Day 21 of the 25 Days of TF-mas! (contains elements of shrinking and girl to food tf)
With a slap of cardboard on wooden surface and a clattering of thousands of tiny painted pieces rattling together, Elliott sat the puzzle she'd just acquired on the living room coffee table, right next to the previous homeowner-turned-wrapping-paper. It was rush time now for Elliott, the power of an unfathomable cosmic being filling her with enough energy to fizzle her previously simple human mind. There were only a few days before the party, and while her decorations were great and the puzzle was a nice start, it simply was not enough for Elliott. She needed more holiday spirit in the air.
'What are we missing?' Her inner voice asked as she paced about, maintaining her habit of talking to herself with the royal 'we'
"We're missing... we're missing..." She wracked her brain for memories of the holidays from her childhood. Her mind felt frayed a bit, like the ends of her memory were fuzzy and faded, interspersed with difficult to parse images of various lifetimes of changing and manipulating the minds and bodies of humankind. The fact that these memories extended well beyond her own measly twenty six years of life on earth made her head hurt to think about. Instead, she'd finally dredged a memory from the miasma of her mind. The cookies were well and good, and she could trust the mind controlled Susan to handle the main courses, but there was one treat she had every year that Elliott would be remiss to not include. As Elliott began to look up the ingredients, a little thought buzzed in the back of her mind.
'Why don't we just make it out of people?' Her inner voice had a point, she supposed. It would be tremendously easy to pluck some unsuspecting person off the street like she had with her new car, but no, this was starting to get a little out of hand. Elliott was a human, no matter the supernatural powers she possessed now, and it would be wrong to continuously mold her fellow people like they were lesser. It felt a little odd for Elliott to have to convince herself of this idea, but either way, she had to hurry if she wanted to gather everything she'd need in time for the party.
Elliott drove the car she'd turned Elizabeth into over to the grocery store. It was definitely a boon to have a means of transport besides walking. She recalled having to be driven home after picking out a tree, but... also recalled driving home from the tree park without one. The distraction nearly caused her to crash Elizabeth, slamming on her breaks to stop in time for the red light. She decided to focus on the mission at hand. The rest of the drive went smoothly, and Elliott parked her car and practically ran inside. Unfortunately, despite the holidays being several days away still, the place looked like it had been struck by a simultaneous series of cataclysmic disasters. Shoppers bustled about in frantic little zigzags as though there would never be another opportunity to shop again. To be fair, Elliott considered with a weary sigh, she was there for the same reason. Dejected but not defeated, she powered through the masses to hunt down the ingredients she needed, though with each massacred shelf display and each vacant slot she lost more and more hope of finding what she would need. Sure enough, the first three items were utterly gone. It was all starting to become a bit too much for the girl. Panic was beginning to grip her chest as the loud noises of the crowding shoppers around her threatened to drown out her own thoughts. Combined with her memory issues earlier and the immense pressure she had put herself under to make everything ready by a strict deadline, Elliott was about to snap.
MacKenzie was something of an amateur baking aficionado. Her shelves were lined with all types of tomes on the subject, from classic cookbooks on sweets to hobbyist, themed recipe books to even a book of laminated, handwritten recipe cards. Truly, it was a passion for the girl. As such, she often went fairly overboard during the holidays with cookies and cakes and peppermint bark just to name a few. Truth be told, she'd already completed more than enough baking and treat prep to last multiple celebrations, but she liked to peruse the clearance section and look for spare vanilla and peppermint extract to stay stocked up for next year.
It was in this little scavenger hunt that she came across a woman, sitting hunched against one of the shelves with her head in her hands. She looked like she was having a total meltdown. MacKenzie stepped carefully around the woman, taking a moment to notice her interesting hair dye - it faded totally to white near the ends. She made a mental note to try something like that in the near future as she passed, scanning the shelves as she went. No matter where she looked, MacKenzie's eyes kept drifting back to the woman. She was still sitting there, rocking gently back and forth like she were in a horror movie or something. It was a little sad in a pathetic sort of way, seeing someone losing it over a grocery list. Her plan was to let crazy ladies lie, unwilling to deal with people that couldn't just enjoy the season. Eventually, though, MacKenzie approached the woman against her better judgment and tapped her shoulder.
"Excuse me, miss?" she put on a high pitched lilt to her voice. The kind that people did when speaking to their dog, or the elderly. The woman slowly looked up at MacKenzie, who continued. "I need to get something from the shelf, here, if you could just..." She gestured for the woman to scoot aside.
Elliott blinked, returning to her senses for a moment to look at this patronizing girl up and down. Sure, she was rude, but Elliott didn't really care much about that sort of thing. Her existence has been so thoroughly disrupted that she was more focused on the girl's insinuation. The idea that Elliott was in the way or beneath this girl in any way was... wrong. It wasn't infuriating, or even frustrating. It was confusing to Elliott, in the same way that hearing someone say one plus one equals orange might be. Elliott kept her gaze fixed on MacKenzie as she slowly stood to her full height which, thanks to a recent growth spurt, left her taller than her adversary by enough such that Elliott had to tilt her head down a bit to look at her. That would soon change.
MacKenzie was put off by Elliott's silent stare down, but at this point to abandon the thing she made her move for felt like admitting defeat to some random creep in a grocery store. That wasn't a loss she was willing to take just yet. Much to her discomfort, however, Elliott was not moving out of the way. So, both in an attempt to hurry things along and to show her bravado to this random stranger, MacKenzie reached past her to get the item she wanted. Elliott suddenly grabbed MacKenzie's arm in a vice-like grip. The motion was so quick and unexpected it caused MacKenzie to gasp hard enough to drive all of the air from her lungs. Elliott's glare was intense, and the strength of her grip was starting to hurt, but before she could struggle much, she was hit with a wave of vertigo. Her vision tunneled and a rush of air hit her as though she were moving extremely quickly. Additionally, she had the sudden realization that her feet no longer touched the floor.
"Let... go!" was all she managed from her new, vulnerable position that lacked any leverage to free herself.
Elliott obliged. MacKenzie was falling, having been dangling from Elliott's grasp. Looking up, she saw enormous shelves shooting up into the sky and Elliott's face looming over her. MacKenzie fell backwards for several seconds, letting out a terrified scream until something caught her. It was a bag of some sort, big enough to house her whole body but not much more than that, with clear walls and an opening above her. She scrambled to try to stand in the bag but could only watch in terror as Elliott pressed the seals together, locking her inside of what appeared to be a quart or maybe gallon plastic baggie. Compared to the shrunken MacKenzie, she was something of a giantess and peeked in on her like a child might watch a fish they'd won in a carnival game. For MacKenzie's part, the stuffiness of the bag was already starting to get to her, and unbeknownst to the girl, Elliott was on a bit of a tight schedule. She really did not have time to run around store to store to find ingredients before the party happened, so MacKenzie would have to provide a substitute. Something drew MacKenzie's eyes to her arm and elicited another shriek from her. Her arm had holes in it, clear through to the other side. Tiny holes, evenly distributed in grid-like patterns covered her arms. Then they began to fall apart. In square-ish chunks, parts of her body fell away as Elliott walked out of the store, bag in hand. MacKenzie felt some of these lost parts crunch under her feet as she lost balance, tumbled about by Elliott's movements. Her arms were gone, and the holes spread more and more. Then something else happened. Her legs smeared on the walls of her plastic prison. Globs of her were left behind as she was tossed around uncontrollably. The movements were small for Elliott, but for a girl of MacKenzie's current size, it felt like an earthquake. The squares of her body were getting stuck in the globs of her legs as well, coating themselves in the stuff, which was rapidly turning a light, gooey brown. The bag smelled strongly of chocolate and peanut butter. MacKenzie had mostly fallen away at this point, but did notice one more thing in her waning vision. A splattering of white powder was constantly dusting her face and the reset of her changing body, courtesy of her hair and clothing joining in on the transformation. She'd made enough batches herself of the stuff to know what she was changing into. At least it was something delicious.
Elliott looked over as the bag finally settled and stopped writhing in the car seat beside her. She shook it vigorously one last time to ensure the cereal was perfectly coated in the chocolate peanut butter mix and topped with powdered sugar. The sight of the puppy chow, or muddy buddies if one preferred, brought a semblance of childlike excitement back to her previously detached and cold eyes. She revved Elizabeth's engine and raced home to add MacKenzie to the growing pile of treats.