Philip was nearly ready to close up when a young woman, maybe twenty years old came into the shop.

She looked around for half a minute, obviously nervous, then turned to him. “A friend of mine told me you could help me with something… unusual.”

He let out a long, tired sigh. “You mean the doll thing?”

Her eyes lit up. He knew that look. “Y–Yes!”

“Follow me.”

When they were upstairs, he picked a jar of capsules off the shelf and held it up. He mostly wanted to run a respectable magic shop, but the little capsules, each filled with a special alchemical powder, went a long way towards paying the bills. “If you swallow one of these you’ll get what you want.”

She held up her hand as though to take the jar, but he didn’t give it to her. “How… How does it work?”

“Magic.” It was sort of bad taste for a sorcerer to give an answer like that, but he had to consider the audience.

“Really? I didn’t think wizards were into that sort of thing.”

Philip rolled his eyes. “You have no idea what some wizards are into. People who don’t have to worry too much about the laws of physics have… different options.”

“Still, there must be quite a story behind all this.”

Philip rolled his eyes, and sat down. “Are you sure you want to buy some of these?”

“How much?”

“Sixty dollars.”

“For the jar?”

“Each. Making them isn’t cheap.”

She was probably thinking about how much money was in her bank account, and possibly how much she could afford to put on her credit card. “Okay. I’ll get at least one.”

He sat down at his desk. “I’m not sure when exactly, but a long time ago there was a wizard called Valmar—typical stupid-sounding wizard name. For some reason he wanted to find a way to turn a woman into an ‘ideal’ concubine. He tried several different things before hitting on the idea of turning them into living inflatable love dolls.”

“Wait, wait, wait. How could he have come up with that if it was, like, centuries ago?”

“I was about to get to that. We think he either traveled back in time or looked into the future. Hopefully the latter. The point is, after some experimentation he pulled it off, and—in his opinion—perfected it. The original version of the spell had to be done as a big ritual, and it made dolls that can’t wear any clothes without deflating, so they couldn’t run away. He made at least a dozen of them, some for himself, and some for wealthy clients. Not everyone was big on how they look, especially since the whole skinny equals beautiful idea is relatively new, though at least they look a hell of a lot better than the inflatable dolls they sell today. But a lot of them were willing to overlook that because the enchantment also gives them instinctual pillow skills.”

“Is that a technical term?”

“Um, yes. Anyway, can I continue?”

“Sure.”

“Oh, the other thing is that the dolls basically become shells with a human soul held in place by magical energy. And Valmar purposely made it so that that energy can only be replenished by having sex.”

“Kinky.”

“Something like that. Basically these dolls can live indefinitely as long as they have sex at least once a week.”

“Wow. I wasn’t planning on living forever.”

“And I have no intention of giving you the permanent version.” She seemed sort of torn to hear that. The materials cost more, the ritual took ages, and he’d get in trouble with the local Mage Council if anyone found out.

“These capsules last for about 8 hours each. They’re the safe, recreational version. Anyway, these days most magic users are trained at the Mage Academy, but that’s a fairly recent thing. Before that it was all masters and apprentices. Valmar’s successors tended to be pretty unpleasant guys, but at one point a fairly decent guy named Victor—who was my mentor—came into the picture.

“He had no idea the kinds of things his master, Alexander, was doing. He only found out about the whole love doll thing when he was told to bring a woman and he made the mistake of brining his girlfriend along.”

“What happened to her?”

“She’s still a doll, though he took care of her ever since.”

“That’s sweet.”

Philip shrugged. “Like I said, he’s a decent guy. Anyway, especially when the master is into dark stuff, you don’t normally leave an apprenticeship alive. So when things came to a head, Victor killed Alexander.”

“What did he use?”

“Man you’re morbid. He shot him. Alexander was enough of an old-fashioned wizard to assume that nothing made by ‘mundanes’ could possibly harm him. From there Victor decided to run a sex shop, as a source of income and as a cover to find the other dolls and take care of them. He tried to find guys to take care of them, but a lot of times it ended badly. Also, having twenty-some women on hand who literally need to have sex once a week to not die was not as pleasant as some people might think.”

“How did he keep up?”

“He made some friends who could help, and he learned to make… basically magical Viagra. He couldn’t find a cure, but he was determined not to use the spell ever again. There was this one woman—Karen—who talked him into it because she was about to die of cancer.”

“Ouch.”

“On the plus side he was able to modify the spell so that she could wear clothes and such.”

“So he’s the one who made the ‘recreational’ version of the spell?”

“There’s a bit more to it than that. Victor’s training as a wizard was incomplete, and Valmar purposely made the spell hard to decode and alter—he was absolutely terrified that someone might find a way to use it on him. But Alexander taught someone else before Victor, a guy named Ron who he never formally took on as an apprentice.

“Ron was pretty fucked up, frankly. He got off on watching the transformation, especially when he was doing it on women who had no idea what was going on, and he tended to discard them after. That was how Victor found out about him—someone brought him a doll that they’d found deflated in an alleyway—and it turned out that Ron was planning to take revenge for Alexander’s death.

“But it also turned out that Ron had managed to make all kinds of crazy variants of the enchantment, some of which were temporary or reversible. He made a collar that would induce the transformation, but could be removed by a man. He also made a kind of incense, and there’s this story—don’t know if it’s true or not—that some crazy rich guy tried to use it on a hundred or so maids at once, but since its duration depends on how many you use it on at once, it lasted for less than an hour. You’re blushing.”

“Sorry. I… um…”

“Believe me, I’ve seen just about everything working here.” He really wanted it to be a respectable magic shop. “You would be very hard-pressed to shock me.”

“Heh. Okay, so what happened with Victor and Ron?”

“Well, the difference between them in terms of their magical skills was that Ron had this natural talent that let him fiddle with the enchantment, while Victor had somewhat more training in general magic. So when Ron came gunning for him, Victor set a trap. A really ironic trap.”

“Turned him into a doll? But I thought it’d only work on women?”

“Actually all he did was set up a spell that turned Ron into a woman. Ron had flooded the place with that incense of his, figuring that it would eliminate any female friends that Victor might have to help him.”

“Man, that is ironic.”

“Yeah… So, when the Mage Council intervened they convicted Ron of various sex crimes, and let Victor off the hook provided he finished his formal training. It was all pretty awkward for Victor, since the whole thing wound up becoming public, among magic users.”

“Won’t you get in trouble for telling me this then?”

“Do you really thing anyone would believe you? Anyhow, the other thing is that the council went against his wishes and have been occasionally using the love doll spell as a punishment for sex offenders.”

“Not much for poetic justice?”

“He knew from personal experience that having that kind of power over a woman can make good guys to all kinds of messed up things… You’re blushing again.”

“Sorry.”

“Yeah. Anyway. When they recovered Ron’s notebooks they were able to devise a way to reverse the transformation, though it took a while to make that new spell not be horribly inefficient and expensive. And there are just enough weird people like you around to make it profitable to make temporary forms of the transformation spell available. Victor isn’t thrilled about the whole thing, and I should mention to you that while we’ve mostly fixed it, the temporary version does ‘stick’ sometimes, especially if you use it a lot. But it can be fixed like usual.

“And that’s basically the end of the story. Now, do you still want it, and if so how many?”

“Um… I think just one for right now.”

Philip took the jar’s lid off, and pulled out a single capsule, handling it gingerly, and put it into her palm.

“They don’t affect men, do they?”

“If by ‘affect’ you mean ‘turn into an enchanted inflatable sex toy’ then no. But they supposedly cause a really terrible migraine.”

“Is there a male version?”

“I read that someone’s working on it.”

“Are there lots of wizards who are into fetish stuff?”

“There’s not that many, but I’m pretty sure there are more than among the general population. You wouldn’t believe how many people there are who are into… ‘modified slimes’ is what the like to call it.”

“Wow.”

Then she did something that caught him off guard. She swallowed the capsule.
Philip let rubbed his head and led out a long sigh. “I really, really hate it when people do that.”

“Huh?”

“It takes effect immediately. Please tell me you have a boyfriend who’s close by.”

“He’s kind of… in Italy right now. What’s wrong?”

“The transformation eats up most of the magical energy in your body.”

“So?”

“So, you’ll need to have sex right away to replenish it.”

“That kind of sucks.”

Something made a soft sound as it hit the floor. It was one of the pockets from her jeans.

“What the hell?”

“It also disintegrates your clothes.”

“That’s kind of cool…”

“Maybe you’d like to take them off before it’s too late?”

Her T-shirt was already full of holes, and the stitching of her jeans kept coming undone. Philip sighed and started to unbutton his shirt.

“Sorry about this,” she murmured, not sounding particularly sorry. Her jeans, at last completely devoid of stitches, fell to the floor in four main chunks, followed by what was left of her shirt. Underneath her bra and panties had holes in them.
Philip closed and locked the door just in case. “It never ceases to amaze me just how easily fetishes can override common sense.”

She flashed an impudent grin. “You don’t seem too unhappy to see me.” She paused to feel her chest. “Hey, they’re getting bigger.”

“Your waist is probably getting a little smaller too. The spell adjusts your figure a bit.”

Her expanding breasts shoved through and destroyed her bra. “They’re going to go back to normal after this is over, huh?”

“Yes.”

He’d seen this a few times before, so he knew that she was up to what he thought of as the “line drawing” part of the transformation, where she would acquire doll seams. First circles around her breasts, then at her shoulders, down her sides, circling around the hip joints (clipping off the last remnants of her panties as it they did so), and down the front and up the backs of her legs. Each time an area was sectioned off it gradually took on a plastic sheen, and every step of the way she made sounds of delight.

When her belly button turned into an air plug like one would see on a pool toy or punching dummy, she finally lost it and announced, “Oh my god this is so fucking awesome!”

Philip rolled his eyes. “Glad you like it. That means it’s all done.”

Then she did something he’d never seen anyone do before; she pulled open her own plug. He watched as she flopped to the ground and deflated. He’d heard of inflation fetishes—and somewhere in the shop was a bottle of orange capsules for those people—but the idea of a deflation fetish was something new to him.
He knew she couldn’t hear him—she’d be unconscious, held in stasis, until she was re-inflated—but he rubbed his temples and said, “You are goddamn insane.” He cast a simple cantrip to inflate her again, and stopped just before pushing the plug all the way in. “Or maybe you just have really poor impulse control.”

When he pushed it all the way in, she sat up, and looked appropriately confused. “What happened?”

He poked at her plug. She inhaled a little more sharply than was necessary. “When this gets pulled out, a doll loses consciousness completely. You are really lucky I know a spell for inflating things.”

“I bet there were guys who would put them in suitcases.”

“In one case there was one kept in a locked wooden chest as a family heirloom. She still isn’t right in the head.”

When they were both standing again, she swayed a little. “I feel kind of dizzy.” She leaned against him, resting her head on his chest. “I lied. I don’t have a boyfriend. Not anymore.”

He looked down at her for a moment, and then picked her up, holding her sideways like a surfboard or a guitar case.

“Hey! What do you think you’re doing?”

“You don’t seem so dizzy now.”

“Shut up!”

He put her down on the bed and climbed in next to her. “Next time just ask me directly, okay?”