Trouble began the next morning. See, the spell that Bethany had woven was only supposed to last one night. And I woke up, and it hadn't expired. I was still a "shorty" with my head and neck attached to my waist, my torso floating in some nether-realm of half-existence. But the spell should have weakened overnight, and now I found not only had it not lost any energy, it had been re-woven in the night.
I kicked off my sheets, and went to the kitchen to find Grace fumbling with her leg-arms to make coffee.

"So she got you too, huh," she said.

"What, did she re-weave the spell?"

"Uh-huh. And she is quite wisely out of here."

I sat down. "Oh it's on now. I'm gonna turn her into a worm."

"Can you really do that?"

"Maybe."

"I think that'd be a bit over the top. You had fun last night didn't you?"

"Yea, but I have class later! And then I'm supposed to watch a movie with Max!"

"Ooh! You didn't say anything about that!"

"Yea, well, there's not much to say. We kissed goodnight out front and he went home."

Grace awkwardly ground some coffee beans and dumped them into a filter, not without spilling a few grounds out onto the counter.

"This is hard enough in the morning when I have hands," she said.

"Where is Beth anyway?"

"I think she's on a run."

"Perfect. When she gets back, she'll be too tired to get away."

"I don't know if I like where you're headed with this. If you turn her into a fish or a worm or something, how's she supposed to put us back?"

"I don't care. It's about revenge."

"Well, I want some arms back! My feet are starting to ache from being hands so much."

"You know who could put you back? Alexis. I'd rather stay like this for a week than ask for her help."

"Really… yea, I can't blame you. Still, if anyone can break down a fresh weave, that's her."
Grace took a mug from the cupboard and set it under the spout of the coffee maker.

"Didn't you go to see her?"

"Yes. And she might do something weird to you in exchange, but she's just … I don't know, I still like her."

I'll go ahead and explain my backstory with Alexis, even though this is a bit of an aside, I think it's another good story about SCIM. And it just illustrates how what can seem like a strange situation actually turns out to be a fascinating and positive experience.

The way it worked was like this — when someone weaves a spell, they have control over that spell and only they can cancel it outright. Anyone else who wishes to modify or negate that spell will have to understand not only everything about how it was put together, but how to undo every step in the right order so as not to let any magical energy escape. For this reason, it's actually very dangerous to try and un-weave a spell that's not yours without quite a bit of study. Most spells have a temporary duration and will expire on their own — un-weaving can have permanent and entirely unpredictable consequences if you don't do it just the right way.

Alexis however, is something of a prodigy at this. I think the word for her ability is an Intuit. With regular magic, she has as much trouble as any other student — she has to study and practice each technique until it's perfected before she can perform it. But in un-weaving, she has this savant ability to workout the way to deconstruct a spell even if she has virtually no idea what or who is behind it.
Her abilities, however, did not come without an apparent cost. I suppose whatever difference in her brain that allowed her to see leylines in such a clear way also cost her a bit of her sanity. Mopey and moody, she often refused to help someone close to her without any explanation, but in other situations demonstrated unending kindness and generosity towards people she barely knew. Sometimes she asked for payments immediately, sometimes "a promise of payment at a later date."

The thing was, you didn't want to owe her any favors. I think my own case with her is a pretty good example. Freshmen year, I was practicing a spell for Incantations in Pyromancy when I sneezed. The magical energy shot from my lips up my sinuses and came out my eyes. The burning sensation was really intense, and try as I could to alleviate it, I simply couldn't focus with that much energy still burning. My solution was to perform another spell, a gimmick that let me take my eyeballs out. It's actually pretty advanced magic, but I memorized the spell when I was 15. It took an entire summer, but it's a good party trick if you want people to stop talking to you.

In any case, Alexis found me a couple hours later after word had spread that I botched my spell. She un-wove it on the condition that I would owe her a favor. I hastily agreed, because I had a lot of studying to do and it would be a lot easier without my eyes inside my head. She fixed everything in under 5 minutes and only asked that I come see her next week.

Well, I came by a week later asking what she needed and she abruptly told me to come back the next day. The day after she was in the right "zone" or something, and said we had to go down to the hyromancy lab because she had an experiment to run. Well, we got down there and she says she's doing research in consciousness transferral, which is pretty technical stuff. Basically it's like that scene from the mad scientist's lab where he flips the switch that swaps two people's bodies. Only to actually do that is like a four or five day long procedure.

I was hesitant to commit. But I did owe her big time.

"What is it I need to do?"

"Can I confide something to you?" she asked.

"Sure."

"A part of this is research. But I also have a bit of a personal interest in the topic. What I mean is this — I've already run this experiment in different forms, on different occasions. I don't know how to explain this in a a subtle way, so I'll just come out and explain it. I have a fixation on the idea of making love to myself. From another body." She was blushing but her tone was forward and direct. She, rightly I felt, was not ashamed of what she wanted even if it meant confessing her real intentions.

"You mean, we switch bodies and get it on? I don't know how I feel about that. I'm not into girls."

"No, that's not entirely it. I want to inhabit both bodies, hence the hitch. Some people are into body switching because they love another's body so much they want to possess it. Now, I'm somehow into this idea of making love to myself, and knowing that the other person I'm with is also me. It's strange, I know that, and I'm not going to pull a 'you owe me' and make you do anything you don't want to. But if you do this for me, allow me to borrow your body I mean, I won't forget you doing this favor for me."

"Huh. I'd never even thought about it like that, but I guess that makes sense."

"The problem I guess is that I'm too selfish to want another lover. So in order to have a relationship with someone, I'd basically need someone who doesn't want their own body… but it'd still need to be a body I found attractive so… I guess you see the dilemma."

"Okay, I mean, I do owe you and I'm actually kind of intrigued a bit if only by the novelty of something like this. But what happens to me? Where do I go while you borrow me?"

"That's up to you. Once I remove your consciousness, I can transfer it to almost anything you like. If there's nothing you want to be, I'll just leave your liquid essence in a jar for a while."

"Am I conscious the whole time?"

"Depends. There are ways to suspend your thoughts so it'll be as though no time has passed, but that will take an extra day for me to get ready. If we do it now, you'll be aware the whole time."

"How long are we talking here?"

"I can do the procedure in about an hour, then I'll borrow you for, I don't know, two or three?"

"Alright. I'll do it. Can I ask one other question though?"

"Sure."

"Have you ever gotten a guy to do this for you? Or is it only girls?"

"I've tried both. The truth is, the gender of the other me doesn't apply so much, as long as I find them attractive and know that I'm in both bodies."

"And how do you do that anyway? Both bodies I mean."

"Well I don't control both at once from one consciousness. But yesterday I was in here and I extracted exactly half of my liquid essence. It's right here."

She held up a mason jar full of a clear liquid. I started to laugh.

"What?"

"I don't know," I said. "It's just funny to me, I guess that you're carrying around half of your mind in a jar?"

"It's not exactly half my mind. Even a drop of liquid essence can fully form it's own consciousness as myself, but the more I divide it into multiple vessels, the more divergence occurs so the copies in consciousness become less 'me.'"

"So how many copies have you made before?"

"The most? I guess ten or so. A bunch of little dolls I made. Now if you don't mind, can we get started?"

"Sure."

She led me over to a machine at the far end of the room. It consisted of a chair enclosed in a box, with an opening at the top. She told me to sit down with my head sticking out the opening and fasten the stock around my neck.

"Did you think I'd try to get away?"

"You head has to be kept still for this part."

"What's going to happen?"

"I'm going to remove it." She took out a machine attached to a helmet with a black faceplate.

"Wait. What?"

"This is how we do it. Don't worry it doesn't use blades. Lasers and a spacial-flux crystal array. Very quick. The machine that distills your essence can't be big enough for your whole body, it'd be too expensive, and besides all it needs is your head. The way it works, we set your head in the middle of that large white sphere thing, and then it's bombarded with Wainwright Rays at a high frequency while a small amount of Oerich Gas and Purwel Dust is added to the air. The result is that your essence will begin to liquify and leak out. The whole thing takes about an hour to drain."

"You've done this before?"

She lifted the collar of her shirt to show me a fresh cut across her neck. "I had to distill my own liquid essence last night, didn't I? It's completely safe, and almost painless. I think it's more boring then anything, just sitting there waiting for your brain to melt, kind of. Oh, wait. Before we proceed, what kind of receptacle would you like?"

"Do you have any suggestions?"

"I have a couple good options right here."

She pulled out a metal chest and opened it for me. Inside it was a variety of toys.

"Wait, you mean to leave me as a toy?"

"If you'd prefer an animal, we can go find one but that will take extra time."

"Sure. That's fine. I'll be the robot."

"Interesting. Not many girls pick that one."

"What do they usually do?"

"The teddy bear or the marionette."

"I kind of like the teddy bear. Or the toy truck. Or wait! Is that a slinky?"

"Yes. You want to be a slinky?"

"Absolutely!"

Now I was actually excited for this. I sat down in the beheading apparatus and waited for Alexis to set everything in place. Satisfied I was snug in the helmet, she went over to a console, flipped a couple switches and turned a key. There was a loud fzzzt! noise from the helmet and I lost feeling below my neck. She picked me up which was rather disorienting, and went to the white sphere and set me down on the counter.

"This is pretty weird already," I said. That was my first time being beheaded. I'd always thought the eyeball thing was pretty edgy.

"I met a girl online once who got off to having her head cut off."

"Really. I'm not surprised somehow."

"We traded favors, in that way I guess. Sorry if this is too much information, but you seem intrigued."

"No, I am. I mean, I guess I've got a few kinks of my own, but I'd be into guys. But what were you saying?"

"Oh, the girl. She liked to have her head cut off, but in a more … violent way. Like with a knife or an axe. And blood, she liked the blood. I guess it had something to do with a fantasy about being killed that way, though obviously we didn't go that far. She returned the favor, in kind to me."

"That's cool. I mean, I've only recently started to imagine magic in a sexual way — before now it was just school stuff, but if I could switch bodies with boyfriend or something, I think it could get interesting."

"I could do that for you someday if you like."

"Well, I need the boyfriend first. And then I need to convince him it's a good idea."

"Sure. Well, in any case, we're ready to begin."

She unstrapped the helmet and lifted my head up and set it on a string hammock in the middle of the sphere.

"Alright," she said, "I'll see you later. The machine will do it's thing and you'll start to feel it working. It's actually pretty interesting. And the next thing you know, you'll be a slinky."

"Okay!" I said, giggling at the thought of it. She closed the door.

The machine started to hum. At first I was a little bit bored, but I distracted myself by imagining what it'd be like to become a slinky, and to think of all the other toys I'd like to be if I could. A basketball! A koosh ball! A toy plane! I tried to think of what I would be if I could be anything at all, should I ever do this again.

After a while a spicy and chemical smell entered the air, and I could feel a change taking place. It's a difficult sensation to describe, but I began to become less "aware" of myself inhabiting my head, and more aware that I was leaking out of my ears and collecting in a basin at the bottom of the sphere. As time passed, I was more and more aware of this, and although I could still see out of my eyes, it was as though I were watching that from somewhere else. Finally I no longer seemed to be inside my head. After another couple minutes, a drain opened up and I could feel "myself" drain down into a glass tube and into something else.

Everything kind of went dark. I could hear a hissing noise, which I later found out was my essence being heated and evaporated in the chamber where Alexis had placed the slinky. A minute passed in the dark, and then something opened. I was removed from the chamber and placed on the desk by a mirror.

Don't ask me how a slinky could see. But I could. I took my first slinky step, onto my opposite end and coiled up back into a stack.

"Everything worked out as planned," someone said. If a slinky could talk, I would have gasped and squealed with a mix of anxiety, surprise, and excitement. It was my own body speaking — now inhabited by Alexis' other essence. She patted me on the "head" and said, "Thank you! We'll be going now. Meet you back here in three hours?"

I raised up a couple coils and nodded.

So that was how that whole thing went. In any case, I found being a slinky opened a world of transformations to me. Part of why I ended up a potions major was because in the intro class you get to turn yourself into a piece of fruit. I don't know why, but I've really enjoyed becoming 'inanimate' objects like that, and there's lots of different ways to be them. Anyhow, I know that whole thing went off topic and I was going to tell you about how the rest of that day went — how things went with Max and how I got revenge on Bethany. But I'll have to tell that one next time.