An item from Transformation Fetish Fiction which should not exist, yet does.

A conversation in a booth.

“So, you’ve managed to get both the Freak and Dirk Allen mad at you, and need to disappear?” It was more of a statement of fact than a question, and the young, teenaged boy seemed to enjoy saying it.

The other occupant of the booth looked decidedly unhappy.

“Yeah, and you’d better not be wasting my time!” he stated angrily. “Look, you came highly recommended, but I was led to believe that you were someone older…”

The kid held up one hand, dangling from a tarnished, gold colored chain was a cheap looking medallion of some sort wrapped in a pair of plastic sandwich bags, one inside the other.

“Do you know what this is?” asked the kid, nonchalantly.

“It looks like some junk jewelry from China,” the man replied, barely giving the item in question a glance.

“Did you read those links I sent you?” the youth asked, green eyes studying the older man from beneath a tangled mop of thick, red curly hair.

The man looked disgusted and shook his head, barely moving his perfectly combed hair.

“No, and I don’t think a fourteen year old kid like you should be reading them either!”

“Fourteen?” the kid momentarily looked worried. “I’d hoped to be able to pass myself off as sixteen!”

He recovered quickly, however, and closed his hand around the metal, hiding it from view.

“You judge things by their appearance, and are repulsed by some fetish web-sites, yet you insist on messing around in the Occult Underground,” observed the youth, laying the medallion on a napkin on the table in front of him, then sliding it carefully to one side as their waitress stopped at the booth and set a full order of barbequed ribs in front of him.

The boy’s face went red as he, as well as the waitress, caught himself looking down the front of the waitress’ uniform. Luckily for him, the waitress merely smiled and offered to get him refills on his ice tea and water. The kid stammered a polite “Thanks!”

Meanwhile, the man merely looked impatient, sitting in stony silence as the young woman place a hamburger platter in front of him and refilled his coffee.

“Whew!” exclaimed the young man, watching their waitress walking away. “DEFINITELY hetro now!”

The older man cleared his throat.

“Yeah, where was I?” the kid replied, refocusing his thoughts. “Well, those were all Transformation Fetish story sites, and if you’d read them then you might know what this is.”

He gestured at the metal disc sitting on the table near him.

“Now, it shouldn’t exist, only it does—I’ll get to that in a little bit—“

“Oh, get on with it!” demanded the man, scowling.

He might have said more, only their waitress chose that moment to return with the boy’s refills. The youth once again politely thanked her, and, once again, appeared distracted by her body, watching her walk away.

He looked back at the older gentleman to find him glaring, not having touched his meal. The boy quietly cut a rib free from the rack and started eating it, all the while watching the man carefully.

“I assume you were going somewhere with what you were telling me…?” the man finally spoke, raising an eyebrow over his icy, washed out blue eyes.

The kid slowly sucked the last of the meat off of the bone, placing it carefully in a basket.

“Yeah. Maybe,” he eventually answered, noncommittally, licking his fingers. He paused and cut free another rib. “Did you bring the stuff I asked for?”

Sighing, almost wearily, the man answered.

“Yes, and it almost wiped me out, you know.”

“Well, if you’re goin’ to disappear, you can’t exactly use it, you know?” the kid replied, non-sympathetically. “Let me see the book.”

The man grimaced, and opened a briefcase beside him on the bench. He extracted a somewhat worn, leather bound journal. The boy watched intently, wiping his fingers carefully on a paper napkin.

“Just out of curiosity,” the man commented, handing the book across the table. “You do know that you have to somehow get it to Mars to completely activate it, at least in theory.”

“Yeah, I know,” the kid said distractedly, focusing on flipping through the pages, studying the item intently. He pulled out a pen and wrote something on a page, after the last entry in the book, and watched for a moment. Then, looking satisfied, he closed the journal and placed it in a beat up backpack sitting next to him.

“You mean to tell me you have some way of getting that thing to Mars?” asked the man incredulously.

“Never mind that,” the younger man answered, sounding short. “Maybe I do, maybe I just want to add some stuff to it, maybe I know someone else who wants it. That’s not part of this deal. Maybe I would have been willing to tell you if you hadn’t tried to lecture me. Do you have the cash?”

“Yes,” the other man sighed. “$275,000, which I had to mostly make large bills in order to fit into this briefcase along with the book.”

“Well, keep $25,000 of it for yourself, since that’s the going rate with my contact at the DMV for a ‘no questions asked’ driver’s license,” the kid informed him, glancing at the briefcase. “I was going to let you keep 50k, but I’m beginning to see why Dirk’s so annoyed with you, and I want to get myself a really cool car now that I’m young.”

“You know Dirk Allen?” the man said, looking worried.

“Yeah, we really don’t get along though, so don’t worry,” the youth said offhandedly. “We keep it strictly professional, and don’t try to talk books and writing any more. I called him a second rate William S. Burroughs and a third rate Hunter S. Thompson one time and, well, that’s kind of a long story. I think he only calmed down when he found out I rate my own writing attempts even worse than that.”

The kid chuckled at the memory, and then looked serious again.

“Look, I agreed to help you and you came through with the stuff I asked for, so, even though I am not one of those Merchant avatar types, I’ll come through on my end.

“This junk jewelry is actually pretty powerful,” he continued, explaining seriously. “It is a thing called ‘the Medallion of Zulo’—and why I said it shouldn’t exist is because, in the Transformation Fetish fiction circles, everyone knows were it came from—a story written by someone called Jennifer Adams for what’s come to be called the ‘Altered Fates’ setting. Basically it was more or less a plot device which became popular.

“The way it works is that you touch it to an article of clothing while you have skin contact with the medallion, and it changes you into an exact copy of whoever last wore the clothing. If no one’s worn it, like if you touched it to a new pair of underpants, fresh from the plastic bag, you get turned into someone who the underpants were designed to fit. Probably but not necessarily a version of yourself.

“That ‘probably but not necessarily’ thing is very important,” the kid cautioned, still serious looking. “Keep in mind it comes from a shared world setting, and the details change from author to author. There isn’t even agreement on who ‘Zulo’ was or is. My personal favorite is a history someone wrote for the medallions—oh, yeah, there might be more than one—which has it that Zulo was an African trickster god, as well as some sort of childbirth god or something.

“Which reminds me, one thing people seem to agree upon is that if you get turned into a woman and get pregnant, or are having your period, you can’t transform until the child is born, aborted, or whatever, or your period is finished. That probably came about because—well, never mind.

“Another thing which seems agreed upon is that once you change, you have to wait twelve hours before you can change again. So no changing and immediately making enemies,” the youth cautioned, flashing a grin with some very healthy looking teeth. “Also, people generally can’t hang onto one of the medallions for more than three days—it wants to change hands. Usually the transformations are ultimately beneficial, but, if a person really is nasty in some way or another, they generally wind up worse off—again that seems to be an author dependent thing. Some of the writers seem to get off on some pretty odd stuff…”

He paused to eat a bit more, then resumed talking while still eating.

“I think that’s pretty much all you need to know,” he stated, picking up his ice tea with sticky hands. “Don’t count on having it for long, be careful what you touch while holding it—Oh! Wait, there is one more thing—it can change you into animals, so make certain that dog collar you are touching it to was worn by a human with punk leanings and not your neighbor’s mastiff! Also, sometimes touching it to a picture of someone works, and you get to be the person in the picture. Sometimes it works with something merely handled by someone. Anyway, just be REAL careful with it. That’s kind of why I like the trickster god origin. It helps me to remember to be careful.

“That’s about it,” the kid summed up, finishing his meal at the same time. He grabbed a desert menu and started looking through it.

“Wait,” the man said, looking at the medallion and then the boy. “You said it shouldn’t exist—why?”
The kid looked up from the menu.

“Well, think about it,” he replied. “Jennifer Adams created it for a story, everyone knows its origin, and knows its fiction. Of course, here it is, and it works—I’ve used it!”

“You wanted to become a kid?” The man looked surprised, as if he was not certain the boy was serious.

“Not exactly,” the red haired youth answered. “I wanted to be younger, and turned myself into a 24 year old college student version of this body. There is at least one other item with similar origins floating around that makes guys, and guys only, younger—but you really don’t want to know how that works, trust me, if you were bothered by some of those stories!

“Anyway, one of the sleep walkers got himself a major charge by predicting Obama would become president—“
“That election was a blow out!” the man objected. “That wouldn’t have worked, not the way I understand it at any rate.”

“He predicted it before Obama declared himself a candidate,” the kid explained. “He was into Transformation Fetish fiction and decided to make some items real. He’d not telling which ones or how many.”

He slid the napkin with the Medallion of Zulo on it across the table.

“Please pass the case under the table to me,” the youngster requested. “And buy me desert—I’m still hungry.”