wrenches into the operation. He would have to send someone out to track Loreane down, but he could undermine them just a little. The snooping dark mages and threat of missing artifacts would be enough of an excuse to short the search team a little manpower and the library never had very much to begin with. The turnover rate was unmatched. He couldn't outright save Loreane, but he might be able to give her a slight chance.

***

In her haste to gather a few items that might increase her odds of survival and flee the library Loreane had left a secret passage open. Throughout the hallway the shadows shifted unnaturally. Only a little at first, bending a little or casting in a slightly wrong direction. Then they started to elongate and grow in size, eventually converging on one point. Detaching from the items that cast them the shadows swirled about in a circle with flickers of purple until they congregated into a new shape, one of an extremely tall and exceedingly voluptuous woman. The shadowy, unsteady image of a woman walked down the hall and little points of purple light stood in for her eyes that shifted around as if to scan the hall.
Trinkets and scrolls she had not seen in any of her trips to the library in the flesh greeted Estella through the dim tunnel-vision her spell granted her shadow avatar. She had left a little rune of magic on the back of the elf's shirt just before the little librarian had so rudely refused her advances. Saying 'no' was one thing, but drawing an anti-magic knife was a bit much. She had expected for her shadow self to appear right behind that librarian elf, but they were nowhere to be seen. There were a few shreds of what might have been her clothes. Perhaps she'd had an unfortunate encounter with that explosive spell sitting on her desk? Estella's magical senses were strong enough that she could generally tell the purpose of a particular potion just by being in its general vicinity. The fate of the little bookworm wasn't a concern though and Estella started directing her shadowy projection to look for something a little more interesting in this hidden hallway. She had just caught sight of a display filled with all manner of seemingly unsorted things when suddenly a janitor turned the corner.
They had been moping the floor or whatever it is people of such a position do when they turned the corner. It looked like they spotted her shadowy projection, but this person didn't so much as flinch or blink in surprise. Estella felt some disbelief as she saw them sigh, turn to their cart and start going through their vials, bottles and bags. Estella started to direct her shadow projection past them to investigate the display when the janitor turned around with a bag and blew some sort of dust at her.