A Few Words About Transmogrification - Part 2 - The Problem with Petticoats

Urban Fantasy, Humor

I got out of the shower to find the dragon leaning against the vanity. He wasn’t good with personal boundaries either. “Okay, now, what the hell did you do to Wanda?” I asked.

“It’s nothing. Well, nothing I can’t fix at least.”

I stopped in the middle of pulling on my jeans and twirled my finger in the universal signal of ‘get to the point.’

“What?” he said.

Apparently, dragons aren’t from our universe.

I spoke slowly. “How did you make Wanda’s blouse disappear?”

“Well, I wasn’t trying to—”

“Ya, ya, you’re never trying to. What happened?”

“Wanda was at the bus stop when I headed out this morning—”

A thought occurred to me. “What did you go out in public as?”

“A dog. Now stop interrupting. As I was saying, she was at the bus stop, and we struck up a conversation.”

“Wait,” I said. “Didn’t anybody notice that she was talking to a dog?”

“That’s nothing, have you seen Joe from downstairs? I heard him talking to God last week. Can you believe it?”

“Wanda,” I prompted.

“Right. She was at the stop, and it turns out she hadn’t brought a jacket. I wanted to be a gentleman—”

“Don’t you mean gentle-dragon?”

“Bugger off with that again. Don’t you have any new jokes?”

I pushed him out into the hall so I could get in front of the sink to pretty myself up. “Okay, so how does Wanda not having a jacket lead to you making her top disappear?”

“Well, I didn’t really make it disappear. I changed it into—”

“—into a disaster,” I finished for him.

He snorted, and this time a plume of smoke did escape and set off the alarm. I yanked off my clean t-shirt, and frantically waved it at the smoke detector until it accepted my surrender and fell quiet again.

“Sorry,” he said.

“No worries.” I pulled my shirt on for the second time and returned to my beauty routine. “Now, about Wanda.”

“She said she was chilly and regretted not bringing her jacket, but she didn’t want to be late for an appointment and couldn’t go back for it. So, I offered to make her one.”

“Uh huh. And then?”

“Well, I wrote the word across her back, but it didn’t turn into a coat like it was supposed to. It was a frilly skirt-like contraption instead, and it appeared on her bottom half instead of her top.”

I stopped teasing goop into my hair and stared directly at him. “Please tell me she had something on underneath.

“She did. Some sort of holster contraption.”

“It’s called a bra,” I said.

“Yes, that’s it. She was screaming something about everyone seeing her in her bra.” He pointed to the smoke alarm. “She sounded more wretched than that bloody thing.”

The red LED on the alarm flickered in response, and he quickly lowered his claw.

I was missing something as usual. “So, how did you mess this one up? What did you write?”

“Petticoat,” he said. “It sounded pretty. I thought it would be a cute jacket that would go with her skirt. I still don’t quite get how that ended up as the frilly thing.”

I couldn’t even laugh at this stuff anymore. “I don’t even need to google this one. A petticoat is a skirt, kind of.”

“How on earth is a petticoat not a coat, but a skirt?”

“It just is.”

“I am so tired of you people and this insufferable language.”

“Well, now you have to fix it, or Mrs. Maple will lock you in a room with Fluffy.”

#

We knocked on Wanda’s door.

“You’re not fooling anyone, you know,” the dragon said.

“What are you talking about?” I whispered.

“That gunk in your hair—and whatever it was that you sprayed on yourself in the bathroom—it’s not working. You can’t transmogrify away all that ugly.”

He held a claw up for a high five, which is actually a high three in his case. But as usual, he completely failed to grasp the nuances of when a high five is, and is not, appropriate.

I left him hanging with a resounding “nope.”

We both stowed any further nattering when her door opened partway. She hid behind it with a bath towel clutched in front of her, the white straps of a bra disappearing over each shoulder. “Oh no, not you again.”

“She’s talking to you,” I said. “Hey, Wanda.”

“Hey, Whitty.”

“I’m very sorry,” the dragon said, “but Mrs. Maple asked if I could try to fix things. I would have earlier, but, well, you were busy running and screaming.”

“You turned my top into a bottom, you idiot.”

I wasn’t sure if she would cry or put a hex on him. The first would lead to consoling her, and the other might result in my roommate wetting himself. It was a win-win for me.

“Uh, that was an unseen complication due to the stupidity of your English language,” he continued.

“What are you—” she turned to me, “what the hell is he talking about?”

I gave her my best gosh-golly-gee shrug with a sympathetic smirk. “He tried to turn your blouse into a petticoat.”

“He did turn it into a petticoat!”

The dragon interrupted us. “If I may. I thought a petticoat was an actual coat.”

“Maybe if we could come in?” I asked.

“Whatever,” she said, but stepped aside and let us enter.

Wanda’s apartment was the opposite of our own in every conceivable way. Not only was the layout reversed, but the counters were spotless, the table tidy, and the shelves with their assorted knick-knacks were well organized. You could eat off her floor. In that way, our apartments were identical.

“Listen, not to be dense here, but why haven’t you put on another top?” I asked.

That’s when she did begin to cry. I stepped towards her, but the dragon beat me to it and slid a mottled arm around her shoulder. I made a mental note to explain the virtues of being a good wingman later on.

“In here,” she said.

Wanda wiped her eyes on her towel and led us into the bedroom. She grabbed a red button-up blouse from the bed and put it on. I was about to ask again what the problem was, but when her fingers got to the fourth button, the blouse came away with a tear. In the blink of an eye, it flipped down her torso as if pulled by invisible hands, and remade itself into a frilly petticoat of the same bold red. The room was littered with crumpled petticoats of every color. I picked up a sheer black number off the floor, wondering what it might have been.

She snatched it out of my hand. “Do you mind?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m trying to get an idea of what happened here.”

The dragon had picked up a white one and was sniffing it. “It’s been transmogrified.”

“You think, Einstein?” Wanda and I said simultaneously.

The dragon eyed us.

“What’s wrong with him?” Wanda whispered to me.

“He’s confused. You can tell the way the bridge of his nose wrinkles.”

She laughed through the last of her tears, and I couldn’t help smiling back at her.

“Are you two about to mate?”

“Eww.” Wanda crinkled her own nose.

“Well, thank you for that,” I said to both of them.

The dragon ignored us and went back to sniffing petticoats and muttering to himself about what could have gone wrong. Wanda busied herself folding each one and stacking them on a chair. She still held the towel in front of her, but as she leaned down to pick up another transmogrified shirt, it fell open and revealed a cute little mole in the center of her back above some faint scratch marks.

“Wanda, I don’t want to sound weird—”

“Too late,” the dragon remarked.

I ignored him. “Do you mind if I check your back. I think I have an idea about how the genius did this.”

She looked like she might say no, but then she shrugged and pulled her hair forward over her shoulder.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Perhaps you’d like to stop leaking pheromones and tell me what you are doing?” the dragon said.

The lines were pale, but there it was, the word petticoat in the dragon’s horrid handwriting. I pointed to show him what I found. “Right here. You basically carved the word into her back with your claw.”

“Oh,” he said.

“That’s it? ‘Oh?’” I said.

“Well, it’s rather excellent, actually. I didn’t know I could endow a spell onto an object in your language. This opens up all sorts of opportunities.”

“Can you turn our thirty-two-inch TV into a sixty-inch?” I asked as my interest piqued.

“Well, no,” he conceded, “but I can turn Mrs. Maple’s cat into a hairless wonder.”

“Don’t mess with the cat.”

“Hello!” Wanda glared at the two of us over her shoulder. “How are you going to fix this?”

The dragon rubbed a finger under his chin and shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.

Wanda spun towards him, but he was oblivious to all the signs of a woman who was about to level everything around her. That hex was coming soon.

“Well, perhaps we could remove it,” the dragon mused.

“With what?” I asked.

“Wanda, do you have a cheese grater?” he asked her.

“No, you idiot!” she screamed.

“Well, there’s no need to be insulting. I thought almost everybody had one in their kitchen. Hang on. I’ll go get ours.”

“No! I meant you are not using a cheese grater on me.” She turned to me. “Is he always this dense?”

“Yes.”

She turned and picked out a white bottle from a row of neatly arranged concoctions on her dresser. “Try this.”

The dragon went to take it from her, but she pulled away. “Not you,” she said, and pushed it into my hands instead. “If you think you can handle it?”

“This isn’t one of your potions, is it? Should I be wearing gloves or something?”

The last shreds of her already frayed patience threatened to completely unravel. “It’s just moisturizer.”

I squirted a dab into my palm and rubbed the lotion across the scratches on her back. “There, try that.

Wanda pulled one of the three remaining blouses off a hanger in her closet and slipped it on with her eyes shut. She began to button it up, slowly at first, and then as fast as her fingers would allow, almost unbelieving when she made it all the way to the top.

“Oh God. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I said.

“Now,” Wanda said to my roommate, “what are you going to do about my ruined wardrobe?”

The scales on the dragon’s snout wrinkled again. “Well, I suppose I could try turning them back into whatever they might have been. What was this one?” the dragon said, holding up a pale yellow petticoat.

“It was my favorite T-shirt.”

He laid it out on the bed and traced out some letters while chanting and making a few gestures with his other claw. What a crock.

It turned itself inside out, revealing a pale yellow t-shirt with a brown blotch on the front.

“Was it like that before?” he asked.

“No!” she screamed.

He glanced at me. “T-e-a shirt?”

Wanda snatched it out of his hand and headed out of the room. “Never mind, I’ll throw it in the laundry.”

Once she was gone, he gave me a wink. “That was for you. I think fixing this could take a couple of nights. Maybe you could offer to buy her dinner?” He grinned, horribly, showing me all of his teeth, and then held up a claw for a high five.