A Different Origami [Non-Canon] (Raffle Prize)

Penny re-checked the address on the sticky-note she held, then examined the building again, dubiously.  It was a one-story structure, but long, stretching a good hundred feet or so.  From the large glass windows at one end and the series of garage doors down its length, she gathered it had been an auto shop at some point.  But all the signage had been stripped away, and the glass windows of what had been the front desk area were soaped over.  All that remained to identify the place was a street number in mismatched decals on the front: 4-2-1.

Aside from her car, the parking lot was empty.  The painted markings were faded to near-invisibility, and the asphalt pavement was cracked and crumbling up in several spots.  Maybe Legati Street had a North-South division, and she was on the wrong end?  She re-checked her phone's GPS, and even browsed to a couple second-tier map websites just in case, but they all agreed she was in the right place.

Or at least, that she was at the address she'd meant to find.  By the look of the place, Penny was starting to seriously doubt this was the "right place" in terms of her personal well-being.  Five steps back to her car, twenty miles back to home and she could forget all about this.  Her trainers shifted on the asphalt, but didn't turn.

Her usual friends-cum-workmates had all gone on a short-notice trip abroad, while Penny had been forced to remain behind...she'd previously promised to care for her neighbor's sick cat while she was away abroad.  On top of that, her aging computer had coughed out its last.  So basically everyone she knew was having a grand time overseas, while she had nothing to do but mop up cat sick and watch reality TV.  If she couldn't get her computer fixed, she might well die of boredom, but it was at least $200 she didn't have.

Then Maris had texted her, out of the blue.

Maris wasn't a friend, exactly...she assisted for a magician Penny had never worked with.  But they'd bumped into each other at a convention once, and the girl had said she was trying to keep her options open, so they'd exchanged contact info.  Still, when her text had come, asking if Penny would be willing to fill in for her in exchange for some quick cash, it had seemed like the perfect solution.  But now that she was faced with the place...

If it had been after dark, she'd probably have already left, but it was one in the afternoon and the sun was beaming down cheerfully.  It made everything seem more dingy than scary per se, so her mild desperation was able to edge out her good sense, and Penny approached the door.  She tugged on the handle, and was slightly surprised to find the door swung open easily.  She stepped inside, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the dim interior, then glanced behind her, as if to make sure that the door she'd stepped through was the same one she'd opened.

The room was comfortably decorated as a living room, with a puffy couch and chairs, a good-sized TV, and several bookcases.  The floor was carpeted with thick blue pile, and the walls that weren't covered by bookcases...including the large windows, whose soaped surfaces were covered on this side by drywall...displayed a mixed collection of posters, half for classic magicians and half for gory B-grade horror movies.  The door that led to the garage area had been replaced by a normal wooden interior door, and was half-ajar, giving Penny a partial view of another furnished room, including a slice of bed.

"Hello?" she called out hesitantly, a little less concerned, but still off-balance from the unusual living arrangements.  

A mop of damp brown hair poked around the door, followed in turn by a pair of blue eyes.  The remainder of the face that held the features together was male, mid-to-late 20's, and attractive, and from its position firmly in the top-third of the doorway, its owner was tall.  His expression was mildly vexed, and he kept the rest of his body behind the door.

"Ah, you must be Penny...?"  Penny nodded, leaning slightly forward in a half-subconscious effort to see more of the man hidden behind the door.  "Sorry, I'll be just a second...Maris must've forgotten to mention the doorbell...or to lock the door when she left...or to give you the right time..." he trailed off in mutters as his head vanished back behind the door, which closed behind him.  Penny smirked and shook her head in bemusement.

While she waited, she nosed around the magician's belongings.  The magic posters, "Thurston, Master Magician", "Carter the Great", "The Great Nicola, World's Master Mystic", were mounted in glass-covered frames and appeared to be actual originals.  The B-movie ones, "Wizard of Gore", "Last House on the Left", "The Abomination", "GO-re GO-re Girls", from their condition seemed also to be originals, but were simply sellotaped to cardboard sheets.

The bookshelves held a few magic trade books, but also a reassuringly random collection of fiction and non-fiction.  There seemed to be a slightly disproportionate number of foreign dictionaries, however, as well as a good count of old-looking books with foreign titles or completely unmarked spines.  She turned back as the door opened again.

"Sorry to keep you waiting."  His now-dried hair was wavy brown, and he'd thrown on khaki's, an undershirt and a bowling shirt, unbuttoned, that read "Ernest" over the pocket.  "Miles Marshall, thanks so much for helping out," he added, crossing the room and extending a hand to her.  Penny shook it.

"Penny Matthews, it's nice to meet you...I think?  Maris wasn't...ah...entirely complimentary of you when we met."  Miles made a slight grimace and shrugged.

"We have a...complicated working relationship.  But it's still worth it for both of us, or she would've quit by now.  Why, what did she say?"  Penny shrugged uncomfortably.

"I don't want to get her in trouble...maybe you should ask her yourself?"  Miles frowned, but nodded.  "Nothing crucial though, or I wouldn't be here.  So...what are we doing?  Maris' text said you just needed to work out stage direction and pacing for a new routine?"

"Right, right...it's this way," he said, leading her into the bedroom then through another door in the opposite wall, which opened into the rest of the former auto shop.  It seemed largely unmodified, though the car-lifts had been removed, the windows in the bay doors were soaped, and there were a number of pieces of stage magic apparatus scattered about, a couple in different stages of disassembly.

"Maris said you'd prefer cash?" Miles asked, picking up an un-sealed envelope on one of the workbenches and handing it to Penny, who peeked inside.  "It's $500 for the day, which can be up to 6 hours if we need it, but I think we'll be done by four or five at the latest."

"That's...that sounds fine!"  Better than fine...instead of waiting two days to have her paperweight fixed, she could swing by a big box store on her way home and have a shiny new computer before dinner.

"There is one thing...I make arrangements with 'volunteers', but when I can I like to have them run through 'cold', not knowing what's going to happen in advance.  Better reactions, from them and the audience.  Is that going to be ok?"  Penny hesitated, wondering how much of what Maris had said was actually joking, as she'd thought at the time.  "There will be minimal discomfort, and I'm happy to add another $300 to your fee, for peace-of-mind?"  Penny bit her lip, unsure, but visions of an even shinier computer with a bigger hard drive and a gaming graphics card won her over.

"Sure, that seems...fair."

"Great.  Ok, just pull a chair up to the second bay, against the door, and have a seat while I set things up."  Penny picked up a nearby folding chair and set it up as instructed, then paused.

"Oh, do I need to change or anything?  Maris didn't say..."  Miles eyed her standard rehearsal outfit, blue sports-top, purple leggings, and flexible no-lace dance shoes she could quickly toe off if she needed.

"No, that's fine, doesn't really matter for this series."  Penny nodded and sat down, doing her best to pretend like she was an audience member watching an opaque red curtain while Miles huffed and puffed, wheeling large frames around.  After a couple minutes, he finished, and pulled out a stopwatch.  He started it, then tucked it into the breast pocket of his shirt and took a couple steps forward, miming pushing a curtain aside with his hand.

"Well, that was interesting, wasn't it?  Pause for laughter..." he said, the last bit muttered under his breath.  "For our next illusion, I'll need another volunteer."  Penny raised her hand, feeling a bit silly, and the magician turned his head from side to side and nodded in apparent satisfaction at the number of possibilities.  "We need a more specific sort of assistant this time, however...we're looking for someone who's always wanted to take a yoga class, but never got around to it?"  Penny laughed...that ruled her out completely, but she kept her hand up anyway.  Miles nodded again as if a bunch of people had put their hands down.  "Ok, I've got just the thing to select one of you...keep your hands up for just a minute, please."

He withdrew a small square of white paper from his front pocket, smoothed it out between his palms, then began to rapidly fold, twist and crease it with shocking speed.  Only a few seconds had passed, but now a tiny, perfectly-folded origami crane sat atop his open palm.

"Pause for applause," he muttered, smiling.  "There's an old Japanese legend that if you fold 1000 of these, a magical crane will appear and grant one wish.  I did the other 999 during intermission...brief pause for laughter."  Penny smirked, but her eyes widened when the magician lifted his hand sharply and the paper crane took flight, zig-zagging around the garage.  After a minute, it landed neatly in her raised hand, and she somehow felt delighted and special, despite being the only person there it could've picked.

"Young lady, could you make your way up onto the stage?"  Penny stood and began to walk directly towards Miles, but he took the stop-watch out of his pocket and waved her aside, staring at it.  "Stretch it out a bit...got to come down the aisle, move around to the stairs, come up the stairs..." Penny agreeably mimed the actions, until his directions allowed her to actually stand next to him.  

"What's your name?" he asked, holding an imaginary microphone out to her.

"Penny," she answered, smiling prettily at the nonexistent audience.  Miles nodded approvingly.

"Everyone, please welcome Penny to the stage!  Pause for applause...So, you've wanted to try yoga, flexibility, strength, oneness with the universe, all that?"

"Sure...who couldn't use a bit more flexibility in their life?  It's just...intimidating, maybe?"  Penny tried to hide her smirk.

"Well, I think we can grant your wish tonight.  If you could just hop up onto this table," he said, motioning to the apparatus behind him.  There was a large steel table, about seven feet by four feet, perhaps two inches thick.  As Penny approached, before turning away to push herself up, she saw there was another steel table behind the first, slightly shorter but otherwise identical aside from a small open oval near the top.  Both were attached to an odd collection of metal arms and joints, and there was an outline of a spread-eagled body stenciled onto the table she was sitting on.  "Great, now lie back, arms up, feet apart...is it ok if I remove your shoes?"  Penny nodded and the magician slipped them off, setting them on the floor nearby, while she flexed her toes a bit.  The magician eyed her position critically.  "Scooch this way a bit?"  Penny complied, and Miles moved around to the other end of the table.  "Now raise your hands a bit further," he instructed, guiding her wrists while watching.  "There, perfect.  Just one more thing..."

He moved away from the table to approach a vertical frame and rotated it, showing the "audience" that it held a large piece of white paper, held taut at the corners.  At the base of the frame was an odd apparatus, a low rectangular box with a couple of wide open tubes that curved upward from each end.  The magician rose to his toes to reach over the top of the frame and withdrew a japanese sword.  He crossed in front of the table again, then faced the garage doors.

"Kids, never run with scissors.  17th century authentic samurai swords are fine though, pause briefly for laughter, then" he interrupted his own stage direction to yell and rush at the paper, sword held high, slashing downward in a complicated curve as he leaped through the frame.  He turned the frame again, and Penny and the "audience" could see that a perfect outline of her position on the table had been cut out of the paper.  "Pause for mild applause and laughter..."  Miles unclipped the paper from the frame and then carefully laid it over Penny, and indeed it settled right down onto the table underneath her, barely brushing her where it passed.

"So, Penny," he said, leaning over the end of the table close to her head, "Have you ever seen a magician do an illusion called 'Origami'?"  Yes, Penny thought, from the inside, too, but shook her head 'no'.  "Well, the assistant gets in a box, and then there's a few folding panels, but the core of it isn't really origami, it's just squishing a girl in a box into a smaller box.  There's usually a bunch of dancing and some swords and other filler, but I thought of a way to make it more authentic, and the squishing part could go much faster."

At the word "much", he straightened, and pressed a button underneath the table.  The hydraulic arms underneath heaved convulsively and the other table rotated up and over with alarming speed.  Before she even really saw it coming, it slammed down onto Penny with incredible force, smashing her flat instantly between the solid steel plates.  Or almost flat...about two inches of her fingertips and toes were past the edges of the second panel, as well as her face.  But the latter only protruded an inch or so from the open oval in the second table, as the rest of her head had been flattened along with the remainder of her body.

"Brief pause for shock, Penny, are you still with us?" he asked casually, again holding his imaginary microphone near her face.

"Wow, um...I think so?  That was...abrupt."  Miles stopped the stopwatch, looking concerned.

"Are you ok?"

"Oh, yes, I'm fine...like I'm coming off a serious 90-minute massage...I just usually have a bit more time to enjoy the experience, you know?"  The magician nodded.

"Well, we can try it the other way, there's just a minor change in the patter wording so..." he crossed to a workbench and jotted down the stopwatch time with a couple of notes, then moved back to the table, carrying the sheet from the paper frame.  He draped the sheet over the tables and poked the button underneath.  When the top plate retracted, pulling the sheet away, it revealed Penny un-flattened.

"Ok, so...more authentic...slow button," he poked under the table and the top plate began to rotate into place but considerably more gradually, "...of course, the squishing part is still necessary...hold very still, now..." he re-started the stopwatch and waited while the plates moved inexorably together.  This time Penny could feel what was happening, as the edges of the open oval contacted her face and began to press down, touching more and more of her body with each quarter-inch.  She let out a little "oh", feigning surprise, to get back into "character".  It was deliciously relaxing though, indeed, much like an intense full-body massage.  But she noticed that her volume wasn't being conserved...that is, her body wasn't spreading out as she was compressed, it was simply flattening down onto itself, retaining the same general outline.

She realized why, as the plates once again came completely together...she felt the flattened edges of her body merge somehow with the cut outline in the paper, so she was essentially of a piece with it, aside from her fingertips, toes and face.

"Brief pause for shock, Penny, are you still with us?" Miles repeated.

"I think so...this feels soooo wieeeerd...?"  The magician chuckled.

"We're just getting started, my dear."  He poked at the table button and the top panel retracted again.  This time it left Penny still flattened, the slight bump of her face obvious on the table even from the side.  "Looks like you're a bit taller than I expected, but we can work with that...wiggle your fingers a bit?"  Penny obliged him, and the far corner of her paper bent up a bit as she tried to wave to the "audience".  "And your toes?"  She flexed them up and down, then spread them briefly, leaving no doubt that they were genuine.

As she was doing that, Miles wheeled the empty frame over to the table, then pulled the top edge of Penny's paper up into it, clipping it into place.  He wheeled it backwards and she slid off the table until she dangled in the frame.

"Keep going, if you would?" he asked, and rotated the frame around.  It was clear in profile that there was no place to hide Penny's body inside the literally paper-thin material.  From the rear, the sheet was entirely flat, the back of her strawberry-blond bob perfectly "rendered" in 2D.  As instructed, she kept her digits moving the whole time, her toes occasionally bumping the weird box thing at the frame's base.  "Interrupt applause, Hang on, folks, like I said, we're just getting started..."

With one hand, he lifted the bottom edge of the paper half-way to the top, then creased the resulting fold.  He continued in this fashion, unclipping Penny's paper from the frame and lowering it to the floor halfway through, and only slightly slower than his original demonstration due to the size of the materials.  This level of manipulation, in her already-flattened form, was something else entirely...Penny closed her eyes and just drifted, buoyed by jolts of warmth and relaxation as the magician made each crease.  When he'd finished, Penny had been folded into a giant paper crane a few feet long and across.  Her fingers wiggled from the tips of the wings, and her toes rested on the ground under each of the two paper "feet".  Her face was centered in the crane's head.

"Well, what do you know...a magical crane has appeared...pause for applause...."  Penny bounced experimentally on her toes and wiggled her fingers, but she didn't seem to have any control over her paper-parts, so she didn't move much.

"I can't see what I look like," Penny complained.  Miles stopped the stopwatch.

"Hmm...we could get a mirror over here...actually, that works for the audience, too."  He walked to one corner of the garage and wheeled a large standing mirror over, re-starting the stopwatch when he was a couple yards away.  "Take a look," he said, positioning it so she could see herself.  Penny laughed, though she wished she could flap her wings properly.  After giving her a moment, he wheeled the mirror around her in a circle, giving the "audience" a view around her.

"Now for the wish...I'm pretty content, so we'll let you have it even though I did the folding.  Of course, there's fine-print...origami wishes only get you...more origami, pause for laughter.  So...do you have a favorite animal?"  He held his imaginary mic down to Penny's face in the crane's head.

"Oh...hmmm..." she said, putting on an elaborate expression of thoughtfulness.  "Cat...definitely cat," she said, after deliberately allowing a few moments to pass.  The crane's head twitched slightly as she attempted to nod.

"Cat, huh?  Ah, I've just the thing then..."  With a couple deft pulls and twists, Miles undid all his earlier work, and Penny was once again a flat sheet of paper, hung in the frame, though with a crazy network of creases criss-crossing her.  He pulled a white silk handkerchief from his shirt pocket, tucked it into one fist, then pulled it back out, revealing it had become orange.  He repeated this maneuver, and now the handkerchief had a print of an asian-looking tiger face on one side.  Miles reached up to the frame and held the handkerchief over Penny's face for a moment, pattern towards her.  She felt a brief tingle, and when he lowered his arms, the handkerchief was pure white again, and Penny's face had been artfully made up as a cute tiger.

"Don't pause for applause," Miles muttered as he picked up the discarded large sheet.  He held it in front of the frame, briefly covering the entire paper, then dropped it, and the paper itself now held a black and orange tiger-stripe pattern.  Another half minute of rapid folds and tucks that Penny still silently wished he'd spent a little more time on, as they only managed to tantalize, and the magician stood back to hold the mirror for his assistant.  She'd seen the handkerchief, so she wasn't entirely surprised to see she'd been folded into an elaborate origami tiger, about two and a half feet long.  It was still pretty amazing though...her fingers and toes capped each leg, and her face-makeup perfectly matched the pattern in the surrounding paper that made up the tiger's head.

Miles began his circuit around her with the mirror, so she made adorable growling noises at the "audience", clawing the floor a bit with her fingertips.  The magician chuckled.

"Don't worry folks, there's no danger, she's a...paper tiger, after all...pause and grin at audience groans..."  He made another half-circuit and left the mirror behind Penny, then picked up the sheet and began draping it over her, back-to-front.  "But that's hardly good enough for a wish, is it?  Let's stretch that fine print a bit..."  He pulled the sheet over her head but tucked it across the front legs so her fingertips were still visible, then took hold of the rear of the sheet.  "One, two, three..." he pulled the sheet forward quickly, and Penny felt a shivering vibration across her entire body that left her slightly queasy but invigorated at the same time.  As the sheet lifted, it revealed she'd become a genuine live baby tiger.  Penny happily discovered she could move again, and took a quick caper in a circle...after having adjusted to mismatched multiple human limbs, four ordinary feline ones were pretty easy to get the hang of, even if they were stumpy.

"This is wonderful!" she tried to say, though it came out as a cute baby tiger roar.

"I'd say she's pleased, folks, what about you?  Pause for long applause...I don't think she'd want to stay this way forever, though, so..." he moved to re-cover Penny with the sheet, but she playfully bounded aside, letting out another heart-melting tiger cub roar.  "Or maybe she does?" he asked, bemused.  Miles shook his head.  "I'm not sure I could afford to feed her when she grew up...though I might have something for the moment..." he reached into his shirt pocket and somehow pulled out a whole cooked tuna...not an adult one, but a good foot long, clearly too large to have fit into the small pocket.  He flipped one edge of the sheet forward and laid the tuna on it so it didn't touch the not-entirely-clean workshop floor.

Penny regarded the tuna with scorn...it was an obvious trick to get her under the sheet, and she was having way too much fun.  But the scent of the tuna suddenly hit her nose, a thousand times stronger than anything she'd ever smelled before, filling her whole head with insatiable desire.  Before she knew it, she'd pounced on the fish and was ripping into it with her fangs, barely pausing to chew before swallowing to bite again, and every mouthful was the best thing she'd ever tasted.  But then the sheet was falling over her, and off, and she was just face, fingertips and toes again.

"Pause for laughter," Miles muttered.  Penny spit out the paper origami fish that was between her lips and made a face.

"Spoilsport...I see what she meant now..." she grumbled.  Miles chuckled, but waved an admonishing finger.

"Stay in character, please, but we can negotiate later."  He winked at her, and once again after a few quick tugs and twists, she was left hanging flat in the frame.  "So, we covered flexibility, and I think we can count a tiger as strong...all that's left is 'one with the universe'.  We'll need you entirely flat for this, safety first..."  He leaned down and brushed a handkerchief over her toes, but before she formed half a giggle, they'd become flat paper, and not terribly ticklish.  Straightening, he repeated the process with her fingers, which flopped forward over the top edge of the paper.

"Ok...concentrate, deep breath in, then let it out and say, 'Ohhhhhhhmmmmmm'..."  Penny wasn't sure where this was going, but she did as he asked.  Midway through her "Om", she felt the handkerchief brush her face, and then she was stuck, mouth open, and entirely part of the paper.  She couldn't move her eyes, but she could barely make out the magician at the edge of her vision, withdrawing a cheap-looking star-topped fairy wand from his pocket.

"Pause for laughter..." Miles shrugged, then tapped the top edge of the paper.  Penny could still see most of herself in the mirror, and there was a rapid flip-flopping motion in the paper that traveled downward from where he'd touched.  When it passed, the paper surrounding her flattened body was pitch black, while her body itself had become some sort of iridescent chrome material.  It was a peculiar sensation, like seeing herself in the mirror when she'd gotten her makeup just right, only over her whole body...prettiness made visceral, somehow.  "Brief pause for applause, interrupt- I agree, she's quite lovely, but the Universe is a big place, so if she's going to become One with it, we'll have to spread her out quite a bit..."

Miles kicked a switch on the odd box contraption, which began to make a whirring-grinding noise, and air started blowing forcefully out of the tubes on each end, up and away from the frame.  Only at the last moment did Penny realize the box was an industrial-strength paper shredder, but then the magician had unclipped her and she was sliding rapidly into it, a hundred cuts every inch.  She was overwhelmed with the sheer intensity of it and would've screamed if she'd had a working mouth, but it was frozen in her silent paper "Om" as her head passed into the shredder and then there was nothing, and everything, as the thousands of pieces of glitter she'd been shredded into were blown into every corner of the large building, somehow every piece separate and yet still connected, she was a tornado, she was a cloud, she was the stars in the sky...

"Pause for long-ish applause," Miles muttered mildly, staring at his stopwatch.  He gave it about 45 seconds before continuing.  "But even from the most transcendent journey, we must return home to find perspective on what we have learned...and presumably, pay our electric bills, pause for laughter..."  The magician moved behind both tables and lugged out what appeared to be an old-fashioned canister vacuum...the hose ended in a comically-wide funnel shape.  He plugged it in and flipped a switch, and it made a terrible whining drone.  For a moment, nothing happened, and then glitter began to rush into it from every corner of the building.  When no more glitter was forthcoming, he waited about five more seconds, then flipped off the switch.

Penny, no longer One with the Universe, but instead just her normal self crammed awkwardly into a small cylinder, pounded on the sides a bit, causing it to rock.  Miles undid three latches on the side, opening it up, and Penny got out, standing up and stretching a bit, trying to seem casual, but somehow unable to keep from grinning.

"So..." said Miles, casually.  "Yoga, huh?  Brief Pause for laughter...Please, everyone give a huge round of applause for my fabulous volunteer, Penny! Pause for long, deserved applause...and bows...oh, fetch Penny's shoes..." he quickly grabbed Penny's dance shoes and she pulled them back on.  "...and Penny leaving the stage..." He motioned to Penny, who dutifully mimed the trip back to her seat, ending in the chair she'd started in, and Miles stopped the stopwatch.

"I think I see exactly what Maris meant...and also why she puts up with you," Penny mused, still trying to process everything she'd experienced.  Miles chuckled.

"So, negotiation.  I'd like to do one more run through, but if you're willing to forego the extra $300, I'll let you Imprint the tiger cub Transfiguration so you can kitten-out to your heart's content..."  He grinned.  Penny tried to consider it rationally, but after only a few seconds she mentally waved goodbye to the advanced graphics card...