A magic show wasn't exactly the first place Natalie wanted to go after spending so much time cooped up in her apartment, but at least it was an event that was happening. That being said, she was at least able to appreciate the cheesy entertainment and hammy performance by the magician so far. Though her excursion had started as just an excuse to leave the house, she was now oddly invested in what was happening.

    The aforementioned magician had just finished up a card trick routine. Right after the tricks were finished, he spoke to the audience a bit before quickly turning around and running directly into the table of discarded cards, knocking them all over the stage. The audience got a laugh out of it, but Natalie noticed that the magician seemed genuinely embarrassed, as though he had already forgotten about the table his assistant had placed there earlier. Either way, the performer quickly recovered and moved along with his show.

    "Heh, hehe..." The magician casually kicked the cards out of his way, "Anyway, we're going to need a volunteer for this next trick!" Any connoisseur of obscure magic tricks would know what was about to happen based on the machine that his assistant rolled onto stage: a pair of rollers resembling a laundry wringer with a box in the back, presumably for an assistant to hide in as they pretend to go through the rollers.

    Natalie was not a connoisseur of obscure magic tricks, but she already had an idea of what this trick might be about. A bemused smile appeared on her lips when the magician asked for a volunteer. Surely there was already a plant in the audience for the magician to pick, but Natalie raised her hand to volunteer as a fun little bit of interactivity. The theater's spotlights roamed around the audience for a few seconds as the magician peered into the crowd. Suddenly, he and the lights both stopped and pointed... right at Natalie.

    Natalie, with her hand halfway up, looked behind her, then to her sides.

    "You! Yes, you! The tall blonde volunteering! Come on up!" the magician called.

    Natalie put her hand to her chest in confirmation and let out a couple of confused chuckles. The magician's assistant came into the audience and beckoned Natalie to come up onto the stage with her. 

    "W-Well, alright!" Natalie said mostly to herself. She felt a mild amount of embarrassment walking up to the stage. She wasn't a shy girl and had a bit of experience performing in front of people, but she certainly didn't expect to be a part of a show today. She was just happy that she bothered to make herself look decent. A light amount of makeup was enough to accentuate the natural beauty of her face, which was framed by long, straight blonde hair. She admitted to herself in the mirror just that morning that her butt looked quite nice in her denim shorts, which were accompanied by an equally casual t-shirt that rode high enough to show just a sliver of her belly.

    The magician welcomed her to the stage and asked her name.

    "Uh, hi! I'm Natalie, I like long walks on the beach, and, apparently, getting myself into situations where I have no idea what's going on, haha!" She was glad that she wasn't the only one who laughed at her nervous joke.

    "Well Natalie," the magician continued in his hammy performing voice, "I've actually recently broken out into the modelling industry. Have you ever thought about being a poster girl?"

    Natalie snorted a stifled laugh, "Oh, yeah, totally, that's me!" She stuck both her thumbs up to the audience and gave a sarcastic smile.

    "In that case, I have the perfect device for you right here!" the magician exclaimed, indicating toward the wringer on stage, "If you'll just step right on up!" Natalie was guided to sit on the back side of the box of the wringer device, facing the audience.

    "Told you I could do it, mom!" Natalie half-heartedly joked. She was feeling the energy of being on stage, however, the magician still hadn't told her how this trick worked. Was she just supposed to pretend to go into the box? Did she have to go somewhere? What was happening?

    The magician didn't seem keen on filling her in about the trick at all. He grabbed a crank at the side of the machine and addressed his confused volunteer, "Alright Natalie, you ready to squeeze into your new role?"

    The precariously perched woman pursed her lips and looked around. "S-Sure!" she shrugged to the audience and let out another nervous laugh.

    With a declaration of "Here we go!" the magician gave the crank a few rotations. Natalie's eyes widened as she felt a pinch and pressure creep from her toes to her ankles. She looked down to the magician, then out to the audience.

    "Uh, ah-!" With a few more cranks, Natalie's noises of confusion were cut off by her body getting pulled down into the box of the wringer. She once again looked to the machine's operator and then to the audience, but a bit more frantically this time. Her brain was having a hard time processing what exactly was happening to her body, but she could tell that there was an abnormal amount of pressure on her lower half.

    Natalie opened her mouth in another futile protest, but the magician already started cranking the wringer again. Before she knew it, the crushing feeling rolled across the rest of Natalie's body. Her vision was briefly obscured, then a flurry of colors passed through her sight accompanied by a fluttering sound, and suddenly she was on her back staring up at the ceiling. The first thing she noticed about her new situation was the constant, incredibly tight pressure covering her whole body. The next thing was that when she tried to pick herself up off the floor, she couldn't move a muscle.

    Natalie didn't have much time to ponder her circumstances before she felt herself get lifted up into the air. Though the hapless volunteer was still trying to piece together what just happened, the result of the trick was plain to the audience; Natalie had been crushed by the wringer and reduced to the thickness of a poster! The magician held her by the top of her paper-thin head as he displayed her to the rows of viewers. The freshly made poster girl was frozen in the exact pose that she had entered the wringer, with her hands at either side of her surprised face. Most of the audience got a kick out of the shocked expression on the 'prop,' some even noting the detail that the poster's thighs seemed to spread outward and spill out over the edges of Natalie's shorts, or the detail that it seemed like Natalie's shirt had ridden up her torso to expose even more of her belly than before.

    Of course, the trick to this trick was that it wasn't a trick. Natalie was quickly realizing that her thighs were spread out from the pressure of going through the rollers, her shirt had ridden up during the trip, she was stuck with a ridiculous expression of surprise, and she was, in fact, flat. The whole experience was so surreal and overwhelming that she came to terms with this fact surprisingly quickly. After all, she couldn't deny that her body certainly felt very flat. The complete change in her body's shape was pretty hard to deny.

    "Say, Natalie, you looked pretty good before, but now you really have the body of a pinup girl!" The magician joked to the audience as though he hadn't just reduced a girl to being a 2-dimensional image. He was met with some polite laughs from the audience. During the noise, the magician took a moment to whisper, "Hey, nice job playing the part," into Natalie's ear. Unable to decide between saying something funny to diffuse the situation and asking what the hell was going on, Natalie tried to make any noise at all, but found she couldn't make a peep. Not only was she utterly immobile, she couldn't speak out of the flat, O-shaped ring of her mouth either.

    As though she were a mere prop, Natalie was tossed from the magician to his assistant, who caught the poster girl and continued to display her for the onlooking masses. The magician disassembled the wringer box to ensure that, yes, Natalie was not hiding inside of it, then took a bow. The assistant bent Natalie in half at the waist to simulate a bow from her, which Natalie took about as well as one would expect an inanimate poster to take.

    "Well Flatalie, I mean, Natalie, good luck with the your new modelling career! Everyone give it up for our very flat volunteer!" The audience gave a polite applause as the magician's assistant walked back down into the rows of seats with Natalie in tow. "Oh, and if any of you are agents, you'll be able to find her right in her seat there. I don't think she'll be moving from there for a bit." The audience laughed again as what they thought was a mere paper printout of a woman was laid back into her seat, the assistant pressing the poster into the chair at the waist to simulate sitting.

    "And now, for our next trick..." The spotlight faded from where Natalie was sitting. The assistant went back to the stage. The magician continued his act. And yet, Natalie was still just as flat as when she passed through the rollers. Out of the corner of her vision she noticed the woman sitting next to her take a closer look at her and snicker. Natalie tried to indicate to this woman that she was, in fact, a flattened person and not just a stage prop, but any attempt to make contact was met with the reality that her whole body was a useless flat sheet, incapable of such human actions as movement or making sounds. 

    "...Ok... Um... Now what...?" Natalie thought to herself. As the show went on, Natalie double checked every part of her body just to see if there was some wriggle room left in her flattened form, but found no luck in moving, which was quite unfortunate because having her third dimension crushed out of her wasn't exactly comfortable. Well, parts of it felt kind of nice, now that she thought of it. In fact, she found that if she wanted to she could probably get used to that constant buzz of pressure around her crotch... Of course, that bit was accompanied by the much more foreign and unusual sensation of flatness across the rest of what was supposed to be a normal human body. Additionally, it wasn't exactly ideal to be helplessly stuck in a form where she couldn't even squirm an inch.

    After a few minutes, the flatty figured there was nothing to do but put up with the unpleasantness until the show was over. After all, this was all part of the act! This dude would probably just retrieve her after the show and fix her right up, then they'd all have a laugh about how silly it was. Plus she'd have a story to tell her friends! She just had to wait for the magician to remember her after the show.

    Natalie tuned back into the show, where the magician was struggling to think of the joke he had come up with for his latest illusion while his assistant whispered the line into his ear. 

    "...He's going to remember to fix me, right?"

    Despite being flat, the rest of the show was quite enjoyable. The magician performed a few more impressive tricks that, at this point, left Natalie wondering whether they were actually tricks or simply acts that were as seemingly impossible as the one she just went through. Eventually, the magician did his last trick of the night, thanked the audience, and disappeared from the stage. The buzz of a content audience filled the room as they began to shuffle out, some of them slowly down briefly to catch a glimpse of the 'prop' that was left in the audience as they stepped over her flattened legs.
    
    Before long, everyone had filed out, and a janitor came in to clean the theater. He left Natalie alone, figuring the magician would retrieve his belonging on his own time. Enough time passed that the janitor finished cleaning and left Natalie by herself.

    And so, Natalie waited. And waited. And waited...

    "...He actually did forget about me..."