As Amber, the group’s designated human, took the paper that now contained Maddie under her arm, the rest of the girls split up, each one wanting to explore a different corner of the impromptu carnival that surrounded them. Well, except for Hwan. She was getting the sense that simply being out here was dangerous, that you were liable to get some sort of change that might never be reversed if you so much as bumped into someone. And while she was preoccupied with that thought, she bumped into someone.
Hwan immediately began to apologize, before looking up and realizing that what she had run into was a life-sized figure carved out of wood. That threw her for a moment, until the figure turned around.
“Sorry about that,” it said. “I don’t have eyes in the back of my head.” Hwan, not wanting to provoke this stranger into doing anything to her, didn’t respond right away.
“I know what you’re asking,” he continued, “who am I?” (Hwan was confused - she didn’t ask anything like that... did she?) “Well, you don’t need to know my real name. But I ate the Pinocchio Fruit, so I guess you can call me Pinocchio.” Then he added in a low voice, “As long as you remember that the original character of Pinocchio is from a public-domain folk tale, and that I have nothing to do with any other version of the story.”
Still fearing the worst, Hwan was disarmed by his ease of conversation and mustered up enough courage to reply. “If you’re Pinocchio, why doesn’t your nose grow?” Indeed, the man had a rather small, button-shaped nose, which barely extended off his wooden face.
“That’s because I can never tell a lie,” he responded, with a bright smile and a distinctly mischievous look in his eyes. “Here, let me show you what I mean. I can see from your ears and that tail that you must be some sort of fox. That must explain why your nose has grown so much.”
Hwan was about to point out that she didn’t even have a nose anymore, as her inflated face had been flattened into a design painted on her skin. But she suddenly felt a sharp pressure that seemed to be pushing its way out of her head. In a few moments, she found herself staring, cross-eyed, at an orange snout that had invaded her vision. It looked quite a bit like the one that her mother now sported, except for the shiny sheen of its plastic surface.
Hwan had no time to protest before Pinocchio carried on. “Of course, those weren’t the only things that gave it away that you were a fox. I mean, I could hardly understand what you were saying earlier. It sounded like a bunch of yipping to me!”
Hwan wasn’t going to take any more of this. She couldn’t let her body get even more mixed up than it already was! If her friends wanted to get all these ridiculous, probably permanent changes, that was up to them, but it wasn’t what Hwan wanted at all. She needed to give this Pinocchio guy a piece of her mind. “Yip,” she told him forcefully, then raised her hand to her mouth. That wasn’t what she meant to say. “Yip,” she tried again, and that was all that came out.
“And just look at those paws of yours!”, the man went on. “You must have an awfully hard time trying to work with those things.”
Hwan tried not to look down at her hands. If this guy can manipulate her body just by talking about it, maybe she could thwart him by refusing to acknowledge it. But it wasn’t just her upper limbs that he had in mind. Hwan soon found herself struggling to stand upright, and at that point she had to look down at herself. Her legs were now shaped like those of a fox all the way up to the knee, and she had no idea how to walk on them.
“Oh, don’t over-exert yourself, girl,” Pinocchio said as he watched Hwan stumble. “I can see that you’re clearly meant to walk on four legs, not two. It would be a lot easier for you if you just accepted that.”
And with that, Hwan tripped over her unfamiliar feet and landed on all fours. When she tried to push herself up, she couldn’t. She was just standing now, and it felt natural enough, but she had to crane her neck to stare up at the wooden man rather than looking him straight in the eye.
“But I can tell you’re not just a fox,” Pinocchio said. “No, you’re synthetic, like me. A little plaything, aren’t you? Yes, I understand now. You must be a stuffed animal.”
Hwan tried to protest again, but all that came out was another “yip”. This time, though, it had a distinctly higher pitch. “Yip?”, she said again, and it sounded even higher than before. “Yip!”, she cried out once again, but not because she was still testing out the sound of it. She had just realized how much taller Pinocchio looked as he stood over her, looming like a giant that was many times her size.
So did the other people who passed by, seeming not to notice that anything was happening as she shrank. Hwan thought that was both disheartening - no one was likely to help her out here - and strange. Most of the people who came here for spring break were transformation enthusiasts who loved to watch other people getting changed almost as much as they loved being changed themselves. Did they really think that nothing was happening? That she had been a little plush toy even before she ran into this man? Was it possible that his words were not only reshaping her body, but rewriting reality itself?
“Well, it’s been nice to meet you, little foxy,” Pinocchio said, “but I have to get going now.” Then he started to walk away, his clog-like feet making a hollow clunk against the equally wooden surface of the boardwalk with each step.
Hwan started to run after him. She felt as if she was moving with incredible speed as she ran along on all fours, the soft but solid contents of her plushy paws hitting the ground very differently than the air-filled feet she was used to. But for as fast as she seemed to be going on her little legs, Hwan wasn’t even close to keeping up with the man’s casual stride as he walked away.
Finally, she lost sight of the man who had changed her, watching him disappear behind a forest of enormous legs. She had to wonder if he even realized what he had just done, or if he really believed that everything he said was true and always had been. She stopped running down the boardwalk, only to find herself standing below a carnival game booth, covered in prizes - stuffed animals which looked a lot like her! She had to get away from here, find her friends, and hope that they remembered her as she normally was. Otherwise, she might be carried off in some kid’s loving arms...