A pair of women strutted confidently through a back hallway of a theater, following a sharply dressed man. His outfit was an impeccable tuxedo, white gloves, and a top hat. Each of the women was dressed in a snappy black jacket with a crisp white button-down shirt underneath. Unlike the man’s suit, which was perfectly tailored and utterly classy, the women were wearing outfits that were cut scandalously tight, each button threatening to pop, particularly around their ample bosoms. Their long, sexy legs were covered in fishnet stockings and each of them wore spike heels that looked as though they should be impossible to walk in.
It wasn’t just the outfits that matched, though. The women were identical twins, wavy blonde hair falling to their mid backs, full lips highlighted with red lipstick, and piercing blue eyes skillfully accented with eye shadow.
“Okay, girls. Sorry to rush you, but I’m in a tremendous hurry. Normally I’d want to vet you two a little more carefully, but we’ve been having a hell of a time finding good assistants lately, and both your agent and mine seem convinced you’ll be a good fit for the show,” said the man as he pulled a key from his pocket and fitted it in the door at the end of the hall.
The brass plate on the door said “Gary the Great.”
“What were your names again?” he asked.
“I’m Glitz,” said one of the twins.
“And I’m Glamour,” said the other.
“Glitz and Glamour. Nice. That’ll work great.”
He opened the door and snapped on the light. Inside was a rather small dressing room. The walls were covered with posters dating back fifty years, all headliners at the theater over the years. In the middle of the room was a mostly packed steamer trunk.
“I assume you two have seen my act?” Gary said.
He gathered a few colorful handkerchiefs and assorted other magical paraphernalia and dumped them in the box.
“Oh yes,” they said simultaneously.
“Okay. We’re going to have a few days of rehearsals on the road, so we don’t have to cover too much right now, but are there any tricks you want demonstrated before we go? Something quick so you can start working on how you want to assist?”
The girls gave each other a knowing glance.
“The magic hat,” they said in unison.
“The centerpiece of the show, naturally.” He took his hat off his head and began to work his way through a well-practiced speech. “The hat starts off like this. As we can see, perfectly empty.”
He showed it off, revealing a smooth felt interior with nothing hidden and no apparent room for a secret compartment.
“Now, normally we’d start with a rabbit in there, but since this wasn’t in prep for a show…”
He stepped over to a large cabinet and opened it to reveal a few cages, each containing a white rabbit. He selected one and held it up.
“Perfectly normal rabbit.” He held the hat, opening up, and dropped the rabbit inside. It fell out of sight, and the hat didn’t even shake with the impact of it striking the bottom. He then tipped it forward. “And it’s gone.”
Sure enough, the hat was just as empty as it had been when he started.
“When we want the rabbit back, we just say the magic word, atuskadero escardito, and reach our hand inside.”
He reached into the hat, his arm disappearing to the shoulder into a hat that was barely six inches tall. When he pulled it out again, he was holding the rabbit.
“Easy as that. Sometimes we go the extra mile, if people aren’t giving the proper reaction.”
He dropped the bunny in again, then tapped the hat on its flat bottom and it collapsed, now barely an inch thick. Waving it around showed nothing inside.
“And then there’s this little feature.”
He gave the brim a twist and the hat rolled easily into a tight black tube. Not only was there no evidence it (supposedly) contained a bunny, there was little evidence it was ever a hat. It looked like little more than a six inch “magic wand”. It even had the glossy, smooth texture of one.
“Viola! Proof enough for even the staunchest of skeptics. And then, pebbimity!”
At the sound of the word, the hat popped back into its collapsed shape, then popped again into a full top hat. He caught it by the brim, reached his arm in again, repeated the magic words, and withdrew the bunny. It was completely unharmed.
“That’s the magic hat. Naturally we’ve got some other stuff we do with it, but you get the idea. Now if you’ll just help pack this away, we’ll discuss matters more on the private jet.”
“But wait,” said one twin.
“How does it work?” said the other.
“Magic.” He said.
“How does it really work?” they asked.
“Magic.” He repeated. “Now I’ve got to talk to the theater manager for a few minutes.” He handed Glitz the hat. “Pack this. And a few of the spares from the rack over there. I look forward to working with you.”
With that, he was off, shutting the door behind him.
“Typical, doesn’t trust us with the workings of the trick yet,” Glitz said, looking at the hat sadly.
“You don’t think he realizes we’re here to steal his secrets, do you?” Glamor asked.
“Shh! Why don’t you just scream it from the roof? Look you go back there,” she pointed to a curtained doorway. “See if he’s got any notebooks or folders or anything. Schematics and such, plans. I’ll investigate the hat.”
“Okay,” Glamour said, pacing off through the curtains.
Glitz got to work immediately, setting the hat down on the table. The light from the overhead lamp shined inside, revealing it to be empty, which at the moment, it really was. She carefully stuck her hand inside, running her fingers along the silk interior. Her probing of the sides didn’t reveal any seams or zippers. Nothing that would conceal a bunny or flip open to let it drop through. She pushed her hand deeper, searching for where the sides met the top.
It was at this point that she began to realize something unusual. The hat was only six inches deep, but she’d already gotten her forearm entirely inside, and with no sign of reaching bottom. The only change in the feeling of the fabric against her fingers was a subtle stretchiness as she probed further down.
She scratched her head and peered all around the outside of the hat, but didn’t see any place her arm could possibly be going. Looking in the top, it looked like her arm simply continued down into a shadowy interior. Puzzled, she slid her other arm inside, trying to test how far it could stretch. The brim offered firm resistance, but even with enough force to stretch it to almost twice its diameter, it didn’t show any sign of reaching its limit.
Just as she was about to call her sister to weigh in on how such a thing could work, she saw the glint of something in the darkness of the hat, just barely visible between her arms.
“Ah ha!” she said, pressing her hands against the walls of the hat and stretching harder.
Doing so while it was sitting on the table was awkward and limited her leverage, so she lifted the hat up over her head, trying to stretch open whatever flap or baffle she’d caught a glimpse of. She was so determined to do so, she didn’t notice that every push and shove of her arms slid the smooth fabric a little further down her arms.
“Come on… I know I saw something in there…” she grunted, forcing harder and harder.
The brim was stretched tight, nearly at her elbows, and her face was inches from the expanded opening of the hat. One final heave caused the brim to roll over her elbows, and suddenly the resistance was gone. Her arms flipped straight out to the side, stretching the silky fabric of the hat like it was spandex and forcing the hat band down the sides of her arms and around her head. The brim came to a rest just under her armpits, pinning her breasts down in front.
Everything from her armpits up was now fully inside the hat, and there was no sign of a bottom. With the stretchy brim pinned tight against her skin it was pitch black inside, and though stretching it was no problem, the fabric around her always seemed to conform to her body, wrapping her face and arms with silky smoothness.
From the outside, the hat was just as it had always been, albeit with a brim stretched enough to fit around her upper chest. It wasn’t any more deformed than that, offering no hint that it contained a fair amount of the upper body of a progressively more desperate and struggling woman.
She gave up on stretching the fabric and tried to work her thumbs through the brim again. If she could hook them through, she could pull the hat off again and try investigating from a different angle. The brim was very tight, though. Her attempts to push her thumbs under it only managed to inch it further down her chest. Finally her breasts popped inside and the band slid down to her narrow waist, coming to a stop just above the curve of her hips.
“Okay, what the hell?” she muttered.
The stretchiness of the interior must have had some sort of limit, because she could feel it getting tighter around her, packing her breasts tight against her chest and pinning her arms to her sides. In her fruitless struggles to grab a handful of the material and yank the hat back up, she suddenly became aware of an odd loss of equilibrium. She felt very lightheaded, or more specifically, light bodied. It almost felt like she was being gently lifted, the weight on her feet barely half what it would normally be.
Her brain churned on this new sensation, and slowly it came to her that what she was feeling was precisely what it would feel like if the upper half of her body was missing… as if the part of her trapped in the hat wasn’t even there. She tried to take a step forward, but doing so caused the waist-high hat to strike the edge of the table. Being little more than a pair of legs with a hat atop them was new enough that she’d not yet learned to keep her footing, and thus went tumbling backward.
A few mad kicks and a scrabbling of her heels managed to stand the hat upright, tipping her long and sexy fishnet-clad legs straight up. The gravity forced her hips through the band, and so began a quick, inevitable slide inside.
Her shapely legs kicked helplessly as the hat swallowed inch after inch. She felt the smooth, stretch fabric glide over her skin, embracing and binding her tighter and tighter as she slid down what felt like an elastic tube. Her wiggling feet and shiny black high heels were the last things to go, slipping easily inside and leaving the hat sitting innocently on the floor.
It looked perfectly normal, the same size as it had been when it was on Gary’s head. Though there was a whole woman packed snuggly within, struggling for all she was worth, it didn’t so much as twitch.
“I can’t find any… Glitz?” said Glamour, pacing out from the room to find her sister missing. “Where did she go?”
She spotted the hat and plucked it from the floor. As before, the light revealed an empty silk interior.
“Guess she couldn’t figure it out,” Glamour said.
From down the hall, she could hear the raised voice of Gary as he finished up his conversation with the manager.
Glamour thought quickly. Her sister had gone somewhere, so she could realistically excuse herself to go look for her. And she was holding Gary’s hat, with a few spares hanging on the wall. All she had to do was hide the hat somewhere on her person, replace it with a spare, ask to go look for her sister, and then make a break for it. With his hat in their possession, they could take all the time in the world to work out its secrets.
She tapped its bottom, causing it to collapse with a thump. The next bit took a few tries, but finally she found the piece of brim that started the hat rolling up. After a moment she was holding a six inch wand that, once they reverse engineered it, could make her and her sister rich. All she had to do was hide it.
Unfortunately, a skimpy vegas magician’s assistant outfit wasn’t an ideal place to hide something. Trying to tuck it into the inside pocket of her jacket made it obvious, and that was the only pocket she had. Then it struck her. She was fully trained as a magician’s assistant, which meant she’d learned quite a few of the old sideshow tricks. Fire eating. Sword swallowing…
As the footsteps began to approach, she looked up, relaxed her throat, and put the rolled up hat to her lips. A quick, smooth push sent it sliding easily down her well-trained throat. She swallowed, driving the six inch tube into her stomach, and the deed was done. Not a moment too soon, she grabbed a spare, plopped it on the table, and no one would be the wiser.
Gary opened the door. “Okay girls, I… Where’s Glamour?”
“I’m Glamour,” she asked.
“Oh, right, sorry. Where’s Glitz then?”
“She must have stepped outside. How about I just go find her…”
“Just a sec. Inventory check first. I don’t mean to be distrusting, but you’d never believe the attempts at espionage in the Vegas magic circuit.”
He glanced around the room, scanning the walls, then rummaged through the chest for a moment.
“We’re down a hat,” he said quickly.
“Oh! Uh… Actually, that… Uh…” she stuttered. “I… didn’t want to tell you this, but Glitz accidentally collapsed it and rolled it up, then it slipped out of her hands and rolled under something. She went to go find a flash light to go look for it. I’ll go help her find one, so…”
“Hah!” Gary said, nodding his head. “Yep, I’ve had that thing snap shut and roll away a dozen times. Not to worry. It’s easy to find it. All I need to do is say the magic words to empty it out. We’ll hear it rattle or see it shoot across the floor. Easy as pie.”
“Rattle?” she said. “A hat rattles?”
“Well, I always keep a few gags in there. A bowling ball, some bowling pins. A pocket watch. Stuff like that. Trust me, it’ll make a racket.”
“Uh, I don’t think—“ she began, startled by the thought of what might happen if a bowling ball suddenly made an appearance in her belly.
But it was too late. Gary said three seemingly gibberish words. The result was immediate. She felt motion within her stomach, the rigid form of the want suddenly uncoiling. With a muffled pop, a cylindrical bulge jutted out from her abdomen, popping the buttons on her shirt. From the way the flesh of her belly bowed in at the mouth of the cylinder, the opening of the hat must have been facing forward. After a moment of uncomfortable fullness, the opening of the hat bulged outward and her belly stretched around a hard sphere, which was soon joined by some longer lumps that clacked against it.
Glamour clutched her lumpy, bulging stomach and stumbled back. It should have been agonizing, she realized, but all it felt like was that she’d eaten a huge meal. Her cheeks were cherry red with embarrassment and the hot burn of discovery.
“Glamour…” Gary said, clucking his tongue as though he was a father who had caught his daughter stealing a cookie. “Did you eat my hat?”
“… No?” she said. “Oh God!”
She stumbled back again as a new, very pointy pair of bulges contorted her stomach. Her belly began to sag down, wrapped tight around what quickly became apparent as a pair of long, struggling legs. Inch by inch Glitz’s body was extruded from the hat, feeding into the moist, slick interior of her sister’s gut. When the spell had run its course, the whole of Glitz’s body was curled up in Glamour’s belly. The flesh was wrapped tight around her, perfectly outlining her every detail as she struggled to at least shift the bowling pins and bowling balls out of the small of her back, where they’d become lodged.
“Ugh… So full…” Glamour muttered.
Gary shook his head in disappointment. “And the other magicians said those mystical safeguards were a waste of time.”
“How… How is this possible…” Glamour said, running her hands over the tightly wrapped form of her sister.
“Magic,” he said simply. “The best magicians do it for real.”
“Did… did I eat my sister?” she asked.
“It would appear so.”
“Is she going to die?”
“Mystic safeguards. She’ll be fine.” He said. “Though from the sound of that muttering, she’s none too happy.”
“… Am I going to die?”
“Again, you’ll be fine. The same might not be true of your employment aspects. Normally I’d fire you two on the spot, but frankly, even if you are industrial spies, you’re the only assistants I’ve been able to find.”
“What are we going to do?” Glamour asked, not yet having come to terms with the supposed safety, or for that matter the reality of having somehow swallowed her sister by mistake.
“I’ll figure out how to get her out of there. But I can’t very well head off to the airport with you looking like that.” He took the duplicate hat. “Hold still.”
She didn’t have time to object. With a deft motion, he plopped the second hat on her head and gave the top a slap. It slid down over her head easily. He then gripped the brim and began to shove it down. Her shoulders and breasts slipped inside easily enough, but the lumpy, sister-shaped dome of her belly took a bit more work. She tried to back away, but he held her in place and worked at the brim, inching it down over her belly until it finally made it over the curve of her swallowed-sister’s butt and slipped easily to the ground. He then picked up the hat containing both of his assistants, popped it on his head, and commenced packing the rest of this things.
“Hey,” he called to his manager. “Two things. First, cancel the second and third meals on the private jet. And second, figure out who gave Glamour and Glitz such good references, because they’re going to hear from my lawyer.”