The Joneses - Presets 43-53

In the morning, Mr. Jones wakes to the insistent beeping of his alarm.  He hits the snooze button, then sits up and laughs.

There’s a very annoyed yowl from behind him, as Honey tumbles from her cozy spot curled up in the small of his back.

“Sorry, sweetie.  I forgot.  This fiendish device will never disturb us again.”  

Mr. Jones rips the cord out of the wall, ruining the plug in the process.  He dumps the alarm clock in the bin, and then rolls over to face the pretty little cat that has been sharing his bed.  He pets her softly, and Honey soon dozes back to sleep.

Mr. Jones, however, is quite awake.  He’s been getting up at the same time every day for so many years, that he finds it quite impossible to sleep further.  Once he’s quite sure that his now-feline wife is sleeping, he carefully dislodges himself from her, and slips from the bed.

He sits in the kitchen eating his breakfast.  He has to work not to bolt his food as he used to on weekdays.  Once he’s finished eating, he picks up the newspaper, and slowly reads his way from one end to the other.

He has finished the sudoku and started in on the crossword when little cat feet come prowling into the kitchen.

“Mrowl?”

“Ah, good morning Honey.  Would you like a saucer of cream, or a restore?”

Honey looks at the fridge pointedly, and Mr. Jones pours her a saucer.  “Anything else?”

Honey laps at the cream.  Once the saucer is empty she meows for more.

“You can’t have just cream, you know.  I could open a tin of tuna.”

Honey’s ears perk up at that, and she purrs and purrs while butting her head against her husband’s legs.  She stays underfoot, twining about his legs as he prepares her meal.

Stephen laughs at her eagerness, and sets a cereal bowl on the floor by the fridge, filled with a tin’s worth of tuna.  “Enjoy.  A little salt or pepper?”

Honey eats hungrily, ignoring his comment.

Once he has finished with the paper, Mr. Jones peruses their library, and picks out a small stack of books he’s been meaning to read but never found the time for.  He piles them beside his reclining chair in the living room, adds a small bowl of raisins and an apple to nibble on, and settles in to read.  Honey gravitates to his lap.

Several times through the afternoon, Mr. Jones asks if Honey wants to change back.  Her only answer is to stop purring and glare at him, and he gets the point.  After the third time she flexes her claws pointedly, and he stops asking.

As evening approaches, Mr. Jones starts to get hungry.  He gets up, and starts poking about in the kitchen.  He sighs softly.  “I have no clue where to even start.  Honey?”

“Mrow.”

“I know, please?  It has been fascinating to have a cat for a wife, but I’d like to eat dinner with you.   And not me at the table, you lapping from a bowl.”

Honey nods her head, and prowls toward the bedroom.  One ‘Restore’ later, and Honey is stretching languidly on the bed, in her curvy, blonde human form once more.  “Mmm.  It’s so relaxing being a cat.  Can we do that again one day?  Not soon, but...”

“Maybe.  Think Stacy would mind a second cat for a week?”

Honey grins at her husband.  “How about a second and third?”

“I... huh.  Maybe.  The idea of being so vulnerable is a bit frightening.”

Honey picks up the remote and aims it at him.  “So you don’t want to try preset 30, that one with no limbs?”

“Uh... sweetie...”  Mr. Jones’ stomach takes that moment to growl loudly, and both laugh.

“Dinner first.  Then play.  You’ve got some catching up to do.”

Mr. Jones hovers in the kitchen, watching his wife cook.  She enjoys the attention at first, but he is always in the way.

“What are you doing?” she asks in exasperation.

“Watching.  Trying to figure it out.  I haven’t the slightest idea how to cook dinner, and...”

“I’ll teach you, if you like.”

Honey explains the steps as she is doing them.  She giggles when her husband starts taking notes, but finds it charming.

Over dinner they talk about meal planning, and Honey finds that Steven actually had some interesting ideas to offer.  They have time now to do more than rush, after all.

Then, of course, they retire to the living room to watch their favourite shows.  Honey cuddles up against her husband, and before they’ve even caught up on their recorded shows from the past few days, his idle stroking of her half-exposed breast has gotten them both rather distracted.  Mr. Jones confirms that the night’s shows are set to record, then lets Honey tease him into the bedroom.

Honey scoops up the remote before her husband can, and restores him to the last shape he’d worn, the buff and sexy preset 23.  “Are you ready?”

“For?”

Honey flicks him quickly through the leather outfits, and before he can tell her to stop, he’s armless and legless like she was.  She leans down to give him a kiss, and a quick fondle.  “Mmm, I seem to have a toy to play with.”

Steven shudders under her touches, and she tosses her apron aside.  Her enormous breasts dangle in his face, and he moans in frustration.  “I just want to touch them.”

Honey lowers herself onto him, her breasts landing on his chest, just tantalizingly out of reach of his tongue.  “No...”

She sighs, and gets up again.  “Fine, fine.  We’ll keep going so you can have your arms back.”

Mr. Jones looks very odd with pink hair.  Both are puzzled that he is wrinkly and old on that preset, while Honey has her curvy #23 body.

“Maybe it has something to do with Restore making me Honey, instead of Linda?”

“Wait, aren’t there two buttons for you?”

Honey shrugs.  “Not any more.”

“Can you even change back to Linda?” asks her pink-haired husband, worriedly.

“Don’t know.  Don’t really care.”

But there is no helping it, Mr. Jones has to know.  Pointing the remote at her, he sees her name as ‘Honey Jones’, as before.  But it does not she’s on preset 23.  Channel-down takes her back down to 16, then older again.  Once it finally stops as preset 1, Linda is back.

Linda grabs the remote from him, points it at herself, and hits ‘Restore’.  She’s back in Honey’s body once more.  “There.  I can be Linda again if I must.  But not for a second longer than I have to.”

“You’re really determined about this.”

“Yes.  Now come on, there are more presets to try.”

Steven looks very silly in corsets, so they quickly skip over those, right to the cat.  Honey waits for her husband to adapt to his new form, but he keeps trying to stand up, and falling.  She can’t help but giggle, and he looks more and more offended.

“Right, sorry.  Moving on.”

Steven still looks like a cat, but a little bigger than before.  Something about his limbs looks off to Honey, and it’s only when he succeeds in balancing on his back legs that she realizes what it is.  “You’re... a little bit human, I think.”

Steven is having too much fun walking around the bedroom as a 2’ tall cat to notice Honey’s comments.  He notices when he grows up to about four feet tall, though.  This time he’s distinctly more human, almost exactly halfway between human and cat.  Now it’s quite easy to walk.

Honey claps with excitement as Steven goes from walking to acrobatic flips and cartwheels.  He bows, with a feline grin.

A tap later, Steven is almost as tall as Honey, and nearly human in form.  Even his feet are human shaped, flat on the ground rather than raised like paws.  But he’s still covered in the stripy gray fur and white belly of Stacy’s cat Mickey.  His face has a slight hint of a muzzle to it, but is otherwise quite human.  His hands are still quite paw-like, however.

“Oooh.  You look nice like this.”

Steven twists and turns, and gets distracted by his tail.  “That feels so odd.  Oh!  I can talk.  Not being able to speak was odd, too.”  His voice is rough and rumbly, and not much like his human voice.

Another tap, up to preset 46, and Steven is almost entirely human.  He still has cat ears, cat eyes, very paw-like hands, and a swishy tail.  His skin shows just the faintest hint of Mickey’s fur pattern.

Honey frowns. “You don’t look very much like Steven.”

Steven turns to the mirror, tail swishing behind him in agitation.  “You’re right.  Who...  This isn’t even my voice.”  His voice is human now, with no feline burr.  But it’s sweet and soft, utterly unlike the way Mr. Jones is used to hearing himself.

“I think maybe you’re just a humanized Mickey?  You do sort of resemble him, even without the muzzle and stripes.”

Another tap makes that even more clear.  Steven is human, save for slitted eyes and two tiny cat-ears poking out of his hair.  But he’s very much not Steven in looks.  There’s a mischievous spark to his grin, and when he poses in profile, his face looks noble, almost regal.

The next touch removes the paws and tails, leaving the eyes and ears as the only obviously feline attributes.

“It’s an interesting look,” murmurs Honey.  She reaches up to ruffle his hair and skritch his ears.  Steven’s eyes close in pleasure, and he purrs.

When Honey tries to take things further, Steven shakes his head.  “Sorry sweetie.  Mikey was fixed.”

Honey gasps, looks, then starts giggling.  “Wow.  That’s... unfortunate.  Moving on?”

“Please.”

Honey touches channel-up, then starts giggling even more.  “You’re the Cowardly Lion!”

“What?”  Steven spins to look in the mirror, and his tail flares out as he moves, baffing softly against Honey’s waist.  She cuddles up beside him, and makes a face at how scratchy the fur of the Lion-suit is.

“You look just like in the movie.”

“Roar.”  They both laugh.

Steven becomes Dorothy next, then the Tin Man.  He gestures for the remote, and Honey hands it to him.  She finds it somewhat disturbing to be cat-boy for a while, but that phase doesn’t last, and soon she’s the one in Dorothy’s body.

“We could watch The Wizard of Oz like this...” suggests Honey in Judy Garland’s musical voice.

Steven shakes his head, clanking slightly as he does so.  “This silver bodypaint itches terribly.”

A moment later, they are twin Tin Men.  “Oh,” says Honey.  “I see what you mean.”

Her next form is no less painted, however.  This time her skin is green, and she’s wearing the broad black hat of the Wicked Witch.  “I really hope this form is waterproof.”

“Oh!  That would be dreadful.  I don’t want you to melt...”

“And I don’t... well, I suppose Restore would still work.  I wonder what it would be like.”

She doesn’t get to experiment, and instead turns grey.  Her skin, her clothes, her hair, all various shades of grey.  She looks herself in the mirror, “Bogart?” she asks, in his distinct, masculine voice.  “I’m Humphrey Bogart?”

One more tap turns her into a similarly grey Ingrid Bergman, also wearing a fedora and coat.

Steven hands the remote to her.  “Up twice.  Then we can dig out that Casablanca DVD our kids gave us last year.”

Honey smiles Ingrid’s famous smile, and changes Steven.

Bogart grins at her.  “Of all the gin joints in all the towns of all the world, she has to walk into mine.”

“Play it once, Sam, for old time’s sake.”

They had never before successfully played a DVD, something they’d never admitted to their children.  But this time, with the remote to guide them, it proves easy.  

“Just like magic,” murmurs Steven, as the opening credits play.