Amber was going to keep a safe distance from the boardwalk this weekend. She had planned the trip, done the research, and booked the tickets. And if she had gleaned one thing from all of that work, it was that the city's famous boardwalk had recently become known as transformation central. It was not a safe place for anyone who wanted to come away from their vacation unscathed - everyone assumed that if you were down there, you knew what you were getting yourself into and it was fair game. There were plenty of one-star reviews from people who very much did not know what they were getting into to illustrate that point. Amber hoped her friends were doing alright, though. And not just because she was the one who'd have to go looking for them if they couldn't get back to the hotel on their own.
But Panama City Beach was still a popular tourist destination, and not all of those tourists were looking to get themselves changed - even if most of them were at least a little curious. And there were plenty of things for them to do while they were here, even if they'd been relegated to areas that were a little off the beaten path.
So Amber was walking down a quieter street, out of sight of the ocean, when she noticed that people were starting to form a little bit of a crowd in a local park. Somebody had scrawled "MAGIC SHOW" on the sidewalk in chalk, with a big arrow pointing directly to the bandstand. Amber found it a little funny to see them using that term. She wondered how the old kind of magicians were doing these days. All that sleight of hand didn't seem quite so impressive anymore when it had to compete against real magic. (Or maybe it was some exotic new type of science - nobody really understood how it all worked.)
Amber had learned a lot about herself in the past few whirlwind weeks. She'd never thought of transformations as something that would appeal to her before she started getting to know Hwan's new friends. But she immediately realized her interest was quite different than theirs. Most people her age were experimenting with whatever changes they could get done to themselves, but Amber was content - sometimes even excited - to just sit back and watch it happen to other people. She soon learned she wasn't alone. There was a growing community of "spectators" who felt the same way, who sought out TF hotspots like this one and then stood back at a safe distance. And as the crowd started to form all around her, she was starting to suspect that this was the kind of event that was designed for exactly her type of people.
Amber's timing was perfect - it seemed that the show had just begun. A man with a ridiculous, cheap-looking top hat was on the stage. His loud, booming voice could easily be heard well beyond the range of the small crowd, and Amber started to pay attention to what he was saying now. "... that's right! You know the rules! Y'all've seen the TikToks! It's time to play everybody's favorite game - Real! Or! Cake?!" He shouted out each word like he was expecting the whole audience to chant along with him, and he didn't seem deterred by the fact that nobody was joining in. "Now, do I have a volunteer who'd like to come up and help me get this show started?"
Just as Amber expected, most of the crowd looked like they were trying to lay low at this crucial moment. She could see it in their shifty eyes, almost leering, all watching the people around them to see who would make the first move. But there were a few who didn't have that look on their faces, who seemed perhaps even blissfully unaware of what was surely about to happen. They could easily be distinguished from the rest by their raised hands, waving to try to get the attention of the magician on the stage.
The man in the top hat picked a waving arm out of the crowd. The woman quickly ran up and joined him atop the stand. She smiled and stared a little nervously back at the crowd she'd just emerged from, clearly given to some stage fright.
"Well! Thank you for volunteering to be our assistant today," said the man. "And may I say, you are a lovely assistant. Would you tell us your name?"
"Suzanne!", the woman answered, with a breathless energy fitting for a game show contestant.
"Welcome to the show, Suzanne. I was about to ask you to go and fetch our first prop, but it looks like you've already brought it out for us!" He reached over and grabbed Suzanne's purse. It was firmly in his hand before she had a chance to react.
"Hey, wait! You can't just take that. That's my purse!"
"Is this really your purse?", the man asked, mostly toward the audience, with a dramatic flair. "It looks like it might be a cake to me." He held the purse out, showing it off to the crowd. "What do y'all think?"
The crowd let out a cacophony of responses, but most of them seemed to be some variation on the word "CAKE!"
The magician nodded. "Let's find out." He put the purse down on a long table in front of him with one hand, and suddenly revealed that the other was holding a large butcher's knife. In fact, Amber noticed, the knife was the only thing sticking out from the sleeve of his well-tailored suit - there was no sign of a hand holding it underneath.
Suzanne winced as she watched the man bring his knife straight down onto her purse. But she breathed a sigh of relief when she saw it cut through the fabric effortlessly to reveal cake filling inside. "Right, I forgot," she giggled. "Magic. But I will get my real purse back, right?", she asked innocently.
Amber was surprised to see that this woman apparently didn't know what she was dealing with. Fruits and their users seemed to be everywhere these days, she thought. Why wasn't Suzanne catching on? But Amber had to remember that, up until a few weeks ago, she would have been equally clueless. Most people, unless they were TF enthusiasts, were unlikely to encounter one themselves and were only dimly aware of what they were capable of.
The magician smiled broadly as he answered Suzanne's question. "You'll be reunited with all your belongings just after the show, I assure you."
"Can I at least have my phone back?", Suzanne asked tentatively?
"Of course," the man replied, and he stuck his one visible hand behind the woman's head. A second later, he pulled out a smartphone from right in between Suzanne's ears, and he motioned as if to give it to her. But when she was about to take it, he snatched it back. "Hold on a second," he said. "I think I mighta grabbed the wrong thing. I don't know... this looks an awful lot like a cake to me, too. Everybody?"
Now the crowd was much quicker to respond, with shouts of "CAKE! CAKE!"
"The votes are in," said the magician. "But Suzanne, what do you think?"
"Um, that's clearly my phone," she responded - but her tone of voice suggested that she was now much more prepared to play along. "I mean, look! It just got a notification right there in your hand!"
The man's face was briefly lit up by the glow of the screen before it faded back to black. "Hmm, seems so. But there's only one way to find out for sure!" He laid the phone down on the table, right next to the halved purse-cake, and sliced through it easily with his knife. But it wasn't quite as easy to see the interior of such a thin object. So, without hesitation, he grabbed one half of the phone, raised it up to his mouth and took a bite. His eyes trained upward, and he seemed lost in thought for a moment as he chewed and swallowed. "No, this one's not a cake." The crowd burst into laughter. "It tastes more like a biscuit to me," he finished with a grin. The laughter turned into a cheer.
"You know," Suzanne ventured, "I'd ask you how you manage to swap those things out for cakes so quickly. But I guess a magician never reveals his secrets, right?"
"Certainly not," the man replied. His demeanor had suddenly gotten more serious. Had Suzanne's attempts to break the illusion offended him? "Because I don't need to. This really is magic." Then his affable smile came rushing back to his face. "But Suzanne, I really have to wonder about you. Your purse and your phone - they both turned out to be nothing more than delicious pastries. That's awfully strange, if you don't mind my saying so. Do you think... maybe... you might be a cake yourself?"
Suzanne looked nervous again, and fidgety. "N-no, of course I'm not made of cake!" She looked away from the magician and out at the crowd, but their leering, expectant faces only made her feel worse. "I mean, I-I'm standing here right now talking to you. Do I look like a cake?"
The man made a show of looking her up and down. "You're very lifelike, I'll give you that much. But looks sure can be deceiving - that's exactly what we've learned here today. Do we have a verdict from our lovely audience?"
Now the whole crowd knew exactly what to do. They easily fell into a rhythm, chanting in unison, "CAKE! CAKE! CAKE! CAKE!" Even Amber found herself joining in now.
"Looks like we've got ourselves a hung jury," the magician drawled sarcastically. "We're gonna have to settle this the hard way. Or, well, I like to think of it as the easy way. Suzanne, would you be ever so kind as to lie down on that table for me?"
Suzanne gulped. Her smile and optimism were completely gone by now. "You're really going to cut me open with that thing?"
The magician raised his knife up to the woman's face, and she flinched. "Take a good, close look at that blade there. Look at how dull it is. 'That thing' won't hurt you in the least. It won't even break the skin." He pressed the blade against his own neck for emphasis. "Unless, that is, you really are made of cake. You're not a cake, are you?"
"No," Suzanne replied forcefully. "Of course not. And you can prove it!" She wasted no time in lying down on the table, the two previous cakes bumping up against her thigh as she got into position.
"Well, all right," the man said. "Let's do this. One more time, y'all! Real! Or! Cake!" And just as the crowd repeated his words, he brought the knife down and sliced straight through her midsection, separating her legs from her torso and both her hands from her wrists in one clean motion.
Suzanne sat up with a jolt the moment she felt the blade pass through her body. She was dismayed to find that her body was completely split in half, the crumbly brown texture of a chocolate cake visible where her organs should've been spilling out. She tried to pull herself up further, but found that her arms were reduced to stubs, her hands flailing uselessly against the table's surface when she tried to move them. Her whole body now looked like a cake on the outside as well, covered from head to toe in flesh-colored frosting. And the more she struggled against the table she laid on, the more the frosting started to smudge away.
"That's our show for today, everybody," the magician announced, ignoring the frantic motions going on right in front of him. "Now, I can't possibly eat all this cake by myself, so anybody who wants can come up here and grab a slice!"
As the crowd descended on her helpless form, the cake-woman cried out. "No! I can't be a cake! Somebody, please for the love of--" A few people had started tearing away pieces of her and putting them in their mouths. "Oh my God! Ngmmmmph!" It was hard to tell whether that was a stifled cry of pain or sudden, unexpected pleasure. Probably it was both.
By the time Amber got up to the stage from the back of the audience, there wasn't much left of the woman. Certainly not enough to be recognizable as a person. She picked up what looked like a finger. It writhed and squirmed in her hand as she held it. Eating it probably wouldn't do anything to her, would it? She shrugged and tossed the chunk of cake in her mouth. Just as promised, it was delicious.