Thud

Utanith stirred a little.

Thud

The dragon stirred again.

Thud

Utanith blinked blearily as he opened his eyes. He brought a forepaw to his temple, the pounding headache having roused him from sleep. When did I fall asleep?... The thought hang heavy on his mind; he couldn't remember much about the recent past, namely where he was, how he got there, and what he was doing before he woke up. He looked around the room as his vision came into focus, trying to glean from his surroundings what exactly he had been doing; the completely blank walls, however, offered no clues. As he continued to regain consciousness a wave of nausea hit him; he vomited. Dragging himself to his feet (He had four, at the moment - Knowing his current form had long since become an instinctual sort of thing.), Utanith made a second attempt at discerning what exactly was going on: Another look around the room revealed a single door, a sort of metal roll-up affair. A vent was located on the ceiling, too small for Utanith to fit into at the moment. A speaker, or what appeared to be a speaker, was set into the wall; Utanith idly wondered if it was just a speaker, but didn't pursue the thought. Aside from those, the room was empty.

The lack of features in the room bothered Utanith. He certainly didn't own any buildings with rooms like this, and he didn't know anyone that did. A variety of names passed through his head that might, but none seemed particularly likely. He peered at the door, checking to see if it had any sort of opening device, but it appeared to be designed to only open from one side. Indeed, no matter what sort of force he applied the door wouldn't budge. It was a troubling situation, and Utanith considered his options: He didn't have anything with him, and his mouth was void of the gram of gold he kept for just such an occaision. Either he had already used it, or it had been removed or fell out when he was unconscious; his predicament suggested it had been removed, which was an alarming notion. It was unlikely that someone who didn't want him shapeshifting had friendly intentions.

The speaker crackled as someone spoke, presumably into a low-quality microphone; Utanith tried to recognize the voice, but it didn't sound like a voice he knew. "Utanith Kesilai, shapeshifter number 980-984-780. You are being detained by the Society of Peoples Against Shapeshifting." The dragon snorted. Great, I'm a number in someone's book and they want me dead for no good reason. Utanith had heard of the group before; he didn't, however, realize that they were in the business of kidnapping. The voice continued: "We are very much what it says on the tin - We believe that shapeshifters are a danger to society." Utanith shifted uneasily, his mind dominated by visions of his own death. "Luckily for you," the speaker seemed to pour every ounce of his disgust into the word 'you', "we're not in the killing business. However, we can't just let your kind wander around willy-nilly. We've designed a device - Which you might have noticed we already put on you - That should take care of the problem nicely." Utanith looked over his body, decidedly alarmed; amongst the other things he had woken up to, the collar that was now resting at the base of his neck had gone completely unnoticed. The speaker crackled again as the voice spoke, "That collar will keep you from shapeshifting. Not only is it a solid piece of titanium-alloy, our enchanters have added some special properties to." There was a pause before the voice continued. "You'll find it rather difficult, impossible really, to shapeshift with it on; destroying it should be nigh impossible without risking your life in the process." The voice chuckled. "If I were you, I wouldn't even try. Now, all we wanted to do here was give you the run-down; much as we have a problem with you, we want to deal with it peacefully. We're going to sedate you and return you to your home, now." In actuality, the room had already been filling with gas; Utanith could already feel his head swimming. A very short while later he had collapsed under his own weight, and finally drifted into unconsciousness. A solid thunk was the last thing he heard.

Utanith awoke. He found himself back in his own home - There was no headache, and everything seemed to be in its proper place. He remembered quite vividly what had transpired; a quick look in the mirror confirmed that the collar was indeed still present. What he hadn't realized was that his name - and presumably the number they had identified him with - were engraved on the collar. A groan of displeasure filled the room. "Damn...Could they really have done that?...Does it really work?" Utanith pondered the thought, concluding that it might not actually work, and that he might still be able to shift. With that, he sped to his stash of reagents: Thousands of gold ingots, each weighing exactly one gram. One gram of gold was all he needed to shift; he snaked his tongue out to snatch one, rolling it under his tongue and focusing on the shift. He aimed for a fox, readying himself for the transition to a biped. A long moment passed; the gold ingot remained under his tongue, and he was decidedly still a dragon. "Then...It's true..." He didn't quite know what to do with himself; he spent some time still trying, hoping that maybe it would, but after an hour he finally gave up. The air had become heavy and his limbs tired, and he didn't want to do anything but sleep, so he returned to his bed and curled up, hoping he might just wake up from a terrible nightmare.

---

After some time Utanith managed to bring himself to figure out the collar that had been so maliciously placed upon him. Obviously the enchanters at the Society of Peoples Against Shapeshifting had foreseen this; there would be all kinds of things put into it to prevent it being removed, but Utanith knew better. Not all posibilities could be accounted for - Somewhere there was a chink the enchantment that he could take advantage of, he just needed to find it. So, he began looking. To the uninitiated, it might have appeared like Utanith was just sitting there with his eyes closed - In actuality, he was feeling out the magic that had been placed on the collar. Over the course of several minutes the dragon's brow grew more and more furrowed, discarding a possibility with each passing moment. The enchantment was like a fine mesh, weaved around the collar and, to Utanith's surprise, himself as well. He had figured that they would have only enchanted the collar - Why even have the collar if they were just going to enchant him? It didn't jive; there was something to be found there, and he was determined to find it.

Utanith spent several hours examining the enchantments. He managed to discover a variety of things: The enchantment was very strong, the product of perhaps a dozen enchanters working together; the enchantment enveloped himself and the collar; removing the collar would, much as he had been warned, kill him. There were a lot of other little things in the enchantment, but the important things were that Utanith was not going to be able to break the enchantment, and that there was a sort of hidden catch. Whether or not the catch was intentional the dragon couldn't tell, but it was there, waiting for him to take advantage of it: Under a very specific set of circumstances the enchantment could be made to allow shapeshifting. So, he set about preparing - He retrieved his energy sink (Into which he had been putting energy for quite some time - He thanked his past self for having some foresight), a piece of chalk, and one of his less aesthetically pleasing gemstones. As an afterthought, he brought 3 of the one gram gold ingots so that he could test the fruits of his labor.

Utanith set down the piece of chalk, which was now significantly smaller than it had been when he first picked it up. His curves weren't as smooth as he'd have liked, but he figured they were good enough - They weren't getting any smoother without some opposable thumbs, anyways. With a grunt he moved the energy sink to it's designated location - A chalk square that it fit into with room to spare. He had already put the gem in its spot, having decided to do so in the process of drawing the chalk pattern (He had only done so after debating with himself for a couple of minutes - The argument that it was easy to draw around and that it was one less thing to worry about later had won out). He took his position within the pattern, placing his forepaws on the energy sink, and concentrated. His goal was to remove just one of the many inter-woven enchantments, and quite a few things needed to happen in a specific order and at specific times for it to work. Failure, the dragon was sure, would mean death. So he focused, possibly harder than he ever had before, on the task at hand. He provoked the enchantment he wanted to remove by trying to shapeshift; in his minds eye he passed a hook under a thread and pulled it slightly loose. Other enchantments began reacting to his interference - In turn he put a short burst of energy into those enchantments, leaving them to disperse the energy while he removed the enchantment he was concerned with. That enchantment gone, the work was halfway done - He began the next bit as quickly as possible. He wove a new enchantment - A new thread - and slid it between the other enchantments to take the place of the one he removed. The gemstone shattered, and the pieces zipped towards the collar before seeming to dissolve into it, their energy filling the gaps where the new enchantment didn't quite match the energy of the old one; four small shards of the gem remained on the floor. In his mind's eye, Utanith saw the thread that was the new enchantment pulled snug into the weave of other enchantments. He grimaced as he withdrew from his work, taking his paws off the energy sink, waiting with bated breath to see if it took.

Utanith stood there for what seemed to him an eternity; he glanced at a clock, finding that only about 30 seconds had passed. He waited another thirty. As the one minute threshold passed he let out a sigh of relief, fairly certain that if anything were to have gone wrong it would have by now. He padded out of the chalk pattern almost drunkenly before laying against the wall, shaking from the stress of the work. He let himself relax for a few more minutes, the dragon's breathing slow and deliberate.

His work done and his body relaxed, Utanith stood up and took one of the gold ingots he had brought with him and put it under his tongue. Well, it'd be nice to have some thumbs to clean this chalk up... He focused on a familiar form - A black and white fox, his favored anthro form. The ingot seemed to melt and the dragon seemed to vaporize. Moments later the vapor that had once been Utanith reformed, leaving a fox where before there had been a dragon. The collar remained, though it appeared to have shrunk to fit the new form's smaller neck. Utanith felt around it with a paw before nodding, satisfied. "Replacing the enchantment with one to resize the collar with my shapeshift seems to have worked...And now I've got some fancy jewelry that I can't ever take off." He let out a sigh, the statement making it sound decidedly more annoying than he realized. "Better than before, I suppose." He felt around the collar some more, and noticed something he hadn't before - There was something engraved on the collar. "Hm?" He found a mirror and spent a couple minutes craning his head around while he tried to decipher the engravings in the reflection. "'Utanith Kesilai - 980-984-780' ...Hm. Well alright, then. They sure went to some weird lengths to specifically try and incapacitate me." He sighed once more. "Well, better find a broom and clean up this chalk..." And with that Utanith padded off, idly wondering if he would run into the people that had caused this mess again.

He hoped not.