The invitation I’d received from the Shapers’ Coven was intriguing, and I accepted and marked my calendar right away. They specialized in transformation magic, something I’ve never had an iota of talent for, and I wasn’t going to turn down an offer like this:
The Shapers’ Coven invites you to share an evening of transformation and self-discovery:
Come as You Would Be
Wear a costume, arrive on time, and be transformed into the likeness you have assumed at eight o’clock on the dot. The transformation will last until dawn. Your mindset and attitude toward the entity your costume represents will strongly affect the spell.
Some safety rules:
1. Don’t cosplay as anything mindless, like a zombie, or with an addiction to blood, life force, human flesh, etc., like a vampire.
2. If you cosplay as a female character, and are considering of having sex before dawn, be sure to think of your character as infertile. Pregnancy could make the transformation permanent whether your natural form is male or female.
3. Don’t cosplay as something that can’t survive in Earth’s atmosphere, pressure, temperature, gravity, etc.
4. Don’t cosplay as an inanimate object. Sapient robots should be safe, however, or magically animated dolls, etc.
5. Don’t cast any spells on yourself before coming; use only mundane costume parts and makeup. Prior magic could interfere with the transformation spell.
Arrive between seven and seven forty-five, please. RSVP to Evelyn Killian, 785-555-0077.
I mulled over my costume for days before deciding; who knew whether they’d have another party like this next year. Finally, I decided, put the costume together (driving to Kansas City for most of the parts, where nobody would recognize me), and nervously tried it out in the privacy of my apartment the day before the party.
I made sure to arrive just after seven. I didn’t want to risk being late; even though we don’t have the unpredictably heavy traffic that some cities do, there was always the possibility of a flat tire or engine trouble. Once I parked and got out in front of Evelyn and Brandy’s house, though, I felt nervous about walking around in this costume for almost an hour before it became reality and my body changed to fit it perfectly. I screwed up my courage, walked up to the door, and rang the bell.
Evelyn answered almost immediately. She was costumed as a slightly damaged gynoid, with part of her cheek and forearm showing exposed circuitry, drawn on her skin with face paint, and a high-tech looking monocle over one eye. She squinted at me for a moment before saying: “Seth? You look great. Nice choice.”
“Thanks,” I said, wondering how much of my natural blush would show through the artificial blush I’d applied to my cheeks. “I was afraid it would look ridiculous until the spell takes effect...”
“Don’t be embarrassed,” she said. “I’ll bet half the people here will be crossplaying. I’d do it myself if I hadn’t already tried being a man several times and decided I didn’t like it. Come on in.”
I went in. Most of the people who were there that early were members of the Shapers, including their venerable mentor, Maude Holtzmann. Evelyn introduced me to the people I didn’t already know. Over the next forty minutes, the rest of the guests arrived, and I saw that Evelyn was right: I wasn’t the only one in an opposite-gender costume by any means, so I didn’t feel anywhere near as embarrassed as I’d felt when I walked up to the door.
At seven forty-five, the Shapers gathered in a circle in the basement. Some of us watched from outside the circle, while others continued talking, dancing, or playing games upstairs. I sat at the foot of the basement steps with my friend Blake, an agricultural mage who’d also decided to crossplay — as a pollination fairy. I figured he’d be insect-size when the spell took effect. “And maybe I can go out and work some healing magic on a few beleaguered bee colonies before dawn,” he said in a low voice as the coven members prepared to begin.
The chanting began and we observers fell silent, listening and, at least in my case, only understanding a little. Eight o’clock approached as the chanting and gesturing continued, and different coven members burned small amounts of this and that in the little braziers each of them had.
Then suddenly there was a flash of light and a high-pitched sound like a chime or bell, and I felt really weird for a moment. Blake seemed to vanish from beside me, but I barely noticed, being focused on my own body. I reached up to gingerly touch one of my new breasts... and was distracted by a tiny woman with buzzing wings, wearing a dress that seemed stiched together from a couple of small leaves, suddenly zooming in front of my eyes. “You look gorgeous,” she said in a high, squeaky voice.
“Thanks, Blake,” I said. I would have said more, but someone screamed.
“She’s dead!” — “Call 911!” — “No, you idiot” — “My sensors indicate she died of a blood clot in the brain. There is a 98.3% chance she felt no pain.”
I scrambled to my feet, gathering up my skirts, to get a better look. The coven members were gathering around Maude, who had collapsed.
“Do you realize what this means?” someone said. “At that point in the spell, her death would have acted like a human sacrifice.”
“Oh, no.”
Transformation wasn’t my specialty, but even I knew what that meant. Her unintentional “sacrifice” would have supercharged the spell with far more magic than was intended to go into it. The spell might affect people outside the house, or last past tomorow’s dawn, or both.
“Can you figure out how far the spell went and how long it’s going to last?” I asked.
“We will work on reverse-engineering the magic,” Evelyn’s calm monotone said. “I suggest the rest of you go upstairs and turn on CNN and the local news, and start checking social media for keywords like ‘transformation.’ If the spell has extended well beyond this house, you will soon see evidence of it.”
I turned and hurried up the stairs.
* * *
After I’d told the people upstairs what had happened, there was shock and grief among those who’d known Maude well, but a couple of people had the presence of mind to turn off the movie someone had put on (the 1932 version of The Mummy) and turn on a local news channel. It wasn’t showing anything yet, but it was too soon for the station’s reporters to notice anything unless they were at a costume party or trick-or-treating with their kids somewhere within range of the spell. Someone else pulled out a tablet and pulled up CNN’s live feed, and several others started checking social media and looking for relevant tags.
Meanwhile, despite all that, we all had new bodies to get used to. I wanted to slip into one of the bathrooms to have a look at myself all over, but — surprise! so did everyone else who’d changed gender and a lot of the ones who hadn’t. There was a line of six or seven people outside each bathroom, even with everything else going on. There was also a group of people sharing the full-length mirror in the guest bedroom; I joined them after realizing how long the bathroom lines already were.
It wasn’t long before an elf with a bow and arrows slung over his back exclaimed: “Here’s something!” He held up his phone and read aloud: “Everybody at this party who was wearing a costume just changed in some way. I’m like a hundred times stronger and my beard is real now. Did this happen to anybody else?' — He doesn’t say where he is, but... hmm... from some of his earlier tweets, I think he’s in the St. Louis area.”
We heard shouts from the living room a few moments later, and several of us went back to see what was up. CNN was showing a shaky cell-phone video of a scene similar to the party we were having here: some people who might have simply been in costume, but others who had pretty obviously been transformed into something nonhuman. The narration was describing some of the less obvious changes the people at the party had undergone. “Dave there, the vampire, he doesn’t just have real fangs; he’s like totally different, suave and seductive... you see those girls he’s got hanging off his arms? One of them wasn’t even a girl half an hour ago...”
That made me wonder what personality changes I might have gotten and hadn’t noticed yet, but I didn’t have a lot of time to introspect about it just then, because the phone video clip ended and the studio reporters said that was just one of dozens that were popping up from all over the U.S, Canada, even as far as Mexico City.
“So the spell extended thousands of miles from here,” a catgirl said, her ears twitching. “Does that mean it’s not going to last any longer than planned? It’ll wear off at dawn, right?”
Nobody knew; the Shapers were still in the basement, casting diagnostic spells.
“I’ll go downstairs and tell them what’s on the news,” I said, and left the living room.
* * *
I found the Shapers busy casting something complex in a spell circle, and I knew better than to disturb them. I sat by myself in a quiet corner of the basement, reading the news on my phone and feeling myself up a little while trying not to be too obvious about it, until they finished the spell, stepped out of the circle, and relaxed.
“What did you find out?” I asked.
“The spell extended somewhere between six and seven thousand miles from this house,” droned the gynoid. I hadn’t realized robots could work magic, but I guessed it wasn’t all that surprising. “It should not last past dawn, however, unless someone gets pregnant, gets a second transformation spell cast on them, or removes any garment or accessory that is part of their costume. Then it will become permanent.”
I let that sink in for a moment, and then exclaimed: “But — lots of people are going to take off their costumes! Hell, people are probably already doing it upstairs in the bathrooms!”
“Very likely,” Evelyn said. I turned and ran up the stairs, and soon I was banging on the hall bathroom door. “Don’t take off your clothes!” I shouted. “It will make the spell permanent!”
I heard a muffled voice through the door, repeated myself a little louder, and then rushed through the house warning everyone else. Some of the Shapers had come upstairs and were doing the same. “We must get the word out,” Brandy (who had dressed as a Shi’ar from Marvel Comics, and had a kind of feathery mohawk) was telling the people in the living room. “Everyone get on Twitter and Facebook and warn people not to take off any part of their costume if they’re affected by this. The coven is going to work on contacting the news agencies.”
So we all got out our phones and started doing that.
* * *
After a few minutes of posting warnings on social media, a number of us left the party to go out and warn the local trick-or-treaters and their parents not to take off any part of their costume before dawn. We couldn’t possibly get to everyone in time, but we had to try.
Of course, we realized later, once kids (and their parents or older siblings, if they were also wearing costumes) started transforming, they’d mostly gone home right away instead of continuing to trick-or-treat. Hardly anyone was on the streets of Evelyn and Brandy’s neighborhood; Blake and I didn’t see anyone for several minutes after we left the house. When we did, it was bad news. There were two zombies, a teenage boy and a girl, scrabbling ineffectually at the door of someone’s house. One of them was moaning wordlessly and the other was saying “Braaaaaiiiins” over and over. I wondered what that said about their attitudes toward fictional zombies and whether they knew anything about the real ones before their transformation... but I didn’t wonder long, because we had to do something about them.
The zombies had belatedly noticed us, and were now shambling towards us. Blake flew up over their heads and started working a spell to make the grass under their feet grow fast and trip them up, while I cast a binding spell. Within another minute, I was levitating the restrained zombies back toward Evelyn and Brandy’s house, while Blake continued scouting.
“Got a couple of shamblers,” I said when Brandy opened the front door. “I don’t think they’ve lost any clothes, but it’s hard to be sure.”
“Did they hurt anyone?”
“They were trying to get into a house when we found them, but they weren’t smart enough to try smashing a window.”
“Good. We’ll keep them restrained until dawn... hopefully they’ll change back then.”
I went out to rejoin Blake and keep looking for more unfortunate victims.
* * *
We found a few more victims in the next few hours — fewer and fewer as the night went on, mostly those who had lost their reason or memories because of the transformation and couldn’t go home. Meanwhile, others were trying to get warnings out with limited success. Out of over twenty million people who were affected by the spell, we estimate that less than a million heard the warnings in time and less than half heeded them. Many who would have heeded them didn’t hear them until too late. Not many news outlets reported on our warnings in the critical first couple of hours, and those who did didn’t treat them seriously; it wasn’t until eleven (central time) that three of the Shapers forced their way into a Kansas City television station and demonstrated their magic for the news anchors in front of cameras, to prove their credentials and give weight to their warnings. By the time cable news channels picked up the footage from our local station and repeated it, and it went viral on the Internet, it was too late for many of those affected, who’d already taken off some or all of their costume to explore their changed body or just to go to bed.
I somewhat regret not having a chance to undress and explore my temporary body, but I think I would have regretted making the change permanent even more. After seven hours of roaming around town rounding up zombies and others who’d suffered a loss of intelligence or self-control, I finally crashed on the floor of one of Brandy and Evelyn’s guest bedrooms, still fully dressed (and with my two-inch heels duct-taped to my feet to keep them from slipping off during the night). When I woke up, I was in my original body, as were most of the partygoers who’d stayed to help out and crashed there afterwards.
In the months after the public exposure of magic, those like the Shapers who knew transformation magic set up a program to gradually restore those who had suffered the worst from the spell — losing intelligence, mobility, the ability to speak, or important senses. But there was no way to change everyone back; there were too many, scattered over too wide an area, and even with another, deliberate human sacrifice, there would be no way to accurately target those who wanted to change back but not reverse the spell on those who liked their new forms — people who had been healed of gender dysphoria, paraplegia, or various chronic illnesses. Not to mention the many new potential mages we had to test and begin training; about five percent of those in costume at the moment of the spell were dressed as some sort of witch, wizard, magical girl, or some such.
Now the Shapers have come up with a way to change back a large number of people at once without a human sacrifice. The trick is, you’ll have to come to Lawrence, Kansas and all squeeze into the University of Kanas stadium on Halloween; everyone who registers in the next month will be entered in a ticket lottery, those with disabilities getting an extra ticket, and fifty thousand people will get in. Dress as your old self — or the person you wish you’d cosplayed as last year.
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