Jeanie then made a brief gesture with her right hand, and Ms. Chan started feeling a little strange. Her students watched as she became more feminine-looking, as her facial features softened a bit and her short bob haircut grew out until her black hair cascaded halfway down her back. Her ears elongated and became pointed at the tips, and her tiny gold stud earrings expanded downward and transformed into crystal teardrops. Her shirt and jeans merged together, changed color and shrank until she was wearing a strapless green dress with a ruffled knee-length skirt, followed by her sneakers changing form to become a pair of translucent green-tinted high-heeled pumps.
Two bug-like antennae sprouted from her head, emerging from her hair, and gossamer wings emerged from her back and unfurled, rainbow-colored from the combination of the overhead fluorescent lights and the sunlight coming in from the classroom windows. Ms. Chan looked over her now-bare shoulder at her wings, confused, and then looked down at the long, thin stick that had somehow replaced the ballpoint pen she was clutching in her right hand.
Jeanie explained, both for Ms. Chan's benefit and the class's, "Your teacher said fairies don't exist, so I've turned her into one! I left her human-size so you could get a good look. Do you want to see her fly?"
"Yeah!" came the shouts from the class. Jeanie made another gesture, kind of a magical push, and Ms. Chan's wings started flapping a bit. She rose off the ground a couple of inches, looking very unsure of herself. The class started hooting and hollering.
"Do you want me to shrink her to the size of a real fairy?" Jeanie asked the class.
"Yeah!" was the enthusiastic response. Ms. Chan, who now found her feet about a foot off the ground and the rest of her body pitching forward, shouted, "Wait!" Trying to right herself, she started to windmill her arms, and an intense shower of sparks began to stream from the stick in her right hand. The children gasped as the sparks came towards them.
Jeanie instantly realized the problem -- she'd given Ms. Chan a real, working fairy's magic wand, and it was scaled up to human size. She made the wand disappear, and brought Ms. Chan safely back to the floor, but the entire room had gotten a dose of 10- times-too-powerful fairy magic.
The linoleum floor began to disintegrate under the children's feet, replaced by a dark green moss. Bookshelves along the walls transformed, the shelves becoming thick vines that managed to support the books, the side pieces becoming trees, living trees that spread out their branches and covered the ceiling. The children suddenly found themselves sitting atop tuffets of densely-packed grass, their desks now giant polka- dotted toadstools in a variety of vibrant colors -- a few pencils and pieces of paper fell off and onto the mossy ground due to the rounded tops of the toadstools. More vines were growing up the walls, sprouting flowers as they climbed. They grew around the portraits of the U.S. presidents posted in a long horizontal row, but then those pictures began to change; George Washington's face was replaced by a male fairy, labeled "Oberon," and then John Adams became a female fairy, "Titania," and on and on the pictures changed in sequence, one every half-second or so, becoming mostly female, "Peaseblossom," "Pibgorn," and 38 other fairies.
Ms. Chan looked dazed. The children couldn't believe their eyes. Jeanie certainly hadn't intended for things to go this far.