Morning comes gently. You take your time waking up, not wanting to have to face another day in this house. You had just had a dream of your old life, going to work and chatting with friends. Those days feel like a million years ago. What are your friends doing now, you wonder? Have they realized you're missing yet? Are they searching for you? Will they find this place? You rather hoped they wouldn't. It would probably trap them just as easily as it trapped you, and not even on your worst enemy would you wish this kind of existence.
You pull yourself out of bed, feeling refreshed just like the day before. No sore muscles, no aches, and even the bruise from your trip on the staircase was gone.
You glance around the room and see it exactly the same as ever. You remove the towel from your hair, letting it fall in waves and pile up on the bed. A chilly draft blows briefly and you sigh. You know what's coming next.
You open the closet door, hoping that this house will grant you some dignity, some leniency. Your eyes fall upon a familiar dress. It is now completely cleaned up and back on its hangar, exactly as it was yesterday. Although...not quite. It takes you a minute, but you figure out what's different. It looks a little smaller, the puffy shoulders are gone, and the skirt portion is longer. Vertical lines now feature throughout the design, beginning on the bodice and travelling down to the skirt's hem. The frills at the hem are gone, now just a simple white border. The same border is found along the top of the bodice, with white crisscross lace running down the center. It stops around the waistline, where the skirt begins to billow out at its forty-degree angle.
The whole ensemble flows softly, seeming almost to float when the air catches it. Maybe it's not the same dress, but it might as well be. You're stuck for another day wearing this gothic getup you never wished for.
But why was it smaller? Did the house accidentally shrink it in the wash? You pull it off the hangar, unconsciously rising to your dainty toes to reach it, and hold it up to your body. Oddly, it looks like it'll fit you just as well as yesterday. Then you come to a realization.
You look down at your chest and see not the supple breasts of yesterday, but a pair of modest B-cups. When you walk up to the wall mirror, you can see that you've shrunk in size again. You're more than a few inches shorter, and your figure is a little less curvy, though quite lissome. Your hair's magnificent locks have shortened along with your body and are no longer dragging on the ground. Now they're tickling your ankles.
You tried to ignore the depression welling inside you once again. You still had a lot of work to do if you were going to get out of this house and through that maze, no matter what form you took. You threw the dress on the bed and gathered the other accessories from the closet. Noticing that they too had altered.
The socks and gloves had lost their stripes becoming uniformly white in color. The fingers of the gloves had closed up, looking more like ivory opera gloves now than gothic arm warmers.
Looking at the shoes, you see they are a far cry from the platform boots of the day before. A cute, black leather pair of Mary Janes sit before you. A single wide black strap crosses over the tops, leading to a silver buckle. White thread stitching joins the somewhat thick soles to the shoes' bodies. Picking them up, you notice they feel heavier than you'd expect, which was saying a lot considering how much of a drag those big boots were on your feet yesterday.
You slip on the pure white stockings and gloves, then the dress. The bodice tightens more firmly around your smaller chest now and actually covers your breasts more than the first dress, leaving far less cleavage in sight. Your black lips form a grimace as you lament the slight loss of your chest.
The skirt definitely got longer overnight. Its hem is now dangling just below your knees. Because of its longer length, it puffed out more toward the bottom as well.
After putting on the plain black collar, you pause to make sure you didn't just miss a bra and underwear in the closet. Your exposed slit hasn't stopped feeling needy since yesterday, and you were really starting to despise that small corner of your brain that continuously sent you signals of pleasure from the titillated region.
You pause as you notice a bit of black fabric sticking over the edge of the shelf above the hanger your new dress was on. You reach up on tiptoes but it sits frustratingly out of reach of your slim fingers. With a soft huff you jump, the tips of your fingers just reaching the object and gripping it tightly. You land with a quiet "oof" and look at what you found. A pang of annoyance lances through you as you fail to find the underwear you were hoping for; you'll be going commando again it seems.
In your hands is a black beret, made of a similar material as your dress. Sighing, you figure you might as well continue wearing the full set. You put it on, carefully arranging your bangs beforehand to ensure they won't get in your face.
Turning to the shoes, you slip your feet into the Mary Janes and buckle them up, flexing your toes softly. They seem comfortable enough. You head to the study, where you find a ruler in a drawer of the desk. Sure enough, the soles only add one and half inches of height. That barely even begins to make up for all the height you lost overnight, leaving your stance at around five foot one. Is the trade-off worth it, you wonder, if you could now better keep your balance than in those boots, but at a reduced height?
Your stomach suddenly growls insistently, pulling your attention away from the new ensemble. You decide you've had your fill of the black apples, and you leave the study, trying to locate the kitchen.