As Jon kissed Mikey, the inescapable thought occurred to him, that he wouldn’t get to activate the magic circle after all. Unless they found replacement changed individuals who could activate the “time” and “mass” segments. Oh well. It was much more important to undo the damage he had done to people he cared about.
Jon stood back, and Mikey opened his eyes. He looked at his hands. He spoke a few words, in his voice, the way it was supposed to sound. He bounced on his bare human feet a few times. And then burst into tears.
“Oh no, I thought you would be happy,” Jon said.
“I am happy! This, nightmare, it’s over! I didn’t, want to, to be a st, stupid bird girl!” Mikey said in fits and gasps, crying some more.
“This is big Jon. Aside from a few like me who got changes they ultimately decided they wouldn’t want to undo, this could be the end of the mist! At least for as long as you live,” Karyn said.
“Mikey, let’s go down to the basement again, I think it probably won’t work, but in the slim chance it does, I want to know if you can still activate that segment of the magic figure.”
Mikey happily bounced down the stairs, leading the other two, and spent the next few minutes trying to activate that, and the other, segments of the magic figure, to no avail. He stood in different positions and posed in different ways. Nothing activated any part of the magic circle.
“I want to try something,” Jon said. “Life,” he whispered, as he looked at that segment of the figure. It hadn’t activated for him before, but that was while he was working on it before the whole magic figure was complete. Jon maybe had not been to that area since before the moment the magic circle in its entirety had been completed, so if he really did have the ability to activate the life part of it, it could have escaped his discovery. “The ability to change life. There’s a good chance…”
Jon stepped over to that part of the figure, and as he reached the boundary of its circumference, his 1/5 of the figure lit up.
“Life,” Jon said. “I guess I’m life.”
“What? No! No no no NO NO NO nooooo…” Mikey cried, as her arms and hands had rapidly become wings once again, as feathers draped her body, as her feet changed back into talons, and the rest.
“Hold on Mikey,” Jon yelled out, and rushed over to kiss her once again. And it worked, once again. Mikey was his human male self again. But for how long?
“What’s the point,” Mikey wailed in despair, “it’s only going to last a few minutes. What are you going to do, follow me around all day, kissing me every 5 minutes?”
Jon didn’t know what to say. There was no denying what his brother had said. This was no solution. “What a horrible power this is. The power to give people false hope, and then to just yank it away, leaving nothing but despair and sadness, emotional torture and emotional scars.” And then Jon thought back to Biff. “Oh, Biff must be out there, suffering too, everything he thought he had gotten back, pulled away from him once again. And probably humiliated in front of Sarah on top of that. And he doesn’t even have anyone, he’s just out there all alone. I can’t even imagine how rough it is for him right now. Maybe his worst day ever.”
“This isn’t so hard for me to get into after all, maybe,” Sarah said, her smaller body on top of Biff’s, snuggling against it, her own body half-transformed to the wolf state to give herself about the same level of humanity as Biff, as she held up one of her relatively small wolf forepaws against one of Biff’s huge lion paws for comparison, and Biff relaxed belly up on her living room couch, 6 out of 7 of her own limbs wrapped around Sarah, as Sarah toyed with the last one. “Even without a sexual element to it, you’re still a big cute cuddly kitty, and you’re so cute, what was I thinking, I should have just done this earlier.” She then went back to licking Biff’s face, and then they kissed again, neither of them able to get enough of the feeling of their modified tongues lapping against each other in their mouths.
Biff was fine with not being so biologically sexually driven by girls any more, when wolf-Sarah’s cuddliness transcended gender. She vibrated Sarah’s whole body and even rattled the feet of the couch against the floor with the intensity of her purring. “What an idiot that James was,” Biff thought, “losing interest in her because she’s like this? Maybe we can get Jon to kiss me and change me just long enough for me to put a litter in Sarah, and then he can put a litter in me, and we’ll have them together. That might be fun. Not the outcome I had in mind. But it’s still pretty good. Maybe my best day ever.”
“Well, I guess we’re back to the plan of seeing what comes of the magic circle then. So between me, you and Biff, we’ve got time, mass and life. That leaves charge and space. I don’t suppose you know any changed individuals with powers like that?”
Space powers? Thinking of Alice, Mikey said, “well actually, now that you mention it…”
