“Well, well, well,” came a familiar voice from behind Hwan, as she watched people getting into the pool. “Look who finally decided to show up!”
She had been staring, maybe a moment too long, at the party laid out before her. Hwan had to admit, she didn’t realize just how many floaties there were in town. Sure, having a Fruit user around made it easy to do it, and fairly low-risk too, but she had never seen dozens of them in one place before, and only a handful of unmodified humans milling around in between. There was no way all of these people went to her school. Some of them had to be from neighboring towns... or maybe they were too old for high school...
“You ready to hit the water?”, Natasha continued, finally getting Hwan to snap out of her thoughts and turn around.
“Yeah... I was just, uh, taking in the view,” Hwan replied, a bit lamely. “I feel a lot less special now, I guess.” She tried to keep a joking tone in her voice when she said that, so it didn’t come off as insecure as she felt.
“You kidding? Everybody here is a floatie - well, almost everybody - but nobody else has those things,” Natasha said, pointing to Hwan’s prominent plastic ears and then dropping her finger down toward the tail sticking out above her butt. “At least, not yet. You’re gonna be the center of attention tonight!”
Hwan wasn’t entirely sure if she wanted that. Sure, she’d always wanted to be popular at school, but this might be too much too fast. It was both exciting and terrifying to have so many people, transformed people who practically defined “cool” nowadays, taking notice of her one by one and clearly being interested.
She couldn’t even get to the edge of the water before she was swarmed with questions. By now, the word about the Fox Fruit had gotten out all over town, and most of the questions boiled down, with varying degrees of subtlety, to “when’s your mom gonna start giving out changes?”, which Hwan didn’t have a good answer to.
Eventually, people started to get the hint that it might be a bit of a sensitive subject and backed off, although a lot of people still wanted to know more. Was her hearing sharper? Yes, a lot, and it took some serious getting used to. Can we stroke your tail? Okay, but it doesn’t have any fur on it, so it won’t be like petting a dog or anything. Are there any side effects to mixing changes together like that? The thought hadn’t even occurred to Hwan before, and she tried not to seem too outwardly concerned about the idea.
All the while, she was getting her first experience on the water as a pool toy. It was a strange sensation to be walking on the surface of the water - she had expected it to be like solid ground, since the other floaties seemed to be treating it that way, but whenever she took a step her foot would sink right down into it. It felt more like quicksand. She soon learned there was a proper technique to it - moving slowly but steadily, sliding your feet across the surface rather than stepping onto it, was all a skill that had to be learned. Of course, the fact that any of them could jump down at any time to be partially underwater was part of the fun as well.
She was starting to get the hang of all this, both physically and socially, when the sliding French doors opened up on the patio overlooking the pool. When Brad came out, it wasn’t like everything stopped - some people were just here for the party, after all - but a lot of conversations broke off mid-sentence and a lot of floaties turned to look. He was an undeniably attractive guy, highly charismatic and self-confident too. And his eyes fell right on Hwan.
“I’ve been hearing a lot about you, and your second change,” he said as he approached her. She was frozen in his gaze, like the inanimate object she technically was, her mind consumed by one thought: “don’t fuck this up.”“That doesn’t happen every day, does it?”, he continued, not showing any impatience for Hwan’s lack of response.
“I really got lucky with that,” she blurted out as her crush came up to the edge of the water. “I had no idea it was going to happen. I didn’t even have to ask for it...”
Hwan was about to tell the whole story of what happened with her mom, but Brad, with a bit of a mischievous glint in his eye, cut her off right there. “Can I... ride you?”
All she could say was “What?” She should have been offended by such a forward question, and if it had been coming from anybody else, she would’ve been. But she felt she had to give him some leeway...
“Well, that is what a pool toy is for,” Brad said with a grin.
“Uh, I mean, yes! Totally!”, Hwan stammered out in response. Brad barely needed that invitation to make the first move, practically falling on top of her as he pushed her down onto the surface of the water. With a swift and seemingly practiced motion, he swung a leg around Hwan’s prone torso, his crotch pressed against her nozzle. People all around them were staring, some snickering and others in a jealous sort of awe. He pushed his feet against the rim of the pool, creating a ripple that knocked a few floaties onto their butts, and propelled himself and Hwan toward the middle of the water, everybody else making way for them.
Hwan was lying flat on her back, half-submerged in the water. She wanted to sit up and lean toward Brad, but soon found that she couldn’t. The weight and pressure of him on top of her was causing her air-filled body to stiffen out, and she could no longer bend at the waist. The air that was squeezed out of her torso and hips was moving into her hands and feet, all of which felt swollen and inflexible. Her head was the same way, and her face felt hot and flushed as well - she knew from seeing it on other pooltoys that she was still very capable of visibly blushing.
She wasn’t totally immobile, but now didn’t seem like the time to test exactly how much and how far she could move. She was content to just sit back and enjoy this, barely believing that it was really happening to her. This was exactly the sort of thing that the other floaties were constantly experimenting with, and after shying away from it for weeks, Hwan was now getting a taste of the strange things her new body could do.