Grumpy Magician 0 - Quinn's first sawing

Quinn had had many lovely birthdays, but she was particularly looking forward to her thirteenth; her parents had promised her a lovely surprise. Like a lot of girls her age she was hoping for a pony.

Before the day, she observed, but failed to listen in on, several covert phone calls between her parents and some unknown person and the only thing that clued her in was the repeated mention of the date of her birthday. She was also given the chore of inviting her friends to her birthday party; writing out and delivering by hand all the invitations. She suspected that this was a cover for her parent's arrangements for her surprise.

Her birthday arrived and after school she was given a stack of presents to open. The most notable of these was a party dress of white satin with a broad blue ribbon round the waist tied in a large bow at the front. She was mildly disappointed that there was nothing that hinted at the pony she had come to assume was the big surprise. Soon her parents shooed her upstairs to change into the party dress. This coincided with the arrival of a large white van. Her mother went upstairs to help her change, but Quinn was a big girl now and did not need or want the help. Her mother continued to hover and make pointless conversation, which Quinn soon realised was to cover the activity in the back garden. Rather than peek at what was happening, she avoided looking, because she wanted the surprise to be a proper surprise.

Once dressed in her new dress, she was kept busy answering the front door to her party guests and playing party games and dancing to her favourite songs, at a volume that her parents did not usually allow. As it was getting dark, she and her friends were fed sandwiches and cakes and the rest of the stuff that Quinn had put on the list of party food she liked. The 'daisy-fields' were a particular hit with her friends; these were individual dishes of lime jelly with slices of banana floated in them before they set, so they looked like white flowers in green grass.

When the girls had demolished the food, Quinn's mother announced that they had organised a big surprise for Quinn. There was to be a magic show in the garden. All the girls cheered as they were trooped to some chairs set up in front of a small stage in the back garden. Of course, Quinn was disappointed that the surprise was not the horse she would have so dearly loved, but she thought that at least her parents had some idea of what she liked; since seeing a magician at a friend's tenth birthday, she had spent quite some time recording and re-watching TV magic specials and saving her weekly pocket money towards getting more videos of magicians.

The magician was entertaining for a bunch of twelve-year-olds, but Quinn felt a little disappointed that she was now a teenager and the entertainer was a kid's magician. The highlights of the show were a chair suspension with Quinn in her new dress and a dagger headbox illusion performed on Quinn's mum.

After the show, it was time for everyone to go home. Quinn hung around the magician and asked girlishly impertinent questions about where the doves had been before they appeared and so on. The magician was tired (it was his second show of the day and it took quite a bit of energy to set things up, even if the parents helped, which they so rarely did) and when he got tired he got irritable. When Quinn's discourse turned to the lack of 'proper big illusions' in the show, he said, "If you don't shut up little girl, I'll saw you in half, for real."

Quinn's response was, "I'm not a little girl. I'm thirteen. And you wouldn't dare."

"Just you try me!"

Losing concentration while trying to lower one of the scaffold poles that were part of the stage and acted as somewhere to hang the stage lighting from, he dropped it and it bounced of his knee before hitting the grounded and rolling away.

Quinn laughed. This enraged the magician and he made a successful grab for Quinn's wrist. Quinn did not have time to scream before the magician's other hand covered her mouth and then he dragged her round the back of the still partially erected stage.

Quinn suddenly felt terrified; she was in the grips of a large and angry man who had threatened, with no little heat, to saw her in half.

He whispered in her ear, "What have you got to say, bearing in mind if you scream it will go worse for you."

He slackened the pressure of the hand across her mouth. She said, "I'm sorry Mr Magician. What are you going to do to me?"

"Like I said, I'm going to saw you in half... for real." He directed her gaze to a thin-model sawing box that sat on the grass unused.

Curiosity got the better of Quinn's fear and she asked, "Why have you got a sawing box? You didn't use it in the show."

"I was hoping to persuade your mum to do it; it wouldn't have taken more than a short while to teach her what to do. And you wouldn't be asking stupid questions about why I did not do it."

"So, are you going to teach me how to do it?" asked Quinn, partly in the hope that if she cooperated, he would let go of her wrist and she could get away from this angry man.

"No. I'm not going to teach you how it's done, I'm just going to put in the box and saw you in half; like I said, for real." His hand briefly left her face, and equally briefly Quinn considered screaming for help, feared that such an action would anger the man further, resulting in him taking more drastic action sooner and thus reducing her survival prospects, which she was already thinking were slim, at best.

The hand that had left her face soon attached a handcuff to the wrist he was gripping and then grabbed the other one and it was soon shackled to the first. He then stooped and grabbed her round her waist and knelt down so she was held over his knee. Quinn almost expected him to spank her, but the free hand was used to attach another set of cuffs to her ankles. He turned her round again and tied a knotted cloth between her teeth and round the back of her head; now escape or screaming for rescuers were not a possibility.

He dumped her on the grass and went to prepare the sawing box. He opened the lids and pulled out the stocks and made sure that separation blades were easily to hand. His final preparation was to plug a jigsaw into the extension lead that still lead from the house and had been the power for his show.

During these preparations Quinn noticed that the box was adult-sized and too big for her to fit in and have her head sticking out of one end and her feet the other. She had little time to speculate. The magician picked her up and laid her in the box with her blue beribboned waist at the join between the two halves of the box. Before she could try to worm her way out, he took the chain between the cuffs at her ankles and hooked it over the projection between the ankle-holes and inserted the remaining part of ankle stock trapping the chain in place.

He soon had a similar arrangement in place at the head. Quinn's handcuffed hands emerged, by not much, through the neck hole and one of the wrist-holes of the completed head-stock. He then slammed the lids shut and Quinn heard the catches being turned locking the lids in place, removing any chance of escape.

Suddenly, hope burst in; she heard her mother's voice, calling, "Have you seen Quinn?"

The magician sounded uncertain. "She was here earlier, asking all sorts of questions," he admitted. "But I can't see her now." Which was perfectly true, because Quinn was shut in the box and not visible from the outside. "Maybe she went and hid somewhere; girls that age can be sort of flighty like that. I got the impression she was not particularly impress by my show." He patted the box. "Maybe if you had seen fit to allow me to teach you what you needed to know for this, she might have hung around and badgered me to show her how to do it."

Of course, Quinn tried to scream to let here mum know she was trapped in the box, but the gag was very efficient in her mouth and it was barely audible to her captor.

To the magician's relief and Quinn's horror, her mum took the magician's words at face value, and walked back to the house, muttering something about it not being the sawing she had a difficulty with, it was the skimpy costume he had insisted that she would have to wear.

Quinn's relief showed on her face when the magician opened the side of the box and peered in. Seeing the expression, he said, "No, little girl, I am not going to release you. I am checking that there is no metal in the way; I wouldn't want to damage my jigsaw blade on any buttons or catches while I'm sawing you in half." He slammed the opening shut.

Quinn hoped, even as she heard the whirl of the jigsaw, that she was being pranked. This hope died as the jiggling blade of the jigsaw appeared through the slot between the sections of the box. If this was a prank it was getting dangerous. She screamed pleading and threats into gag, which were totally inaudible outside the box where the jigsaw's electric motor whined.

The reciprocating blade advanced purposefully on Quinn's waist and soon touched the ribbon there. The ribbon was soon shredded and Quinn felt the jiggling pressure of the blade against her waist, and expected to feel it shred her flesh as efficiently as it had the ribbon. Her body froze, partly to avoid any move that would put her closer to the blade, but mainly because her mind was too busy trying to work out what to do and what to expect and anticipating the worst, to take any control.

She felt the blade touch her skin and take a bite at her tender flesh. She screamed the pain into the gag; the magician heard it outside the box. He paused. At the end of the scream, Quinn realised there was no more pain. She craned her neck to see what was happening. She saw in the limited light that the blade was charging up and down with great rapidity about an inch into her waist and gnawing at the ribbon. She was puzzled; why am I not feeling more pain? Where was the growing red patch I am expecting to see seeping across the satin of my dress? Why does it feel good? Does it feel good? Yes, it feels good. What happens next? Will I survive after all?

Hearing nothing more from inside the box, the magician resumed advancing the jigsaw across the top of the box. It slowed at the middle, requiring more force to get it moving again. It emerged from the other side of box.

Inside the box, Quinn tried to follow the progress of the blade through her body and to recognise the feelings she was feeling. She knew the jiggling feeling of the blade as it inched through her waist. She felt the extra vibrations as the cutting edge attacked her back-bone. Then there was the feeling like being rubbed across her belly, which felt soothing, even as the blade gave every appearance of ripping through her abdomen. And finally there was an intense pleasure sensation that she had never before experienced; such pleasure was worth the pain and terror she had experienced getting to this point. Quinn was slightly saddened when the blade left her body and the box.

There was a thump on the lower part of the box when the magician put down the jigsaw on top of the box. Suddenly, from Quinn's point of view, her view towards her feet was cut off by the insertion of a metal sheet that filled the cross-section of the box. Quinn's assumption that the jigsaw blade had passed through doing no harm, other than the damage to the dress' waist band, was proved mistaken. Then she felt movement.

The magician unclipped the two halves of prop and positioned them as he would usually position the halves post-sawing. He then opened the side-doors and looked in. He was worried that he had killed the daughter of his employer in a fit of temper, but he was also unnerved by the lack of blood seeping out. What he saw unnerved him further; Quinn looked him in the face and did her best to smile round the gag.

She looked from her captor's face to the view the open side-doors afforded of her lower half. Within the limitations imposed by her cuffed ankles, she could see her knees move under the skirt of her dress.

"Are you going to scream if I ungag you?" asked to magician.

Quinn did her best to shake her head and the transmission of the message was more successful than the intended gesture.

He reached into the box and pulled the gag free. "Are you alright?"

Quinn thought this was a silly question. If he had intended to kill her by sawing her in half, what did it matter if she was alright; he just needed to know she was not dead and try something else. If he had not meant that she be harmed (trying to teach her a lesson about talking back to adults) he should know what he was doing and having intended no harm, done no harm. This lead the young girl to the worrying conclusion that the magician (an adult) had not known what he was doing.

She saw the man looking more and more worried. She said, "I don't know, but it doesn't hurt."

"That's good, I hope," said he. "Before I try to put you back together, can this be a secret between you and me?"

Quinn wondered why he wanted it to be a secret, but decided that if she said 'no' there was the risk that he might not put her back together. "Ok, that you sawed me in half is our secret."

More movement, as the magician returned the two halves of the box to their former relative positions. He next withdrew the separation blades and Quinn felt a repeat of the intense pleasure she had experienced during the sawing. It did not take long for the magician release Quinn from her bondage.

Quinn sat up in the box and crooked her little finger towards the magician.

"What's that for?"

"It's to make the promise that our secret is just our secret and we will never tell anyone. We intertwine little fingers and it is done," Quinn explained. They intertwined little fingers and looked into each other's eyes.

As Quinn climbed out of the box, she said, "That may have been the best birthday present ever. I've never felt anything like that and after the beginning I liked it." Then she ran around the makeshift stage and into the house, where she was greet with a shout of, "And where have you been this past hour, little madam? And what have you done with the ribbon on your brand new party dress?"

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The magician had discovered that real magic was possible and he could do it. Between engagements he cautiously experimented. He is now a well-known illusionist, with some TV specials under his belt, but he still, sometimes, has difficulty with his temper.

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Quinn grew up to become the much-loved magic-loving character she is, but she is always volunteering for her next magical experience hoping to find an set of experiences to match or possibly surpass her first time.