Cat Crazy 4
“Come in, Curly, come in. I have to show you my newest invention.”
Curly cautiously entered Jackson’s garage laboratory. Cautious not because he didn’t trust the unruly-haired old man, but because his work area was as always piled with bits of this and that, and an incautious move could dump piles of electronics or worse on one’s head.
Jackson eagerly picked up a small device from his workbench. “Here it is!”
“Did you miniaturize the spell recharger, finally?”
Jackson shook his head. “No, no. Technically infeasible between the antenna and the electromagic transducer required. But the right general idea. This device makes spells permanent.”
Curly yelped and took a step back, bumping against a bookshelf and nearly causing a cascade of debris. Once he’d steadied the pile he asked in an uncertain voice, “It’s not on right now, is it?”
“It is. Takes almost nothing to operate, the batteries will last for months at a go.” Jackson finally noticed how Curly was trying to back away and laughed. “What are you worried about? I thought you wanted a change?”
“Yeah, but...” Curly held up his right hand, showing again how it had turned into a rubber mit. “I was kind of hoping to get my hand back in time.”
“Oh! Right, yes. Nothing to worry about, though. This only affects transformations as they happen, not after the fact.”
Curly sighed with relief, and marveled over the device once he was willing to actually approach it. He remarked on how tiny it was.
“Built it into the shell of my old HP-35 calculator. It’s really quite breathtakingly simple once you understand...” Jackson then went off on a tangent about magic theory that Curly couldn’t follow, waving his arms frantically as he explained what distinguished a permanent spell from a temporary one. Jackson eventually wound down as he realized how badly Curly’s eyes had glazed over. “Never mind. The simple version is pretty much what I said earlier. It breaks the connection between the old form and the new one, so there’s nothing pulling the target back to its old shape. As a result... permanent change.”
“Wow. That sounds kind of dangerous, doc. Is there really a market for it?”
Jackson tucked the calculator-shaped device into his pocket, and shook his head. “Not as much as you’d think. Everyone’s too worried about being able to be ‘normal’ again. Pfah. Fools, the lot of them. In any case, I’m not stupid enough to sell these. It’d wipe out the recharger market.”
“What about the other way, though? Can you make a recharger run backward so that it gets rid of a change you don’t like?”
Jackson looked stunned. “But why would you ever...” Curly held up the doll mitt that was his right hand. “Huh. Never considered accidental transformations. How did that happen, anyway?”
Curly blushed. “I’d rather not say. Can it be done? Making a spell go away faster than it would?”
Jackson turned and stared at the half-built recharger sitting on his workbench. Curly knew the design reasonably well, he’d soldered enough of them. It looked like the core was complete and it only needed the housing to be installed. He waited and watched while Jackson started pacing, deep in thought. “It would take a small alteration... wait, no. No, it just has to have the rectifier removed, or... Fascinating. It would do just that.”
“Do what?” prompted Curly after another minute’s worth of silence.
“Oh! Right. Simplicity itself. If you place a substantial electrical load across the inputs of the recharger and activate it, the recharger should act like a generator. It’ll draw power from any spells in its effective radius, discharging them over time. You’d need an alternate power source for the recirculation antenna, though. That, or just run around the device really fast.”
“Cool. Heck, I could manage that. How long will it take to discharge this spell on my hand?”
That question sent Jackson to the blackboard and then to a bank of diagnostic devices which he hemmed and hawed at. Eventually, he dusted his hands off and wrote ‘1.21’ on the blackboard. “There you go. One point two one hours, assuming maximum recirculation.”
“Oh. Well, maybe it’ll wear off before then on its own.”
Jackson shook his head. “Oh, no. You’ve got a good one on your hands. Five days minimum until it’ll wear off. I took some readings from your backpack as well, and my boy, you’ve done me proud.”
“What did I do?”
“When I gave you my old magic detector, I’d hoped you might come back with the magic equivalent of a nine volt battery, or maybe a bicycle generator. Something I could tinker with, maybe empower one of my lesser gadgets. But no, you came to me with the magical equivalent of the Hoover Dam. Time to show you what I’ve really been working on all these years.”
Jackson strode over to a tarp-covered object on the far side of the garage. He whipped it off to reveal a sleek black car.
Curly stared at the car in confusion. “Your invention is a Trans Am?”
“No! It’s merely supplying the power plant and the portability. Something I could pick up used and cheap, but with enough horsepower. I’ve upgraded the alternator and of course there’s the transducer and emitter...” Jackson popped the hood open to reveal a mass of modifications. The bulk of it was a copper-wound emitter that poked out just at the edge of the hood.
Jackson opened a boxy cavity near the back of the engine bay. “Quick, quick, I have to see if this works. Put the source in here.”
Curly looked uncertain, but pulled the folded-up doll out of his backpack. “If you say so. What will happen to it?”
“Nothing untoward, I assure you. It’s what’s in front of the car that will be affected.” Jackson took the proffered object without looking at it and dumped it unceremoniously in the box. He latched it closed, then shut the hood. “Hop in, let’s take this baby for a spin.”
They drove a short distance to a nearby strip mall, and Curly watched with avid curiosity as Jackson messed with a home-made display panel that had replaced the car’s radio. A bar of LEDs filled from one end to the other as Jackson revved the engine. “OK, we’re good to go. Whoops! Almost forgot the most important part.” Jackson took the calculator out of his pocket and slotted it into a bracket on the display.
“Uh, Doc... won’t that make this thing’s effects permanent?”
“I’ll show them!” cackled Jackson. “I’ll show them all!” He punched the big red button and the car suddenly stalled hard. The bar of LEDs immediately blinked out.
“Did it work?” Curly asked after a moment.
Jackson merely pointed to the crowd outside the mall entrance. Where there had once been a few dozen people of varying descriptions there was now a similar number of cute girls in maid’s uniforms. They started approaching the car, looking slightly dazed. As they got closer, Curly noticed they all had cat’s ears, and slitted eyes.
“What’s with the ears, doc?”
“That was unexpected, I have to admit.” Jackson frowned for a moment, then shrugged and got out of the car to await their arrival. Curly wasn’t far behind him.
The first catgirl to reach Jackson bowed before him. “What is your bidding, master?”
“You made them slaves?” asked Curly incredulously.
“Do you have any idea how much work it is to keep up that decrepit old mansion I inherited? I’ll need at least this many maids to even begin to get it back into shape.”
While most of the approaching catgirls seemed docile enough, and agreed to follow Jackson back to his house, there was a gleam in the eyes of more than a few that made Curly wary. Jackson was over the moon, though, and drove the car slowly back to his place with the catgirls following in a pack. He grabbed the spell permanizer from the dash of the car before he got out, and led the catgirls into the house. Curly hung back, and noticed the way at least eight of the tails were swishing. Those girls were not docile, not at all. But before he could call out a warning, the claws came out and they pounced.
Jackson screamed in terror, then had the presence of mind to hit something on his belt. A loud crackling noise permeated the room, and when it cleared Jackson and the four closest catgirls had turned to stone.
The remaining predatory catgirls turned their eyes on Curly. He held up his hands defensively. “I had no idea that the old man had this planned, really I didn’t!” He pointed to his still-mittened right hand. “See! I’m as much a victim as you.”
They looked at each other and conferred for a moment in hushed tones. “Do you know how he did this? Can you change us back?”
“Sort of, and I think so. I really, really hope so, anyway.”
With the help of the docile catgirls, the car was quickly stashed away in Jackson’s garage laboratory once more. The five statues were brought in to stand beside it. One of the feral catgirls asked Curly what had happened to them.
“The doc did mention he’d made a sort of personal defensive device. I guess that was it. He just may have outsmarted himself, though.”
“Oh?”
“Well... he was carrying a device that makes spells permanent, you see? So... he might be stuck as a statue. So might your friends.”
“Fix them,” growled another of the catgirls. “Or these claws will get a workout after all.”
Curly gulped, and got to work on the recharger. The modifications that Jackson had suggested didn’t take long to make, but the power output surprised him. The 100 watt bulb he’d added as a load glowed brightly and burst a moment after he activated the unit, to much yowling.
“Sorry, sorry. That means it’s working, though. I just need something bigger to dissipate the energy.” Curly soon had a space heater attached where the bulb had been, and it was glowing merrily. The garage started getting rather warm between that and all the catgirls, so the docile ones were dispatched to help clean up the house and make some food.
An hour passed, and the feral catgirls were getting antsy. Curly managed to keep them calm, but it wasn’t easy. A little later, though, he had something to show. His doll-mitt hand was turning back to normal. None of the catgirls were showing any signs of changes, though, and the looks Curly was getting were making him worried.
A loud knocking came from inside the Trans Am. Curly stared at it in awakening horror then dashed over to it, threw the hood up and opened the box where the doll had been stashed. A human face looked out at him from within the box, and mouthed, “Help”.
Curly extracted the cube of flesh from the box and set it on the garage floor. Under the continuing effect of the discharger it slowly melted and grew into not one but two human figures, both quite naked. The female one grabbed her head and pleaded for Curly to turn the discharger off before she was more than half restored, her lower torso still a cube of flesh.
“Okay, but it might take longer...”
“Just do it,” Candy snapped. Then she flashed him a pretty smile, showing fading violet eyes. “Please? If you do I can fix this mess.”
Curly shrugged, and did as she’d asked. He watched in puzzlement as she kneaded at herself, changing her face from human to a catlike one. This worried him more than a little, especially when those bright violet eyes turned on him once more.
While Candy was kneading George back to human form, Curly explained the events of the past few days. He was amused to find out that he’d been right. Candy was indeed a shapeshifting exotic dancer. George was less sanguine about the two of them being naked in front of Curly, so some of the catgirl maids were sent to find clothing for them. Candy kneaded an old shirt into a top that fit her much better.
The feral catgirls were more agitated than ever by this point. Curly knew how some of Jackson’s gear worked, and had determined that his fears were correct. All of the catgirl maids and the statues as well had been affected by permanent spells, not transitory ones.
“We’re stuck like this?” wailed one of the ferals. “What about her? She changed herself into a catgirl.” The catgirl fell to her knees in front of Candy. “Please? I want to be human again.”
“Are you sure? Given the choice, I’d go for the catgirl thing myself.”
“You don’t understand,” said one. “I was a guy named Carson an hour ago. One of these other ones is my girlfriend, and I have no idea which.”
One of the docile catgirls raised her hand. “Um, I think that was me. My memories are coming back.” A few of the others murmured assent, though they all retained the demure body language they’d been using ever since being changed.
Curly sighed with relief. “Do you remember what you looked like? We can change you back, or at least get you close. Right?”
“Um... Well, there’s a slight problem,” said Candy. “I can change you, sure. But it’ll only stay that way for six days or so, then you’d be right back to being catgirls.”
Curly slowly started to smile, then walked over to the statue of Jackson and pulled a calculator-shaped object out of his pocket. “Oh, I think we can deal with that problem.”
Soon enough, Candy was working busily away at changing the catgirls back to humans, including the stoned ones. What surprised and pleased her was that four of the docile catgirls decided they were happier as they were, and volunteered to stay on with their rescuers. She did a little bit of work on each one to give them different shades of hair and fur, but otherwise left them as Jackson’s ray had.
Curly sighed as the last of them went into the house to start cleaning up and getting ready for dinner.
“What’s wrong?” asked Candy.
“I kind of wish that had happened to me,” he said wistfully.
Candy prowled closer, and started kneading on Curly’s shoulders. “Wish granted.”
Just as Curly’s ears were poking out of his hair, a peremptory meow cut through the congenial atmosphere in the garage like a scythe. Candy took one look at Lenny and yelped. “Turn it off!”
Curly looked confused. “Turn what off?”
“The permanent spell thingy! Turn it off quick!”
Curly stared at the calculator, then shrugged. “I... well, I hope this does it.” Tapping the power button once dimmed the display, and a quick test of the results of Candy kneading his chest proved that the effects were indeed temporary.
“Foo,” Curly said softly. “Ah well. So why was it so important to turn the permanizer off?”
Lenny started kneading at his feet, and Curly stared at them in consternation as they started turning into paws. “The cat? The cat can change people?”
Candy grinned broadly. “Yup. And it seems he likes you. Have fun!”