Button 10 - “Summer of ‘96”

Yana was annoyed.  Not at accidentally turning herself into a love-doll, but at Darryl for stopping using her.  And now... now he was walking around, doing stuff she couldn't quite see.  He walked briefly into her field of view, and scooped up the towels and blankets, then walked off again.

It took some time for Yana’s pleasure-addled brain to put the pieces together.  He was packing up the camp.  Why was he packing up the camp?  He had the energy to move again, he was supposed to be using her!

Slowly, she put it together.  She was a doll.  That seemed right, but it did filter through that she might not have been one earlier.  He was some sort of half-doll thing, and she remembered doing that to him.

Yana tried to move like Darryl was doing.  She strained and strained, but she had no muscles, she was just latex and air.  Air.  Valves.  Something about...  Now she remembered.  The Button was now a valve in her right hand.  She needed to fix that, or Darryl would do something stupid like pack her into the car, instead of fucking her again.

It took effort to focus enough to figure out why Darryl was getting ready to leave.  Something about the button.  Why was that important?  He was supposed to be with her.  She was supposed to be a doll... no, that wasn’t right.  She was a doll, she was supposed to be something else.  It was just hard to remember what.

When Darryl came to pick her up, he plucked ineffectually at the valve in her right hand one last time.  The blue colour of the valve reminded her of the button, and Yana finally put one and one together.  The button was the problem, it needed to not be on her.

She flailed at it mentally, but its grip on her was tenacious.  She sawed at the threads connecting it to her viciously, but they regrew faster than she could cut them.  Someone needed to be pulling it, and the only person nearby was...  Ah, yes.  She had to fix Darryl.  Why couldn’t he take the button off?

As she bounced on Darryl’s back, Yana examined the spell on him.  The knot holding it all together was easy to find, right where she’d put the button...  A moment’s work later, Darryl was normal once again, and hugging her tight.

Darryl shouted with relief when he changed back to normal, and grabbed at the valve in Yana’s hand.  Air rushed out of her, but he knew he had to continue.  It took a couple of tries to get the button to let go, but finally, reluctantly it pulled away.  For a moment, Darryl thought Yana had managed to get herself stuck as a doll, like she’d done as the boat, then the vinyl sheen retreated and left his fiancée in its wake.

Yana was suddenly too heavy to carry in his arms and he set her rather unceremoniously on the pile of camping supplies.  She stared up at him blankly for long enough to make him nervous.

“Yana?  Are you still there?”

Yana nodded slowly.  “Feeling your insides gas away into nothing is... is...  Sorry, what was that again?”

“Are you going to be OK?”

Yana thought about that for a while, then nodded.  “Just a bit scrambled.  Did I really turn us both into dolls?” she asked, softly.

“Yup.”

“Oh.”  Yana stared up at the sky.  “That could have gone pretty badly.”

“Yup.”

“But you had a plan.”

“Yup.”  Yana glared at Darryl, and he grinned.  “I was going to go see Aunt Bea, of course.  I’m sure she could have fixed it.”

Yana wrapped her arms around her legs, shivering.  “I tried to get the button off.  It wouldn’t go.  I cut and cut, and it wouldn’t let go.  Too many threads.”

“Couldn’t you cut them all at once?”

Yana shook her head. “They’re kind of ... spread out.  They go everywhere.”

“What if you twisted them up into a bundle like when you tied off the knot, then cut that?”

Yana stared at him, then a crazy smile grew on her face.  She held out her hand.  “Give it to me.”

“But you hate...”

“Don’t care.  Give it to me.  If I can free myself, then I don’t have to be afraid any more.”

As soon as Darryl dropped the button in to her hand, Yana was a doll once more, exactly as she had been.  Darryl crouched in front of her, watching intently.  A momentary flicker caught his eye, and he saw the button reappear in Yana’s palm.  Unfortunately, it immediately latched on to Yana and flattened back out into an inflating stem.

“That almost worked, Yana.  I saw the button... if your hand was tilted, I bet it would have fallen.”

Yana tried variations on the theme, but the button was persistent.  Darryl just sat and watched, encouraging her softly after each limited success.  After the fourth cycle, he commented, “What if you didn’t have a hand?”

This time when the button appeared, Yana’s hand melted away before it could latch on.  The button fell straight down, and latched on to her leg instead.  Duncan cheered the success, and laughed at what had happened.  Soon the button was lying on the ground, and Yana was a legless lovedoll.  Duncan picked her up, and carried her away from the button.  He scooped up a towel from the pile of gear, and laid it on the soft moss, and Yana atop of it.

“That was wonderful, sweetie.  You did it!  And now, you get your reward.”  Darryl made love to the Yana doll, slowly at first, teasing here and there.  But unlike before, he didn’t stop to tease her into moving.  Even after he’d spent himself within her, he kept stroking and teasing at her inflated breasts, and everywhere else.  He lay beside her, occasionally changing sides as one arm or the other tired out.  This went on for an hour or more, Darryl wasn’t sure.  After a while, he started to get more than simply hungry.  Breakfast had been a long time ago.

So Darryl leaned over and gave Yana a deep kiss on her ribbed, O-shaped mouth, and told her matter-of-factly that he was going to go prepare lunch.

He had the fire built up and sausages sizzling in the pan when Yana finally rose up, human once more.  She drifted languidly over to the fire, and draped herself over him.  It made it harder to tend the food, but Darryl didn’t mind.

“Happy?” he asked, as he transferred their lunch to plates.

“Gloriously,” Yana replied.  Then she fell upon her food like a starving beast.

Once every last scrap of lunch had been consumed, and half a box of crackers besides, they sat in each other’s arms, watching the breezes make ripples on the lake.

“Penny for your thoughts?” asked Darryl.

Yana chuckled softly.  “Wasn’t, really.  Just... happy.  Finally free.”

“Free?”

“I’m not afraid of the Button any more.  I beat it, I can do it again.  Even if I have to reduce myself to nothing to do it, I can break free.”

“So I can turn you into a swimsuit now?”

Yana smacked him on the shoulder, playfully.  “Hell no.  If you even try, you’ll spend a week as a... as a... hell, probably as my dildo again, which isn’t going to stop you at all.”

Darryl laughed loudly.  “Not much, no.  I could live with that fate.  Oh please, oh please don’t throw me in that terrible panty drawer again.”

Yana giggled.  “Watch it, bub.  Or I’ll be wearing you home.”

“Oh no.  Forced to not drive for hours and hours to get home, whatever shall I do.”

“All right, that’s it.”  Yana got up and found the Button where it had fallen near the fire.  “You’re going to be my swim-fins.  Won’t that be fun.”

Darryl shrugged.  “I don’t think that’ll be enough to get you to the bottom of the lake.”

“Well then what do you suggest?”  Yana asked, seriously.  “I really want to go see.”

“Maybe a mermaid?”

“Oooh,” Yana cheered.  “That could work.”

Darryl closed his eyes and considered the changes it would take.  “You’d need to keep the leg muscles, kind of like you did when I was a doll, but restructure them around a spine that goes all the way down, then...”  He opened his eyes as he felt his body start to change, but it was too late.

Yana stared down at what she’d created.  She hadn’t meant to touch Darryl with the button, not really.  All that was left of him was a thick, muscular tail, covered in shiny red scales, and ending in a broad fin.  The other end... she touched it, curiously.  The tail just sort of stopped, ending at a puckered seam where his upper body should have been.  Looking at how thick and sturdy the tail was, Yana guessed that most of his mass had gone into it.

She touched the seam curiously, and gasped.  It opened to her touch, revealing its warm satiny insides.  It tugged at her, suckling at her fingers like a giant set of lips.  Her hand was buried up to the wrist before she had the presence of mind to pull it back.

“Should I... wear you?”  Yana stroked the scales gently.  “Flip your tail once if I should, twice if you need me to change you back.”

The great tail slapped the ground once, then lay still.

Yana grinned.  “Cool.”  She wriggled out of her clothes, and sat in front of the tail.  Carefully, she fed her toes to it and cooed at how soft it was as it sucked on them.   The mermaid-tail suckled on them greedily, and soon had her ankles as well.  It was warm inside the tail, and the muscular pulsations around her shins, then her knees, then her thighs felt relaxing and comforting.

When the lips got to her hips, they had to stretch to fit.  As they paused to do so, Yana tried wiggling her toes.  She frowned as she couldn’t really feel them.  She couldn’t feel much of anything below her hips, in fact.  The tailfins flapped a few times, then the sucking started in earnest once more.  Now that her hips were inside, it started going faster.  Over her belly like a warm, comforting wave.  Up to her breasts, breaking there briefly before advancing once again.  Yana wriggled at how nice it felt, and wished the burst of pleasure from her hips hadn’t faded so quickly.  Then it was over her breasts as well, warm softness enveloping them, squeezing them nice and tight, like a living corset.

The tail fetched up against her armpits, and stopped.  Yana idly wondered if it would have gone farther if she’d kept her arms by her sides.  Where would it have stopped?  Did she want it to?

But the tail had stopped, and the feeling of missing limbs was going away as well.  Yana could feel the moss against her feet and legs.  She blinked at that, and tried to sit up.  Her tail bent sinuously, and she stared at herself.  She had no hips, at least none that she could recognize.  Her whole body flexed and bent as she moved.  Those shining red scales went from just above her breasts, all the way down to her broad fins.  When she wiggled her toes, the broad, ribbed fins moved and spread.

Yana ran a hand down her body, and she could feel its touch against every scale.  She cupped her breasts, such as they were, and pouted in disappointment.  They were much reduced by the grip of the tail, making only the slightest of curves.  They didn’t even feel very sensitive.

Yana shrugged, then looked toward the lake.  It was a good thirty feet away.  She sighed, and briefly wished she’d started a little closer.  Belly-flopping toward the lake went slowly, so once she was past the worst of the campsite obstacles, she turned sideways and instead rolled her way down the slope.  She giggled with dizziness, until she landed in the water with a huge splash.

Yana tried out her new tail in earnest.  With a little practice, she found she could zip through the water at a tremendous rate, creating a huge wake behind her.  She crossed the lake from side to side, then laughed with glee as she jumped clear of the water and dove back in.

The pull of the lake-bed was stronger now, and she could not ignore it any further.  She swam out to the middle, seeking this way and that to be sure she was right on top of it.  Yana took in a lungful of air, then lept out of the water once more.  She splashed down in a dive, and arrowed toward the bottom of the lake within seconds.  There was nothing there but an outcropping of rock, which puzzled her.  She’d expected treasure, or at least some sign of whatever-it-was.

Yana closed her eyes, and opened herself to the sense she’d been developing for magic.  She squeaked in surprise, letting loose a rush of bubbles, as she realized it was all around her!  There was an immense ribbon of power that ran deep under the ground, rising up to graze the bottom of the lake and away again.  So much power, so much warmth.  She didn’t want to leave.

Yana curled herself around the outcropping, pleased to find it a perfect shape for doing so—it almost looked as if it was once human itself.  She drifted into a contented torpor, letting the magic pour through her.  A small part of her worried that she’d run out of air, but another part of her, the greater part, took the magic in hand and made the worry go away.

As the sun set, and the light dimmed, Yana’s form curled tighter around the rock.  She slept.

* * *

In the morning, Yana woke with the dawn, stretched, and looked around.  The filtered green light of the sun illuminated the rocky landscape of the lake’s bottom.  Bright-scaled fish darted away from her, startled by her sudden movement.  The rock outcropping had changed subtly, too.  She didn’t think it had looked like a mermaid before, but couldn’t really remember what it had been.  Yana shrugged it off and flexed her muscular tail, revelling in the power of her body.

Moments later, Yana burst through the surface of the water, greeting the sunrise with a series of increasingly spectacular jumps.  At the peak of one of them, she spotted the neat pile of their camping supplies, and memories of the previous day came tumbling back.

Yana grounded herself on the shore of the lake, and tried to make her way up to the campsite.  It was painfully slow going, her body was not built for locomotion on the ground, not at all.  Her arms were mostly unchanged, and couldn’t drag the weight of two people up the slight rise.  Yana frowned.  While her arms were mostly unchanged, looking them over now she saw that they had acquired a fine sheen of scales, webbing between the fingers, and fins along her forearms.  When had that happened?

She returned to the lakeside, where the ripples of her departure had mostly died down.  Reflected in the water was an unfamiliar flat nostril-less face, that was as much fish as human.  She brushed clawed fingertips over her face, trying to find her mouth, and failing.  How was she breathing, then?  Yana eventually concluded that she wasn’t.  A further search with eyes and clawtips did not reveal where the Button had got to, and Yana started to worry.  She loved this body, but didn’t want to be stuck in one little lake forever.  If only she had access to the ocean...

Yana shook her head, and then closed her eyes to summon her magic sense.  The button’s location as the center of a tangle of threads of magic was immediately obvious.  It was buried deep inside her, not far from where her hips would have been if she still had them.  She reached for it with her will and her claws.  The feeling of her hand slipping through her synthetic flesh as if it was putty unnerved her, and she lost focus.

Yana sighed mentally, lacking the apparatus to do it any other way.  She opened her eyes to survey the damage.  Her right forearm was missing, sunk into her flesh from just below her elbow.  She wiggled her fingers and the way that stirred up her insides made her squirm, which only made matters worse.  It took a sustained effort to get her focus back, still her heart and her fingers, then reach deeper.  Soon she was rewarded by the button’s emergence in her grasp, connected to her by a thin thread of magic and fabric.  A snip, and it fell to the ground.

Yana carefully rolled away from the button, then sat up on her long, scaly tail.  There was something else she needed to do, but she was having a difficult time remembering what it was.  The water looked inviting, and she really could use a dip to cool off after all that wriggling about inside near sensitive bits.

The refreshing water cleared her head once more, and she carefully severed the knot of magic that was holding her form together.  Suddenly she was very human, very cold, and getting splashed by Darryl who was in a similar state.  Luckily the water was shallow enough that Yana could pull him to shore.

As they sat at the edge of the lake, dripping and shivering but slowly warming in the morning sun, Yana asked, “Are you back yet?”

Darryl looked at her mutely.  Recognition slowly dawned on his face, and he leaned in to kiss her.  Once they broke for air, he answered softly, “Getting there.  That was... wow.  I was just part of you.”

Yana stood up, and helped Darryl to his feet.  “C’mon, let’s get some dry clothes on and then sort all this out.  I’m sorry we got stuck for so long.”

Once they were dry and warm, Darryl asked, “How long was it, anyway?”

“Just the one night.  I think.”

“So we’ve got another day.”

“Do you really want to sleep here for another night?” Yana asked very pointedly.  “I’m not going to be the bed this time.”

Darryl bowed to the inevitable.  “We’re already all packed up, anyway.  If you’d do the honors, we can be off to the car and out of here in time to make it home for dinner.”

Yana touched the Button to the pile of camping supplies, and it turned into a walking stick with a blue gem at the top.  She offered it to Darryl.  “Here, you get to be the pack-horse this time.”

Darryl laughed, but found the walking stick to be very useful on the hike back to the car.  Catching himself with it saved him from a nasty turned ankle when they were scrambling down the steepest part.

At the car, Yana just wanted to toss the walking stick in the trunk and be off.  Darryl reminded her that if they did that, someone would be stuck for hours the next time they used the button.  So with ill grace, Yana helped pack the pile of supplies into the car.  Of course, it didn’t fit nearly as well as it had before, and the overflow—mostly clothes and towels—got dumped on the back seat.

Once they made it back to a road that wasn’t half goat-track, Darryl got Yana to dig through his tape collection in the glovebox.  “See if you can find ‘18 till I die’, there’s a song on there you’d like.”

When Yana realized what the lyrics of “The only thing that looks good on me is you,” were saying, she sung along with the chorus heartily.  Afterward, she passed the next few songs fidgeting with the Button.

Darryl noticed, and shook his head.  “No transforming your driver.”

Yana mock-pouted.  “You never let me have any fun.  Maybe I’ll just turn myself into a doll to pass the time.”

“That might not be healthy either.”

When the next song started up, and Yana had to giggle.  “This one’s your song, sweetie.”

Darryl laughed.  “I’d forgotten about it.”  He sung along with the chorus, “I wanna be your underwear.”  

After reading the lyrics in the liner notes, Yana said, “I want to use this as a checklist.”

“Oh really?  For you or for me?  I could go for another night in a Yana-bed.”

Yana shivered, despite the warmth of the day.  “Pull over.”

“What, here?”

Yana pointed up ahead, where a roadside motel was coming into view.  “No, there.  We’re in no hurry, right?”

“Not as such, no.”

“So we can play here, in a warm, dry room.  It looks deserted enough that we won’t disturb anyone.”

Once they had their room, the first thing Yana did was start a shower.  The second thing was to turn Darryl into a t-shirt, and wear him into it.  He didn’t complain afterward, but that might have been because by then he was a thick, warm terrycloth robe.

Yana plucked the button free of the robe, and set it on the bedside table with a grin.  “What do you think, sweetie?  Should I leave you like this for a while?  You are awfully cozy.  But I’m getting hungry, and I need a big strong man to dig out our food.”

They ate cold camp food, spiced by anticipation.  Then Yana handed Darryl the button.  “Remember what you did with the bed last time?”

Darryl nodded.  Yana shimmied out of her clothes, and laid back on the motel bed.  “Do it again.”

Darryl didn’t need to be asked twice.  He scooped up the button, and touched it to the bed, carefully avoiding Yana.  The sheets turned silken, and the same pale pink as Yana’s skin.  Slowly she started to merge into the sheets, sinking away as if into a pool of skin-tone liquid.  When her arms and legs were gone, and little left but her head, breasts, and hips, Yana called out, “that’s enough.  Hold it there for a bit.”  She closed her eyes in concentration for a few seconds.   “OK, take the button off.”

Darryl did so, and to his wonder the Yana-bed stayed just as she was.  “You tied it off?  You’ll stay like this?”

Yana wriggled what little she could.  “Yes, master,” she said in her submissive voice.  “I’m your bed, for as long as you like.”

Darryl took charge, teasing Yana into a moaning, panting mess before giving her release.  He found that she was just deep enough for him to have his own fun, too.  It was a good thing that there weren’t any neighbours to disturb.

Later, as Darryl lay cuddled against the silken remainder of his sweetie, Yana sighed.  “Are you still awake?”

“Mmm.”  Darryl stroked a silken breast, smiling.  “A little.  What’s up?”

Yana sighed again.  “I’m not stuck.”

“I thought that was the point of all our practice, earlier.  That’s good, right?”

“Yes, but...”

“But?”

“I like being stuck, when it’s with you,” Yana admitted meekly.  “This whole scene earlier was amazing... except now I know that I can end it with a mental snip.”

“That takes focus, right?”

“For a few seconds, yeah.  I need to be able to feel the magic.”

“So if I was to do this...”  Darryl’s hand darted lower, and started to tease at a little fold in the fabric.

“Oh!”  Yana moaned and writhed against the silken bonds that held her tight.  Darryl teased her for as long as he could, but eventually he tired, and snuggled up against her.  Once her breathing had slowed, Yana sighed, and her body emerged from the bed to hug her sweetie.  “Oh, Darryl.  What am I going to do?”