Penny lived in the medium sized blue house next to Cory's two story yellow one. Her yard was separated from Cory's by a hedge which ran perpendicular to the street, planted rather close to his house. Penny's house sat at the far end of the yard.
Dusk fell and Penny became bored from the sudden lack of television the power outage had brought her. She now lay on the front lawn, staring at the sky. She listened to her older sister Lisa raking the leaves behind the house.
A sudden rustle in the dividing hedge piqued Penny's curiosity. She stood up tentatively, and made her way to the spot where Cory lay stuffed upside down into the bushes. As she approached, she could see a pair of white stockinged legs sticking up out of the bushes. One foot was wearing a shoe; the other lay on the grass unnoticed at Penny's feet.
"What in the world is this thing?" Penny asked, running her hands over one of the plastic legs. Cory shivered mentally at the unexpected stimulation. Feeling around in the bushes, she found and then grabbed an arm, and pulled hard. Cory came tumbling out of the bush, landing on his plastic face in the grass.
The lights flickered back on, but Penny didn't care about her television show now. She had something much more interesting to play with, she thought, as she dragged Cory back to her house and up the stairs. Penny was rougher than Lisa would have been, and Cory's head banged against every step along the way. He could feel it, but it didn't hurt him at all. This disassociation between sensation and pain freaked him out. His humanity seemed farther away than ever at this point. He could only stare at the ceiling as he was dragged into a bedroom.
Penny was younger than Lisa, but was generally considered too old to be playing with dolls. This hadn't stopped her by any means. She rationalized it as being more normal than her sister's "odd obsession with Japanese cartoons".
Penny sat Cory on the edge of her bed and started at him for a minute, sizing him up. "This doll looks more like a tomboy than a girly girl. But maybe she'd make a good dancer," she said, as she dismissively removed his remaining shoe. Cory wanted to kick her.
Penny grabbed at his dress and pulled it up over his head, sliding his arms out of the arm holes. After a brief struggle, she managed to remove it and tossed it into a corner. Cory felt cold, and extremely embarrassed. Penny had no way of noticing. She ran her hands over Cory's flat chest, wondering if this really was a boy doll after all. Nothing was molded beneath the pair of white tights to give her any clues.
But Penny had a short attention span, and didn't give the matter any more thought. She rooted around in her closet and pulled out her old ballet tutu. It was a pink and frilly thing, with a white petticoat beneath the drooping skirt. Penny unzipped the back and stretched it out, pulling Cory into it legs-first. She slipped a pair of glitter-covered pink sneakers onto his feet.
Across the street, the Chronivac hummed to life, its power fully restored.
Placing Cory on the floor, Penny inched the tutu up over Cory's bare torso and pulled his left arm into the hole. After some more struggle as before, his right arm followed suit. Just as Penny was zipping up the back of the tutu, however, the stress she had put on Cory's doll body took it's toll and she heard an arm give a loud SNAP.
Immediately, the Chronivac across the street sensed the danger Cory was in and sent out an emergency signal. Penny had no sooner zipped the back of the tutu when a beam of green energy hit Cory, traveled through the metal zipper, and continued into Penny. Cory was transformed immediately back into a human, the tutu's zipper became fused shut, and Penny was transformed into a living doll, a look of alarm plastered across her face.
Cory heard footsteps in the hallway.