The Twisty Transformy Adventure of Salem Maitland
Part 1 – It Begins
By ThatGuy

Meet our hero: Salem Maitland, sometimes called "Sandy" after the color of his shaggy brownish-blonde hair - runs in the family. Smooth, sensible, and concerned with keeping everything together, he's a perfect person to have a mass of weirdness be dumped on him. Which is good, because what you are about to begin reading is the start of what will by far be the strangest day of his life.

Salem attended a local college during fall, but as this was the summer he was back home for a while. And as your average college student home for the summer his days were spent hanging out, trying to have fun and definitely trying his best not to care about the weird stuff out there.

But let us explain a bit: see, there are a lot of strange things out there - magic and mad science mostly – all of which could change your shape, warp your reality and really put a damper on your day. After seeing the occasional jerk mess with the wrong stuff up at the college and turn into something or other, Salem was in no mood to deal with any of it on vacation. Well, at least, not an inordinate amount of it.

Unfortunately, fate had other plans.

It all started during a late Saturday morning, during a frantic bout of video games with his best bud Chaz, occasionally known as "Shaggy" after the cartoon character – compared to Sandy, who as a bit of a jock was somewhat fit, Chaz was very slim despite his love of eating pretty much anything he could get his hands on.

Case in point, they were currently playing a heated head to head video game over the last pizza roll. And Chaz was winning.

"Not this time!" Sandy was yelling as his little red car drew closer to Ronnie's yellow one. "I've got your number this time! There's only one king!"

"Yeah, man, but it's not you," Chaz smirked, but even he knew he was losing ground.

Salem was just about to pass him and gain glorious victory when the race was interrupted by a bang - said bang being the sound of Sandy's little brother Samuel – Sam for short – racing into the house and slamming the door behind him. Both racers jumped and turned, allowing their cars to veer off the road and crash, not that they noticed one bit.

Sam wasn't paying attention either. He looked fairly frantic, actually – he kicked off his sneakers, which looked a little strange and discolored, and took off for the stairs up to his room in record speed, passing right behind his older brother. His shaggy hair, the exact same color as Salem's, seemed oddly long and his clothes looked a little off… and what's more (as Salem couldn't help but notice), though Sam had always been a little skinny he looked a bit… daintier.  It all added up to one suspicious (but totally in keeping with the genre of this story) sum.

"Crap, crap, crap, crap!" Sam cried, "I gotta fix this!"

"Hey, wait!" Salem shouted as he ran past, "where's the fire?"

"No-time-to-talk-bro-sorry-bye!" Sam said in one breath as he rocketed past, and maybe it was just that he was talking rapid-fire and out of breath, but Sandy could've sworn his voice was a little higher and a little lighter. "Crud, crud, crud!" And with that he was gone.

"Well, that was strange," Salem mused.

"Stranger than you think, man," Chaz said, pointing over to where Sam's sneakers had landed… if they could even be called sneakers any more. The tongue and laces were almost gone, sinking into the sides. Sides which were no longer soft but were starting to look hard and glossy, suspiciously like patent leather. Not to mention both of them were getting slimmer and turning light blue, all things normal sneakers usually don't do.

Salem groaned. His protagonist senses were firing off the charts. "Aw, crud. Don't tell me."

"Sure looks like it," Chaz said innocently.

Face met palm with shocking speed. "Darn it, I came home to get away from this stuff!"

"Looks like you failed, bro," Chaz said just as innocently. Salem shot him a brief glare and rushed up the stairs towards his brother's room.

Chaz, meanwhile, turned back to the game. With Salem gone he could get maybe one or two games in with the computer before the plot forced him into action – and honestly the computer was a lot better a challenge than his friend was (not that he would ever tell him that). But… his conscience got the better of him. Sam was like a brother to him too, so he might as well see if he was all right.

He reached the top of the stairs to find Salem pounding on his brother's door. "Sam? Sammy? Open up, I know you're in there!" He shouted. Chaz resisted the inappropriate urge to laugh. "I'm giving you ten seconds!

There was no response.

"Ten!"


Still nothing.

"Nine!"

The door shot open, but the teenager inside wasn't quite familiar. And for good reason: she was a girl.

In fact, the whole room, supposedly Sam's, looked quite different from what they were used to. Instead of a stereotypical dark blue the whole room had turned into a slightly less stereotypical light blue – from the walls to the bedsheets. Sam's rare action figures, which he had displayed proudly above his dresser, seemed to have been replaced with rare barbie dolls some how. There were still wrestling posters all over the room, but the had changed from pictures of male wrestler to images of female wrestlers… though Salem wasn't sure whether not having the male wrestlers' pictures around was a good thing or not.

"Huh." Chaz mused. "Not bad. The barbies are a little stereotypical, though. You ever notice how that always seems to happen? I mean, lots of girls don't-"

"Shut up, Chaz."

"Right…"

The girl who answered the door looked confused. "Um… hey bro. Shaggy.  What's up? Is this about me leaving my shoes downstairs?"

Salem groaned again – which was obviously going to be a running reaction for him. His fears were realized, but that didn't mean he had to be calm about it. "Wait… Sam? Is that you?"

"Um… yeah?" The girl who was apparently Sam raised an eyebrow.

"Let me guess," Chaz chuckled. "Your name is Samantha, right?"

"… yes?" She said, obviously still lost. "Don't you know my name by now?"

"Ha! A female version of her real name! I knew it!"

Yes, that's right – Sam had somehow fallen victim to a classic gender change spell, and now had no memory of who she was. Salem, who again had come home to avoid these kinds of debacles, was finding this much less entertaining than Chaz was. "But… but you're a girl!"

"Um… yeah… last time I checked…" she put her hands up in a distancing kind of motion. "You guys are starting to weird me out, ok? If there's nothing wrong, I gotta get ready."

"But you're not supposed to be a- wait." Looking at the person who was now apparently his sister, Salem noticed that she was already dressed. Which meant "get ready" involved something special. "Get ready for what?"

"To go see Bruno, course!" She sighed dreamily, and there was a look Salem didn't like one bit in her eyes. "I think I'm going to ask him to the dance tomorrow."

"Ah, yeah!" Chaz said in sudden realization, "the Generic Party / Dance tomorrow! I almost forgot. One of our friends who goes to that unspecific ritzy university is throwing it. And he has a brother in high-school, which is why the our friends and Sam's friends can both go at once! Y'know, in case either of you forgot…"

But Chaz' blatant bit of exposition went totally ignored by his companion, who looked absolutely livid. To clarify what Chaz didn't explain, Bruno was Sam's best friend – the two were inseparable in much the same way Chaz and Salem were, which in the realm of transformation usually did not mean anything good. Salem's suspicions were rising in ways that did not bode well he for who would otherwise have been a lucky high schooler.

"I know that look," Chaz noted. "You think he pulled the 'turn your friend into a girl so you can have a girlfriend' bit on your brother?"

Salem gave an eloquent growl in way of response.

"So… you want to go beat the kid up?" A less eloquent but no less expressive hiss was the response. "Cool, I was getting tired of pretending to almost lose to you. Should we bring Samantha?"

Salem twitched at hearing his "sister's" name, and grabbed her by the arm in lieu of answering the question. "Come on, bro. We have a few questions to ask your 'boyfriend.'"

Samantha's confusion was unsurprisingly not soothed. "Wait… what do you mean 'bro?' What are you talking about. Hey! You could at least let me get my heels on! Hey!"

The voyage down the stairs and into the foyer passed quickly, or at least it shall be written as such. Not five minutes later our heroes find ourselves on the move just outside their house, where Samantha was trying to get bearings on the situation.

"So… you're saying I'm supposed to be a boy?"

"Yes!" Salem seethed.

"I don't believe you."

Chaz chuckled. "I didn't think you would. But it's the plot we've found ourselves in, so you might as well run with it."

"Um… okay?" Not soothed by the kind of incomprehensible meta reference that was unexpectedly becoming one of Chaz' major characteristics, Samantha instead looked towards the yard next door and found something to distract her from the strange situation her brother and friend were trying to convince her of. "Hey, look! Abigail's got a new babysitter."

"Poor girl…" Chaz mumbled.

"Hey, wait!" Salem stopped short, an idea starting to shine behind his eyes. "Abigail! Maybe she knows something about this."

Abigail Charmagne was the ten year old daughter of the Maitlands' next door neighbors, and as fate would have it an very powerful witch for her age – it comes from her father's side of the family, which most who were in the know found strange as typically that sort of thing game from the mother. In any case, Abigail was usually kind and cheerful, but she was still an enormous brat when it came to using her powers: as many a babysitter has unfortunately discovered. Her doll collection was well into double digits when her parents discovered where the sitters they were hiring were disappearing to and forced her to turn them back – they still remembered the gaggle of stunned and aghast women storming away from the house (and the one or two that promised to come back to babysit soon), though the Maitlands suspected that afterward she had just begun finding better ways to hide them.

Usually, the Charmagnes either found someone who had no idea what kind of horror they were walking into to babysit or called the Maitlands, with whom Abigail was not only always good and polite, but whom she almost never used her powers against. But true enough, there was a young woman in the yard whom they had never seen before playing with Abigail. They were currently having a tea party, and the fact that everyone besides Abigail and the sitter were dolls was quite foreboding.

In any case, Chaz found the idea that that had changed to be quite likely. "Well, she did always like Sam. But she prefers girls as babysitters… maybe she turned him into one."

"Shut up! I'm not a boy!" Said Samantha, who was ignored.

"I was thinking that she might've seen something," Salem said, "Sam was still himself when he ran in after all… but that's an even likelier idea! Ugh… that's just perfect. I guess I'll have to get her to turn him back."

"Yeah, you – a confused college student who can't even convince his own brother that he's a boy – versus a bratty power-tripping preteen enchantress. Good luck with that."

Chaz was also ignored as Salem walked over to the fence dividing the two houses, irritation in his eyes. "Hey Abby!" He shouted, taking care not to sound too aggressive – he hadn't entirely ignored Chaz after all. "Can I speak to you please?"

The girl looked up, and a big cheerful grin shot across her face as soon as she saw who was calling her. She immediately shot up and ran across the yard, leaving her surprised sitter to pull herself off the grass and try to follow her.

"Hey guys!" She chirped, bouncing on the balls of her feet. "How are you?" Salem opened his mouth to start the interrogation, but then Abigail glanced at Samantha and cut across him with the speed of a hyperactive child. "Wow! Sam, is that you? You're so pretty!"

"Thanks, Abby! I-"

Salem ignored her, earning him an indignant huff. "Listen, Abby. Can you reverse whatever you did to Sam, please? Your fun has gone on far enough."

Abigail cocked her head to the side in a sincere show of innocence. "Huh? I didn't do anything to Sam. Honest!"

"Right," Salem rolled his eyes. "Just like you're not planning on doing anything to your new sitter."

Abigail chuckled guiltily. "Well… maybe that. But I swear, I'd never do anything to Sammy."

"Well even if you didn't, turn him back for us, will you?"

Abigail waved her hand idly – more quickly than she usually did when people gave her an order – and grimaced. "Whoa. That spell's way too strong for me. I'm sorry, I can't-"

Just then, Abigail's new sitter caught up to them – conveniently having not heard a word of the conversation. She was a fairly busty coed with freckles and a long, brown ponytail – nobody Salem recognized, which meant the Charmers had once again had to find a babysitter from all the way across town.

She reach out and shook Salem's hand. "Hey there! Name's Joan. I'm watching this cute little monster for today," she ruffled Abigail's hair – obviously she had meant 'little monster' as a term of endearment. Salem was mildly tempted to correct her. "So… who are you?"

She brushed her hair out of her face coyly and gave Salem a clearly interested look. If he wasn't sure that ponytail wasn't going to be made of yarn in an hour or so, he might have asked for her number. "We're Abby's next door neighbors. We're wondering, did you see a boy around high school age with blondish-brown hair run past here?"

"Yeah… now that you mention it. Shot past here like his tail was on fire. Why?"

"Uh… no reason. He's… uh… gone for the moment and we're trying to figure out why he left. Did he tell Abby anything special?"

Abigail stuck out her tongue at him, obviously irritated at not being believed. Joan did not notice, however. "Er… no. Not that I can think of. She said hi, but he was in too much of a rush."

"Darn…" Salem visibly deflated. "Well, thanks anyway." He turned to walk away – back to his first lead, he guessed.

"Wait!" Abby shouted. Salem turned back halfway. "You should talk to Noriko! I can't believe you didn't think of her! She's way better at you-know-what than I am! She can bring Sammy back for sure!"

"Yeah!" Salem realized. "That's right!" Noriko Hikaru was another one of Salem's good friends, and – even better – she was also a witch… with the benefit of ten years more experience than the girl standing in front of. He also couldn't believe he hadn't thought of her before now, she was the perfect person to help with the problem at hand. "Thanks!"

Abigail grinned. By her side, Joan rubbed the back of her head, obviously not catching onto a word they were saying. "Thanks! Just make sure you get Sammy back, ok?"

"You bet." Salem smiled. "You behave now, ok?" Then he turned to her hapless sitter. "And since she probably won't behave, you should probably get used to plastic."

Abigail laughed and ran off, while the clueless sitter just stared back. "Uh… thanks. Have a good one, and… I hope to see you later." She gave him a last flirty look and turned to chase after her charge.

Samantha and Chaz walked up to join Salem. "That girl is doomed, isn't she," Samantha quipped, looking vaguely amused.

"Yep…"

"There's a joke in here about your best chance for a love interest being a Raggedy Ann, but I'm not going to make it. But hey, at least there's Noriko, right?"

"Shut up, Chaz."

"Right."

"Anyway…" Samantha said, interrupting their running gag. "I'm still not sure I believe this whole 'I'm supposed to be a boy' stuff, but I just remembered – while I was walking home I was listening to this:" she held out a purple mp3 player and handed it to her brother. It clearly said Meta Industries on the side. "I took it off because I started to feel… weird while I was listening to it. At least, I think I was…"

Salem's plotline senses began to tingle anew. "Where did you get this?"

"I dunno…" she admitted. "I was at the mall yesterday with – sigh… - Bruno, and it was a free sample. I didn't see who was giving them out, I just grabbed it."

"Well, at the risk of adding another person for us to go investigate," Chaz piped in, "Keith up at the Magitek Shack could probably take a look at it." Keith, who filled the role of "the cool teenager who wasn't a jerk like all the others" when Chaz and Salem were kids, was a master when it came to magical technology. "But we've already got enough things to worry about, right? What should we do?"

It was a good question. On the one hand, he still really wanted to go have a very intimidating talk with Bruno about why his brother-turned-sister had the hots for him, but on the other hand this mp3 player could have something to do with it – Meta Inc… that was a suspiciously transformation related name if he ever saw one. But at the same time he couldn't help but notice that Sam had gotten the thing while with Bruno, which seemed highly suspicious.

But at the same time, none of that should matter right now, should it? It was important, but not as important as getting his brother back as fast as possible. Plus, it would be nice to add Noriko to the cast sooner rather than later – for totally platonic reasons that totally had nothing to do with anything Chaz was implying, of course.

A tough decision, where to go next. Where to go, where indeed? You'll find out next time!