A Job Offer
The Never Ending Quest - Episode 117982
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Fred had felt terrible fear and apprehension at this woman's sudden appearance, but now, she began to wave her hands in gentle gestures, and started to sing a merry tune - "Come, dear creatures, follow me / Come follow, dance with glee!" - which comprised a few simple, repetitive verses, but at once Fred was no longer paying attention to the words. Her mind had gone blank, blank as the mind of any toad, and she found herself instinctively drawn to this strange creature. She did not notice or care about the phenomenon all around her: an identical reaction from all the once-human creatures in the cottage! They came to surround Ginnie, the bats alighting on her shoulders, the cats and rat rubbing against her legs, the toads simply surrounding her feet, and the bugs crawling up her dress. She smiled as she continued to sing, and then her hands were doing something else, and their surroundings melted away, to be replaced by the interior of a stone tower packed with herbs, scrolls, and spellbooks. Fred found herself rather unimpressed and unaffected by the shift, and the same was true of the rest of the creatures. Ginnie dropped her hands and began to draw a circle on the floor around the assemblage of animals she had stolen, all the while continuing to sing her song. Soon enough, she straightened up, transitioning into humming. Fred sat on the stone floor among the other toads, listening vacuously. As Ginnie's song tapered off, Fred's mind slowly began to clear. She looked around, blinking her large eyes, registering that all eighteen other creatures were present with her, and reacting similarly. She noticed a full-length mirror against the nearby wall. All the tables and desks covered in parchments and pots of unsavory-smelling substances. She hopped to the line drawn around them in some dark liquid, but found that when she made to cross it, all her muscled simply refused to cooperate. Ginne approached the circle, and clasped her hands, a large smile on her face. "Welcome, unfortunate ones, to my home! You are are to be handed the singular honor of serving me as my agents. I know you were once something else, and I can get you back into your true human forms, or perhaps something even better. However, it won't be an absolute. I will shift you back and forth between your original forms and witch-given forms at will, occasionally giving you the limited ability to make that shift yourself. In return, you will serve me by going where I tell you to go and doing what I tell you to do. I have a great many errands I'd like to run and not the time nor the energy to do all of them. If this arrangement doesn't sit well with you, I suppose I might as well turn you loose, leaving you in your current forms. That is the deal." Fred listened in astonishment, and though her fellows had always been difficult to read, now it seemed clear that at least some of them were receiving this development with great excitement. She wasn't so sure. Yes, she ached to be human again, and would do just about anything for it, but... serving a witch? Witches were invariably up to no good. It was so far from the life she had once had, the life she still dreamed of returning to (even if she had long known it was impossible). Ginnie reached forward, and plucked a centipede out of the circle. She placed it in front of her and took a vial from her belt, pouring it over the tiny creature, which began to writhe and squirm, as she chanted a mystic spell. Before Fred's very eyes, the centipede began to grow and change, the vast majority of its many tiny legs shrinking to nothing, while four distinct limbs sprouted outward, and it took on a human shape—specifically, the shape of an elderly man with a long silver beard, completely naked as he lay on the floor, his limbs flopping around awkwardly as he seemed dazed at what had happened to his body. Ginnie nodded thoughtfully, looking rather dispassionately down at him, and turned to the group of stunned animal onlookers. "I suspect many, if not all of you will be quite old as well, as none of you are currently species that are longer-lived than human. A lot of years tend to get lost in translation. I'll probably fix up some of you, but not all. Depends." She turned her sights back on the man before her, whose eyes were so dilated they looked almost totally black. "So, geezer. What do you think about the job offer?" At length he managed to push himself to his knees. It appeared his human instincts were slowly kicking back in. He looked in his reflection in the mirror. Down at his shaking, wrinkled hands. Up at her lovely face. And he gasped, "Anything. Name it." She smiled. "Excellent."
It was an agonizing wait, for Fred's turn. She didn't do them all in one batch, either. She started with the bugs, and then the cats—which was good, because among those who were left afterwards, none of them particularly wanted to eat each other. But after that, she called it a night, and they were left to wait in the darkness. Fred supposed it was good she still had plenty more time to consider her decision. Nobody had said no yet, and she was, admittedly, terrified of what might happen. She supposed it wasn't an awful thing to simply be released, at least compared to all else a witch might do, but she found herself doubting that that was truly all she had to fear. And who knew where they were now... What if they were in the middle of a desert? Or a city? Somewhere she had no hope of surviving? Perhaps she'd done enough surviving... Or, perhaps... she'd done enough suffering. Ginnie resumed the following morning. Fred still hadn't seen any of the transformed people since they'd been led away. This did nothing to ease her stress. Three more transformations later, it was Fred's turn. Ginnie placed her in front of her, next to the mirror. She began to chant, and pour her elixir over Fred's dry body, and it was absolute relief to her toady skin. Until it wasn't. Until that skin began to prickle and stretch, and Fred released a distressed croak, but she was helpless, the picture of indignity as she writhed in pain, her body reinventing—or rather, rediscovering—itself in the space of less than one minute. And then she lay, panting, her skin tingling all over but decidedly less dependent on moisture—her vision completely redone—her hands so much more complicated and versatile—her legs totally new. She thought to gather herself before doing it, but she glanced desperately into the mirror before she could. An old woman, perhaps around seventy years of age, looked back at her. The woman's hair was silver like starlight, long and thick and beautiful. Though her height was hard to discern, since she was still sprawled out on the floor, it was clear that she was very, very small. Her eyes were a bit clouded, but still a lovely blue, and though she was aged indeed, she was still stunningly beautiful. Belboz had known what he was doing. From above her came Ginnie's voice: "Wow! Talk about aging with grace. That's incredible. Betcha you wouldn't even mind if I left you like that, hahah! Anyway. So, you know the drill. Are you in, or out?" Fred swallowed, and opened her mouth to test her voice. Everyone else had been able to produce sound readily, even if they'd stumbled through their early attempts. But nothing came out at all. She was still voiceless. She opened and closed her mouth in despair a few times, and turned her eyes up to Ginnie, tapping her throat. Ginnie cocked her head. "Really? Mute? Huh. That's surprising. I guess I might try to fiddle with that, though truth be told I have plenty of errands that need running without the requirement of a voice. Well, you can still use that old noggin to answer yes or no questions. Give me a nod or a shake." Fred...
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5/10/2021 5:49:24 AM
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