Beth pulled up Wikipedia on the computer in her bedroom and searched for Princess Patience. Nothing -- the closest she found was a reference to a historical novel called Patience, Princess Catherine.
She was in the midst of Googling for Patience's story -- a princess studying the dark arts and being trapped as a frog as punishment -- when she finally got sick of the typos that her inch-long fingernails were causing. There was, fortunately, a set of manicure tools in the bathroom. She went down the hall to retrieve the leatherette case from the drawer in the vanity. As she did so, she looked at herself once again in the mirror, shaking her head at the mixed blessing Patience had given her -- the extremely beautiful face, covered with a thick layer of makeup and with attention drawn to her surfeit of piercings.
She took the small pair of scissors in her right hand and sliced the nail on her left pinky straight across just above her fingertip. The detached piece fell to the bathroom counter and then disappeared. Beth assumed it had bounced to the floor and took a quick look down, as best she could given her new tall, voluptuous body, but didn't see anything.
She turned her attention back to her hands, but before she could slice the nail on her ring finger, she noticed that the pinky nail she'd hacked off was obviously growing back. Stunned, she watched it lengthen and shape itself back into a professionally manicured form to match the other nine. She sighed and resigned herself to having inch-long nails until she could track down Patience again.
But as the pinky nail reached the one-inch length, it kept growing, and Beth noticed that all the nails were now lengthening. She watched them pass an inch and a half and stop at two inches past her fingertips, now slightly curved, and best described as "talons." She was already imagining not being able to type at all.
A crawling sensation on her back alerted her that her fingernails weren't the only part of her that was changing once again. Her hair was actually shortening right before her eyes, as if it were being quickly pulled inside her scalp. She was briefly relieved, but relief turned to fear once the hair got shorter, and shorter, until finally she was left with a smooth scalp.
She barely had time to start imagining having to wear wigs before hair emerged from her head once again. However, it was only emerging in a narrow band down the center, and it was somehow sticking straight up. When it stopped, Beth was sporting a Mohawk, the hair extending about 8 inches, in a line from her forehead to the back of her neck. To make matters worse, the color suddenly shifted from platinum blonde to a bright, vivid purple.
Beth noticed that it matched her eyes, which had become a similar attention-getting shade of purple, definitely not found in nature. She dared to hope that was it for the changes, but then three rings appeared in her lower lip, evenly spaced across. Her earlobes stretched out, large metal rings creating large holes, thick-gauge rings put through them. The piercing through her septum was replaced by a slightly less obvious ring through one nostril, and a silver chain popped into existence connecting it to one of the smaller rings through her ears.
Nothing else obvious happened, so Beth turned her attention back to her body as a whole, and discovered that she'd gained at least a couple tattoos while she'd been paying attention to her face. A ring of flowers wrapped around the upper part of her left arm, and a moon-and-stars design was just below and to the right of her navel. On a hunch, she turned around and looked back over her shoulder into the mirror as best she could; this revealed a colorful abstract design on her lower back and a crown -- just like the one Princess Patience had been wearing -- between her shoulder blades.
No further changes were apparent. Beth was glad that her clothing hadn't gotten any more revealing, and that she hadn't gotten any taller or bustier, but on the other hand, she was pissed that she'd been "punished" so much for merely attempting to eliminate a minor inconvenience -- and the "signature" of the crown tattoo didn't make her particularly happy, either. She headed back to her bedroom, redetermined to track down Princess Patience via the Internet, even if she had to hunt-and-peck every letter using only one fingernail.
But first...