Jeff's vision of the new world began to shimmer around him, dissolving into ripples like a TV sitcom transitioning into an imaginary scene; the only thing missing was a harp glissando. However, the feelings were anything but imaginary - as the world blurred and then re-focused around him, Jeff found the entire physical experience of being Jeff slipping away, replaced by something else entirely.
It was almost too much for his mind to handle, and he found himself almost disassociating from his own body, feeling like his consciousness was watching events unfold at some unspecified remove from it. He had a mental image of his soul trailing behind his body like a balloon, tethered to it by only the merest thread. It was several minutes before the feeling passed and he found himself fully conscious and aware in his new surroundings.
Jeff's room had vanished entirely, replaced by what looked to be some kind of workshop. Judging by the bare rafters and plain unfinished floorboards, this was an attic someplace, but it was at least an attic with open windows and sunlight filtering in. Long worktables held bolts of cloth, scissors, needles, and thread, among other things. Was this place for making clothes or something?
By this point, Jeff was becoming more clearly aware of the new set of sensations that his apparently changed body brought with it. Everything felt lighter, somehow - it felt like there was only empty space where much of his body mass should've been. In fact, that was exactly what it felt like - like his entire body was hollow. His sense of balance and proprioception reflected a body that was weighted much differently - not just from being hollow, either, the shape was somewhat different as well. His hips felt somewhat broader and his chest seemed puffed out in an unusual way. He could also feel a head of long, heavy hair hanging down his back.
What was stranger still, though, was the way his joints felt. It was almost as if his entire body was stiff, except that it didn't feel like stiff joints and muscles normally felt, where it was difficult and painful to move them. After all, he could turn his head and look around just fine. Rather, it was like his body's natural resting state was different - instead of falling to the floor when he let everything relax, his limbs simply returned to a natural resting position that held him standing up in a fixed pose.
And stranger than that, he realized, was the fact that he wasn't breathing - that, in fact, he didn't even seem to have any apparatus with which to breathe.
Jeff had been growing increasingly unsettled as one realization followed another, and this was simply too much to take lying down (or, apparently, standing up.) He had to know what had happened to him. He turned to look around the room, finding that while his joints gave some initial resistance to leaving their resting position, he was able to move freely. Sure enough, this being apparently some kind of tailor's workshop, there was a full-length mirror not five feet away, which he'd simply been facing away from. And it was in that that he made the really shocking discovery.
What was reflected in the mirror was not Jeff, not even some kind of fantasy-world counterpart to Jeff. It was a figure in the shape of a young woman, naked, somewhat petite but not overly tiny, with a modest figure and long brown hair. However, she was not a human being; she looked like one, broadly, but not entirely. The hair was a little too thin and springy; the texture of the skin a little too uniform, the eyes a little too glassy. Most obviously, though, she was clearly constructed out of multiple separate pieces, with visible (though subtle) joints between her body and the different parts of her limbs. Essentially, she resembled nothing so much as an unusually lifelike and highly articulated doll or mannequin.
For a long time, Jeff merely stared at the creature in the mirror, hardly able to process what he was seeing. Absorbed in the moment, he ceased concentrating on moving, and found his limbs - and the limbs of the mannequin in the mirror - returning to a resting state that had her perpetually dipped halfway into a curtsy, clutching at skirts she wasn't actually wearing at the moment. Watching this, and feeling it, made it all too undeniably clear - he was her.
She stepped closer to the mirror, consciously holding herself in a more neutral pose as she inspected herself more closely. Her eyes were, indeed, glass - enormous milky-white marbles with big lightly-swirled blue circles in them that suggested iris and pupil just enough to not come off as too creepy, but not with any finer detail. She looked down at her arm; the "skin" was featureless, but roughly the right color. The texture was smoother and finer-grained than the real thing, but not glossy. She pressed a finger into the forearm; there was no give. Curious, she rapped her knuckle against it; it was dense and hard, like Bakelite. She wondered if that was the "skin," or if there was some harder material underneath.
Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed that her motions were causing some bobbing and jiggling in the modest breasts that rose from her chest. Curious, she raised a hand to one and gently felt at it. This, unlike her arm, was soft and spongy - not like flesh, but like some kind of pliable foam rubber with the same "skin" surface as the harder parts. She supposed that this might be necessary in order to fit, say, underwear correctly. She looked back up at the mirror to find that her mouth had dropped open - apparently at least part of her face was similarly flexible. She wondered what on earth the purpose of such a creation even was.
And then she knew. Having set the parameters for a partial mental adjustment, she found knowledge springing into her mind that hadn't been there before. As she might've guessed from the context, she was intended as, essentially, a glorified dressmaker's dummy - not merely fully articulated and posable, but one that could respond to commands while the tailor observed their creation from multiple angles. She was, then, a magically-animated construct made out of a very finely-crafted mannequin, lifelike enough to fit clothes realistically, but not enough to be indistinguishable from a human being. Her owner (she balked somewhat at the concept, but another part of her found it quite normal) was fairly well-regarded in the business, at least locally, and had received her from a travelling sorceress as payment for a commission, and referred to her as "Gina."
As she was observing herself and pondering this, Gina heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Mildly alarmed at the prospect of being caught like this, for reasons she didn't quite understand, she lapsed back into her resting pose, clutching at an imaginary skirt and bowing her head just slightly to the girl in the mirror. As the footsteps drew closer, she wondered why she did this, but to part of her mind it made sense. After all, a mannequin standing in place with no clothes on was just a mannequin that someone hadn't dressed, but a construct in the shape of a person moving about was too much like a person to be seen running around naked, right?
The footsteps reached the top of the stairs and the door that led into the attic workshop opened, and a woman in probably her mid-to-late thirties entered. She was on the shorter side (if not quite as small as Gina,) freckled, bespectacled, and somewhat frumpier than a leading designer of clothing might've been expected to be. It wasn't that her clothes didn't look nice, but they were in the same state of light muss as her wavy auburn hair. Overall, she had the air of someone who would probably clean up very nicely if she could ever tear herself away from her work long enough to bother.
She set down an armful of miscellaneous materials on one of the tables, shut the door behind her, and made her way over to Gina, smiling gently. She took the mannequin by the wrists and began to adjust her pose, nodding to herself as she tweaked this and that finger or shifted her hips just so. "You've been up and around again, haven't you?" she said teasingly. "I know I didn't leave you facing the mirror last night. Admiring yourself?"
Gina said nothing, unsure how to answer. Her owner chuckled softly as she canted the mannequin's shoulders to one side. "I really don't mind, you know," she said. "As long as you don't cause trouble in the workshop, that is. There's no reason you should have to spend all night just standing in place if you want to do something else."
She smiled, stepping back to assess her work. Gina found, oddly enough, that she wasn't lapsing back into the curtsy; apparently her resting pose was whatever she'd been arranged into last. Her owner nodded with satisfaction. "Really, you are getting more and more like a person these days. I suppose that's what they say about constructs; you've been working with me long enough that I guess my own willfulness is starting to rub off on you. Maybe one day you can help me run the shop, hm? I've already been thinking of having you come down to model..."
The part of Gina that was Jeff was somewhat astonished. Here she had been transmigrated into the body of this construct, and her owner was under the impression that her displaying human characteristics was more some kind of imprinting? She almost wanted to protest that she was a person, but she didn't know how her owner would react...