Steve couldn't stop tinkering with Kelly's magic hat.

Steve had met Kelly in a bar, like usual.  He'd been out with his best buddy Barry, using their usual combination of Steve's best close-up magic tricks and Barry’s roguish charm.  Steve had a new batch of flash powder to try out, and they'd had some fun with that and the usual razzle-dazzle.  Reeling in girls with Barry’s rugged good looks and fanciful tales was easy, but they both had fun with the magic.

Kelly hadn't been the prettiest one there, not by far.  She was more cute than pretty, and her small stature to made the blonde pixie look work.  She'd lapped up their act and asked for more, more, more!  Barry and Steve had obliged, and it had been easy to get her back to their apartment with promises of showing off the sawing cabinet Steve had built.  The cabinet didn't work, but any girl that was willing to get into the cuffs on the table was generally willing to do a lot else besides.  Kelly had proven no exception, and had hopped into both the prop and Barry’s bed eagerly.

Steve really wished he hadn't been the wingman that night.  Kelly didn’t just ‘like’ magic tricks, she loved them.  Barry kept asking him to come up with new stuff that he could use with Kelly in the bedroom.  Steve would normally have found this to be an imposition, considering how noisy those two got and the lack of soundproofing within the apartment.  But Kelly had this amazing smile that she shone on him whenever he pulled out a new trick, and making her so happy gave him a warm glow inside.

After a week of this, Kelly had brought over her ‘favourite thing in the world’, a hat that her great-uncle had given her.  She’d showed it off for Steve after Barry had failed to show any interest in the glittery purple hat.  She did some of the usual tricks, pulling scarves and some juggling balls out of it.  When she pulled a solid wooden yardstick out of it, Steve had been properly amazed, and his enthusiastic applause had earned him another of those dazzling smiles.

He’d checked the yardstick over for every trick he knew, and it seemed to be a perfectly ordinary piece of wood.  Kelly had relented, and told him that the hat itself was magic.  She proved the point by setting it on the kitchen counter, and pushing her arm in so deep that her shoulder was even with the countertop.  Then she straightened up, with the flattened hat still in place where her arm should have been, and danced around a dumbfounded Steve.

Steve stared at her in awe and wonder.  “But... how?”

Kelly took the hat off, and it sprang back into shape.  “Magic, of course!”

Steve couldn’t just let it go at ‘magic’.  He’d read everything he could find on the subject, had been to every magic shop in a five hour driving radius.  Even the ones that sold crystals and tarot cards, rather than props for magic tricks.  There was, as far as he could tell, no such thing.  His engineer’s mind was stumped by the hat, though.

Kelly had grinned at his intense fascination, and left the hat with him when she’d gone into Barry’s room.  He tested it with everything he could think of.  There was a false bottom to the hat, a panel of dark purple satin that matched the rest of the lining.  It hinged away when pressed, then sprung back into place.  The false bottom revealed a silvery barrier that blocked light but only slightly resisted having an object pushed through it.  Beyond it was a space that he measured carefully.  It was 2’ 5 7/16” square, and 11 13/16” tall.  The entry was against the end of one of the long sides.  The surfaces felt like rough wood with a thick coat of paint, except for the bottom, which felt like some kind of plush rug.  

The most peculiar thing of all about this hidden space was that it seemed to have its own gravity.  When he tilted the hat this way or that, ‘down’ was still toward the large square side that had the carpeting on it.  This led Steve to hypothesize it was some sort of portal effect.  He wondered where the other end was.

Trying to shine a flashlight into or out of the space had no effect, the light just reflected off the barrier.  It looked like a pool of mercury, the way one could stick one’s hand through it.  Dipping his hand in and out of the ‘mercury’ of the portal distracted Steve for a while.  It was so shiny!

Sticking his cell-phone inside to take a picture resulted in a cryptic error message and a crash, though it rebooted OK.

By the next evening Steve managed to dig up a polaroid camera that still worked, and some film for it.  Disappointingly, the inside of the ‘box’ just looked matte black, with a dark purple carpet on the bottom.  He did get a look at the false bottom’s mechanism—it was little more than a sprung hinge on a round fabric-covered door.

His prior experience with his cell-phone crashing led Steve to skip right over GPS and on to radios.  Just sticking the antenna through the portal produced weird distortions, and putting a transistor radio inside didn’t seem to work any better than his phone had.  Not willing to give up on the idea, he next breadboarded a simple crystal radio, with an expanded tuning dial.  Since earlier tests had proven that electricity crossed the barrier with minimal losses, Steve put the antenna and tuner inside the hat, but ran the resulting signal out to an amplifier and speaker.  His persistence was finally rewarded with the blips of a radio station going past, and he carefully tuned in to the strongest one.

Kelly emerged from the bedroom when she heard the scratchy old jazz tune emerging from the speaker.  When she saw Steve’s setup, she asked, “What are you doing with my hat?”

“Well, I’m not quite sure where it is... but the other space gets a few radio stations.  I’m hoping to get a call-sign at some point.”

The song ended, and an announcer’s voice crackled over the airwaves.  “That was Ella Fitzgerald and ‘A Tisket, a Tasket’.  Up next, half an hour of uninterrupted jazz.”

“Well, bother.  I’ll just record it and search for something useful later, I guess.  G’night.”

“G’night, Mister Magic.”  Kelly had quickly learned who had taught Barry all his tricks, and who she had to butter up to get more.

By the next evening, Steve had also found two weaker stations on the dial, and managed to record their call signs and relative signal strengths.  That in theory gave him enough to triangulate the box’s location, once he’d looked up the stations’ locations.

When Kelly checked on Steve before going home that night, she saw he had a map spread out on the table.  He was using a compass to draw circles of varying sizes and colours.  Some overlapped, most of them didn’t.

“Interesting art project,” she commented.

“Ha!  Uh... yeah, it does look kind of cool, doesn’t it?  But what really matters is that I’ve figured out where the box is.  Right... well, somewhere in this general area.”  Steve pointed to a spot where the three red circles overlapped, forming a small triangle.

“Chesterville?  Weird.  My Great Uncle used to take me there when I was a kid.”

“Really?  Up for a road trip down memory lane?  We’ll have to take your hat, all this stuff, and an unlicensed FM transmitter.”

“Sounds like fun.”

Barry came along on the drive as well, once he realized that Kelly and Steve would be alone otherwise.  Steve would occasionally ask him to stop so he could fiddle with his radio gear and the map that was spread across half the back seat.

Eventually, they found their way onto a little-used cart track, and Kelly perked up.  “Wait, I remember this...  Great-uncle Wyatt had a hunting cabin up this way.”

Sure enough, the signal strength inside the cabin was very strong.  But there was nothing obvious that it could be coming from. Steven circled around, eventually settling on a spot in the middle of the floor that was ‘closest’.  “Huh.  There’s nothing here.”

“Maybe it’s under the floorboards?” suggested Kelly.

Steve moved his transmitter up and down, made some more calculations, and nodded.  “Yeah.  About twelve feet down.  Maybe he had a bomb shelter in here?  I didn’t see a storm cellar from outside.”

Kelly poked at the fireplace, and one of the stones shifted.  “I think I remember... try pushing beside the fireplace.”

Barry did so, and the bored look on his face vanished as what had seemed to be a solid wall swung away, to reveal stairs winding behind the chimney.  “OK, that’s cool.  Your uncle must have been really paranoid.  Maybe there’s something valuable down here!”

Once they’d made it into the basement, all three stared around in wonder as the lights flickered on.  Dozens of circular mirrors of varying sizes were arrayed against the walls, and there were a variety of other bits of equipment in the middle.  The largest piece looked like a giant ray-gun out of a Flash Gordon movie.

“What is all this?” breathed Steve.  “Do you remember?”

Kelly nodded, slowly.  “I was only six.  My great-uncle was taking care of me while my Mother was in the hospital.  He showed me some magic tricks, and... some of his stuff down here.  I was pretty upset, he was trying anything to distract me.  I don’t remember the mirrors, though.”

Steve had busied himself trying to find the signal source.  Eventually he settled on a shelf with a handful of boxes on it.  Opening them one by one revealed pairs of little mirrors arranged on velvet.  He was just about to close the last one and turn away when his mind caught up to the image within.

Steve carried the box over to Kelly.  “This is...  I...  This is it.”

“What are you talking about, man?” asked Barry.

“Look inside.  That’s my radio.”  Steve set the box on a clear spot on the lab bench, and then stuck his hand into the magic hat.  Inside the box, a tiny copy of his hand waved up at them.

“Guys?” asked Kelly, who hadn’t looked at the box yet.  “I don’t think these are mirrors.”

They looked over at her, and her arm was elbow-deep into one of the mirrors.  As she tilted the mirror, there was no sign her arm on the other side.

Steve went back to the shelves of boxes, checking them again.  The shelf he’d examined didn’t reveal what he was looking for, but the boxes on the next shelf down held larger discs, and waving in the second box he tried was a tiny arm.  Steve very carefully brushed his finger against it, and Kelly squealed.

“There’s something in there!”  

Kelly jerked her hand back.  Steve looked over at her worriedly.

“Are you OK?”

“I... yeah, it just brushed against me.  What was it?”

“Stand back,” Steve said.  “This should be cool.”

He pushed his finger into the portal where Kelly’s hand had appeared.  A giant fingertip emerged from the mirror, and nearly knocked Kelly over.

“Yikes!”

“Sorry.  Don’t know my own strength... or reach,” Steve apologized.

“No, it’s my fault.  You said stand back...  I just didn’t...  What’s going on here?”

Steve pulled his hand back, and the giant fingertip vanished.  “They’re portals.  But... to different sizes.  Handy for storage, but I guess they’re not so useful for instantaneous travel.”

“These are all like my hat?” asked Kelly, incredulously.

“I think so.”

Kelly looked around, stars in her eyes.  “Do you know what this means?”

“We’re going to be rich!” exclaimed Barry.

“New technology to figure out...” mused Steve.

“OK, first you do that, then we’ll get rich,” amended Barry.

“No, no, no.  It means we can put on an amazing magic act!”  Kelly made puppy eyes at Steve.  “Please?”

* * *

“OK, let’s review what we’ve got,” said Steve.  They were back at Steve and Barry’s apartment, after a second trip to Chesterville to retrieve all the portals with Steve’s van.  “Counting the hat, we have 30 portal pairs.  Three with large outlets, a bit over 3 inches, eight with medium ones, half that size, and the rest are tiny, with outlets just over 3/4 of an inch.  The other ends range from six inches to just shy of six and a half feet.  All the portals have different size ratios, which means we can’t pair them up to do a sawing.”

“Awww,” said Kelly.

“Some of those looked pretty close,” noted Barry.

“Yeah, but the closest I can find is still about 4% different.  I think some of the ones with different end-points might end up closer, but none are conveniently sized for tricks. I’m not sure we can hide portals a yard across in a sawing box and make it look good.”

“What about a Disembodied Princess?” asked Kelly.  “Nobody will spot that my legs are a bit shorter if I’m standing on a platform.  If you can slide the portals up and down, you could vanish different parts of me.  Come on, grab those 4% ones and we can try it now!”

Steve went over to where a stack of the larger portals was standing against a wall.  He pulled out a tape measure, and used it to find the right two.  “OK, here we are, 38-plus and 40-minus.”  

He opened up the boxes of tiny portals, waved his arm through each of the silvery discs in turn, and used that to find their matching ends.  The little portals got stacked on the kitchen table, the big portals on the floor.

“OK, everything’s ready,” Steve said as he turned away from the table, and came face to face with Kelly posing in a very sparkly green sequined tube top, and matching shorts.  “Wow, how’d you change so fast?”

Kelly grinned mysteriously.  “Trade secret,” she said.

“You look like the perfect assistant.”  Steve shook his head as if to clear it, and turned back to the portals.  “The illusion should start with the portals below you.  So if you’d kindly step into them, we can begin.”

Kelly giggled like a schoolgirl, and stepped into the portals.  She sunk with a yelp, disappearing into the portal like she was sinking into lightning-fast quicksand.  At the last moment she managed to get a grip on the edge, and pulled herself back up so her head and arms were showing.  It looked like she was clinging to the edge of a small swimming pool full of mercury. “Uh... was this supposed to happen?”

Barry looked at Steve.  Steve looked over at the table.  A tiny version of Kelly’s body was standing between the two tiny portals.  One was on the table, the other was hovering at breast level.  Steve gently pushed down on the top of the little portals, and Kelly wobblingly rose back up to near full height.

“Sorry about that,” said Steve.  “We’ll have to arrange to keep the little portals the right distance apart.  Or maybe, if your upper body was supported...  Barry, can you hold her up by her arms?”

“Easily,” said Barry.  He scooped up his girl, and held her close against his body.  Against his six foot tall frame, her feet dangled just below his knees.

“Now gently lower her into them.”

With Kelly supported, it was a simple matter to lift the two portals up to varying heights.  Steve dragged over two chairs, and propped up the lower portal at knee height.  He then lifted the upper one until it was snug under Kelly’s arms.  “There!  A very impromptu Disembodied Kelly.”

Kelly waved her hands through the space where her body should have been with the biggest grin on her face.  “You did it!  You vanished my body.  This is awesome!”  

Kelly grabbed hold of the upper portal, and asked Steve to lift the lower one up.  She craned her neck over the edge of it, watching as her body slowly reappeared.  When the portals were finally touching, she giggled again.  “All back together.  Wait, something’s not...  There’s a bit missing.”

Steve looked at his handiwork, and started to laugh.  “There seems to be about four inches missing, yeah.”  He stuck the tape measure through the portal and nodded.  “Pretty close to that, anyway.”

Barry grumped, “It’s the exact wrong four inches missing, doofus.  Her boobs are gone!”

“Where would the right four inches be?” asked Kelly.

Barry considered that for a few moments.  “Your legs, I think.”

“What’s wrong with my legs?”

“Nothing.  I just like your curvy body and your cute little breasts better.”

“Hey, whose breasts are you calling little... yeah, I suppose.  You still seem to like them, though.”

Barry laughed.  “What can I say, I’m an equal opportunity breast man.  Big or tiny, I’m good.”

Steve snickered.  “Well, right now, they’re extra tiny.”  He held up his fingers, perhaps an eighth of an inch apart.  “The ittiest, bittiest titties you ever saw.”

“OK, that’s too small.”  Barry lifted the portalss up, and Kelly slipped down through them.

“Tada!”  Kelly posed dramatically.  “Hey, that could make an amazing entrance.  Put one portal on the couch, and the other on the floor over there.  Steve, can you keep the little mirrors together?”

“Sure.”  Steve placed a stack of books on top of them.

Kelly set two chairs so they faced the silvery portal on the floor, and got the guys to sit in them as her audience.  Behind them, she sat on the couch beside the other portal.

“Imagine we start with an empty stage, and just the portal lying there.  Maybe some fabric around it to hide the details.”

She scooted over, and lowered her legs into the portal on the couch.  The one on the floor wobbled and started to rise, revealing her bare feet and a little of her calves.  Kelly reached into the portal, and grabbed the lower one with her hands.  She transferred her weight to her feet, gripping the edges of the lower portal carefully, and slowly started to lift.  In front of the guys, the portal slowly and steadily rose.  Knees and thighs slowly appeared.  The illusion of a naked woman forming before them was finally dashed when her sparkly green shorts emerged from the shimmering disc.

With one supple motion, Kelly slipped into the portal on the couch, and hoisted it the rest of the way above her head.  The rest of Kelly’s body appeared swiftly, and she stood there, posed with the portal above her head and grinning hugely.  Steve and Barry applauded wildly.  Kelly set the portal aside, then took a bow.

“See!  It’d be an awesome appearance.  Then we’d need some other trick...”

“Not the Disembodied Princess?” asked Steve.

“No, we save that for last.  Do you have a middling large box I could use?  One that a contortionist could plausibly fold herself into, or maybe a bit smaller?”

Steve nodded.  “Yeah, I have a few boxes of books I never unpacked after we graduated and moved in here.  Give me a minute.”  He soon returned from his bedroom with an old microwave box.

“That’ll do.  Do you have a portal that’ll fit into it?”

Steve measured the box, then flipped through the pile of portals.  “Ah, here we are.  Nineteen inches.  A touch big, but you should be able to fit.”

Kelly set it on top of the box.  “Pretend that this is just inside the top, so the audience can’t see it.  Now I can climb in...  Oh, that feels weird.”

“What feels weird?”

Kelly wriggled herself further into the portal, looking for all the world like she was climbing into a box that was too small to hold her.  “The gravity’s a different direction.  Makes it easier to not fall, though.”

Soon all that could be seen of her was her head.  “Now... Barry, could you grab a couple of your swords, and run them through the box?”

“Uh, is that safe?”

“Of course it’s safe, silly.  I’m not actually in the box.”

“Right!  Of course.”  Barry jogged off to his room, and soon was back with a couple of rapiers and his vanity piece, a ‘replica’ of Excalibur.  The rapiers punctured the box easily, but the mighty Excalibur wasn’t especially sharp, and Barry had to hack at the box a few times.

“Maybe we should have a slot for that one,” mused Kelly.  “Oooh, in the lid!  We can close the lid, and as long as I’m out of the way and you don’t shove the sword in too hard, you can stab it right down the middle.  That would look amazing.”

“You look pretty amazing just like this,” said Steve.  “You look thoroughly skewered.”

“Do I?” squealed Kelly.  “I wanna see.  Barry, there’s a big mirror in your bedroom, carry me in there.”

From the noises Steve heard emerging from that room soon after, it seemed Kelly really, really liked how she looked.  He got up to close the door so he didn’t have to hear what came next in detail.  At the door he caught a glimpse of Kelly, still in the box, though without the swords.  She was still grinning like mad, too.  “C’mon,” she was cajoling.  “let me stay in here, and I’ll give you the best...”

Steve quickly shut the door on the rest of her offer.  He couldn’t forget her smile, though, and started to grin at the memory of it.

Steve got out his technical pencils and a stack of paper.  That Disembodied Princess wasn’t going to design itself.  Stealing quick peeks at Kelly’s tiny body writhing in the portal storage box was very inspiring.