Once the girls had been seated, the man continued standing up to tell his story. “Remember a few years ago, that big earthquake in Haiti? A couple months after it happened, I spent my spring break going down there with a group from my fraternity, helping to repair people’s houses. While we were replastering this old woman’s wall, I was just shooting the shit with my buddies, and I guess she didn’t like what I was saying about women -- I didn’t even think she spoke English. She starts ranting about cursing me with this so-called beauty gem that she currently had possession of, and told me that the next time I was treating a woman like a sex object, I’d find out what being a sex object really meant.
”We all laughed it off, the rest of the trip was great, we helped a lot of people, yada yada yada. We get back to school, I talk my way into bed with this hottie from my lit class, I sneak out of her apartment in the middle of the night, get back to my fraternity -- and I turn into a super- stacked black woman, and it turns out I can only wear hooker clothes.
”Long story short, I spend the next three years tracking down this beauty gem, finding out everything I can about it -- and it’s not that easy, looking like I did -- I ended up having to do, uh, things to earn money and all that. Anyway, this gem -- it’s hard to track down because it’s set to have a couple different functions, but once it gets used for the purpose it’s given, it magically teleports itself to a different voodoo priestess.
”I realized there were a lot of voodoo priestesses in New Orleans, and you catch more flies with honey and all that, so for the past few months, I’d been living there, trying to befriend the owner of every single curio shop and souvenir stand, asking about a beauty gem -- it finally paid off when I heard one had suddenly appeared for sale, but once I tracked it down, it turned out the priestess had put it in a voodoo doll and sold it to a white girl as a gift item -- it wouldn’t be ‘activated’ until the gift recipient used it. A little detective work, and I obviously did track it down -- so here I am.
”So I discovered doing my research something that few, if any, modern voodoo practitioners knew about the gem -- it was possible to ‘unlock’ it with a spell, giving it almost unlimited power. I knew when I got my hands on it, I’d be able to turn back into a guy and do a lot more besides, although there was one catch related to the powers it was given when it was created.” He looked at Robin to say, “Once you go black, you never go back.”
Robin had a quizzical expression on her face, along with the rest of the girls, so the man explained, “The one catch is that once your race has been changed with it, it can’t be changed again. I mean” -- he pointed toward his dark-chocolate-skinned male body -- “I was white. This isn’t too bad, though. But that means, I’m sorry, you’ll always be black.”
Robin looked down at herself, obviously a bit terrified at the prospect of looking like her current self forever.
The man smiled, though, and said, “Don’t worry, this gem really is supposed to be almost unlimited -- which I think I've proven already. Let’s see, I wish...”