When Christine heard the sound of the zipper fastening up again, she immediately felt… different across her whole body. “Did it work?”, she asked aloud, and the audible voice that came out of her mouth gave her at least part of an answer. “Yes!”, she cried out, relieved to be human once again.
She was eager to spring up off the bed that she was lying on, but when she moved her arms underneath her and pushed against the surface underneath, nothing happened. There was no force to her push - she couldn’t even feel the bed underneath her with her hands. From her position staring up toward the ceiling, she could see Bronwyn standing over her, and the girl’s face looked more shocked than pleased - either way, she was not rushing to help or to explain what was going on.
Confused, Christine shifted her focus to her legs. They seemed to be tangled together, but at least she could actually feel them press against the bed underneath. With a heave, she could move her whole lower body toward the side of the bed and try to set her feet down on the floor. Baby steps, she thought, wondering if this new, unfamiliar, hopefully temporary body was going to force her to learn how to walk all over again.
With all the strength she could muster, she shoved her whole body off the bed, hoping to land on her feet and figure things out from there. And it worked - for a brief moment. She rose right up to a standing position, but immediately faced the problem of her uncooperative legs, which still felt like they were all tangled up into a single mass. She tried to balance herself with her arms, but that didn’t help at all. In seconds, she found herself starting to fall forward, and there was nothing she could do to stop her descent. Her face - her whole upper body - hit the floor with a rapid thump. Thankfully, somehow, it didn’t hurt at all. But she had no idea how to get up.
That was when Bronwyn, after a loud gasp and a stifled scream, finally stepped in to help. Christine could feel herself being lifted back up, then pulled into a tight, squeezing hug around the collarbone.
“Aah! I’m sorry!”, came Bronwyn’s voice - sounding muffled, like her mouth was covered by fabric. And Christine could feel the girl’s face pressed awkwardly against her back… “I wasn’t sure how to say this, but…” And then Bronwyn spun her around until she was looking at a floor-length mirror. “Look!”
Christine immediately saw that the girl was not holding a person. All that was in her hands was the same body pillow she’d been showing Christine earlier. Of course, Christine thought. She tried to wave her arm, and the arm of the anime girl printed on the pillow started to move in just the same way. “Whoa”, she said, and it came out of the cartoon’s mouth. “Is that really… me?”
Now that she had the mirror as a guide to understanding the sensations she was feeling, Christine was able to realize that in this form, she sort of had two overlapping bodies. One was the design printed on the pillowcase, which was now magically able to move around on its two-dimensional surface, but couldn’t escape the confines of that limited space. The other was the interior of the pillow itself, an undifferentiated mass of stuffing in a six-foot-long cylinder.
The anime girl’s body was easy for Christine to control, but any movement it made was purely cosmetic, and couldn’t affect the 3D world outside. And the pillow inside could actually move, but she didn’t know how to control it. She could flail her upper or lower body from side to side with all the grace of a dying fish, but making it out of the bedroom by herself seemed like it would be next to impossible. She wouldn’t even be able to keep herself upright if it wasn’t for Bronwyn, clutching her securely and holding her up to the mirror.
“So…”, Bronwyn started, after watching Christine examine her new form for a minute. “At least you can speak now, right?”
“Right”, Christine said, with a muted sense of satisfaction.
“Thank god for that”, Bronwyn replied. “I felt so terrible just… making decisions for you and hoping you’d go along with it. Now I can actually get your permission for things! Speaking of which, what do you think? I know this isn’t what either of us were hoping for, but do you want to stay in this body until tomorrow? Or would you rather try… I don’t know, something else?”