#fox!hiro

[bh6-au-ideas]

Zootopia AU merged with an alternate scenario of Experiment/Fox!Hiro AU: what if Hiro retained his sentience & personality when he was mutated into a fox, but lost all his memories (including his name). He still walks on 2 legs though. He takes on a new name & starts a new life elsewhere & lives that way until Tadashi finds him. (to amp it up->"Nick Wilde" is Hiro's new identity/persona)

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[bh6-au-ideas]

Based on the Experiment AU from February 20 (7 months ago): I can only guess that the fox living at the shrine Tadashi visited was Hiro all along-does Tadashi realize that? It's like a Nina Tucker chimera, except the fox is regular-shaped, can't talk, & a little feral. What if after a transformation, a person's new form grows more permanent as the days go by? Hiro likely can't be cured by the time Tadashi realizes his little brother is the fox, since it has been a few years at that point.

I said it before, and I’ll say it again. I have mixed feelings about this AU. Because Fox!Hiro is adorable, but being separated from his family and experimented on is horrible. So actually, no, not mixed feelings. That’s actually really sad.

Tadashi still brings him home though, once he figures it out, and he insists he can find a cure. He calls up Honey Lemon, because he figures out of all of his friends she’ll understand the transformation best, and the two of them try to work out a cure. Meanwhile Fox!Hiro is having the time of his life terrorizing poor Mochi.

The fact that there isn’t a cure (Tadashi refuses to believe it, even when Honey Lemon herself tries to tentatively bring it up. They don’t speak to each other for a full week) isn’t even the saddest part. The saddest part is that Tadashi keeps speaking to Hiro and treating him like he’s a real person. But over the years Hiro has slowly lost his humanity, and by the time Tadashi found him he was pretty much pure animal. And there’s no bringing back his mind at this point, no matter what Tadashi tries.

It will be a very sad day when Tadashi finally realizes how hopeless his efforts have been. And that he really has lost his brother forever.

- Baymod

[bh6-au-ideas]

William and Sly AU: there's also flying islands. This is annoying at times for Hiro because he has to climb up prickly pine trees to REACH some of these islands. Why is there a bridge from a place that can only be reached with flight anyway. And then there's the times he falls and has to climb ALL THE WAY BACK UP.

I bet he was REALLY happy once he got those wings and could avoid that mess.

Maybe he makes a point to ask Tadashi, in his own foxy way of course, to redo that wings spell in the future when he really needs to go out and collect things in all the random places. Because they are so freaking convenient, and for a magical elf like Tadashi, it should be a relatively simple spell, right?

- Baymod

[bh6-au-ideas]

(Baymod note: Sorry I added in a Read More because this one is a bit long)

William and Sly AU?

Elf Tadashi moves into a cabin in the wilderness, well away from most other people, to work on a magic related project, because the magic harmonics for the unfinished project would be really dangerous for humans.

He meets a sapient fox when he sneaks into the cabin and starts eating all Tadashi’s food. No, really.

Little guy’s food was being stolen by gnomes. Gnomes are small winged beings that hoard and hide mushrooms, and are actually the reason the place is mostly wilderness despite all the ruins; they chased everyone else out by playing merry magical HAVOC everywhere and stealing and hoarding everyone’s food.

Tadashi responds to that by setting up a system of runestones to get to a cave that he then blocks off, so it’s only accessible via the runestones. He also names the fox Hiro, because he’d had his name removed by a gnomish spell (really, really cruel). Hiro chirped nonstop all day and decided to do something in return for Tadashi: he gathered the fairyflies, small glowing magical insects, required for lighting runestones.

Runestones have a limited range; he needs 13, including the one in his house and the one in the cave, to get there.

And then one day, the runestones suddenly stop working. At first Tadashi thinks it’s just a standard fluctation, so he goes out to recalibrate the spell, and promptly gets ambushed by a darkling.

To a human or a sapient fox, darklings are harmless. To an elf or a fairyfly, darklings can be lethal.

Tadashi’s fine but he can’t head towards the runestones at all and the gnomes had worked together to block the other way out of the valley so he asks Hiro for help.

Hiro rushes out, first to collect everything useful in the non-runestoned side of the valley (that he can reach), then to try to reactivate the runestones, fairyflies swirling bound around him like captured flames while he searches the cave-ridden hills; the gnomes hid the caves with illusion spells, but they’re better against eyes than noses, and as a fox Hiro can sometimes sniff out the holes. Other times he just noses against walls and sees if his nose goes through.

All Tadashi can do is wait. And draw a magic map, hoping that Hiro will come back safe.

It works; not only does Hiro reactivate the runestones, but before each activation he thoroughly searched the area around each stone for darklings, and used the light magic charge from runestone activation to kill them.

He can’t keep the charge bound around him forever, though; there’s a reason it kills darklings. It burns. At first, it’s just a faint pleasant warm sensation, but it quickly builds.

The spell he uses to catch the charge gives out moments before he would, releasing the magic in a flash of sparkles and light; if he wants to make the woods safe again, he has to catch the darklings before the spell dissolves.

Hiro manages fourteen out of fifteen.

The darklings can’t hurt him; but they can eat the fairyflies surrounding him, and he needs five to activate each runestone. Thankfully they’re common.

He visits Tadashi after each runestone activated, checking on him, giving him edible mushrooms that he found (the ones he didn’t eat anyway) and even getting the magic map.

He finds a temple with a heavily enchanted dias, meditating on it to accept the spell and gaining temporary translucent feathery wings. He’s not a good flyer, he really just glides, but he can get to a LOT of bizarre places and no gnome stash is safe.

Eventually, he gets to the ominously unlocked storage cave.

Attempting to activate the runestone causes a giant snake monster to attack him, only to phrase clean through taking only the fairyflies.

It smells like darklings; someone’s made a darkling queen.

Hiro repeatedly activates the runestone, running into the semisolid snake again and again and again, dumping the white magic charge into it over and over, feeling to burn start to linger even as the thing drains the magic from the stone and local magic levels drop. 

It bursts eventually, a cascade of sparkles, and Hiro barely has it in him to teleport all the way back. He collapses on Tadashi’s bed and has a well earnt sleep, unaware of the fact that the one darkling he missed is dividing.

Several months later, Tadashi’s been forced to make an invisible wall across the valley side, making that side of the valley only accessible via runestones; the gnomish wall is gone, it’s safe. His journal, containing his project notes goes missing; gnomes ripped it up and scattered it.

Tadashi made the mistake of trying to trade it for a spell. Namely, Dissolution.

Dissolution seals up openings with a weak but solid copy of the surrounding walls. The gnomes use it on their caves, but on the first one they seal, they forget to remove the keep out sign, allowing Tadashi to find out what the heck is going on. Tadashi can’t burst the spell, he’s too magical, but Hiro’s got weak enough innate magic that his running footsteps or him shoving his nose and forepaws against the dissolution wall is enough to break it.

Hiro goes out to find Tadashi’s journal.

He quickly finds: a bomb, lots of mushrooms, a few journal scrap, and an amhni, removed from the pole the gnomes would have put it on.

Given what happened at the last temple (he’d liked those wings), when he finds a small temple, he’s willing to ask the spirits inhabiting it what they want.

There’s an ohnem there; they speak in rhyme and riddles, and this one wants something. It’s actually trapped in several runestones, which are in turn trapped in rock. Blowing up the weak rock around each of the four runestones would free the ohnem of their wrongful imprisonment.

Hiro blows up the rock on the cliff edge stone, and keep searching.

He finds another temple; this one’s got another ohnem in it, and the riddle is about the amhni. They are supposed to form a rough diamond, with an amhni of each of the four elemental magic at each amhni pole.

Hiro also finds dragon statues; he can feel the fire magic trapped within, and he knows that if he lets the fairyflies following him free, he’ll be wreathed in flames, kept from burning by the dragon’s blessing.

And he finds chunks of inexplicable ice, with pixies frozen in them.

Then, near a cliff edge that he can’t climb, he finds another temple. The ohnem in this one claims, via riddles, that something froze their four pixies, but they’re still alive, and they ask for them to be freed.

Ohnems return their favours.

Hiro blows the runestones free; he can use them.

He sets each amhni on its pole; he can see things he wants or needs outlines in intangible sparkles that travel far enough away that finding dissolutions is now trivial.

He wreathes himself in flame, again and again, and sets the pixies free; the ohnem gives him pixie style flight.

It’s an interesting feeling, being able to, if you choose, find purchase on thin air.

Hiro finds journal scraps hidden in places that only true flight could find. He finds them in chests encased in rock (did the gnomes trap the ohnem? Why?) and frozen in magical ice.

By the time he returns to Tadashi, he’s almost gotten used to the feeling of leaping off of air or being wreathed in flame.

Tadashi reassembles the journal, unaware that Hiro read ALL OF IT, and the gnomes crown Hiro Mushroom King because they are not entirely stupid and risking getting Hiro angry as opposed to concerned was stupider than they were.

Submitted by: Longpost Anon

(Oooh, I’ve never played these games before, but now I’m intrigued. Especially with all the magic and spells and A FOX YESSSS

Oh, but what if the darklings were something like microbots? And the darkling queen was Yokai? Maybe the gnomes could be teeny little Yamas or something

But hey, if Tadashi’s an elf, at least he finally has an excuse for those big earts of his XD

- Baymod)

[bh6-au-ideas]

Hiro goes missing and for the next few years, Tadashi searches for him. He's so stressed about it to the point where he frequently visits a shrine to relax. He also plays with the fox living there. After getting leads on Hiro's whereabouts, Tadashi learns about secret, sick experiments that involve turning people into animals-permanently. Tadashi digs deeper until he learns, to his horror, that Hiro was one of the test subjects and got turned into a fox years ago-the same year he disappeared.

AAAAAAH NOOOOO HIRO BABY NOOOO but also AWWWW WEE FOX BABY

I have mixed feelings of sadness and cute