Carlton wiped the oily grease from his calloused hands on an already filthy cloth, sighing contentedly as he stretched his aching back. He’d spent the last good long while lying underneath an old fashioned automobile in the mechanic shop where he worked, and it showed. What parts of his mechanic jumpsuit uniform weren’t dirty were scratched or scuffed in other ways.
“I think we’re finished, sir,” Carlton called over to the elderly man who had been waiting at the edge of the garage.
The older man, wearing clothes so old fashioned they looked like they’d have been out of date even when he was young, grumbled and stormed over to Carlton. His cane click-clacked on the garage’s grimy floor, the coattails of his impressive cloak blowing in a wind that didn’t seem to affect anything else nearby.
“It’s about time,” the elderly man snapped in a thick accent that Carlton couldn’t quite place. “I’ve been waiting for nearly an hour.”
“Sorry about that, sir,” Carlton apologized, resisting the urge to roll his eyes, stopping himself from saying back that he’d been doing all the work while the old man just stood there. “Your vehicle is older than most models we see, so we had to do a bit of guesswork when fixing it. Even the shop’s senior mechanic hasn’t seen a lot of the parts in your car, so we had to improvise.”
“It better work as good as the day it was spelled,” the old man grumbled, prompting Carlton to raise an eyebrow. “How much?”
Carlton told him the fee, explaining the extra costs of the unusual nature of this fix-up job. The older man looked aghast at first, and then furious.
“This is an outrage!” the man growled. “With how long you took, I should be getting this for free!”
“Would you like to speak to the head mechanic?” Carlton asked with a sigh. Unfortunately, such behavior was nothing new to him.
“How about I punish you for your insolence instead and be on my way, boy?” the older man cackled with a sneer. “What sort of automobile do you drive?”
“Is that a threat, sir?” Carlton asked.
“Not in any way you could understand,” the man chuckled, his eyes briefly glazing over as a wave of dizziness momentarily swept through Carlton’s mind, almost causing him to stumble. “You drive an outdated jalopy, but you’ve always dreamed of driving a fancy sports car, preferably with a model lounging across the hood, I see. Why don’t I fiddle with your fantasy a bit?”
“What?” Carlton asked, suddenly feeling a little nauseous. “How did you know that?”
The old man mumbled something under his breath and strode past Carlton, brushing past him and sending an odd, tingling warmth through him in the process. The warmth sent sensations racing through Carlton’s mind, memories of warming up with his car’s heater during a winter drive, or of the warmth of the seat on a hot summer’s day. Thoughts of the scent of oil and gasoline and the rumbling heat of an engine made Carlton’s body feel uncomfortably hot.
All at once, a wracking sensation shot through Carlton like a bolt of electricity.
Large sections of Carlton’s skin hardened and deepened in hue to a metallic, crimson sheen, becoming smooth and sturdy to the touch. At the same time, though, his overall frame shrank down a bit, losing several inches in height and much more so in girth. Carlton’s joints and ligaments restructured themselves and transmuted into configurations that were far more mechanical than organic, pistons forming out of muscle tissue, veins becoming pipes for fuel or wires for electricity, and bones becoming a very sturdy metal chassis.
Parts of Carlton remained soft, such as the palms of his hands, though they also transmuted into something inorganic, looking more like the padded leather of car seats than human flesh. With a groan of metal, his waist caved inwards, stomach, heart, and other vital organs painlessly melting into one another and reworking themselves into a compact engine and fuel tank.
The engine revved, sending a rumble through Carlton’s still changing body. He tried to scream, but what escaped his suddenly fuller, metallic lips sounded more like a car horn than a human voice.
Carlton’s face became a series of smooth metal plates sliding over one another to give the impression of moving facial expressions, his eyes disappearing behind a windshield-like visor. Whatever was left of his hair blossomed out in lengthening cascades of silver tresses, soft to the touch but sturdy like viscous, cool liquid metal.
Several exhaust pipes sprouted out of his back. The excess mass from his thinned waist was pushed downwards to significantly widen Carlton’s hips and fill out his rear with the impression of two rounded, womanly cheeks. Flashing blinker lights grew out from the upper side of each cheek, racing stripes appearing from beneath his robotic arms and traveling down his slender sides to disappear at his hips. Even a miniature spoiler sprouted just above his large rump.
All of these bodily changes shredded through Carlton’s mechanic jumpsuit, leaving him bare.
Carlton’s thighs also grew much larger, fuller, and thicker, more of the soft, seat cushion-like material forming out of his inner thighs and lower stomach. His male sex was coated in silvery metal and sucked lower and back up inside of him, forming a soft pair of feminine lips with the words ‘Insert Key Here’ emblazoned just above them.
Carlton’s feet melted away entirely as four small tires appeared and inflated in their place, two on either side of the tips of his legs. He wobbled uncertainly, but at last maintained balance.
Finally, the hood-like compartment that had formed over whatever had become of Carlton's pectoral muscles opened up in two sections, sliding to either side and revealing more soft, cushioned inorganic material beneath.
Carlton’s internal engine revved once more, sending an oddly pleasurable warmth shuddering through him, as two mounds of the soft cushion-stuff rapidly inflated on his torso. They grew larger and larger, ballooning out with full, soft material, until the two imitations of breasts hung heavily from Carlton’s chest, each larger than his head.
New information flooded into Carlton’s mind. A GPS image appeared in the lower left corner of his vision, as well as a fuel gauge. He suddenly learned he had an onboard radio, as well as his max speeds and the type of fuel he would need to run best.
Carlton tried to speak again, to gasp or scream once more, but again, all that came out of his lips was the sound of a car horn.
More information was still flowing into Carlton’s mind, and he realized it was changing his very thoughts, his being, as it did so. He tried to fight back, but the changes happened all the same.
“Your new name is Carla,” the new information told him. “You think of yourself as female, and you love to have sex, either with human men or by wiring yourself up to other cars.”
“No, that’s not true!” Carla tried to force herself to think in response, but she realized too late that she was already thinking of herself with her new name and feminine pronouns.
She glanced at the other cars in the shop, as well as the mechanics working on them. Somehow, none of them seemed alarmed by her sudden transformation, much less that the elderly man and his odd old car also seemed to have disappeared. The sight of the other cars sent that same pleasant warmth rumbling through her, her new sex feeling oddly hungry, desiring intensely to be filled by a man’s dick or another car’s cables.
“No, I don’t want… Stop it!” Carla whimpered in her mind, but she was already rolling on her wheels towards a large pickup truck, running her hands along it and getting a jolt of pleasure as she did so.
Somewhere in the space between spaces just outside the mechanic shop, the older wizard laughed madly at his latest curse as he drove away in his dimension-hopping automobile. He’d never realized changing people into the opposite sex but as an anthropomorphic object could be so fun. He was already thinking of other similar curses to try.