[F->Mannequin] [Captioned Story] [Animated Gif] [Model: @bekejacoba on Instagram]

You found the magical camera at a strange store. “Immortal Beauty” was the description the elderly shopkeeper placed in front of it. He chuckled when you brought it up to the counter, but said nothing more than encouraging you to use it wisely.

You took it home to play around with it, snapping some pictures of the various plants around your house that made decent models for your photograph. After a couple pictures, you noticed each of them had a strange glossy tone. It looked as though your fresh flowers had turned to plastic, becoming little more than the fake flowers one might see at a corner convenience store.

The real surprise came when your roommate startled you. You had the camera in hand, spinning around to find the source of the commotion when you accidentally clicked the shutter button. Instantly your roommate was frozen in place. You watched her skin first turn glossy, then drain of color. As her facial features disappeared, you realized what was happening.

The camera, “Immortal Beauty”, seemed to turn living things into inanimate plastic. You instantly became giddy, the possibilities became endless. You flashed your camera again at your roommate and she turned back to normal. You managed to evade her questions, saying you’d explain later. That explanation would have to wait until after you tried the camera for yourself - and based on your roommate’s flushed cheeks, it was quite the experience.

You had to make it worthwhile - after all, this would be your first time turning to plastic, surely a memorable event. You found a skimpy outfit you had used for a cosplay once. It was a character you hardly knew the character of, but she was hardly dressed and that suited your fans well. You rushed to the bathroom and applied your makeup before inspecting the camera.

There was a multipicture mode that seemed to promise taking one picture after another. You set it so that it would take the next picture after a couple seconds - long enough to be changed, but not long enough that you risked getting caught by your roommate. Posing in the mirror, you counted down from three before pressing the button.

The flash instantly froze you in position. You looked normal, but that quickly changed. Your skin became a smooth and glossy expanse, and you noticed that around key points of your body, dark rings had formed. It was strange to imagine that someone could just pick you up and dismantle you with no ill effect.

The color started to drain from your skin, and with it, you noticed your tattoo fading away into nothingness while your navel piercing faded. You realized that you had already lost your belly button when you were paying attention, but now your skin was even more plastic-like, just a pale white sheet of plastic.

Then came the terrifying part, as you watched your face disappear. Your mouth and nose were already covered, but you could see the mask shift ever so slightly for that change. The drastic change was your eyes vanishing. You could still see perfectly well - perhaps that was why your roommate wasn’t even more panicky - and watch as just an ordinary mannequin stood in your bathroom dressed up in the clothes you had been wearing.

There was a certain zen tranquility to it, being frozen, having no heartbeat or breaths to distract you. ‘You’ didn’t even really exist anymore, at least not in a capacity that anyone would know about. ‘You’ had become only a ‘Thing’, and as much as you knew that should be terrifying, it felt rather liberating. It unfortunately came to an end though, as the camera flashed again and you started to change back. The Mannequin faded away, as the glossy coating making up its surface became more and more imprecise until it resembled skin rather than plastic.

You were left standing there, once again as a person, as the final changes took effect. You breathed a sigh of relief - your first breath in nearly a minute. Before you could look at the pictures that had been recorded on the camera, the flash went off again. Frozen in place once more, as you watched your body freeze into position. Your mind raced, wondering how this could be happening! You only set it for two pictures!

After a couple cycles you managed to move your eyes just enough to see the screen of the phone. Somehow, the phone had taken your input for the delay between pictures to also be the counter for how many pictures to take. You were glad you set it to an even number, though at the rate this was going, you were going to be spending the better part of an hour standing in this bathroom...