It had been a few days since Roxanne disappeared, and her roommate was worried. Samantha had expected her to come back by the morning. She knew that Roxy had had another fight with her parents, which was far from an uncommon occurrence, and usually she went out to cool off afterwards with her boyfriend. In the time she’d known her, this had occurred about six or seven times, and while she didn’t know Victor, Roxy usually came back feeling better. This time, though, she hadn’t come back at all. 

    At first Sam had figured she might have had a hangover or something and was just staying with Victor to sleep it off. But the next day a professor asked her if she could hand Roxy the assignment they’d passed out, since she’d missed the class. Asking around, none of Roxanne’s other friends had seen her since that day either. 

    Samantha knew Roxy had made it to Victor’s house safely; she’d called to check on her and been told as much. But after that, nothing - no response to call or text, nobody else got anything from her. Sam hadn’t and wouldn’t ask Roxy’s parents, since they’d take it as an excuse to pull her from college altogether, which they’d been trying to find a way to do. 

     So the two possibilities were that something had happened on her way home, which probably would have hit the news by now if she’d ended up in a hospital after a mugging or something, or that something had happened at Victor’s home. 

    And that was why Samantha was standing in the apartment lobby and looking for the name. The complex wasn’t far from the dorms - heck, it was basically an unofficial dorm for people who could say they had enough of an income to pay for a place where they had their own bathroom - so it hadn’t been too hard to find the right place, so she was just looking down the directory… 

    “Victor… Victor…” she muttered to herself, wishing she knew a surname if she had to ask… Thankfully, there was only one Victor in the building. “Apartment 5J, got it.” she said to herself, and then hit the buzzer and waited for a response. 

    The intercom crackled to life, and a tired masculine voice came from the other end. “Victor Sydney, yup…” said the voice in a drowsy slur, “Who’s it? I haven’t had my coffee yet…” 

    “It’s Sam. Roxy’s roommate? Gotta talk to you about her.” 

    “What about her? She isn’t here…” The voice yawned over the intercom. 

    “Well, that’s kinda the problem. Nobody’s seen her in days.” Which he should have known, considering he was her boyfriend. Sam felt a twinge of uncertainty… maybe this wasn’t the best plan… 

    The voice was quiet for a bit. “...Come right up.” It said, now a lot clearer. 

    Ascending the dingy elevator to the fifth floor and going to the door at the end of the hall, she found it already open and a tall man with crew-cut brown hair and pale skin that hadn’t seen enough sun leaning on the frame. “Sam?” he said.

    “Yep. Victor?” 

    “Yep.” Victor stood aside, and Sam felt a bit of dread as she entered the dimly lit apartment. The blinds were down, morning sunlight slanting in and providing the only lighting as the door closed behind her. There was an odd smokey smell in the air, although there wasn’t any visible smoke; Sam initially assumed pot, but it wasn’t that sort of smell. “So, Sam. Why ask me instead of the police?” Victor said, plonking himself down on a tired old couch such that the springs creaked when he landed. 

    “Because you’re the last one to see her. I called her the other night and she said she got here safe, and as far as I can tell the last time anyone heard from her. Except you.” Sam settled into a chair, a bit uneasily. 

    “Is that so?” Victor said, leaning forward. “Well, that’s obviously pretty worrying. She got out of here safe enough. Led her down to the lobby and everything, watched her till she was around the block.”

    Sam frowned, considering that. There was something off in his voice. And then… well, he wasn’t a very good liar, and also she’d just noticed a pink strap peeking out from behind the couch. She leaned a bit to get a better look... 

    Victor looked at her, and then down to where she was looking. “...Oh.” 

    “...Did she forget her bag?” Sam asked, knowing she hadn’t. Logically she should run, maybe call police, since this wasn’t a very good sign. Instead, she got angry. “If you touched her…” 

    Victor winced. “...Well, heck. Guess we’re doing this then.” he said, standing. “Sorry about this. Won’t hurt.”

    At first, Sam thought he was about to pull a syringe or some similarly deranged weapon on her. But instead he just pointed at her. “What are you doing? Is a finger supposed to hurt?” In lieu of a response, he acted. A bolt of light shot out of his outstretched index finger and she felt really weird all of a sudden. “W-What?”

    Victor shrugged. “You kinda forced my hand… Roxy will explain everything, I promise.” 

    Explain? What would she explain? Sam noticed then that Victor looked a lot taller all of a sudden, which was an impressive feat when he was already a good few inches taller than her. And then he kept growing, and growing, until he must have been two feet over her… which, was about the point Sam realized he wasn’t growing, she was shrinking. She looked down to see that indeed, she was much closer to the floor than she had been. “What are… this doesn’t…” she said, as she noticed a glint of light off her hand. She brought it up in front of her face, to see that it wasn’t made of flesh anymore but something shiny and hard.

    “Magic always looks weird when you see it the first time.” Victor said simply. Magic? What…? That was impossible, and yet the change continued nonetheless. Her clothes were shrinking with her, as her proportions seemed to stop being those of a realistic human, and she felt something on her head - feeling at her hair revealed that, well, it wasn’t hair anymore - it was some realistic looking nylon, and when she tugged she wasn’t all sure that it was attached to her head anymore. 

    “Magic… magic isn’t real though…” Sam stammered out. It wasn’t, it couldn’t be-

    “Says the girl turning into a doll.” Victor said simply. 

    It was more than she could take. She heard Victor shout in surprise as she tumbled, and she faded into blissful nothing as she passed out on the floor

    Sam woke up groggy. That had been a strange dream, to be certain - imagining that Roxy’s boyfriend was some evil warlock who was turning her into a doll because she was onto him. She groaned and forced her eyes open, bringing her arm around to see the time on her watch.

    The watch was stopped. She blinked the sleep from her eyes a bit and took another look. It wasn’t stopped, it wasn’t a real watch at all - it was stopped at 12:00, with the second counter not going up and a plastic feel to it. Then she looked at the arm it was attached to, and how the light bounced off it’s shiny porcelain surface. And then she looked up and saw that the ceiling was a weird sloped wooden one rather than the straight wood of the dorm or even the ratty plaster of Victor’s apartment. 

    “...Huh?” Was the only thing she could say. 

    “Oh! Sam!” said a light feminine voice from the side. Samantha turned her head and saw sitting on a chair next to her bed a porcelain doll with bright green eyes, long ginger hair flowing down from head to hips, and a cute old-timey girl’s dress shirt and long skirt. It made for a pretty doll, and reminded Sam of some that she’d had when she was a kid and had given away to her little siblings when she left for college. And then it talked. “I’m glad to see you’re awake! Victor was worried he’d laid it on a bit thick,” the doll said, it’s mouth moving just a bit awkwardly as the porcelain lips made movements they weren’t built to make. 

    If Sam had been standing she might have leapt about six feet in the air. As it was, she instead shouted and pulled away. “Gah! W-What, what kind of doll talks!?” she shouted.

    “Well, there’s me, and then there’s you, Sam.” The doll said dryly. It held up a mirror, giving Sam a good look at herself. Long black hair tied back in a ponytail, red jacket over a black shirt, jeans… and porcelain, definitely porcelain. She was a doll of herself, although her face looked a lot like the other one’s - albeit with a bit different coloring. “So we have two examples of talking dolls. Not exactly a large sample size, but certainly enough to prove that we exist, yeah?” 

    Sam took a deep breath and nodded. “...Right. And you are…?” she asked. Right. Just talking to a doll, like it’s no big thing. 

    The doll raised it’s eyebrow. Which also felt strange to see. “...Right, appearance. Uh… Sophomore year, the next door sorority’s fall equinox party, we got dead drunk and spent six hours jumping between piles of leaves and had to sneak back into the dorms because we lost half our clothes doing it. Never told a soul.” 

    Sam blinked. That had been her and - “Roxy?” 

    “In the flesh. Glass? Whatever this counts as.” Roxanne said with a grin that didn’t seem all that freaky now that she knew it was on her friend. 

    “Why do you look… What's going on?” Sam asked, sitting up properly.

    “It’s a bit of a story. So, you know how I fought with my parents again the other night?”

    Sam nodded. “Yeah…?”

    “Well… I had enough. I knew about Victor’s… uniqueness, and went to him…” 

    “You want me to what?” Victor asked with an astonished look. 

    “You heard me.” Roxanne said, “You can do that, can’t you?” 

    “I… I can, but isn’t this a bit drastic, Roxy?” 

    Roxanne, red in the face and with tears still in her eyes from earlier, shook her head. “Maybe, but I’m done. I can’t take them anymore, I can’t take any of it. I have to go, one way or another.”

    “But what you’re asking…”

    “I’m doing it one way or another.” Roxy said. “Either you help me get away from them, or I try myself, and I’d really rather have someone I trust with me when I do this.” 

    Was it rash? Stupid? Probably both,  but Roxy was beyond caring. She’d tried so hard, so hard to get them to see reason, to get them to let her be her own person, but her parents couldn’t stand the thought of her not needing them for everything anymore. They had told her that they were bringing her home now, whether she wanted it or not. “It’s just for a while, Vic… until they stop looking. I know you won’t do anything to them and I wouldn’t ask you to, but I’m asking you to do something for me. Nobody knows you; they won’t even think to check this building, let alone you.” 

    Victor was quiet for a bit. Roxanne was worried he’d deny her - she’d said she would go through with it with or without him, and she would. But running off on her own was a frightening prospect. Finally, he sighed and nodded. “Right. Anything you need before we do this?” 

    “Got everything in my bag.” Roxy said. 

    The process started quick. Roxy was a fairly tall woman, of even height with her boyfriend, but she was quickly a head shorter. “I’ve always wanted to let my hair out a bit,” she said conversationally. “Maybe we can go from this short and dark to long, maybe red?” she said. 

    Victor nodded, and that change started - Roxanne’s black hair, kept short and orderly, began to redden and expand, falling down to her thighs as it turned long and ginger. “You’ve never liked how easily you tan right? So let’s go for pale skin, I guess?” Victor suggested, and as he did her skin, tanned from spending as much time as possible outside, paled quickly. 

    “Hmm… I think now would be an opportunity to live without the back pain, don’t you think? You mind?” Roxy said with a smirk.

    Victor kept his expression quite professional, impressively. “I was never as crazy about the top end as other dudes anyway.”  He said, and Roxanne’s chest shrunk a bit faster than the rest of her, to a larger-end B-cup relative to her body rather than the D-cup it had been. More of her figure shifted to accommodate this, so she didn’t lose her balance. 

    “And I guess while I’m a doll anyway, some classical clothes…” 

    “I’ll shrink some later, I don’t think I can change them that much while you’re wearing it.” Victor said firmly, as his girlfriend rapidly shrunk. 

    By the time she was done, Roxy was just a foot high, looking up at the giant who’d transformed her with a smirk on her porcelain face. “I knew you’d cave.” she said.

    “Ha, ha. Give me a minute and I’ll magic up somewhere for you to stay besides the couch. Would probably be a pain to use the furniture at that size.”

    “That’s… a heck of a plan.” Sam said as Roxy finished her story. “...Well I’m not sure what the plan was besides turning you into a doll, honestly.” 

    Roxy tapped her forehead. “Plan’s all up here, but I’ve gotta keep it quiet until it’s all over, yeah?” 

    Sam frowned. “...Yeah. And why turn me into a doll? Am I part of the plan now?”

    Roxy shrugged. “Honestly? Victor plays it cool but he was totally panicking when you saw my bag and just did the first thing that came to mind.” 

    “I feel like turning people into objects is a weird thing to have as your ‘it’s all hit the fan’ response.” Sam noted dryly. 

    “Maybe it’s normal for wizards. Probably better than being turned into a toad or a newt.” 

    “Can he do that?” 

    “Heck if I know.” Roxy leaned back in her chair, which Sam noticed was probably a shrunken version of a real one. “So, Vic’s said you have two options. One, you stay a foot tall until we leave and nobody ever believes you. Two, he fixes you if you promise not to tell a soul.”

    Sam stood up, pacing the small room a bit. She… honestly wasn’t sure she trusted any of this. Roxy had proven to be herself, yeah, but how did Sam know she wasn’t under some mind control thing? The dude was magic and this was a nutty plan for just getting out under your parents’ thumb. But well… if she said no, who knew what would happen.

    “...Yeah, I won’t tell anyone. You promise to call me as soon as you can?”

    Roxy nodded. “Soon as we’re sure they’ve stopped looking for me. It’d be dangerous otherwise.” 

    Sam let out a breath. “Fine then. Can I go back to being human?”

    The wall of the small room shook a bit as it was pulled out. A booming voice from above, Victor’s voice, responded. “Step on out, then.” 

    Roxanne stood and walked over to Sam, giving her a hug. “I’ll miss you! I promise to call as soon as it’s safe.” she said. 

    Sam hugged her right back, and stepped out of the small box that was serving as Roxy’s house for the moment. Victor loomed overhead. “We’ve got an agreement?”

    Sam took a deep breath. “Yeah. We do.” At least until she was sure she was safe. 

    The spell took hold quickly, and she was growing again - and then she passed out again, because it was just as hard to process as the first time. 

    This time, she woke up on the couch. The lighting in the room was dim; between her two fainting spells, it had gone from noon to dusk. Victor was waiting, and handed her her bag once it became clear she was up. “We’ve got a deal. Remember that.” 

    Sam took her bag and stood, eager to leave. “Right. Right. I know, I’ll remember.” she said…

    “And if you don’t, I have insurance.” 

    Sam froze, her back to Victor. 

    “You tell anyone, you’re a doll again, and this time I won’t be around to fix it. Same goes for whoever you tell. I really do mean the best. But I can’t have you ratting us out.”

    Sam didn’t know if he was bluffing or not. But… well, he didn’t need her to know that. If there was the risk of it, she was out of options.

    “...Take care of her, ok? Promise that?” Sam asked.

    “Of course I will.” Victor said, as Sam left the room. She heard the door close behind her with a finality to it. She wasn’t sure whether or not she’d see either of them again. 

    But well, what was there to do about it?