You continue to scream in protest as your sales-clerk-turned-mother carries you out into the mall.
"STOP! YOU'RE NOT MY MOMMY! YOU'RE NOT MY MOMMY!"
"Excuse me," you hear a man say. The woman stops. Because you're slung around her shoulder, you can't see who's in front of her.
"Please excuse my daughter," the woman said. "She's being very naughty today."
"I'm not her daughter," you shout. "This lady runs the costume shop. Some kinda magic changed her! Please, you have to believe me!"
"Lady, I think she's telling the truth."
You breathe a sigh of relief. The woman shifts, adjusting the way you rest over her shoulder.
"That's preposterous. There's no such thing as magic."
"I've seen you working in there before. And besides, there's nobody in this mall who would ever say a thing like that. Come on, let's get you two sorted out."
You feel a pair of hands clutch your tiny torso. The woman backs away, and the hands are forcibly removed.
"Don't touch my daughter!" the woman shouts.
"Man, what did you two do to each other?" the guy says. "Look, I'm trying to help. You're confused."
"Leave us alone or I'm calling for security."
You hear a punch, then the woman starts to fall beneath you. You tip forward, watching helplessly as the tile floor zooms toward you. At the last second, you're caught in mid-air. The woman's limp body sprawls across the floor below you.
Whatever's got you doesn't feel like regular arms. As it grabbed onto you, it circled your body like a whip. You're turned around in mid-air and are finally brought face-to-face with your rescuer.
He's a man in his late twenties, wearing a fedora and trench coat. He looks human, except for the array of six tentacles coming out of the open front of the coat. The sleeves of the coat hang at his sides, empty. Two of the tentacles are wrapped around you.
You stifle a surprised scream. That wouldn't be any way to greet the man who saved you from an out-of-control sales clerk.
Your face must still have a terrified expression, though, because he says to you "It's okay. I won't hurt you."
He gently sets you down on the floor. You brush off your uniform and straighten the vest.
"Things like this happen sometimes. You gotta be careful when buying stuff from this place."
"Thank you," you say. "Is she gonna be all right?"
"Yeah, just knocked out. My tentacles don't carry too hard a wallop, so she should be coming around in a minute."
You look around for the costume shop, and see that you haven't been carried to far from it. You notice that everyone in the mall is walking past without so much as glancing over at you, the tentacled man, or the woman decked out on the floor.
"Can you help me get her back in the store?" you ask. "We gotta figure out how to reverse this."
The man picks her up with three tentacles and follows you back into the costume shop. "I'm Darksmith, by the way."
"Interesting name," you reply.
The man chuckles. "Most of us like to use different names while we're here in this dimension," he says. "Outside that park, I'm just a regular guy."
"We're in another dimension?"
"Yeah," he says. He sets the woman down on a bench near the shoe section. He briefly tells you that the park acts you walked through earlier is a gateway that connects various points on Earth to this city, which exists in a pocket dimension. It was created by wizards as a way to strengthen the magical community scattered across the globe.
"Sometimes non-magical folk will be able to see the park," the man finishes. "Which, I'm guessing, is how you got here little girl."
"I'm not a little girl," you say to him. During his explanation, you've been browsing the shoe shelves to find a pair that might get you back to your previous age. "I'm a college student. And I'm a boy."
"Ah, sorry," the man says with a sheepish frown. "I shouldn't have assumed."
"It's okay." You don't blame him for coming to conclusions. You had been acting very much like an eight-year-old as the woman was kidnapping you. "So what's with the tentacles?"
"It's the coat. When you put it on, your arms turn into squid tentacles. But they change back just as fast..." He demonstrates by stretching his six blue-gray tentacles wide, throwing off the trenchcoat. In the blink of an eye, the tentacles merge into regular human arms. "Split-second transformation. No pain, no problem. I can hide the tentacles under the coat until I need them, and if I'm out in the real world and I lose the coat somehow, I'm not stuck as a monster."
"I don't think you're a monster."
He puts the coat back on, draping it over his shoulders but not slipping his arms through the sleeves. You can see the coat gain volume and ripple as his tentacles return. "Most would. You might find out yourself eventually. That is, if you ever change something besides your gender or age."
What he says strikes a chord with you. You remember seeing costumes for non-human creatures on the racks.
The woman stirs on the bench. She'll be waking up soon, and she'll probably still think you're her daughter. You need to find something to break the spell. It started when you got younger because of the small shoes. Maybe putting on a pair of larger shoes can fix it. Or maybe there's something behind the counter or in the back room that's available for situations like this.