"How about stripes?" Joy said with a smirk. The audience chuckled. Lupo didn't look amused, though.
"Stripes? I don't know of any goat that has stripes," Lupo said flatly, shaken out of his groove.
"But tigers do, and they're a lot cooler."
"Joy, what are you doing?" Julie rasped to her sister. Her head felt weird.
The showman's sleek veneer was starting to crack. He gritted his teeth inside his closed mouth and looked over to Julie with impatient concern. Julie suddenly coughed. Then outright gagged. She threw her hands over her mouth and with one more cough, out came the Capricorn card.
"What?" Joy blurted out.
The sight shocked the audience back into clapping. As if sensing the turn of the mood, Lupo went from annoyed to enthusiastic in the blink of an eye. "Ah, and there we are! Thank you for keeping that safe for me, Julie." He trotted back over to her and plucked the card out of her hands. "Now, let's forget about goats." He tore the card in half, flicked his wrists, and the pieces vanished. "Your sister says you're a tiger."
"Um...did she?" Julie blinked. She was less sure about what was happening than ever. Being onstage was nerve-racking, and now she'd somehow spit out a playing card.
"Well, not in so many words, but she will." He smiled broadly. It made Julie shiver. She flinched as his arm suddenly whipped by her and pointed his wand at the array of overhead lights. "I'm afraid I left my Chinese zodiac cards in my other coat, so we'll have to improvise!"
A beam shot out of the wand and all the lights went out, except for the spotlight on Julie, which simply blinked with a loud "chunk". Its color changed. It was a little cooler. Julie lifted a hand and peered through it to see the light, wondering why.
Joy looked up at the light and back at Julie, a few times. That was really convenient, she thought. Lupo had one of the lights up there set to shine an array of horizontal stripes at his command. They were uneven and jagged, just like a tiger's stripes, and played across Julie's body. But the color was totally wrong. They were white and blue. There was distortion from the angle of the light, and they didn't move along with Julie, who was fidgeting nervously, so the effect was hardly realistic.
Just outside of the spotlight's radius, a hard-to-see Lupo thrust his arms toward Julie, palms out. "Take a good look, folks! You too, Joy, though I see you're well ahead of me. Now Julie has the stripes you so adamantly requested."
"But tigers aren't blue," Joy mumbled.
Rather than looking annoyed again, Lupo seemed ready for her resistance this time. "A-ha! But observe! Keep your eyes on your dear sister..." His wand lit up again and the stage lights came back on.
Joy blinked and rubbed her eyes. Julie looked down at herself. Nothing had changed. "Her" stripes were gone. She turned to Lupo, but he was focused on Joy. The audience wasn't, though. They were looking at her, gasping as they squinted and blinked. Some of their mouths dropped open.
"Joy," Lupo said enticingly. "Please tell us what you see on your sister."
Joy blinked hard and leaned forward, peering at Julie. "I see... I see stripes! Orange and black ones!"
Julie cocked her head down again and lifted her arms. Her hands were their regular color. She rolled up a sleeve. So was her arm. "I look the same," she said to Joy. "You must be seeing the burn of the afterimage in your eyes."
"Are you, Joy?" Lupo said with a strange, unspoken but detectable insistence toward one particular answer to his question. "Or is your sister indeed covered in a tiger's stripes?"
Joy shook her head, blinking again. She walked closer, squinting. "She... really has stripes." She wanted to believe it was an optical illusion, but the stripes seemed to dance across Julie's form. They wrapped around her naturally. They moved with her.
"No I don't!" Julie said, holding up her arm. "Look!"
"Julie, I think you'll have to take your sister's word for it," Lupo said with a smile. "Is Joy right, folks? What's all over Julie's skin?"
The roar was surprising for such a small crowd. "Stripes!"
"You really have stripes," Joy said warily. "Can't you see them? They're all over."
Julie suddenly felt her arm itch. She gasped as the feeling spread to the rest of her body. Her skin crawled. "Wh...what's happening?!" She scratched at her shirt and jeans. Then she glanced at her bare arm again and her blood ran cold. It was covered in fur. Orange and black-striped fur. Just like a tiger. The hairs covered her hands. She turned them around to see white fur covering her palms and fingertips. They were still human hands, but they were covered in thick, soft fur.
"Oh god..." Her cheeks itched. She put her hands on her face and realized fur was growing there as well. Fur was growing everywhere.
She was so alarmed she didn't hear the crowd cheering, or Lupo thanking them profusely. He was at the front of the stage now, bowing. Joy put a hand on Julie's shoulder. "Hey. HEY." Julie finally snapped out of it and looked into her sister's eyes.
"Could you tell how he did that?" Joy asked. "The spotlight only blinked off for a split second. Did a bunch of stagehands rush up and glue this on you?" Julie opened her mouth, but was so flabbergasted she couldn't find her voice. Was Joy that oblivious?
Julie's skin prickled as Joy rubbed her hand down her furry arm. "It's incredible! It's really stuck on you. It looks so real."
"But...but it's not. Until just now, I had bare skin. You were seeing something that wasn't there."
"Well, it's here now." A skeptic no longer, Joy's voice was steady and confident. "Real tiger fur."
Julie shivered again as the roots of the fur seemed to sink deeper into her skin. She looked at her arm. Then Joy. Then Lupo. Then the exit.