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& Challenge 2: Everyday Magic &
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“For this task, you must find a common household object in the house, and design a magic trick revolving around it. It may sound simple, however I must warn you all again that the contestant with the most lackluster performance will be eliminated at the end of the week. Performances are on Saturdays, so you all better start practicing!” Drake said, releasing the contestants on their merry ways.
~~~
Cammie & Saffron
“Jill?” Cammie asked as she entered the kitchen, finding Saffron instead, “Oh! Hey Saffron. Have you seen Jill at all? I need to talk to her about something.”
“Oh, hey Cameron- I mean Cammie! Sorry,” Saffron said, blushing profusely, “I’m still getting used to the fact that you’re a girl now.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Cammie said, “I realized there was going to be a bit of an adjustment period for everyone when I decided to actually reveal the truth. If it makes you feel any better my name is still Cameron, I just prefer to go by Cammie when I’m in my true body.”
“Thanks Cammie,” Saffron said, “I promise I’ll get it eventually. So, how goes the object hunt?”
“Well, I have some ideas, but I’ve got some stuff I need to settle before I get seriously invested in thinking about it. What about yourself?”
“Well, the first thing that popped into my mind was using a knife, but then I realized that knives and such have been used in tricks for ages. “
“You’ve probably got it easy, since you could just use all your stuffed animals,” Cammie said.
“Oh wait! That’s a brilliant idea!” Saffron took a little notebook out of her pocket, jotting down something before putting it back in her pocket. Cammie gave her an odd look, but she continued on, “that’ll be a good backup if I don’t think of anything good to use.”
“Anyways, I have to go,” Cammie said, looking down her watch and realizing she had already wasted way too long talking to this strange girl, “If you see Jill, could you tell her that I’m looking for her?”
“No problem Cammie,” Saffron told her, giving a salute as she said, “You can count on me!” Cammie meanwhile, left the room, heading off towards her scheduled practice.
~~~
Cammie’s Practice
“Alright Cammie,” David said, “Are you still working out on deciding what you want to use for your trick?”
“Yeah,”
“Well, I don’t see it as being productive to practice anything today then. However, since you’re here anyway and can actually use magic now, how about you give me a proper demonstration of what you can do?”
“Okay David, although you’ll have to forgive me for doing a bit of an easier trick, since I’m a little rusty,” Cammie said, shaking her hands outwards and causing light sparks to fly out.
“So, when I was a magician, I used to do this trick to open several of my shows, since it was a fun way to prepare the crowd for some of the harder stuff I was going to do.” Cammie reached up to her hair ties that were keeping her hair up in a ponytail, letting it fall free. She then said some magic words, “Портал pингс,” and the hair ties began to harden, taking on an almost plastic sheen as the air inside the hair ties’s loop turned a light blue color.
“These,” she said, holding up the two blue circular planes, “are my magic portals.” she place one loop a nearby table, while holding the other in her hand, “and they’re convenient for many things, like,” she pulled out an apple from out of thin air, dropping it through the portal in her hand, where it popped out of the portal on the table before exploding in the air. Cammie blew her finger, which was shaped like a gun with her index finger and thumb pointed outwards at 90 degrees.
“Or,” Cammie stuck her arm through the portal until the hair tie stopped at roughly half way up her arm. The missing part of her arm appeared out of the portal on the table, where Cammie maneuvered it to flop forward. Dragging the appendage by her hand, Cammie commented, “You can use it for your Thing cosplay.”
Cammie pulled her arm out. “Of course, these portals are pretty good for other stuff too. Увећај!” Cammie said, throwing the portal in her hand before throwing it up in the air. In midair, the portal began to expand outwards, until it was roughly the size of a hula hoop. Cammie held it up, letting go of it and allowing the portal to hang in midair. She took a step back before running head first into the portal.
From the portal on the table, a roughly six inch Cammie hopped out, her momentum carrying her so that she landed her somersault on the table. She gave a little bow, as she shouted, “These portals can be fun for size changing adventures!” She hopped back through the portal on the table, emerging normal size once more. “And, it works both ways,” Cammie winked, as she stuck her hand through the portal, a giant hand appearing out of the hula hoop, which gave a thumbs up.
She stuck her hand back in, saying the magic word, “Дисперсе,” which caused the portal to disappear. “And then I’d usually shift into something else regarding the portal rings,” Cammie said, “but I’m feeling a little winded already, and think I better stop.”
“Fair enough,” David said, “I’ve seen enough anyways,”
~~~
Jill & Ophelia
“Wow, you’ve really gotten a lot of mileage out of that animation spell,” Jill commented as she sat on a chair that Ophelia had summoned for her. Sitting opposite of her was Ophelia, who was sitting on a chair of her own. In between them, a table carrying two cups of tea was eagerly bending up and down, awaiting its master to give it a command.
“Thank you, it’s amazing how much that strange girl has squandered its potential,” Behind her, a coat rack was using it’s limbs to measure ingredients out and pour them into her cauldron, which lit up on its own as the spell required. “It has made creating my potions much easier.”
“I see that… So Ophelia, have you seen Cammie at all recently?” Jill asked.
“You mean that charlatan? What business do you have with him?” Ophelia asked somewhat aggressively.
“Well… he came to me on Friday during our normal rehearsal time, and kind of came out to me that he was a female before anyone else…”
“And why would he do that?”
“He told me that if we were going to continue practicing together, that we needed to be completely honest, and that he was tired of living a lie.”
“So what did you tell him?”
“I kind of… ran away.”
“Why would you do something like that?”
“Well,” Jill paused, trying to put her feelings into words, “it’s just that… we had spent so much time together, and then she pulls this on me, and it makes me question, how much did I actually know about this girl? How much does she know about me? I mean she’s brave enough to tell me her biggest secret before everyone else and I can’t even tell her mine!”
“That you don’t can barely do any magick?” Ophelia asked.
Jill looked at her in shock, “Wait! You knew?”
“Please Jill, I’ve been training to be a witch for a while now and checking the amount of magick within me almost on the daily. Checking the power of others is practically instinctual at this point. I nearly didn’t think you had any magick in you until you did your first trick.”
“So wait, if you knew that I had almost no magick, why didn’t you say anything? Why did you help me out with your potion?”
“I didn’t say anything, because as much as it pains me to say, until I’ve unlocked access to the Spirit of Gaia that lays within me, David knows more about Magick, and if he was fine with your inclusion in the contest, I saw no reason to out your weakness to the others. And as for why I helped you out with my potion,” Ophelia smiled, something Jill couldn’t quite recall if she had seen the pale girl ever done before, “it’s because I see you as my friend.”
Jill didn’t know what to say to this, before finally saying, “Thanks Ophelia, I see you as my friend too,” She stood up, “and Cammie is my friend too, which is why I have to go and tell her the truth.” She made her way through Saffron’s door…
~~~
Jill & Cammie
…And straight to the library. She had been thinking of finding Cammie, and the magic doors had not failed her. Cammie looked up from the book she was reading.
“Hey,” Jill said, “I have something I need to tell you.”
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& Question Corner &
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To Cammie: “Congratulations on coming out! Taking that step into revealing your true self is always so hard: my GF had a tough time coming out as trans to her family, and myself as an anatomical polymorph to mine. Though I will admit, it is a shame there's no longer having a male represented in this competition, because they are woefully underepresented in the assistant side of magic. Your updated bio says you're into all sorts of transformation magic? Could you elaborate on that, such as what kinds of transformations (besides genderswapping) really speak out to you?” -FlexibleAnatomy
Thank you for the kind words WanderTones. It’s always difficult to come out to people, especially loved ones, and the fact that you and your GF were brave enough to do so really inspires me.
I really prefer transformations that allow me to keep some part of my humanity, so I guess partial transformations would be more like what I’m into. You know, like centaurs, naga, driders, etc. One of my favorite transformation stories I like to share happened when I was younger. My Mom took me to an Ocean Explorers Camp in California, where we were all transformed into mermaids. We did underwater activities like swimming in coral reefs, or cleaning up the ocean floor, and we slept in underwater caverns. It was really great, although I remember a couple of years after I first joined, there was a big controversy because a high school senior in Rhode Island had gone to one of these camps and had strayed too far into the ocean and had gotten pregnant from a dolphin. Needless to say, after that my Mom didn’t let me go to that camp anymore.
To Cammie: “That was a *bleep* of a gamble you pulled there; trying to compete in a magic competition without having any magic to use is an obviously bad idea, and you could quite easily have been knocked out of the competition before you even had a chance to reveal anything.” -HeraldOfOpera
Yeah, well, it’s not like I entered this contest with the plan to reveal I was actually a girl the whole time. I was hoping that my own spunk and personality were going to be enough to carry me, with David helping out on the magic front similarly to how Alex handles all of the magic in our shows. It’s easy to say all of these things about my actions from your comfortable place at home, however if you were in my shoes I’m sure you wouldn’t be judging my decisions as harshly as you have been.
To Cammie: Remember that question about your unisex name? How lucky did you feel that my previous "questions" gave you a plausible excuse to ignore it entirely?
Um, I think that was one of your “questions” I skipped. So no, I don’t remember it. Also, from my recollection you never really gave me any “questions". You more so just left me rude comments, telling me in a variety of ways that my act sucked and that I was never going to make it past the first round (which by the way, I did just fine without help from the producers, so
)To Cammie: What's there to figure out with Alex? You're in love, and the only objective issue with lesbians is already solved. (It's the "but I want grandkids" factor, for the record; if your folks have any other problems with it then I have problems with them)” -HeraldOfOpera
It’s not so much either of those problems, and more so the “she doesn’t know that I’ve actually been a girl this entire time” sort of thing. When Alex first called me looking for an assistant, she thought I was a female magician who had a male assistant that she could borrow. Like an idiot, I said of course she could borrow my male assistant, Cameron, expecting to only do the one show with her. But then, we got bigger cheers than either of us ever got when we were going solo, and felt that a partnership was in order. I had to fake quit from myself, make up a story about my female self moving away, and essentially create a new backstory for the male assistant version of myself. The only people who ever knew about my ruse were my closest friends, and my parents (who, by the way, have told me they approve of the relationship wholeheartedly, regardless of which gender I decide to tie the knot as). That’s primarily what I came to the show to try to figure out, which was how to tell her the truth, which seeing as how some of her friends watch this show, I’m sure she’s already discovered all this, and I’m not going to get to know whether or not she forgives me until either I get kicked off or win.
To everyone except Cammie: “Who could saw that coming? (in reference to Cammie’s reveal” -HeraldOfOpera
Leela: I didn’t.
Ophelia: I could sense that he was lying and feeling guilty, but nothing else.
Jill: It hit me out of the blue the first time he told me, but I knew before the reveal.
Saffron: Nope
David: The spell that Cameron’s stopwatch uses is a highly advanced one. When he revealed his secret to me, I inspected the stopwatch he used so that I could understand why I couldn’t sense it. Whoever crafted the enchantment clearly knew what they were doing, as part of the reason it sucks up the user’s ability to do magic is because it’s using an excessive amount of magic to create a sort of magical white noise that completely throws off all magic sensing spells that I threw at it. I’m certain that’s how Cameron has been able to keep this secret from so many people for so long.
to Jill: “I do know of a guy who was born with two torsos. The form is more common where he comes from. He could give you a few pointers on movement and such. “ -James-MacCloude
Thank you for the offer James, however as much as I enjoyed doing the form, I don’t think it’s going to become a regular transformation for me. I still live in a really cramped college dorm room, and I don’t think using a form that makes me taller is going to be useful to me. Although, if he has any pointer for using four arms effectively, I’d greatly appreciate those.