By Any Other Name
(Talisman, part II)

by D. Monster

Walter eyed her incredulously and pinched her thigh playfully.

"Experience junkie?"

Callie gave a mock pout and batted his hand away. "Shush. Who's telling the story here?"

"Okay. I'm sorry."

"Not a problem." She knew he was anxious to know what had brought her to be with him under what were admittedly bizarre circumstances – circumstances whose oddity was punctuated at the moment by the fact that the storyteller's body was in bed with him while her head rested on the nightstand.

"Now where was I? Hmmm. I'll start at the beginning."

He interrupted. "Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee?"

She ignored him and continued.

"Actually I grew up in all sorts of places with parents who were very, very rich and never, ever home. I discovered very early on that I had tremendous appetites...but also that I became easily bored with each new experience as it grew old. By the time I was fourteen I was a college dropout and a recovered alcoholic. I've taken and kicked every drug you can think of. I've eaten foods you've never heard of. I've played every game, every sport. I even once jumped out of an airplane without a parachute."

Walt's eyebrows shot up.

"And the sex. Let me tell you about the sex. Men. Women. Groups. Animals. Machinery. If there was an experience to be had, I had it and I had it as hard as I could have it."

"That last sentence was an experience in and of itself."

"Thanks. I try my best. But the point is that I reached twenty having done most everything I cared to do. At least all the things that were possible."

"So you went looking for the impossible."

"Right. And I found it. Or rather him."

"Geoff."

"Yup. I had gone to one of his shows. He only did the standard stage illusions, but I've been to enough magic shows to sense that something was different."

"I've been to plenty and I've never caught on."

"You never snuck backstage. Plus I have very keen eyesight and saw the "Disembodied Princess" twitch her nose. Speaking of which, my nose is starting to itch. Could you reassemble me?"

Walt reached over and picked up her head. He placed it between the shoulders of her reclining body and covered the break with his hand. There was a flash of light – she gasped in pleasure, her back arching - and he withdrew his hand. Where the break had been was an emerald green choker on a restored neck. When she had recovered, she reached up and scratched her nose furiously.

"Whew. Okay. So I got myself hired as a dancer. I wanted to be an assistant but Geoff wouldn't have it – the more eager I was and the more suggestions I made, the more he dug in his heels and refused to include me in anything magical. So when your birthday came up and he wanted to do something special for you, I suggested this. And he went for it...maybe because you've been so down lately."

A pained look crossed Walter's face. Callie realized that she'd reminded him of hurts that he'd seemed to have forgotten over the last day, and continued.

"He really values your friendship. He doesn't seem to have any other friends. Hell, he hardly talks to anyone he doesn't have to. He trusts you. More than anyone else in the world, I think." She paused. "What did you do for him?"

Walter's dark mood seemed to have passed as he looked up. "I was the only person stood by him in the dark hours."

"Dark hours?"

"Well, as you may have heard, Geoff and I worked in the same lab in grad school. It was high energy physics. Big science."

"Building-blocks-of-the-universe kind of stuff, right."

"You got it. I did pretty well for myself. But Geoff was brilliant. He was a star - he was Einstein, Fermi, and Dirac all rolled up into one. Grand Unified Theory, tachyons, antigravity....there didn't seem to be a single area that he wasn't about to make great advances in. And it was really strange, because Geoff really wasn't – and still isn't – a terribly creative guy."

Walter rolled over onto his back.

"Well, about a year in, the shit hit the fan. Turns out that no one could repeat any of his experiments. He was a fraud, a charlatan. And it was all the more baffling, as the experiments still performed beautifully if he was present. He was cheating, but they couldn't figure out how. Didn't matter though – he was pilloried, excoriated...pick a colourful verb. By nearly everyone, too."

"And you?"

"I stood by him. Even after he'd been expelled. I knew him, and knew that at worst he'd made some awful mistakes – he's not someone who would lie about anything. He's a good person, and besides, he really doesn't have the imagination to pull off something like that. Of course, having seen what I've seen now, I understand what was really happening."

"He was subconsciously manipulating the universe around him to achieve desired results."

"Grad school puts a lot of pressure on people, and he responded by inadvertently bending the laws of physics."

"Wow." Realization had dawned on Callie. "I guess this explains his magic shows, too."

"Huh?"

"If his tricks are indistinguishable from regular stage illusions, he doesn't call any attention to himself. And I'd guess that he puts his assistants to sleep so that they don't even realize that they're truly being manipulated magically. That might explain why he got so flustered when I accused him of doing real magic."

"He doesn't ever again want to be under the extreme negative scrutiny he experienced in grad school. And the stakes are higher now, considering that scientific fraud only results in a figurative burning at the stake."

"Yikes," said Callie as she thought, and I bet Geoff agreed to my Birthday Gift plan to get me out of his hair for a while. She smiled to herself. Oh well. Not that I really mind all that much.

Walter began to speak again, but he seemed more to be talking to himself or addressing his remarks to a spot on the ceiling. "But there has to be something useful he can do...seems a terrible waste to squander gifts like that on facsimiles of stage illusions...I understand he's scared, but....."

He stopped and was silent for a long time, staring at the ceiling.

Callie didn't care to interrupt his train of thought, so she kept quiet and dwelt on her memories of the previous night's experience.

After several minutes he turned to her.

"I have an idea. Don't move."

* * *

Her perspective had shifted. And she couldn't move at all now. But she could see. And feel. Her feet were wet. She looked around the room and located the mirror. While most of the room was visible, she couldn't see herself. She picked out the bed and the nightstand. She knew she was next to the bed. On the nightstand were Walt's wallet and keys and a rose in a small emerald green vase.

Aha!

She looked down and saw that her feet, or rather, her stem was resting in water that filled the bottom of the vase. She could feel the sun on her leaves. It tasted good.

This is nice, she thought. Different, but nice.

Walt wandered into the room with something in his hand.

"Hi there," he said as he set a glass vase filled with water onto the nightstand next to her. "Gonna do a little experiment," he said, grinning. He picked up a towel and carefully draped it around her.

In the muffled darkness, she heard "Hocus-crocus!" She would have crossed her eyes if she had any. She felt a curious sensation and then the towel was removed.

She didn't feel any different. But now there was another, identical rose in the emerald vase with her.

"Now for the interesting part," he said. She felt his fingers on her stem. As he began to remove her (but not the other rose) from the emerald vase, her thoughts became suddenly panicked, for she knew – she could feel it deep within her – that he was disconnecting her from the talisman.

But won't I just become a normal flow-

Then darkness.

* * *

-er?

The thought completed itself, but she already knew that the question was moot. The light in the room had shifted. Walt was clean-shaven and his hair was shorter. He wasn't in his pajamas. Time had passed.

How much time?

She was back in the emerald green vase. He picked it and her up gently and set them on the bed, careful not to let water spill. He covered them with a blanket. She felt the vase tighten around her stem and then felt herself growing and elongating. When the transformation had ceased, she reached up and pulled away the covers.

She was whole and human again, wearing a shiny emerald green strapless minidress that came to mid-thigh and hugged every contour. She stood up and smoothed her outfit.

"Hello my flower," he said, kissing her on the cheek as he tied his necktie.

"Flower my ass," she replied, a bit disgruntled. "I was worried I was going to be flower forever. How long was I out?"

"To start," he said, "you were never in any danger. Just as you probably could sense that I was disconnecting you from the talisman..."

Got that right, he thought, and it scared the bejeezus out of me, too.

"...I could sense that doing so would not harm you. It actually took a specific thought on my part to do it – it can't be fully removed without the consent of the wearer of the control talisman. You just became, for all intents and purposes, a flower. For a week."

"A week! And what's with the necktie? You going somewhere?"

"I had a few things that I had to do. And yes. I'm leaving for a while. Here. Come with me. There's someone that I'd like you to meet."

He led her to the kitchen. A woman stood up at they entered. She was striking: slender, wearing a tight black leather skirt and a bustier top with high heels that made her taller than Callie. She had short black hair, pale skin, and piercing gray eyes. She looked very familiar.

"Hi," the woman said. She seemed nervous. The voice was familiar, too.

It was Callie's voice.

"Meet Anna," said Walter.

Callie's world went gray and the floor rushed toward her.

* * *

"That's enough." Walt's voice.

Both Callie and Anna came back to reality with a start. Both were breathing hard as the connection broke. Callie noted that Anna now wore the emerald green ring, the controller talisman, that Walter had been wearing previously.

"Wah?" was all that Callie could manage.

Walt sat down at the table and handed her a cup of coffee. "I thought you were too jaded for fainting spells."

"I guess we aren't," said Anna, who was stroking Callie's hair. Callie looked from the coffee cup to Anna and back, shrugged, and took a sip before speaking.

"So I guess I'm missing a few pages here. What the blazes is going on? You're leaving and I'm being groomed by my Nordic doppelganger. Care to explain?"

Walter smiled again. She was going to punch in the face if he kept doing that. "I made a decision last week. Now that I know what Geoff is capable of, I feel compelled to pay him a visit...and, I hope, to convince that there are ways to use his abilities to make the world a better place. I may not have the power myself, but I have ideas...and there is considerable power in ideas."

"That's wonderful, Walt, but what about this?" She held up Anna's hand, showing him the ring. "Isn't this important to you? Don't you want me? "

"I do," he said quietly. "But this is something that's more important to me right now. I'll be back. Maybe soon. And we can have more fun then. But I need to try to make a difference. My writing is going nowhere. My life is going nowhere. I have to try to do something."

"What makes you think that he'll even listen to you?"

"You said he values me as friend. He sent you to me, didn't he?"

"And what about me? You turn me off for a week to play with her and then you get up and leave." There, she had said it. She knew it sounded selfish, but she was feeling abandoned.

"I thought about you. I actually put you first. You're the reason I waited a week before leaving instead of going immediately. I knew that if I were to leave, I'd have to find you a playmate at least as trustworthy and creative as myself." He was looking at Anna.

Callie looked at Anna, too. Anna smiled hopefully. Callie looked at the ring on Anna's finger and then down at her own emerald green dress. Realization began to dawn. Why hadn't she figured this out before?

"A week ago," he began, "I turned one Callie into two. I thought that no one, likely even I, would be able to give to you the experience you wanted better than you could give it to yourself. But I needed to keep the two of you separate from one another long enough to differentiate you...to make each of you just different enough from the other that neither would be able to completely predict the actions of the other. You can choose to share experiences as you just did a moment ago, in case one of you experiences something extraordinary and unrepeatable that other one must feel, but I suggest you try to be separate people. Trade the two talismans back and forth. You likely have more fun. And things might get even more interesting as time passes."

Both Callie and Anna were smiling, sizing each other up.

Callie turned to Anna. "So what's with the look?"

Anna blushed. "Well, I figured that if we were going to be two people, I might as well try a slightly different look. And besides, sisters draw less unwanted attention than identical twins.

"Oh you two will get plenty of attention as it is," Walter muttered under breath, a wry smile on his face. "If my plane wasn't leaving in..."

He checked his watch and nearly choked on his coffee. "Crap! I gotta get to the airport! You gals want to come along to see me off?"

"Okay," Anna said, standing up then turning to Callie, "we should find you some shoes and do something about your hair – it's all over the place. Oh, I suppose I could do it magically..."

But Callie was already on tiptoe, whispering something in Anna's ear. Anna's eyes widened. "Cool," she said smiling. "We'll be just a moment," she said to Walter.

And then she began removing her skirt and bustier. Callie walked into the pantry and closed the door. She removed a potholder from a hook on the door, turned her back to the door, and set the hook into a small loop that had appeared on the back of the dress. "Ready!" she yelled through the door.

"Okay" came the muffled reply from outside. Then there was a slight crackle of power.

She felt herself empty.

Strangeness. As it had in previous transformations, time seemed to pass differently now. After a long pause, the door swung slowly open and Callie, hanging on her hook, went with it. Anna came into view, deliciously naked. The exhilarated gasp that she gave as she reached for Callie seemed to last forever. She removed Callie from her hook and Callie spilled into her hands. Anna examined her emerald green exterior and her tan lining and Callie wished that Anna had had the time to turn her inside out and then back again. Instead, Anna raised Callie up, placing her arms through her, and pulled her over her head.

Then slowly, she pulled Callie on over her body. Callie felt herself pulled taut over the full breasts, the flat stomach, the smooth hips. When at last Anna had her completely on, Callie could feel the elastic thrum of being worn, of enveloping. As Anna walked to the bedroom, Callie could feel Anna's thighs shifting, her breast bobbing, her whole torso moving within her. Occasionally she could feel the touch of the small patch of dark pubic hair that Anna maintained. It was breath-taking. And she could tell that Anna was excited, too - she could feel Anna's heart racing and her breathe growing ragged as she walked to the bedroom. She was perspiring, droplets of moisture forming on her shoulders and the tops of her breasts.

And then the mirror came into view. Anna stood posing in front of it, the strapless minidress – the strapless Callie, that is – tight and shiny against her magnificent body. Anna shifted her pose slightly and Callie slid a little across several parts of her. Suddenly Callie felt Anna quaking with an orgasm, heart pounding, body slackening, swaying.

And then Callie was in orgasm too. It shimmered and echoed through every fiber of her and she knew that although Anna's orgasm would soon be over, hers would continue unabated until she was returned to her human form. All the way to the airport. All the way back. Forever if Anna kept her this way.

And as Anna began walking back to the kitchen, every movement and vibration sending ripples and eddies of pleasure through Callie, Callie knew that she couldn't be happier.

To be continued...