Ricky lifted up the goggles and wiped some sweat from his forehead on the sleeve of his lab coat. The smell of the arcanic resistor blended with the musty basement smell, and a healthy serving of dust on top of that.
“Well,” he said, looking down at Anna lying inside two connected boxes set across a steel table. “I think it worked.”
“Let’s see,” she said, with a raised eyebrow.
He gave the second box, the lower one a shove down and sideways. It slid easily on the polished steel, with the sound of plastic on metal.
Anna grinned up at him.
“Get this box off me,” she said.
“Yep, I’m getting there,” said Ricky, setting down the resistor on the workbench and throwing off his leather gloves with it. He turned back and lifted the plastic box off of Anna and set it on the floor.
“There,” he continued, “You’re officially cut in half.”
Anna, lying on her back, lifted herself up to her elbows and looked down at where her waist ended. She reached down with one hand and explored the flat sectional cut that Ricky had made.
“Awesome,” she said, with a crooked smile back at him.
“Uh, happy birthday?” said Ricky.
“C’mere,” she said, reaching out to him. She took his arms in hers, and with his help pulled herself up to sit on the cross section through her middle. She kept hold of him, pulling him in for a kiss and a long hug.
“Thanks for playing mad scientist on me,” she said. “Can you get my ass out of that box, and we can go upstairs?”
#
They had met on Tinder of all places. It was only just a couple months ago, and they’d just taken to referring to one another as boyfriend and girlfriend. That said, their ‘relationship’ as it was developing was … unconventional. As Anna put it, she liked to “fuck around” with other boys… and girls.
Normally that might have been a little out of his comfort zone. But Ricky had really only found the experience kind of refreshing. To completely separate out the ‘lust’ from ‘love’ and just indulge both. It was very much a period of reinvention for him on that front.
For Anna, it had been similar. While she’d always been adventurous with hookups, the magic stuff that Ricky could do to her body was … well, she was learning things about her kinks and preferences she’d never before known.
That was an area where Ricky at least had as much experience as pretty much anyone.
He had just moved to a small city with a cheap downtown full of old factories that used to make soap. He was working at a startup in one of those buildings that’d been converted over to offices and loft housing. It paid well and the work was interesting.
That said there wasn’t too much of a ‘modder’ scene there that he knew of. He’d gotten into that when living in Oregon. Arcanic engineering and experimentation meet ups . Post quantum-event, this was a new field of study, one where there really were no experts yet. Just a bunch of smart people, making videos and sharing stuff on the internet.
Ricky had been into it for the science. Whatever had happened four years previous, what they called the “QE” or “quantum event”, it had ripped open some kind of hole in the physical laws of the world. Ricky was not a physicist, so he did not presume to understand how a particle accelerator out in the tundra of Alaska had effected things such that ‘magic’ would become real again.
But somehow that happened. And Ricky was an electrical engineer. So while some people had become magically attuned themselves or just a little bit different post-QE, a lot of others found that the energy of magic could also be manipulated with technology. The potential applications in the medical field were huge, and that was where Ricky ended up finding his current job. They were developing new techniques for surgery nearly every month. It was exciting stuff.
Anyway, that was just the day job.
At night, he’d taken to building modder contraptions in Anna’s basement, to both satisfy his own drive to actually make something instead of just staring at CAD all day on a computer. And also to indulge her new and interesting kinks.
#
It’d been a week prior she’d pitched the idea. They’d been drinking beers at Sully’s Tavern, a rooftop bar on the building next to his work, and she’d given him a smug smile.
“So my birthday is coming up,” she said. “Next Saturday.”
“Nice,” said Ricky. “What’s your birthday wish?”
“To get laid a lot,” she said with a suggestive inflection.
“Nice,” repeated Ricky returning her tone. “You think I can get in on that?”
“Probably,” said Anna with a teasing look. “I wanna throw a party at my house. And I have a request.”
“What’s that?”
“I want to get cut in half. Do you think you can make something like one of those sawing-a-lady-in-half things like those old pre-QE magic shows used to have?”
“Yeah, shouldn’t be too hard.”
“Cool,” she said. “We can bring all the mad science stuff up from the basement and play around with it.”
“Okay,” said Ricky with a squint. “I mean, some of that could be kinda…”
“Just the parts that are idiot proof,” said Anna. “We can skip the shrink-ray I think.”
“Right,” said Ricky, with a relieved sigh.
“And I want to get cut in half,” said Anna again.
“You said that,” said Ricky with a raised eyebrow. “That’s … interesting.”
“I was thinking back,” said Anna, leaning in confidingly, “About the pictures from last weekend. When you turned me into a literal piece of ass.”
She was referring to a transformation they’d watched a video about. The magic had vanished Anna’s entire upper half, so she essentially ended at the hips. It’d been done using a shaping algorithm run through a “white-mana-polarized” loop. But all that meant was wrapping a wire around her waist a few times, taping it in place, running the script he’d downloaded, and watching her upper half just evaporate into a null-dimensional-space.
“And I loved that,” said Anna, “And I had been thinking about just doing that again this weekend, or you know, maybe for the rest of my life—”
She paused to smirk at him.
“Anyway,” she continued, “Like I got just as much of a thrill, maybe even more, from like seeing pictures of me as just this like … fuckable pair of legs. So if I could like, watch my own ass walk around by itself?”
“Well,” said Ricky, “It shouldn’t be too hard to put together the dividers just using an arcanic resonation phase shift. We can just use a z-type sense interface to create the connection so you can feel both halves.”
“Cool. Great science-ing,” said Anna somewhat unaffectedly. “Okay, also, we might need to go soon because just thinking about this stuff is getting my panties fucking soaking, and you already agreed that I would get to chop your fucking head off tonight.”
That had been, in fact, part of a previous deal. Ricky would spend that night, and most of the next day, as a head without a body. His body was to be ‘borrowed’ by Anna’s friend Katie, who intended to lend it to her own boyfriend, who was having his head FedExed over from California for a low-cost visit. It was part of some weird startup called “Head Trips.” In exchange, Katie had promised her own body would be available for them to borrow at a later time. Anyway, that was the summary.
“But we’re meeting her in like two hours,” said Ricky, stopping to take a sip of beer, “What is it you’re saying?”
“I’m saying,” said Anna, “That if you want to get your dick wet before you’re lose your body, going back to your place now would be a really good idea.”
“Got it,” said Ricky. He picked up his beer and drained it completely.
#
“Okay,” said Anna. “This is a bit harder than I thought it would be.”
“I think,” said Ricky, “It’s because your sense of balance is still like, from your inner ear or something.”
“Sure,” said Anna. “But how come I could walk around just fine when I was just my ass and legs? I didn’t even have an inner ear.”
“Magic?” said Ricky with a shrug. “I’m just guessing here.”
Anna was trying — and failing — to walk her legs around on their own, keep her balance, and avoid bumping into furniture. Two weeks before, as a ‘piece of ass’, she’d had an uncanny sense of her surroundings. At the time, Anna was of course unable to explain much of anything and was just mostly focused on well, indulging her every impulse. When she described it to him later it wasn’t that she could “see” but just sort of had a weird visual idea of the space around her. It was what the other amateur modders and mad scientists were calling “Seventh Sense.”
“Yeah, sure,” said Anna. “I was really hoping that my legs could serve drinks and stuff.”
“I bet you can get the hang of it if you practice,” said Ricky, taking Anna’s hips in his hands and guiding them around the ottoman to sit beside her on the couch.
“I don’t have time to practice!” said Anna. “And I don’t wanna have to just stay on the couch all night.”
“Well,” said Ricky, thinking out loud, “We could magic you down to a pair of legs again.“
“Or,” said Anna, holding up a finger. “I just had a great idea.”
“Oh?”
“It’s more carpentry than magic.”
“Well, that’s doable…”
“What if you mounted my ass against the wall over there?”