Naomi took a deep breath before the feed in her lab went live.
She stood dressed, or more accurately encased below the neck, in a skin-tight black latex catsuit. She was the lead magitech engineer on this project but… she wasn’t quite certain why the catsuit was necessary. Something about easier telemetric fidelity
Okay, sure, Kelly was still a .gif file. And Walter was successfully transmitted but could only be printed as a non-magically reactive pin-up (she looked great, though). But last week they were able to successfully restore Julia! Admittedly, they printed her on normal 8 ½ by 11 inch paper, so when she was restored she was only ten inches tall. But Naomi had made certain to requisition an appropriately sized printer to reproduce her in full!
Part of that was because Witch-Tech had run out of interns for her office. All her subordinate engineers had called ‘not it’ before her, so it was up to her to make the first big presentation to the investors.
But no time for that now.
“Today, we here at Witch-Tech are going to make history,” she said to the camera in her laboratory. “I have been prepped for feed into the patented Witch-Tech Bi-Dimensional-Translocation™ System!”
She looked down. The ‘feed’ was a glorified wringer, with two big rollers. She felt the mechanism holding her give and her latex-clad feet slip between them squeezing cylinders. There was no pain… only a pleasant, vaguely far-away sensation as her feet were flattened and then vanished by mechanisms behind the rollers.
“Our system combines magic and technology from over a dozen different fields to safely and reliably flatten volunteers, digitize them, transmit them, and reproduce them elsewhere! With this technology, people can move between stations at the speed of light! Or, at least, the speed of bandwidth!”
The PR department had insisted on that joke. She couldn’t see her audience, watching via webcam from a continent away, but she rather suspected it fell flat… as flat her as her sex and hips had just become, pressed into a two-dimensional form and vanished in the churning, hungry machine beneath her.
“Welp, my head will be going under in just a few seconds. Being faxed across country… feels neat, in a weird sort of way…” Naomi smiled as her head slipped past the rollers and into the darkness of the machine.
And for a moment, time stopped. Or didn’t register for her. Or didn’t exist. There was a peculiar tranquility, a lightness of essence utterly unlike anything she’d ever experienced..
When reality solidified, Naomi could see light emerging, feel herself existing again, inching downward… upside down… the cacophony of light and sound and existence crystalizing into view… but not quite the view she’d been expecting. It was the East Coast office, but it was stripped bare, interns were hurrying about, carrying stacks of boxes. A small group of people were following a uniformed figure, but they didn’t look like the usual VIP crowd, and half of them were carrying phones, visibly broadcasting the demonstration elsewhere.
She heard a voice. She recognized it as Lucille Wright, the Client-Outreach Manager who was constantly showing off Witch-Tech procedures.
“And here is our lovely project manager herself, safe and sound, and having travelled 2,600 miles instantly! The patented Essence-Secure ™ paper she’s printed on keeps her fully conscious and safeguards her structural integrity from tears, shearing, wrinkling, and even fire, all the while keeping her magically stable enough for full reversal back into a three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood senior researcher!”
Lucille grimaced. “We had planned to demonstrate the reversal here, but, as you can see, we’re sort of moving shop right now. It, uh, turns out the Dimensional-Restructurer ™ has already been packed… so…”
Oh… yeah, Naomi remembered that memo. She’d skimmed it last week, but had been too focused on her own project to give it much mind. Due to some… legal unpleasantness, Witch-Tech was relocating to a state with more lenient transformation and property laws. They were also considering a name change. And the main office was a bit of a mess, half-stripped of equipment with only the most bare-bones electronics and furniture amongst the shuffling interns.
“Yeah, we’ll just pack her up restore Naomi once we’re set up in our new office. I’m sure she won’t mind a little down-time while we move.”
Naomi came to be aware of how restrictive her current predicament was. She couldn’t move anything. And she felt so sensitive… even being looked at carried a strange, pleasurable weight to it.
Well, the last few weeks had been super stressful. And it’s not like she could do anything as a latex-clad photo. Like… move in any way whatsoever. Why not just smile and try to relax? After all… it did feel kind of nice…