“Wow, that was so impressive.” The sneer in Shelby’s voice was practically tangible, something you could feel dripping onto the floor as she spoke. “I’m *so* glad we got paired together for this dumb science project.”

“Look, just, I don’t know what happened!” Shelby only rolled her eyes at your pleas. “It was supposed to work, let me just look this over!”

Shelby stiffly moved over to the stack of crates she had been sitting on moments earlier. “You promised me an easy A here. You just zap me with that... thingy--”

“--an exotic matter transducing ray,” you cut in, trying to defend the research project that would surely earn you a doctorate degree with easy.

“--that mannequin ray *thingy*, I spend a week relaxing as a beautifully dressed girl with no problems, and then everything is back to normal. But now I’m some half plastic, half living girl that can’t even sit down right!”

You can’t help but sigh. Shelby wasn’t mean, per say, just at the other end of the social spectrum than you. When you both had seen your professors on the same day requesting assistants for your research projects, you were paired up to help each other. It was pretty easy working on Shelby’s - some surveys around the campus, getting a wide variety of answers that she would correlate into something or other, but yours required experimentation.

“Found it! The ray wasn’t fully charged; it seems some of the capacitors were draining in standby and the circuit never detected that.”

Shelby looked up from her hard plastic chest that she had been knocking on. “So, does that mean it’s fixable?”

You nodded quickly. “Yeah, I can drain the rest of the capacitors, desolder the defective ones, replace them with new ones, test them and then get them charged up.” Even as you were speaking, you got to work, not noticing Shelby walking up beside you.

“Hmm.” She was quiet for a long moment, and for once it wasn’t because she was texting or otherwise distracted. “How long will this take?”

“...” Your fingers pause as you run the figures in your head. “Well, the repairs can be done in about an hour or so. Let’s say two, so I can double and triple check the results. The capacitors... well, they’re going to take a while to charge... let’s say most of this week. Then we can finish changing you, I can get the results I need, and then I can change you back!”

The look in Shelby’s eyes burned a hole through yours. “You want me to stay like this for that long?”

“Well, there isn’t much I can do about it...”

“Ugh! Well hurry up! It looks like I have some crazy tan lines, and that won’t do!”