[TF, F->Glass Statue]
[CW: Aware/Trapped Subject]
Joanne never really had a normal life.
Weird things just always happened upon her. Fate was funny, that way. Not that Joanne minded, the weirder the better. Like that time, a while back, when she ended up a succubus for the weekend. Most people would think demonic corruption would be a terrible fate, but not Joanne.
For Joanne, that would just be an interesting and exciting turn of events.
It’s not that Joanne would seek out these exciting adventures, but they would come up when she least expected them. So when she received a letter in the mail inviting her to partake in experiments at a local laboratory for a decent paycheck, she agreed without even thinking of the infinite ways everything could go wrong.
===
“Hi!” Joanne practically leaned across the counter to the security guard who eyed her up and down.
“Can I help you?” He asked, scratching the stubble of his beard. He took in the appearance of the girl in front of him. She seemed tall, but it might have been the long and slender legs she was blessed with, that seemingly went on forever. They were on display - a sign that Joanne either knew what she was working with, or was blissfully unaware of the show she was giving everyone around her. Her denim shorts barely reached around her rounded rear, and then her soft and pale skin expanded flawlessly until her shoes. They were a light purple - almost pink in the right light, he noted - that matched perfectly with her top. A standard t-shirt would seem to be innoculous enough, but her top hugged her slim waist line and above average chest to showcase her natural assets. Even as her brown hair cascaded smoothly over her shoulders, none of these were what held the guard’s attention for long.
Joanne’s eyes, stole the show. Brown, much like her hair, they seemed innocent enough. But there was a passion in them, a lust for life that shone brighter than any of her other features. He couldn’t help but smile as she talked her eyes danced in the light.
“Yeah, I’m here for the experiment testing? I signed up and was invited to come down to the lab today, I think I’m a little early!”
The guard chuckled, nodding. “Yes, of course. You must be Miss Joanne, then.” At Joanne’s nod, he continued. “You’re the only test subject in today, in fact, you’re the first one we have coming for this program.”
Joanne was curious as to why that was, but she grinned. The whole place to herself sounded exciting, like a new adventure unfolding. The guard passed over some paperwork for her to fill out, and she dutifully completed them. A few moments later, a scientist in a white coat came out from the back.
“Miss Joanne? A pleasure to meet you. Welcome to Pro Scientia Labs. My name is Caroline Stattum. I’m sure you’re wondering what this experiment will be about, so if you’d like to follow me?”
Joanne had to shake their hands as they were walking. They seemed just as eager to get to the experiment as Joanne was, if not more so. The researcher - Caroline - led the way deep into the sterile white laboratory complex, her high heels clicking down the linoleum floor.
“My field of study in college was in Soft Matter. Thing of something that when you apply heat and stress to it, it changes shape or color or properties. This is everything from the liquid crystals in your cellphone screen, to the rubber we use in car tires. Think of it like anything that we think of as a solid or liquid, but is a little blurry on that line.”
“Like peanut butter?” Joanne chimed in.
Caroline turned back to smile and nod. “Yes, that’s not a bad example.” They continued walking down the corridor for a few moments longer in silence. The door Caroline had stopped in front of had a small engraved plaque on the front with the scientist’s name, with “Project: Homo speculo” written above them. Joanne pointed her thumb at the sign, raising a questioning brow to the scientists.
Caroline nodded as if that were answer enough, or perhaps to indicate she’d get to it in time. “I came to Pro Scientia Labs to set up an environment where we can understand these special and unique properties, and see if they could apply to normal solids and liquids. The lab directors came to me with an idea, and I thought it was interesting.”
Caroline unlocked the door and led the pair into the room. Joanne immediately gasped and froze, before letting out a quick laugh and wandering deeper into the room of her own accord. She marveled at the displays, her eyes burning with curiosity and excitement.
All around her, suspended in the air and on nearly every available flat surface were glass figurines and statues. It seemed impossible and costly ridiculous to have the seemingly thousands of ornate glass replicas throughout the lab space. She turned to Caroline wordlessly, her grin speaking enough for her. “Project: Homo speculo is that the result of my work, and the lab directors… interesting idea. Homo speculo, Latin for ‘glass person’. As you can see, there are currently 962 glass figures in here. Insects, plants, small animals. There’s some glass trees and larger mammals near the back, if you’d like to see.”
Joanne didn’t need any more prompting, and she was already off to explore. She marveled at each crystal she passed. Each was perfectly smooth, and entirely transparent. It was only the way light seemed to bend through them ever so slightly differently that she could discern their shapes.
“So, what do you do here, then? High resolution scanning, and the best glass production ever?”
Caroline shook her head, following at a distance. “No. We take the properties of glass, an amorphous solid, and bestow that onto a subject. Every one of the figures you see was alive, and can be brought back to life with no issues.”
“Yes!”
Caroline blinked at the sudden outburst. “Uhm...what? I hadn’t asked a question…”
Joanne shook her head, running up to Caroline. “Yes! Homo speculo, the glass person! You want to test this on a human, I say yes, let’s do it!”
Caroline just shook her head and took hold of Joanne by the wrist to lead her to a corner of the lab adorned more with machines and computers than glass figures. A giant booth rested in the corner. “So, the terms of the ad should have mentioned a long term option for substantially more payment…”
Joanne interrupted. “Yes! I’ll do it! How long do you want me for- no, wait, don’t tell me! Will I still think, or be myself as a statue?”
Caroline laughed, sitting back at her command chair. “Are you sure you don’t want me to tell you?” Joanne nodded aggressively. Caroline had to marvel at the spirit and energy. To the young girl who had started stripping for some reason, this was just an adventure for her. “Alright then. We’ll change you back when we finish with you, then.”
Caroline filled out some of the forms on her desk, then glanced up. Joanne was already in the booth to be reconfigured into glass, the cold air making her nipples perky through the bra she wore. It was a cute pink, matching her panties. “Did you want to be changed like that?”
Joanne mouthed some sort of reply, but it wasn’t clear what it could mean through the muffling walls of the chamber. Caroline just nodded back, clicking buttons to turn on the machine. Her voice came on in a speaker in the booth. “As far as we know, the process put your mind into a coma, of sorts. You’ll wake up when we revert you back to flesh and blood.”
Joanne pouted, but it wasn’t easily visible through the cloud of vapors filling the booth around her. She coughed, then coughed again more violently, before she didn’t feel she could cough again. She tried to speak, and found she couldn’t. Her insides felt tight, stiffer than any flesh could be.
Caroline’s voice boomed to life around the petrifying girl. “Remember, we’re going to need you to hold a pose. If you’re not posed right, you might fall and break. So make sure both feet are on the ground and you’re well balanced. Oh, and find something that would be fitting for a statue for while you’re converted.”
Joanne nodded. The stiffness had spread to her joints and she could already feel it beginning to get hard to adjust her positions. She set one foot nearly in front of the other, then lifted the arch of the other foot so she was on her toes. She tested her balance for a moment, finding the glass conversion was helping her hold the pose. She could feel the posture lifting her rear and putting her legs on display, and that made her smile.
She put her right hand on her hip, noting that it already felt cold and firm. Out of her surprise reflex, she gasped. Except her gasp had no air in her lungs and her mouth had already frozen into her excited smile that she never stopped wearing from a moment ago. Instead, her nostrils flared open as her nose froze and her eyelids were wide open, revealing her bright eyes now crystalized.
She could still see, however, and realized that Caroline never clarified if a subject would remain conscious. She couldn’t move her gaze, but wanted to see the transformation happening to her. She lifted her left hand, the last part of her body to convert to glass. It was difficult, as her shoulder and elbow were nearly finished converting, but slowly it inched into view in front of her face. Her normal pale skin looked dull, almost gray. It kept losing its color and definition, the small lines in her skin vanishing. She imagined she could see each cell in her hand slowly turning perfectly clear from the outside in, despite slowly just fading to a perfectly clear crystal across an imperceptibly smooth gradient.
The gas started to fade from the chamber. Joanne realized it was what was allowing her to see her glass hand as easily as she was, and without it she was as transparent as the glass figures in the rest of the lab. The light seemed to vaguely bend and distort inside her, but she couldn’t tell perfectly where she stopped and the air started.
Caroline got up, and clapped. “Wonderful, wonderful!” The door to the booth opened. “I know you can’t hear me, being unconscious and all, but I must say… you came out wonderfully, Miss Joanne.”
Joanne panicked for a moment, was she supposed to be unconscious?! She tried to say something, or indicate that she was awake, but glass statues aren’t able to communicate that well. The panic faded after a moment, and complacency with the turn of events settled in. She had agreed to this, after all, and they would release her. Eventually.
===
It was a few months before Joanne made it back to Pro Scientia Labs. Caroline had taken her and the other subjects on a tour around the country to various fairs and expos, showing off her miraculous works of science that bordered on the mystical. Once back, she restored all the other subjects, except Joanne. Joanne became mounted in the front lobby, on display for anyone and everyone that entered the labs. The small plaque at her feet barely had any information - privacy policies prevented much about her being stated like that, Caroline had mentioned during the installation - and merely read:
Project: Homo speculo
Long term subject
The other scientists started calling her Speculo, eventually just Spec. Not that she cared. Time had a different meaning to her. Day and night faded into lost meaning, and eventually she only paid attention to when people passed by her. Given the optical perfection of the glass that made her up, it was natural for her to be looked at from many angles as the viewers took in her shape. The fact that she seemed to be in a curious and surprised position with so much ‘skin’ exposed seemed to help persuade many male - and some female - scientists to take a much longer and more exporatory view of her.
Joanne could have sworn she heard Caroline talking with another scientist about restoring her, and something about “finishing her contract for the next year and a half.” Whether that was the case or not, Joanne didn’t care. She just stared off into space at her pristine glass hand, a surprised yet bemused expression frozen to her face as she watched the scientists come and come.