Changeling: An Urban Musical Crime Fantasy - Chapter 2

Thursday, February 5, 1998

After dinner, Tommy leaned over and whispered, “We should go to your room to talk privately.”

It was not a question, and Jenny wanted to be angry with him. Instead, she blushed and started nodding. She had no idea what he had in mind, but there were no coherent thoughts in her head, only two jumbled masses of loosely related chaos. One stream of sentiments was driven by her excitement to learn more about Tommy, and the other by her fear of him.

The fear didn’t stop her from getting up from the table. She excused herself, muttering that she wanted to talk to Tommy in her room. Her throat dried up, and her voice came out as a squeak.

She risked a glance around the table and confirmed that everyone was shocked by her behavior. Even Simone was surprised by her sudden interest in Tommy.

Jenny followed Tommy into the hall. He slowed down again to match his pace to hers as they walked to the stairs.

 At the bottom of the steps, he asked, “Are any of the plaques on the wall yours?”

“Aside from my high school diploma, no.” Jenny shrugged. “Felix is the athletic one, and...”

Jenny laughed and dropped her head. “I was going to say that I didn’t inherit the family trait for being athletic. I’m still trying to get used to the idea that they’re not really my family.”

Tommy nodded, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “I guess it must be pretty shocking to find out that you were adopted.”

Jenny started to nod, stopped, and then shook her head. “No, it really wasn’t. I knew I was different for some reason, so what I’m trying to adjust to now is—” Jenny stopped herself, glancing at his curious expression.

She wasn’t ready to admit the truth, that she was stunned more by how quickly she responded to Tommy than she was over being adopted.

She shrugged and tried to fake a thoughtful look. “Well, my real parents are dead, and I don’t think they ever caught the people who did it.”

Tommy said, “They didn’t catch the humans who killed my parents and tortured me, either.”

Jenny stopped in the hallway, and she had a sudden awful thought. “The killers weren’t all dressed in black padded bodysuits, were they?”

“No, though there was one guy who dressed in mostly black. I think he was the designated pastor of their group.” Tommy’s expression fell into a brooding look, and he shook his head, as if he were denying himself from saying more.

They both fell silent until they got to Jenny’s room.

Tommy shut the door and wandered around the room to examine the posters more closely. He glanced at Jenny, asking, “Aside from shapeshifting, do you have any other special talents?”

Jenny sat down on the side of her bed “I can cast water.”

Tommy spun around to stare at Jenny with sudden interest. “Really? How much?”

“Roughly a baseball, but I can’t control the surface tension yet.” Jenny hesitated before she asked, “Can you cast any elements?”

“That depends. Does hair count as an element?”

Jenny snorted, her face filling with disbelief. “That’s your one trick?”

“Yeah, and I showed it to you when I turned into Lana.” Tommy smiled and raised his hand in a waving gesture. “Go ahead.”

“With what?” Jenny asked. Before he could answer, she said, “Oh, right. Water. Let me get focused, and I’ll try to go for something big.”

Tommy squatted in the middle of the floor, and then he set his hands down to settle himself into a more comfortable reclining position.

By the time he was ready, so was Jenny. She started to hum the tune to Blue Bayou, and then she drew together a ball as fast as she could.

She was surprised when the water swelled to the size of a large grapefruit.

Tommy said, “That’s bigger than a baseball.”

“It’s the biggest size I’ve ever summoned. I wonder if I could keep the surface tension on this spell.”

Tommy asked, “Why would you want to?”

He listened to her explain her idea for using the water as a defensive spell, his eyes lit with keen interest. He let her ramble, nodding in all the right places.

Long before she finished, Tommy’s face had pulled into a thoughtful expression. He raised a hand to rub his index finger in the cleft between his chin and his lower lip.

After a few seconds of silent thought, he said, “Is humming the music important?”

“I don’t know if it is or not, but it helps me focus.” Jenny shrugged. “It still isn’t enough to keep the surface tension on the globe for a water punch.”

“Maybe you might have an easier time maintaining the surface tension if you held onto a smaller amount of water,” Tommy suggested. “For instance, you could stretch one water drop out to the same size, and the interior will be hollow, but it will be much less water to focus on holding.”

Jenny nodded, but her feelings of suspicion returned. “Who in your family taught you that?”

“Matilda does similar tricks with air magic, and both Henry and Diana share the same ability for summoning electricity. They use their power to ‘molest’ ATMs.”

“Do you?” Jenny asked.

“No, but I can’t work with either element. Diana was able to show me how to make my hair grow or shorten. I could probably teach you that spell.” Tommy pointed to the window. “Should I open the window to let you get rid of that?”

Jenny chose to answer him by dispelling the water. She hummed to help her concentrate, smiling when Tommy began to sing along.

“I'm going back some day, gonna stay, on Blue Bayou. Where the folks are fine and the world is mine, on Blue Bayou.”

The globe had boiled away by then, but Jenny kept humming while Tommy sang, “Oh, that girl of mine by my side, the silver moon and the evening tide.”

She stopped humming to sing along with him. “Oh, some sweet day gonna take away this hurting inside. I'll never be blue, my dreams come true on Blue Bayou.”

Tommy nodded his approval as his lips split in a Cheshire grin. “You have very good focus. I think I could show you how to grow your hair. But we should get your first transformation out of the way today, if you’re willing to trust me.”

Jenny smirked, unable to help herself. “Right, and this is the part where I take my shirt off and let you play doctor?”

Tommy laughed, getting to his feet. “It might be easier if you take it off, but I don’t think you put on a bra. So you can get by with raising your shirt too.”

Jenny hesitated, and Tommy held up a hand. “Here, I’ll go first.”

He unbuttoned his shirt to his stomach and exposed his chest. Raising a hand, he pointed to his stomach. “Inside your abdomen, there’s a pocket of fat. You can move that fat anywhere in your body that you want with enough focus, but by default, this is the fat intended to make your natural curves in your female form.”

While he talked, fat began to fill in under his skin. It happened only on one side, and the end result was not exactly feminine looking.

In fact, it looked a lot like a man-boob.

Tommy said, “When you go into your male form, most of that fat will return to this pocket, below the diaphragm, and above the body cavity.”

The fat drained away from his skin, returning his chest back to normal.

“But a lot of your fat is devoted to making that false waist. You should let that fat go when you’re in your female form, but then again, it’s possible that you just don’t know how to move your body fat around yet.”

Jenny nodded, but her face was filled with confusion. “How do I summon fat?”

Tommy sat down on the edge of the bed close to Jenny. “It isn’t magic, and instead of listening to an element, this is like tensing a muscle in your body. But your analogy still partially works, because first you have to know what your fat sounds like when it is moving. Then you can direct it and tell it where to go.”

Skeptical, Jenny said, “It sounds complicated.”

Tommy laughed and said, “Raise your shirt. I’ll show you how easy it is.”

Jenny took her shirt off. There was nothing for Tommy to see, since Jenny was only able to make smaller breasts by reshaping her chest muscles.

Tommy raised his hands, just as she expected, but he didn’t clasp her chest. He set one fingertip at the top of each pectoral muscle, and then he drew his fingers down her skin with a feather-light touch.

The skin on her chest rippled in goosebumps, and Jenny’s mouth fell open as her breath rushed into a fast pant.

Tommy stopped moving long before he could have touched her nipples, and yet the sides of Jenny’s stomach swept into an hourglass figure an instant later. A muffled whoosh sloshed inside her as the fat stored around her waist and stomach rose up and bubbled to the surface of her chest through the pectoral muscles.

Her face started to itch and feel dry as the fat drained from her cheeks. The process took two seconds, and while there was a heavy pressure on her chest, what started making her pant and whimper was the intense burning sensation that came as her skin stretched.

One instant, Jenny had an almost flat chest, and the next tears were welling in her eyes as Tommy “caught” her expanding breasts.

She expected a snide comment, but what she got was, “Whoa! Ease it back a notch.”

Tommy laughed and pulled his hands away before he made a light cough. “Well, that worked for me when I was training, but I didn’t expect you to try and move every ounce of body fat to your chest at the same time.”

Laughing again, he reached out to tap a finger on one of her sunken cheeks, and then the other. “You can put some of it back in your face, where it belongs.”

Fat flowed back into her cheeks, making the skin throb.

Her voice a pained whine, Jenny asked, “Do you enjoy teasing me like this?”

Tommy shrugged. “This is how I got trained when I was younger, but I didn’t respond to my trainer as strongly as you’re responding to me.”

Jenny looked down, pouting before she said, “I haven’t met anyone else like me before.”

“I know.” When Jenny looked up again, Tommy offered her a sympathetic look. “If you think this is awkward for you, I had to have my cousin’s help to pull off a full transformation; and yes, it was humiliating to have to ask him. Thankfully, he moved away, so I don’t have to deal with him anymore.”

Tommy suppressed a shudder, and Jenny realized that he was sincerely troubled by his admission.

He said, “I’ve got two cousins left at the house, and I don’t respond to either of them. Maybe that’s a good thing.”

“We have to go through training with someone who we physically respond to?”

“Yes, but only for the basics like manipulating fat and muscles.”

“Why?”

“It’s very simple. Because you respond to my touch, I can help you learn to focus and move only certain muscles or pockets of fat. You also need someone you respond to in order to swap your sex organs.” Tommy frowned and added, “It hurts too, so, like sex, it’s not all it’s cracked up to make your first full change. But, fortunately, there is a surefire method to make a change without doing anything too involved.”

“What?” Jenny asked. “Kissing?”

Tommy started to say something before he shrugged. “Only if you wanted to. There is an even less involved method, but it will hurt. That’s going to be really shocking for you if you transform as fast as you moved all of your fat to make that double-D rack.”

Jenny pouted at Tommy. He offered her yet another choice where either way, he would have what he wanted, but choosing would force Jenny to reveal her level of interest in him.

She chose to cut him off for once, and she said, “Let’s just go with the less involved method.”

“Okay,” Tommy said.

He rested his finger on her kneecap and slid the tip of his finger to the inseam of her jeans. He moved his finger up to the middle of her thigh, and Jenny drew in a sharp breath and clamped her legs together.

Having her genitals withdraw into her body cavity was an unexpected pain with many sources. There was the wrenching throb of having her testicles compressed and stored in her body cavity beside her ovaries. There was the burning sensation of having her outward facing genitals stretched and reshaped to become the exterior features of a vagina. But the worst pain was when both the skin and her perineum muscle popped and opened, completing her transformation to her proper female form.

The transformation was not quite instantaneous, and if it had been, Jenny probably would have passed out. But the pain lingered after the process was complete, and the rest of her body felt almost as sore as the muscles between her legs.

The pain in her lower stomach faded, and then her chest started to throb again as fat drained from her breasts and seeped back across her body.

She hadn’t realized how much fat she’d moved until she had to return six pounds around her entire body. Every muscle ached from the effort, and within a few seconds, Jenny’s legs no longer had any strength to trap Tommy’s hand.

But he didn’t move his hand, and he didn’t back away. He watched her intently, his gaze trying to track the changes that she made to correct herself back to her normal appearance.

The effort had her panting and whimpering, even though he hadn’t done anything to her.

The pain subsided into a dull ache, and then the presence of Tommy’s hand on her leg started to bring an entirely different set of feelings.

Through her change, he never moved, and the look of fascination on his face never changed to anything stronger.

He gave nothing away with his perfect poker face, and Jenny knew she was sending mixed signals with her face and eyes, and with her actions.

She hadn’t asked him to move his hand, and even if she hadn’t volunteered to kiss him, he had still gotten an easy confession out of her.

Did she want him? Of course she did.

But her eyes were also filled with fear, creating a conflicting image if he was paying attention.

Tommy was, and he leaned back, easing his hand off of her lap. “That’s much nicer now. Check the mirror and see for yourself.”

Then it dawned on Jenny that she might not have agreed to a kiss, but she had happily taken her shirt off to show him her new breasts.

Which were starting to itch.

Jenny hunched forward and Tommy said, “No, don’t do that. It’s bad for your posture.” He laughed at her irritated expression. “You want to stick those out like you’re proud of them. Otherwise, you can always trim down the excess and add it to your ass.”

***

Jenny stood in front of her closet, her gaze unfocused while she tried to think over the events of the day. Though she was staring at her reflection in the mirror, she saw nothing until Simone’s knock on the door drew her out of her thoughts.

Simone’s hair was dyed light blue, where it had been hot pink when she’d left the house that morning. The bright cobalt shade was Jenny’s favorite because it brought out the silver color of Simone’s irises.

Simone’s eyes widened into saucers as Jenny turned away from the closet. “Jenny, what did you do?” she asked, shaking her head in disbelief as she crossed the room. “You look...”

“I look like a Barbie doll,” Jenny said. She gestured at the mirror mounted on the closet door. “I think the change looks so radical because of my waist slimming down. If I understood Tommy, I’ve been using my body fat to flatten my natural curves. In my female form, that fat was meant to be moved up.”

While Jenny described her first training session, Simone moved to sit at the foot of Jenny’s bed, and her pale, angular face filled with a look of contemplation.

Jenny drifted to sit beside Simone, and as she started to describe how Tommy helped her make a full transformation, she was surprised when her heart started thumping again.

She’d fallen silent, overwhelmed by her memories.

Simone asked, “So then what happened?”

Jenny looked at Simone and realized that she was blushing too, and she was on the verge of panting.

Smiling, she tried to feign irritation. “Nothing, you pervert.”

Simone laughed and playfully slapped Jenny’s knee. “Oh, you knew you were turned on. I heard it in your voice, and in the way you look when you talk about Tommy.”

“But I don’t like guys.” Jenny frowned at a thought and looked down. “Or, I didn’t like human guys, I guess.” Her eyes glazed again for a moment, and she shook her head. “I felt so confused about Tommy. I really wanted to trust him right away, but he also frightened me.”

“Yeah, I can understand that.”

Jenny sighed, her face pulling into a frustrated pout. “No, I don’t think you do. You didn’t just start having feelings for a guy out of nowhere.”

“Yes I did,” Simone said. “That’s exactly what happened when I met Felix, and until that point, I thought I was a lesbian.”

Jenny’s argument was deflated, and her anger drained away with her next breath.

Her mouth stayed open for another second before she said, “Oh. Well...”

Jenny dropped her head, staring at her lap.

Behind her, Simone asked. “So how do you know that Tommy is a guy? Can’t he turn into Lana and fix the problem?”

Jenny didn’t look up. She shook her head and her voice was soft and disquieted as she said, “No, it’s not so simple. We can switch genders, but we have a dominant gender, the one we were born with.”

“Oh, and you were—oh.” Simone’s eyes widened, and her face filled with a look of dread. “Something really bad must have happened to you when you were taken from the hospital.”

“It had to have been bad, because I’m still scared now.”

“Of Tommy?”

“No, of being fully female.” Jenny sighed, adding, “Again.”

“You can still be Marcus whenever you like,” Simone said.

Jenny debated with herself before shaking her head. “No, something about Tommy forced me to change, and I...I want to be Jenny when I’m around him.”

Simone smiled and nodded. “So what does he think of you?”

“I don’t know.” Jenny laughed. “He probably thinks I’m an idiot.”

***

Henry snapped his fingers in front of Tommy’s face. “Yoo-hoo! Anybody home in there?”

Tommy blinked as he asked, “Huh?”

“I said, we’re parked.” Henry grinned. “I’ve said it twice now, but you looked like you were still busy trying to eat your own lips.”

He twisted around in the driver’s seat and looped his arm around the seatback. Propping his chin on the top of the headrest, he asked, “Which one is the dominant personality?”

“She is, but whatever happened in her infancy has scarred her so badly that it’s still affecting her now. She’s avoided making a full transformation to her birth gender until today.”

Tommy’s mouth pursed in a tight line, and his eyes glazed as his thoughts turned inward again. “She was sending me mixed signals all through the visit. She was ready for me physically, even to the point that she was flirting with me. But once I was alone with her, and she was in the proper gender, she looked terrified.”

He thought over his visit more, but no new insights came to him. Opening the passenger side door, he got out and walked through the hotel parking garage behind his aunt and uncle.

His thoughts were distracted in two ways. He wanted to think about Jenny, her past and what might have traumatized her so bad that she’d remained hidden behind her alter ego until her teens.

But he couldn’t allow himself to think about her or her problems for too long, because she was trying to hook his mind in spite of the distance between them. If he began to think about her, he would become more receptive to her attempts, and he wasn’t even sure if he could use her for his plan.

He could feel her presence every few minutes, like a long-legged spider walking down his bare neck. The touch was light, and her every attempt was gentle. But she was being relentless in her efforts to reach him, to share herself with him.

And yet, she was terrified of him.

She was a paradox that he had no way of understanding unless he opened up to her. But he would be committing himself to her, and there was no guarantee that she would be as willing to accept him or his family once she knew what they did to earn a living.

No one spoke until they got until their hotel room on the second floor, but Diana had only shut the door when she asked, “Can we use her for the next job or not?”

“Maybe, but not without intense training,” Tommy said.

He walked around the bed to drop into a chair. He was already thinking of going to his room to sleep, but it was still way too early for him. “Her current form shifts to Marcus don’t do much to tax her, so she would be fatigued if she tried to hold a disguise for more than a few minutes.”

Raising his hand to rub the bridge of his nose, Tommy rolled his eyes up to stare at the ceiling. “I’ve also got the impression that if we want to use her, it might be best to lie to her.”

“Okay, so what’s the problem?” Henry asked. “We can lie to her and leave in five days. Then we’ll find someone else to do the job. Easy, right?”

“It’s not so easy. If she hooks my mind, I’ll have to be honest with her. Then she’s going to find out we’re scam artists, and she’s going to think that the only reason we came here is to use her.”

“Uh...” Henry scratched his head. “Maybe I’m getting senile, but isn’t that the point of our visit? With her help, we could pull off something really big. We could reach for millions, Tommy.”

“It doesn’t matter how much money there is in the job. She’s a good person, and she doesn’t care about money beyond having enough to care for herself. She won’t want to be a part of any scam, even if the money is really good. She’s a lot like Kevin. She might even be a bit more naïve than him, or Laura.” Sighing, Tommy rocked his head back.

He slumped in his chair until the back of his head was resting on the top of the seatback. Then he was more laying on the chair than sitting in it.

“I’m trying to think of the money. But you didn’t see the way she looked at me after she transformed, and you don’t understand how often she’s been trying to—”

Right on cue, Jenny made another attempt to reach him.

Tommy stopped himself to start thinking, The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. This is a Pythagorean triangle, also know as a right triangle...

“Look, Tommy, I know how this works, okay?” Henry said. “She responded to you, and she didn’t respond to either of us. This guilt you’re feeling now is just an emotional reaction, because now you’re responding to her. You’ve got to keep your wits about you and resist her until you know if we can use her or not.”

“Maybe you could train her instead,” Tommy said.

“You’ll have to train her on the basics,” Henry said. “Di or I can handle the advanced topics, but she didn’t respond to either of us.” Henry’s face wrinkled with a look of skepticism. “Can you handle teaching the basics and still fend her off, or should we pack it up and wait for another shapeshifter with the right figure to show up?”

Tommy shook his head. “I don’t know yet. Let me work with her tomorrow, and we’ll see what happens.”