Cheryl stares cross-eyed at the remote in her hands. She pressed several buttons, but none of them seemed to do anything.
"Ah! There it is!" Tiffany said as she bent over to take the remote. "I've been looking for it all morning."
Cheryl was too confused to keep a firm grip on the remote and she allowed Tiffany to confiscate it. "Why do you have a remote like that?" she asked.
"For fun, silly," Tiffany winked. "Life is boring unless you find a way to liven things up."
"Where'd you get it? Can I play with it?"
"One question at a time, squirt. I wanted to keep this a secret, but now that you know I might as well share." Tiffany walked over to sit down on Cheryl's bed and patted the mattress next to her. Cheryl obediently followed and sat down, keeping her eyes on the strange remote.
"I found this on the street a few weeks ago," Tiffany explained. "As far as I've been able to figure, it can physically change anybody's appearance. It can even change non-living stuff." To demonstrate, she pointed the remote at Cheryl's favorite stuffed teddy bear, Johnny Giggles, who was innocently napping against one of the bed pillows. A flash came from the remote, and before Cheryl's eyes, her teddy bear had grown twice his original size.
"What did you do?! Change Johnny back!" Cheryl tried to pry the remote out of her sister's hand, but Tiffany fended off her attack.
"Calm down! I'm sorry! Here." One shot with the remote later, Johnny Giggles was back to normal size and looking none the worse for wear. Cheryl scooted across the bed and hugged him tightly.
"Sorry," Tiffany said again. "But look, it doesn't hurt anybody. It's painless. I've been using it...a lot."
"On yourself?" Cheryl asked.
"On myself. And...on everybody else too."
Cheryl's eyes widened. "Did you use it on me?"
"A couple times."
Cheryl immediately started looking over her body, trying to find something wrong.
"The remote can make it so that nobody but the user knows anything is different. I turned you into a boy once, just for a couple hours. You don't remember because the remote made you forget."
"Eeew! I was a boy?!" Cheryl stuck out her tongue, revolted.
"You were cute," Tiffany teased. She ducked as Cheryl threw a pillow at her. It flew over her head and knocked a fancy lamp off Cheryl's dresser. It didn't break, but its shade was bent horribly.
Cheryl looked scandalized. "Mom's gonna kill me. She gave me that lamp for Christmas!"
Tiffany pointed the remote at the lamp, whose stalk was made of a carving of three identical mermaids standing back-to-back-to-back on a seashell base. Cheryl watched in awe as her lamp lifted off the ground, un-bent itself, and flew up to the dresser right back where it was.
Tiffany turned back to Cheryl, shaking the remote playfully. "Rewind," she said.
Cheryl's face brightened. "Can I play with it?"
"No offense, squirt, but it might be better if I held onto it. I'll make you a deal, though. If you promise not to tell mom or dad, or make any sort of trouble over this, I'll use the remote to do whatever you want."