Smooth Plastic

I mage supplied by SOMMAI

The rain had eased off and was steaming from the tarmac by the time Eliza breezed out of the studio building and crossed the car park. A cooling breeze was the only thing that prevented the heat of the early afternoon from becoming unbearable, overhead the sky was a clear blue and the sun blazed mercilessly without a cloud in sight.

Though the journey from the lobby to the car was a matter of only a few seconds, Eliza dreaded this part of her day more than any other and always armed herself with sunglasses, bottled water and an elegant silk fan decorated with twisting and turning Koi carp. The first two items were simply a part of the image she was sure a modern and upwardly mobile celluloid star should portray. But the latter had been a gift from an anonymous admirer; while she had never found who the mysterious source of the fan might have been, it was still the first glimmer of recognition she had ever received from her public.

Eliza had never stopped to ponder the irony of having been sent a fan, by a fan; but then she had seldom been known to read between the lines, or anything at all for that matter.

Despite wearing as little as possible without being in danger of arrest, Eliza found that she was still more than a tad hot and bothered. The scene which she had just finished shooting had not been easy and tempers had frayed before the thing was finally in the can. Her vest top was bothering her; the shorts she had chosen left her legs at the mercy of the sun and boots, which had enchanted her from the window of a shoe shop, were now threatening to rub blisters on her heels.

The last thing she needed to see were the two men in suits loitering in-between herself and her car, but there they were all the same. In concession to the hot weather, both men had removed their jackets and were carrying them over their arms; they wore short sleeved white shirts and black ties, looking very much like the kind of religious nutter that turned up on ones doorstep armed with magazines and warnings of impending damnation. As she got closer, Eliza saw that the two were Japanese, carrying briefcases and apart from being coatless, showed little sign of being bothered by the heat.

All at once one of the men caught sight of Eliza and began pointing in her direction whilst making loud proclamations in his native tongue. The second man, whom Eliza realised was slightly older than his excited colleague, turned on him and issued what she assumed was a reprimand. As soon as the first man had visibly clamed down and was engaged in staring at his feet in a way that put her in mind of a scolded young boy, the second turned her way and offered a polite bow.

Eliza bowed back in what she hoped was the right manner and would have asked what the pair were doing hanging around her car, if the older man had not jumped in on her first.

‘Good afternoon,’ the man’s English was accented, but otherwise perfect. ‘You are Miss Aukerman? Miss Eliza Aukerman, actress and model?’

Eliza nodded; it was a long time since she had been called a straight up actress and the man’s polite manner had caught her a little off guard.

The nod was greeted with a smile and another in return.

‘May I introduce myself,’ the man went on. ‘I am Mr Nakemura, and this,’ he pointed at his younger companion, ‘is Mr Shima, my junior colleague.’ nakemura retrieved a smart black wallet from his jacket pocket and presented it to Eliza with a gesture of pride and reverence.

‘Thanks,’ she said as she accepted the card, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t have one of my own to give you…’

‘No matter,’ Nakemura breezed past the issue, ‘such small matters cannot be allowed to stand in the way of business.’

‘Business?’

‘Yes, business,’ Nakemura smiled again, ‘Mr Shima and I have a proposal which we would like to offer you; it is possibly very lucrative for you, but also a very private matter. Is there a place where we may speak in private?’

 

The waitress deposited three bottles of beer on the table and disappeared, leaving Eliza and her two companions alone in the booth. From the expression on the woman’s face, Eliza had been sure that everyone who saw them was getting the wrong impression. She tucked her long black hair behind her ears and took a sip of her beer, trying to look as aloof and refined as she could manage whilst Nakamura spoke for both himself and Shima once again.

‘You have heard of Oshimasu Incorporated Enterprises?’

‘Who hasn’t,’ Eliza nodded. OIE was a household name the world over, a sprawling Japanese corporation that had massive holdings and influence not only in its home nation but also throughout almost all developed nations on the face of the earth. Like most companies in of its size and scope, it was perhaps an easier task to list things that OIE did not involve itself in rather than attempt to recount the diverse fields in which it manufactured, produced and innovated. When one switched on the TV there was an advert for their products. Hospitals were stocked with their medical apparatus as well as administering their drugs to patients. The company even held large shares in a number of major studios and supported some of its products with films and series that were at worst little more than expensive adverts themselves.

‘Then we are one step on the way already,’ beamed Nakamura. ‘I will assume also, that you are acquainted with the “Dream Princess” range, which has been marketed with great success over the past decade?’

Much like the previous question, Eliza would have had to have lived under a particularly big rock if the answer was no. The Dream Princess range, which Nakamura referred to were possibly the most popular children’s toys in the world and a merchandising phenomenon that seemed to know no bounds. The Princesses in question were a series of fashion dolls, each with a distinctive theme and look; and an extensive range of accessories, each sold separately, of course. Kids and collectors alike snapped these up attracted by the lifelike quality of the dolls and the clever planning that had gone into each one. Rather than creating one doll and selling for it different outfits, an astute soul at Oshimasu had instead decided that every different Dream Princess would be unique in its facial features and skin tones. The surfer Princess was a blonde and tanned California girl, whilst the special edition Juliet Princess created to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of the death of Shakespeare was dark-skinned Mediterranean beauty.

‘Of course.’

‘Then you are also familiar with the Dream Princess doll known as Iyesha?’

At the mention of the name, Shima suddenly seemed to take a more active interest in the conversation and leaned forward as if trying to involve himself further.

‘Yeah,’ Eliza paddled back through her memories, ‘that’s the mermaid?’

‘That is right,’ Nakamura nodded, ‘Dream Princess Iyesha is a mermaid who dwells beneath the ocean waves, swims with the whales and the dolphins and has the voice of an angel with which she sings upon the top of a coral reef.’ Despite being unable to speak English, Shima had evidently recognised the lines Nakamura was quoting and now it was his turn to nod his head in agreement. Though she could not recall the last advert she had seen for the doll that Nakamura was enthusing about, Eliza was pretty sure he had just recited the script verbatim.

‘And…?’ Eliza let the question hang in the air.

Nakamura glanced round from where he had been giving a stern look to Shima, who was once more getting quite excited.

‘Pardon me?’

‘And just what does Dream Princess Iyesha have to do with the business proposition you were talking about?’

‘Ah, yes,’ Nakamura was back on track in an instant. ‘Dream Princess Iyesha has a great deal to do with the proposition, as you put it.’ He produced his briefcase from beneath the table and pulled out a wad of glossy photos, which he spread out on the table like an oversized pack of cards. ‘But before we come to the details of the proposition, there are a few points which I must address with you.’

‘Go on.’

‘Firstly, Mr Shima and I have sought you out in connection with Dream Princess Iyesha for a very important reason. While I myself am a director of the Dream Princess project, Mr Shima is concerned with the intricacies of design and realisation, responsible for the way in which our finished products look and feel. In the course of his work, Mr Shima will be responsible for everything from the colour of a Dream Princess’s eyes to the size of her waist; all these things are part of his work.’ He paused and took a deep breath that was in keeping with the look of resignation that had crossed his face after another glance at Shima. ‘When we are to choose the face and figure of a new Dream Princess, we are committed to giving her the most realistic qualities that are possible with the technology at our disposal. Rather than create what would be an artificial face, we will search for an example of a living and breathing woman who we feel captures the essence of what the Dream Princess should be.’

‘You make the dolls to look like real people?’ Eliza asked.

‘No, please do not think that this is the case. We will settle upon a woman whom we believe is perfect, and then we will make subtle alterations in the characteristics of the new Dream Princess so that she is somewhat like a sister in her appearance to the person upon whom she is based. The resulting Dream Princess is alike to the woman in question, but no case could be made that they are the same; in that respect we are usually very careful.’

‘Usually?’

‘Yes,’ Nakamura looked pained as he made the admission, as though his whole worth were being called into question. ‘But in the case of Dream Princess Iyesha…we were not as careful as we should have been. You must understand that the woman chosen as the essence of a Dream Princess can come from almost any background. Some are women prominent in the media and adored by many; but others can be women whom one might pass on the street, quite ordinary in their lives and characters. Then sometimes it can be that an employee of our company may choose a woman whom they admire greatly and believe deserves to be immortalised as a Dream Princess. And this last is the case with Dream Princess Iyesha.’

‘It’s not?’

‘No,’ Nakamura cast a hostile glare at Shima, who gazed down at the photos on the table and then innocently up at Eliza. ‘In the case of Dream Princess Iyesha, it was Mr Shima who chose the woman upon whom she would be based. You see Mr Shima is much enamoured of the films in which you star, Miss Aukerman, to the extent that he makes the claim he has seen every one of them. In the case of Dream Princess Iyesha, he chose to base her appearance upon your own, and I am regretful to say that he did not take sufficient care to differentiate her facial and…other features from the model which he chose.’

So that was where the fan came from, she thought.

Eliza followed Nakamura’s gaze down to the photo’s spread out on the table. Instantly she realised they were not photos at all, but rather images created by a computer graphics programme. Most showed underwater scenes where all the twee and contrite things that could be imagined to exist under the waves could be seen; barnacle encrusted anchors, shipwrecks, coral reefs and even treasure chests dotted the backgrounds. But at the centre of each image was the same thing, Dream Princess Iyesha, swimming in her native element.

In the aftermath of Nakamura’s confession Eliza was suddenly fascinated. A woman well into her twenties, she had long since decided that dolls were a thing of the past; but this was something different.

Eliza’s eyes traced the lines of the mermaid’s form in wonder. There indeed were the features of her own face, surrounded by the halo of her dark hair as it billowed in the water, there was the line of her neck and the curve of her shoulders. But then for all its familiar little details, the Dream Princess’s body took a radical departure from her own. To the casual eye it might have seemed that Iyesha wore a long dress that clung to her like a second skin, covering her breasts, waist, thighs and beyond in a graceful sweep of aquamarine. A closer look however, would have drawn the eye to the point where the aquamarine clung just as tightly to her claves and continued all the way down to where a pair of silver flukes flared from the end of her tail. Eliza recognised the shape of her own legs in the curve of the tail as Iyesha swam through the water, the heaving of her breasts as the mermaid sat upon a rock and sang, she even saw the lucrative image of her own ass mirrored in the Dream Princess’s rear as she reclined on a beach, back turned to the imaginary camera.

‘Wow,’ Eliza looked up from the images before her, ‘these are so pretty!’

A look of startled relief flushed Nakamura’s face which Eliza took to be pride; it was only much later that she discovered the relief was linked more to the amount which a more litigious individual might have demanded for the use of her image without permission than to Nakamura’s delight at her approval of Dream Princess Iyesha.

‘You will no doubt be pleased to know that Dream Princess Iyesha is the most popular of all the models launched this year, already sales have outstripped all other new dolls in the range.’

‘It’s neat,’ Eliza was the one beaming now, ‘you know I always wondered what it would be like to have a fish’s tail, swim in the sea and all that stuff!’

‘Then maybe my proposition will be to your liking,’ Nakamura ventured.

‘Let me guess,’ Eliza tried to trump him, ‘you want me to dress up as Dream Princess Iyesha for you, right?’ Before Nakamura could answer she steamed on in a state of near delirium at the prospect of a job that involved keeping her clothes on for once. ‘Of course I’ll do it.’

‘Miss Aukerman,’ Nakamura spoke in a level tone, trying to calm Eliza down. ‘You are perhaps thinking of similar possibilities to ourselves on this matter. But we are not simply asking you to dress up as Dream Princess Iyesha. In fact we would like to propose that for the purposes of publicity and promotion, you become Dream Princess Iyesha.’

It had taken a very long while for the full implications of Nakamura’s offer to sink in, but Eliza finally had a good grip of just what he was suggesting. For a long time she had simply sat and pondered the images of Dream Princess Iyesha, shuffling through them like a strange slideshow as the thoughts floated through her mind. The long and short of it all was that the man was offering to take her away from her life as it was, to change the rules completely. If she accepted and Nakamura was telling the truth, she would become a mermaid…become the physical double of Dream Princess Iyesha complete with tail and all.

Though Eliza had never heard of such a thing being done before, she knew full well that there were rumours of just what amazing feats cosmetic surgeons had become capable with the advent of genetic manipulation. Never one to follow the news too closely, Eliza had never the less heard and seen some strange things in during her time in the world of adult films. Body Modification was a growing sub-genre of the industry and the films that had begun to appear which made both the eyes and the mind boggle as they pushed the boundaries.

‘For this service, we will meet all medical and personal expenses,’ Nakamura explained, ‘whilst your personal fee for the services rendered will be, we suggest to open negotiations, ten million dollars American.’

Eliza dropped the images and simply stared at the pair sitting across from her. For all the misgivings that had entered her mind, that was a figure that cast a totally different light on the whole issue. While trading her legs in for a tail would certainly change her life, Eliza reasoned that ten million dollars would have a similar effect as well. A new dimension had suddenly been added to her decision and she realised that above and beyond the sacrifices she would have to make, the money that Nakamura was promising could lift her out of the sleaze of the industry for good.

‘What else do I have to do?’ Eliza asked. ‘I mean apart form growing fins and giving up on designer shoes?’

‘We are proposing that you, as Dream Princess Iyesha, become the living representative of the doll that is based upon you.’ Nakamura replied. ‘Your duties will be to star in television commercials, appear at promotional events and in-between these commitments to live in the style in which Dream Princess Iyesha lives. Also if these things are a success with the consumer, the idea has been raised to commission a television series or even motion picture based around yourself and the other Dream Princesses.’ At this last point Nakamura seemed particularly impressed, as did Shima. ‘Our plans, if you are well received, are to hire actresses to become each of the Dream Princesses.’

‘Let me get this straight,’ Eliza pondered the deal. ‘I let you turn me into a mermaid; and in return you pay me ten million, put me on TV and if people like me I get to star in movies?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think I’d have to be stupid to say no!’

Nakamura reached across the table and shook Eliza’s hand vigorously.

Shima was so overwhelmed with Eliza’s answer that he fell out of his seat and onto the restaurant floor.

 

Eliza travelled more in the space of the next few months than she had all the years of her life before accepting Nakamura’s offer. She was flown across the continental United States from Los Angeles to New York where the contracts were drawn up and witnessed by lawyers representing herself and OIE.

Next came a long haul across the Pacific Ocean to Japan and an overwhelming immersion in the bustling neon metropolis of Tokyo. Here Eliza was introduced to the men and women who worked under Nakamura and Shima, the same people responsible for the doll in whose image she would soon be reborn. Eliza spent her time bowing politely and wrestling with the Japanese language whilst Shima, her constant guide, in turn grappled with English. After a few weeks, they were both able to get through a conversation filled with misplaced words and much gesturing, but always managed to get the point across.

Eliza had been secretly dreading spending time in Shima’s company, afraid that he would turn out to be a drooling pervert just waiting for a chance to feel her ass in a crowded lift. But as she got to know him the character of a genuine and friendly young man had emerged. She might have been aware of the fact that Shima had seen her in a good few compromising positions, but neither of them dwelt upon the fact and Shima himself behaved like a consummate gentleman.

‘Today,’ Shima began one morning, ‘we will be having the first photo shoot.’

‘Today?’ Eliza was puzzled by the announcement. ‘Last time I looked in the mirror I wasn’t a mermaid.’

‘Not yet,’ Shima countered, ‘but today we will shoot you in a costume and use the pictures for publicity. Some will also be sent to the facility that will change you soon, they will also need samples of DNA in order to prepare.’

‘Whatever.’

Eliza soon found herself in a dressing room, being fussed over by half a dozen make-up artists and hairdressers. They painted her face with heavy stage make-up familiar from the more up market films she had done in the past, concealed her own hair beneath a flowing blonde wig and arranged in it a tiara made to resemble white coral interlaced with irregular pearls.

Stripped down to her underwear, the same six Japanese women helped her into the costume. At first the costume resembled nothing more than an oversized aquamarine sock; but as the side was unfastened and her feet were slipped into the bottom, Eliza began to feel the soft fabric close around her legs. Though she had sweated through a few scenes whilst wrapped up in hobble skirts and other bondage paraphernalia, this was a very different experience. The costume had been made of a material that was quite thick, but yielding all the same and hugged her body closely. As it was sealed up the side, Eliza was forced to remove her bra so that the straps would not be visible after the tail ended just above her breasts. Freed from the bra, she found that the thickness of the material had been used to conceal a bodice that now supported her chest very well indeed. Eliza gazed down at the impressive sight of her cleavage, then down at the sweep of the tail and decided that she made a very fine mermaid after all.

As soon as the outfit had been completed with a pair of long and elegant gloves, which matched the tail exactly and ended perfectly level with the line of the bodice, Eliza was carried through to a suitably camp underwater set where cameras awaited.

Eliza had been told in minute detail what would be expected of her by Shima beforehand and she was careful to pose in ways that were in keeping with a Dream Princess rather than with an experienced actress from the adult industry. She posed and was careful not to pout, smiled and tried not to smoulder; but when she caught sight of Shima over the shoulders of the photographers it was clear that there was only so much she could do to dampen her appeal.

Amused and more than a little turned on, Eliza began to realise the potential that her transformation could have. Though she had never had any kind of trouble using her looks to wrap men around her finger, Shima’s reaction to the sight of her flowing form hinted that the mere glimpse of her would be enough to reduce most men to quivering wrecks, have them falling down at her fins.

 

All too soon, it seemed to Eliza, the time came to leave behind Tokyo and embark on the next stage of her journey towards becoming Dream Princess Iyesha. In the short time she had spent there, she had grown very fond of the Japanese and their polite company. Saying goodbye to Shima and boarding a lonely flight to the United Kingdom on a cold and dreary morning was almost more than Eliza could bear. After so long surrounded by friendly faces, she was forced to travel alone to the clinic where the operation would be carried out, the operation that would turn her into a mermaid.

It was at the insistence of the clinic itself that she was forced to travel alone. Known as the Retreat, the exclusive establishment demanded that only the patient make the journey and would accept no arguments on this point.

Just as she had never before seen Japan, this new island was as much a mystery to Eliza and filled her with trepidation as the plane descended through a sky heavy with grey clouds. Her spirits were roused however, when the cloud was left behind, and below was suddenly laid clear a grand vista of pure white. She had arrived in England in the winter and the ground was hidden beneath a deep layer of crisp snow that lent to all that it touched a fairytale quality. Soon Eliza was able to forget a little of the melancholy that had coloured her departure from Tokyo as she allowed herself to be enchanted by the picturesque countryside through which she was driven after the drab and depressing streets of London.

It was well into the night when the driver who had met Eliza at Heathrow finally reached their destination. The clouds that had filled the sky melted away after the sun had set and left behind a boundless black expanse, dotted with stars. Civilisation was only hinted at by the occasional glimpse of cottages clustering together across the snow and framed by the moonlight. Tired from the long hours of travel, Eliza was lulled to sleep by the smooth ride and the pleasant glow of the picturesque winter landscape.

A gentle hand on her wrist caused Eliza to stir and she looked up into the eyes of the driver as he held the door of the car open before her.

‘Here we are,’ he said briefly.

She nodded and began to gather her coat against the chill, which had entered the car as soon as the door was opened. Eliza stepped out onto gravel, cleared of snow and salted against ice. Before her spread the looming facade of a large house built of red brick, its many windows filled with welcoming light and warmth in the winter night. The driver had pulled up by a pair of huge double doors that stood in a commanding position as the only visible entrance to the house. Despite the cold, these stood ajar and spilled light out into the courtyard.

So, Eliza thought, this is it. I walk up the stairs and swim out the back door when they’re done with me.

With her luggage handled by the driver, Eliza made her way up the stairs and through the doors to be greeted by a graceful hallway with sweeping staircases and period furniture. At a desk inside the door, she set eyes upon a woman pondering over a stack of papers. The sound of Eliza’s shoes on the wooden floor caused her to glance up and regard the newcomer with a welcoming smile.

‘Welcome to the Retreat,’ Eliza was unable to place the woman’s accent, ‘My name is Gillian, and you must be Ms Aukerman.’ Gillian shuffled through her papers and quickly scanned the sheet that she finally settled upon. ‘I trust you had a pleasant journey, despite the English winter’s depredations?’

‘Yeah,’ Eliza replied, ‘the snow is lovely, like a Christmas card.’

‘I think that you will enjoy the view from your room. Your benefactors have been most generous in providing for your stay,’ Gillian subtly steered the conversation back to the matter at hand. ‘You will be staying in the grand suite on the top floor of the house, its windows command a sweeping view of the grounds beyond the gardens.’ She handed a key over the desk and nodded to Eliza’s luggage. ‘A porter will attend to that for you shortly. Your room is furnished to allow for all your needs and your meals will be brought to you there. If you need anything else all you have to do is call reception.’

‘Thanks,’ Eliza felt that she liked Gillian right from the start. She was her senior by a good few years, but somehow she sensed the woman was also grounded, rooted and steady in her manner. Eliza could not help but admire the firmness of her skin and the inner peace that Gillian seemed to radiate. The long coat that she wore concealed her body well, but Eliza was sure she had kept herself in good shape and hoped that when she reached the same age she would look half as good as Gillian did.

Gillian motioned to the stairs as the Porter arrived, picking up a steaming mug as she did so. The beverage had escaped Eliza’s attention and she was immediately attracted by the scent of herbs and spices that drifted from it.

‘Could I take a sip?’ she asked, feeling the cold more acutely all of a sudden.

‘No,’ Gillian sounded as if the request had caught her off guard. ‘No. I am sorry, this is a tea, which is not known here in the west…It is very strong and quite bitter; an acquired taste. I only drink it to remind me of home.’

‘Ok…whatever you say,’ Eliza was not about to pry into what was evidently a sensitive issue.

‘I will have a warm drink sent up to you,’ Gillian offered, ‘Coffee, tea or a hot toddy?’

‘Coffee would be nice,’ Eliza smiled as the elder woman made an effort to smooth over her hasty words.

Gillian nodded and smiled in return.

‘You will be under the care of Dr Pickford during your stay with us; he will call on you in the morning at your convenience.’

 

Eliza leaned back upon the chaise long and sipped the last of her coffee whilst the new arrival fussed and fiddled with the odds and ends he had brought with him. Once he seemed satisfied that they were in order, he sat down on the sofa opposite and accepted a cup of coffee Eliza insisted on pouring for him. He drank a little before placing the cup down on the coffee table between them and made an effort to begin.

‘I apologise if I seem a tad awkward,’ Pickford confirmed Eliza’s preconception of the English habit of apologising for nothing and things that were out of a mortal’s control, as if embarrassed that they had not yet quite managed to unravel all the mysteries of the universe. ‘You see normally I’d be doing this in my own office, all casual and chatty, but in your case we were given certain instructions to follow. One was that your visit should be as private as we could manage, which for a clinic such as ourselves is quite secretive, I can tell you. The folks paying for our services on your behalf insisted that you arrive under cover of darkness and leave that way…they also insisted that you have the best accommodation we had to offer, price being no object.’

‘Well, I like this place a lot; it’s very pretty.’

‘Yes,’ Pickford answered, as if the thought had never occurred to him before, ‘I suppose it is.’ He glanced down at the table and then at the bag by his feet before rummaging around inside. Finally he pulled something out and set it on top of the bulging file, which he had already deposited on the table. When he moved his hands away, Eliza saw that it was a doll, namely Dream Princess Iyesha.

Pickford studied her face as she stared at the doll and then at him. While Eliza held his eye, the doll keeled over and fell from its perch atop the file. Pickford looked embarrassed at this, as though he had unwittingly insulted her by way of ill-treating her little plastic doppelganger.

‘The good people at Oshimasu sent this to us,’ he explained, ‘along with a mountain of other materials, in order to help us with our research.’ Pickford’s tone hinted at a mild irritation when recalling being deluged with glossy merchandise and marketing from the sprawling corporation. ‘They felt that this would help us in staying true to the spirit of the whole thing, if you follow.’

‘They’re very dedicated to their vision,’ Eliza ventured.

‘Yes, of course,’ Pickford replied, hinting that there were other terms he could have suggested himself. ‘Anyway, the bottom line is that over the next few days we are going to be engaged in a process that will allow you to represent their product in a very real manner,’ he cast another quick glance over the doll, then over Eliza’s body wrapped in a towling dressing gown and came back to her eyes before he could have been accused of ogling her. ‘What we’ll be doing actually represents the coming together of two separate strands of work which we have been undertaking recently. On the one hand we have been working on other projects for your employer, and on the other I have to confess that you’ll not be the first mermaid for which I have been responsible.’

‘Really?’ Eliza was surprised to find herself a little disappointed by Pickford’s admission; she had been somewhat looking forward to being unique.

‘Yes, I performed rather radical surgery upon another young lady late last year. Things went well and she was most pleased with the results of the operation. Unfortunately I heard that she went missing recently, despite the fact she lived in London. Just how an anatomically correct mermaid sneaks out of a city that size without anyone noticing is beyond me.’

Eliza tried to imagine the mermaid and her strange disappearance, finding that she could not decide between her escaping to the open seas or being kidnapped by a travelling circus. She was reassured by the fact that she herself had the might of a multi-national to protect her from such things.

‘Anyway,’ Pickford changed the subject, ‘as I was saying, this ties in nicely with another line down which we have been proceeding for your employer. They may have hinted to you that you’re to be the first of a whole sorority?’

Eliza looked blank.

‘A sisterhood?’ Pickford ventured, ‘after you there will be many more women coming through those doors whom I’m to make into Dream Princesses.’

This time she nodded in agreement.

‘To that end the process that you will under go has to be a little different to the one I used when making my first mermaid.’

‘How so?’

‘Well the idea is that you’re to be a living representation of a toy doll; the first mermaid that I created was intended for an entirely different purpose. She needed to be convincing as the real thing, needed to have people stare at her and think they were looking at a creature straight out of myth and legend. In your case, they need to look at you and see this Dream Princess Iyesha; the idea is for you to look just like the doll. So no scales and webbed fingers for you, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh.’

‘So you see the two strands that come together here? Firstly I have to make a mermaid out of you, and secondly I have to make sure that mermaid looks like a plastic doll as well. So what I intend to do is take the process in those two stages, plastic doll first and mermaid second. I think it will be easier that way round.’

‘If you say so.’

‘The first stage will take place later today and we’ll see how you get on with that before scheduling the second. How does that sound?’

‘It sounds crazy and a bit scary, but what the hell.’

 

Eliza lay naked on the operating table as the anaesthetic took hold of her and lulled her mind into a state of detached relaxation. She was aware of her surroundings, but could feel neither the cold of the table on her back or the touch of Pickford’s hand as he withdrew the needle and issued instructions to his assistants. Time seemed to loose all meaning as the minutes flowed together and were swept away without Eliza’s noticing.

The first sensation, which broke through, her semi-torpid delirium came when Eliza felt herself being lifted from the table an inch so that a harness of some kind could be slipped under her. Supporting her beneath her knees, arms and the small of her back, the thing was tightened until it raised her from the table completely.

At the same time she was aware of something being placed in her mouth, an object the size of a golf ball and attached to a long tube.

‘Respirator in place,’ a disembodied voice called out.

A moment later Eliza felt two more objects being pushed into her nostrils. Smaller and neatly fitting in place, they stoppered her nose up completely. It was then she realised that the object in her mouth was allowing her to breathe.

Gently cradled in the harness, Eliza found herself being moved slowly across the operating theatre away from the table. Looking around she became aware of a tank on the floor of the room, parallel to the operating table. Perhaps eight feet in length and four wide, the tank stood just taller than the waist of a fully-grown man and was three-quarters full of a clear liquid. Though it resembled water, something told Eliza that it was another thing entirely. Before she could look again, Eliza felt something being pressed over her eyes and blotting out her vision.

‘Gently,’ Eliza heard the same distant voice, ‘lower carefully, on my mark.

In her time, Eliza had always been a sucker for a long hot bath and love nothing more than to soak in a tub for hours on end. The one thing better had been a bath filled with fragrant oils or a prolonged session in a Jacuzzi. But this was a whole new experience. The mystery liquid into which she was lowered inch by inch was deceptively warm and maybe a little more viscous than water. Her hair gathered tightly to her head and every inch of the rest of her body shaved of hair, Eliza shivered as the warmth of the liquid seeped into her limbs and coursed through her very being. For what felt like an age, she floated in the tank, divorced from the outside world and not caring for its concerns in any shape or form.

‘Slowly, lift her out,’ Eliza barely heard the words as she was lifted from the tank. Separated from the soothing liquid, she felt no great disappointment as the warmth, which had suffused her body, still clung to it as the tank was left behind.

With as much care as had been taken to reach the tank, the unseen hands moved Eliza back towards the far side of the room and over the operating table where they paused while another piece of equipment was made ready. The fact that Eliza was unable to see this was probably a good thing, as the new element in the operation resembled a silver case the size of a coffin, mounted on wheeled legs. Pickford’s hands opened the hinged lid to reveal a black interior marked out in the rough impression of a human body so that the contraption’s occupant would be held quite still once the lid was closed again. Into this depression they placed Eliza’s inert form and trailed the tube of her breathing apparatus from a specially made hole in the machine’s side. Once she was laid in the depression to his satisfaction, Pickford closed the lid and sealed Eliza inside.

Eliza found that the sides of the machine pressed against her tightly and allowed no room for her to move. Had she been able to focus her mind, there might have been panic rising within her at the claustrophobic conditions, but the effects of the anaesthetic kept her calm and still as the inside of the machine began to slowly rise in temperature. Soon Eliza was feeling the intense heat and a strange pressure on her body from the effects of the machine in which she lay. From head to foot she felt the sensation of her body being pressed and moulded by the two sides of the machine, from above and below. Much like the feeling of floating in the pool, Eliza felt no pain and afterwards could not have said how long she remained inside.

 

Later that night, Eliza wandered into the bathroom of her suite and allowed the bathrobe to fall from her shoulders as she stepped into the shower. For the past few hours she had been doing as many things as she could that seemed to her normal and mundane, in the vain hope that in them she might find something to stop her head spinning and bring back reality.

The light from the fitting above caught the sheen of Eliza’s skin and betrayed the very first hint of a change in her appearance. Had one passed her fully clothed in the street, it might have escaped your attention that here was a woman who’s skin was perfectly even in tone and texture, a woman who’s skin resembled nothing more than smooth plastic from head to toe. But that was not the only change that had been wrought to her body.

Standing in the shower as the water began to fall on her head, Eliza watched as rivulets ran down her shoulders and into the grooves that encircled the tops of her arms where they met her torso; similar lines lay in-between her thighs and pelvis. At the point where her neck met her head and around her waist, Eliza’s body was also marked in the same way. Although she could still move her limbs as she had done before, the grooves were enough to give the impression that these were the only points of articulation on her body.

Eliza cursed as the soap shot out of her hand and she struggled to retrieve it in the steam and water. She was not normally this clumsy, but then she was not normally grasping for a bar of soap in this particular way. When she finally found the soap, she grabbed it with both hands and stood up to inspect her catch. In reality it was clear that she was staring at the fingers of her hands, rather than the soap clutched in them. The operation had forced the fingers together until her hands served more like mittens than human digits, no finger able to move independently of the fellows it was fused to.

She rubbed the soap into lather and spread it over her body, which was still soft and yielding despite the fact it resembled solid plastic. Eliza’s unified fingers explored a body, which was smooth and hairless as it had never been before. She recalled Pickford’s words as he had explained that the same process would be repeated until there was a living, breathing example of every Dream Princess in Oshimasu’s employ.

In her mind’s eye she pictured dozens of other living plastic dolls as they went about their daily lives, walking dogs in the park, working nine-to-five jobs in the city and presenting daytime chat-shows on TV. In her fantasy, no one seemed to notice the fact that the plastic women’s joints showed when they wore something off the shoulder. When they picked up a spoon and stirred their coffee with a hand devoid of the usual individual fingers, no one batted an eyelid. The images raced through Eliza’s head as she towelled herself dry after the shower.

She tried to dress herself, but found that the loss of her fingers made the task frustrating beyond belief. Little by little she persisted and pulled on each individual garment with painstaking care and attention. Eliza slipped on a pair of silk knickers as a concession to feminine glamour, but for the rest she kept to convenience and comfort. The bra as a dead loss, she thought, another problem I’ll have to handle somewhere down the line. But as she gave up struggling with the hooks and dropped the bra on the bed, Eliza recalled the anatomical details of Dream Princess Iyesha and realised that things were about to change in that respect as well. She pulled a pair of jeans on over her feet, over the toes that had been moulded together in the same way as her fingers and then sat down on the bed.

Eliza felt ridiculous as she sat there, regarding her chest and trying to make the most of it before it disappeared beneath the tail she was to receive the very next day. She had always been turned off by the idea of group therapy sessions where women got to know their bodies, pictured them attended mad old grandmothers, frustrated suburban moms and hippies with unshaven armpits. But now Eliza was determined to break the taboo and spend quality time in the company of her breasts. After all, they had been an integral part of the package that had seen her career flourish, she came to the conclusion that they deserved to be recognised as one of her most valuable assets. So there she sat, for what seemed like hours, just staring at them, admiring the curve and occasionally cupping them in her hands until she was certain that whatever the next day might bring she would be ready for it.

 

‘So this is the last push,’ Pickford said as he directed Eliza’s attention to a long tray that ran the length of the surface next to the operating table upon which she lay. ‘Today we finally define the shape of your body and add the features that will mark you out as the much mentioned Dream Princess.’

Eliza saw that the tray was filled with a clear gel, and atop the gel was a narrow strip of aquamarine that stood out starkly against the sterile white of the operating theatre.

‘Is that?’

‘Oh yes,’ Pickford nodded, ‘that is the tail that we’ll be grafting onto your body. It was made to your specifications exactly, engineered on a genetic level and modelled on the DNA samples that you supplied to us. Once it is attached the tail will feel and act just like your own skin.’ As he spoke, Eliza felt the needle delivering a sedative into her arm. ‘Of course we have to make sure the shape of your body is just right before we can go ahead and bond it to you…’ His voice seemed to trail away as the anaesthetic took hold.

Once more Eliza felt the harness being slipped beneath her body and begin to lift her inert from the operating table. But this time her arms were raised above her head and bound to a previously unseen part of the harness. In this way she was again carried across the theatre and lowered gently into the tank of liquid that had made her body as malleable as clay. The warmth spread through her body, but stopped below her arms as she was allowed to be lowered no deeper. Eliza felt the liquid take effect and seep into the portion of her body submerged, where it lapped over the lower half of her breasts she felt an intense rush of pleasure as they became soft and yielding.

Returned to the operating table, she was shocked by the feeling of something cold being inserted between her legs. But whatever it was remained a mystery as Pickford’s hands began to move over her body.

Eliza was surprised by how quickly the doctor worked at the shape of her lower body. After briefly pressing her breasts together at the bottom in a way that made her sure she would never need another supportive bra in her life, Pickford moved on to her belly button. Without pausing, he smoothed it over and evened the flesh out where it had been leaving no trace. Next he worked down Eliza’s legs, obliterating the gap between them and massaging the flesh together until there was no trace of the former limbs. Upon reaching the end of her legs he did away with heels, feet and toes in the space of minutes. Pickford then had Eliza turned onto her stomach and repeated the process up the backs of her disappearing legs, before removing whatever had been inserted around her intimate parts.

On her back again, Eliza watched as Pickford and his assistants carefully removed the tail from where it lay in the tray. Now that it was stretched out, she could see the way in which it would wrap around her body and form a second skin; she even caught sight of the silver tailfins, which fell away from the very end like the delicate wings of a dragonfly.

As Pickford delicately eased the edge of the tail into place down the side of her body, Eliza was taken back to the experience of being dressed in the costume at the Tokyo photo shoot and in her relaxed state of mind the two mingled into one. Pickford stretched the skin of the tail over her body and pressed it as tightly as he was able, making sure that the line it followed over her breasts and under her arms was perfect. He ordered her turned over again and proceeded to wrap the tail close about her with the same merciless attention to detail, tucking the new skin across her smooth stomach, over her united thighs and finally around the tip of her feet. There he took especial care as he aligned the angle of the fins to ensure that the nerve endings in each would marry up to those in Eliza’s feet.

Eliza watched all this merged with the attention of the Japanese women who had applied her makeup and powdered her face. When Pickford was satisfied and the harness lifted her from the table for the final time, Eliza was certain that she was being carried towards the underwater set where she would pose for the camera. Instead the harness held her in mid-air whilst the lower half of the operating table was collapsed and a machine much the same as the one she had been placed in the on previous day. The difference was that the new machine was perhaps only three quarters of the length, and when the lid was lifted it was plain to see that the impression inside was not that of a human being. Instead the impression was that of the lower three quarters of Dream Princess Iyesha.

Eliza was placed into the device, which left her free maybe an inch above her breasts and left her arms laid upon the operating table. Soon after the lid was sealed closed, she felt the intense heat and pressure as the device performed its function, pressing her body into the mould and completing the last stage of her transformation into the living image of a doll which had been modelled after her in the first place.

It is safe to say that the irony of Eliza’s situation totally escaped her.

 

Eliza waited silently for the cue to be whispered to her through the earpiece and all the time kept her eyes closed as the strange sense of excitement mixed with the tiniest hint of fear coursed through her. Moments later there were the clear and slightly stressed tones of Nakamura’s voice, she took her cue as the light of the world flooded into her cramped confines.

The flash of the cameras was almost blinding as the giant clamshell slowly opened atop the gaudily decorated podium. Crowded ranks of press photographers clamoured and fought for position as Eliza’s eyes adjusted to the sudden galaxy of blinking lights amid the sea of faces.

Nakamura spoke into her ear again and she launched straight into the script that been drilled into her over the space of the past week. In near perfect Japanese, she greeted the assembled press, thanked them for attending and formally introduced herself; not as Eliza Aukerman, but as Dream Princess Iyesha the mermaid who dwelt beneath the ocean waves, swam with the whales and the dolphins and had the voice of an angel with which she sang upon the top of a coral reef. She answered their questions with the replies that Nakamura blurted into the earpiece and charmed the whole crowd into a state of reverent awe before she was done with them.
Once the press conference was over she curled up into a foetal position again as the giant clamshell closed, hiding her from the eager eyes of the media.

 

Alone in her dressing room, surrounded by flowers, small tokens of admiration and discreet invitations to be interviewed on more than a dozen different talk shows, Eliza pulled the fake coral tiara out of her hair and yanked off the blonde wig at the same time. She disposed of the long silk gloves, pulled her tail up onto the couch with a glass of champagne in her hand, and admired the commanding view of her body.

She ran her free hand over the line of her tail. Beginning at her breast, she felt their weight and marvelled still at the fact that they drew the eye and that Pickford had only half covered them, as if his intention had been to give her a dangerous plunging line. Where the aquamarine met her skin the tail was raised slightly to foster the illusion that she might actually be wearing a dress, and what would in that case have been the bodice was lined to give ample support to Eliza’s chest whilst resembling that very same thing.

Her hand slipped further down until it reached her thighs and Eliza curled her tail to stare at the silver tailfin that obeyed her every whim. The operation had deprived her of her legs, but left her muscles very much the same so that her tail functioned very much like a pair of legs bound together, with the exception that her intimate parts were now neatly tucked away around the back behind her buttocks (between which it was hard to slide a piece of paper…most of the time; Eliza found they tended to relax when she was called upon by nature or excited in that certain way).

Reflecting back on what she had gained and lost, Eliza sipped the champagne and smiled at the realisation that she would never have to go back to the industry from whence she had come.

But the nudity issue was the thing that amused Eliza the most. She had spent so long with her flesh on display, feeling like a piece of meat in her previous line of work and been shunned by the moral and upstanding members of society. And now here she was being paid to do the same thing.

Eliza shivered as a breeze blew through the room. Pickford had been right when he said the tail would be a second skin; she felt the same sensations along the length of the tail as she did anywhere else on her body. Though it was designed to resemble a mermaid costume it was tactile and meant that Eliza felt everything that touched her from the couch on which she lay to the breeze that caressed her deceptively naked form.

She was sensitive and sensuous, even though she looked like nothing more than smooth plastic.

Costume: Part 2

Image supplied by tokyoboy

As bashful as he may have been in the consulting room, Dr Pickford turned out to be a total professional when it came to the operating room. He had informed Sophie that the process would be divided into three distinct stages, which he termed “preparation,” “augmentation” and finally “consummation” (he blushed again at the last and moved swiftly on). It would have been possible for the whole operation to be carried out in the space of one day, but he explained that he wanted her to have the chance to come to terms with the alterations to her body a little at a time rather than waking up a biped and going to sleep as a mermaid in the same twenty-four hours.

At 9:00am the next morning Sophie was collected from her room by an efficient nurse and pushed in a wheelchair to the farthest wing of the house. The nurse had specific orders from Pickford that his patient was in no way to exert the muscles of her legs before the operation began.

Dressed in a theatre gown that barely covered her most intimate parts, Sophie could not help gazing down at her legs as she was wheeled towards the first stages of an operation that would totally change their shape. She ran her fingers over the skin of her thighs and was caught off guard by the realisation that when she had slipped her underwear off before stepping into the shower, she had had no idea of the odd significance of the act. It would be a long time before she was able to slip them back on again.

Pickford greeted her as she was pushed through the doors of the theatre. His casual clothes had of course been replaced by theatre greens and his face covered by a surgical mask, which he pulled down to reveal a determined expression.

‘We’ll be starting in a few minutes, Sophie,’ he motioned to the operating table and two theatre assistants gently lifted her from the wheelchair and laid her down upon it and raised the top half to an angle where she could see her own legs and the Pickford’s face. ‘First thing is to administer the anaesthetic,’ he produced a syringe filled with a clear liquid, ‘you’ll be conscious, but unable to feel a thing for the duration. He wiped a spot at the top of her arm with cotton wool and injected the contents of the needle. ‘As soon as this take effect we can start.’

The effects of the injection were unlike any anaesthetic Sophie had experienced in the past. Rather than passing out, she felt a sudden wave of relaxation and well being. The only thing she could compare the experience to be being high, unable to move or speak, yet still aware of her surroundings with her vision blurred slightly at the edges. When Pickford removed her gown she was aware of his touch despite his reassurances that she would feel nothing, but she simply floated on the chemical high that the drug had induced. In a corner of her mind Sophie was aware that she did not know what to expect; but again she simply could not find the will to do anything about it.

Sophie felt her legs lifted and something being pulled up over them. She glanced down and saw that what amounted to a long thin bag of heavy plastic had been slipped over her lower half. The bag was transparent and she could make out her legs inside. She also noticed that the bag was gathered just above her waist so that her torso was left clear.

There was a slight churning sound and Sophie heard a male voice from the far corner of the room.

‘Seal intact.’

‘Solution pumping,’ another voice answered.

A pleasant tingling sensation swept over Sophie’s legs as a warm liquid began to fill the bag. Soon it had totally submerged her feet and still it kept rising to cover her knees and then her thighs until the whole bag was filled. Once full, the pumping stopped and Sophie felt her legs floating in the liquid as if she were laid on her back in a swimming pool, floating on the water. But she was sure that this was not simple water. The liquid’s warmth seemed to seep into her legs until they felt warmed to the bone and the sensation relaxed her so much that she felt she might melt from it.

Sophie could never recall just how long her legs had been floating in the liquid, she felt that she had drifted away and slept for hours. The next thing she recalled was the feeling of a touch on her thigh. Her eyes opened to see Pickford pressing a finger into the flesh just above her knee. To her surprise, when he removed his finger it had left a small depression on the flesh such as might have been left behind had he done the same to wet clay.

‘The solution’s taken effect, the flesh is pliable enough,’ he said to his assistants out of Sophie’s sight. ‘I’m about to begin.’

What followed was a bizarre mixture of massage and a strange trip for Sophie. Pickford moved to the end of the table and began to knead her toes, which offered no resistance to his fingers and soon moulded together until the ends of Sophie’s feet were devoid of digits altogether. Next he began to work on her feet themselves, smoothing the insides of both and rounding her heels in the palms of his hands. Sophie watched as her feet gave way and became one, the flesh of each melting into the other whilst Pickford’s hands pointed them downwards and pushed what had been her heels back a little so that the tip of the newly amalgamated extremity was in line with her legs on an almost horizontal plane. Returning to what had been her toes, Pickford flattened the blunt end of the flesh and smoothed the point together until there was no trace of Sophie’s feet whatsoever as he carefully removed her toenails, placed them in a waiting metal pan and quickly eradicated the small indentations they had left.

Sophie looked on as Pickford moved up to her calves and gently pressed them together. Again she felt the very flesh of her limbs yield as they became one and Pickford carefully progressed all the way up to her knees before returning the way he had come to pull them closer together and seal up the fain line that still hinted as to the distinct limbs which they had once been.

Before he moved upwards, Pickford called to his assistants who gingerly lifted Sophie and turned her so that she lay on her belly. Now the doctor was lost from sight, but Sophie was soon aware of just what part of her was working on. She felt gentle hands make contact with her intimate parts and begin to mould them as they had done her feet and calves. What might have been deeply uncomfortable was softened by the effect of the drugs and the warm and yielding quality that the strange liquid had conferred upon her body. The sensation of movement was soon over and she was turned onto her back once more.

Only now did Pickford begin to push together and mould her thighs, first unifying her knees and then sealing the ever shrinking gap between Sophie’s legs until he reached the point where she had been waxed to remove her pubic hair before arriving at the Retreat. Here he spent a great deal of time putting an end to her crotch and levelling her flesh out so that when he was finished Sophie stared down the length of her body and took in the uninterrupted flow of soft pink flesh which started at her waist and ended at what were once her feet.

Her contemplation was cut short as the theatre assistants again lifted her and placed her on her stomach. Pickford worked quickly now, moulding and sealing the back of her legs so that they were uniform with the front until he reached Sophie’s buttocks. There he inserted something cold and hard, which brushed against her intimate parts and stayed there whilst he pressed the cheeks of her backside together and finally concluded smoothing everything together. When the object was removed the assistants turned her over once more and one held her lower half off the table whilst Pickford and the other pulled a long machine plated with polished metal from the corner of the room.

The machine was about five feet in length, three wide, maybe a foot deep and sat atop four legs mounted with castors. While Pickford opened the device like the bottom half of a coffin, the second assistant fiddled with the table until the section under Sophie’s lower limb folded away, all the time his colleague held her still. Pickford and the assistant then manoeuvred the machine beneath Sophie and guided the other man to lower her into it. She saw that the interior of the machine was shaped precisely to fit her new form and as the lid was closed she felt it press tightly around her allowing not an inch of movement.

Soon she began to feel heat building within the machine and suffusing her lower half once again. Reclined on the table she lost any sense of time and drifted into a deep and dreamless sleep.

When she awoke, Sophie found that she was alone in the dark. She groped instinctively for the bedside table and the alarm that she presumed must have woken her. As her arm waved about in the darkness she contemplated the ride to work and wondered if she should stick to the usual routine for her act, or try to throw in something a little more daring. Maybe tonight was the night to try taking the stage in a full-length toga and falling to the floor in pretend shock at the tail suddenly flapping away from between the folds.

It was about then that she realised the table was not there and there was no alarm.

Sophie recalled where she was and found the light switch on the wall by the bed.

Then she remembered what had taken place in the operating theatre.

With more than a little trepidation, Sophie pulled back the sheets to be presented with the sight of a dull grey material peeking out from under a nightshirt, which she had no memory of dressing herself in. She tugged the covers off her fully and stared at the tight stocking that covered her legs. Made of a smooth material almost without a discernable texture, the stocking was quite thick and extended right up to an inch above her waist.

The way in which the stocking held her legs together reminded Sophie of the similar garments she had worn under her costume. Perhaps, she thought, it was all a dream; just the effects of whatever they doped me up with.

At the other end her feet waved back at her as Sophie flexed them experimentally. They were quite mobile, but something did not seem right. It was as if they refused to bend all the ways that they should and Sophie simply could not make them point upwards as if she were trying to stand on the soles. A vague recollection of what she thought she had seen Pickford doing to them nagged at her, but she ignored it; lying down on her back, she began to pull the stocking down.

As soon as the garment had moved more than a few inches, Sophie stopped dead. At first she had simply rolled the hem down without a second thought, but then she realised that she should have passed her waist a good two inches earlier. She gazed at the point where her legs should have begun and saw only pink skin disappearing under the stocking.

She had not been hallucinating.

She did not have legs, as such, anymore.

She was one step on the way to becoming a mermaid.

If this was the reality of her situation, Sophie reflected, then she was going to get to grips with the practicalities of her new form. With this in mind, she stripped the stocking off completely and pulled herself over to the edge of the bed. She swung her unified lower limb over the edge and regarded herself in the full-length mirror upon the wall. The nightshirt followed the stocking and she took in the changes that Pickford had wrought to her body.

‘Mirror, mirror on the wall; who’s the biggest pink worm of them all?’ she whispered to herself as she followed the line of her body unbroken from head to what had been her toes. What Pickford had begun with his hands, the machine into which he had placed her had certainly made a nice finish to. The seamless line of Sophie’s lower body made her certain that the machine had been some kind of press or mould to set her flesh in its new shape. She noted with interest the absence of pubic hair and toenails. She also found herself admiring the graceful line that her lower half followed, from her waist all the way down to where her feet curved under slightly as if in anticipation of what was to come.

Sophie placed a hand on her extended lap and ran her fingers over the spot in which she guessed her intimate parts had been. She was surprised to find that while there was no trace to be found on the outside, something had certainly been left behind beneath the skin.

Intrigued, she rolled onto her stomach and felt for her buttocks only to find that while they were still there, they too had changed somewhat. Rather than the rounded cheeks she was used to, Sophie found that both sides were pulled tightly together as though their muscles had been strengthened. A probing finger found that the line between them extended almost twice as far as it had before.

Determined to find out all that she could, Sophie forced her finger in-between the cheeks and quickly found that her backside was just where she left it and her private parts had become a close neighbour to it.

Before she could explore any further there was a gentle rap on the door.

Sophie was suddenly aware that she had never bothered to check the time when she awoke. A quick glance told her that she had slept right through the night.

For all the apparent strangeness of losing her legs and awaking to find that her intimate parts had gone walkabout, she was about to have to deal with a whole lot more.

Pickford seemed quite delighted when Sophie explained to him that she had fathomed the ins and outs of the changes that he had made to her body the previous day (she later concluded that this was due to the fact that it spared him the embarrassment of explaining how her plumbing now worked himself), and was keen to move on to the second stage of the operation. Within five minutes of entering the theatre, she was back on the table and ready to take the next step away from being human and towards becoming a mermaid.

Before she received another dose of the hypnotic anaesthetic, Pickford drew her attention towards two plastic tanks that sat on a table a few feet from where she lay. The first and smallest contained eight small blue shapes, much like arrowheads, but curved on two sides and faintly transparent in the strong light of the theatre. Sophie looked closer and noted that they were suspended in a gel just like as the scale Pickford had shown her in the consulting room. She glanced down at her hands and spread her fingers wide apart as she recognised the shape of the webbing that had been glued in-between her fingers as a part of her stage costume.

But it was the contents of the second and far larger tank that held her attention rapt while Pickford explained them to her with a certain amount of pride.

In this tank was suspended a magnificent tailfin. Between two and three feet in length, it flared out at the top and twisted away into two flukes that tapered to points like nothing she had seen before. Of a blue that matched and yet far surpassed the webbing intended for her fingers, the tailfin was ribbed with five lines at each side that began at the top and followed the shape of the individual flukes until they met at their tips. Under the theatre lights, the tailfin shimmered like a giant butterfly of unearthly beauty and grace.

For the first time, Sophie found herself caught up in a state of enchantment.

Not only was she to be a mermaid; but also she was to be a stunning vision unlike anything she had dared imagine.

Pickford explained briefly what Sophie had already concluded; that the object of today’s surgery would be to attach the parts that she saw in the tanks. These had all been grown in the same way as the scales and would function as any other part of her body in just the same way. The webbing was self-evident, but he went into more depth in the case of the tailfin. Raising the end of Sophie’s unified lower limb, he explained that the tailfin would be attached to the bottom of her former feet. Now that the shape of her feet was like that of an uneven diamond, with the longer edges being the outer sides and the shorter being the edge where her toes had once been, the tailfin would be attached to the latter edges and make use of the bones and muscles now redundant that had once worked the long gone digits.

Sophie nodded that she understood and soon the anaesthetic was administered.

Again she was cast adrift on a sublime feeling and watched in a detached wonder as Pickford went about his work, before falling into a deep sleep. She watched as each of the triangles of webbing was placed in-between her immobile fingers after a concentrated spray from a small canister, which Pickford held in his off hand, had been applied. From the way the webbing sank into the skin as each piece was pressed home, Sophie guessed that the same strange liquid was being used as had reduced her legs to the consistency of clay. She wondered what other uses the Retreat had put the same substance, or whether it was the sole preserve of Pickford himself.

Though he had been careful with the webbing, Pickford took the greatest pains by far over the tailfin. With this he ushered the assistants out of the theatre and would let no hands but his own touch the contents of the larger tank. Delicately laying the fin out before the end of Sophie’s lower limb, he made precise incisions down both sides where her toes had been with a scalpel. Though she could feel no pain, Sophie was sure she could feel Pickford’s fingers as he sought and found the bones that her toes had left behind. As he worked, slowly at first and then ever more quickly, she became aware of the tailfin as each bone and its nerve endings were married up to a rib running its length. Eventually the same canister reappeared in Pickford’s hand and as he squeezed the trigger, Sophie again felt herself succumbing to sleep.

When the alarm sounded for real this time, Sophie was awake in a second and silenced the clock she had retrieved from her bag before leaving for the operating theatre for the second time. Estimating that she operation could not have taken more than six hours, she had set the alarm to go off at midnight. This she hoped would give her a good few hours to sleep off the after-effects of the anaesthetic and still allow for more time in which to examine the sum of the changes that had been wrought upon her this time round.

The first became apparent when she reached out and flipped the lights on. Her hand felt as if she were wearing a glove of some kind, and a closer inspection revealed that she was right. Both her hands had been covered by fingerless gloves; made of the same material as the stocking she had awoken in the previous morning. Sophie wasted no time in pulling these off to reveal her newly webbed hands.

She blew on her palm and found that they were every bit as sensitive as her fingers and joined the skin as if they had always been a part of her. Each curved between her fingers and met them below the first joint, and whilst she found that she was perfectly able to hold a pen and perform a host of other minor feats of digital dexterity, she was unable to wear a ring upon her fingers any longer or intertwine her hand with that of another.

Another stocking had been pulled over her legs and she treated this in the same way, only pausing for a moment before pulling the whole thing off to reveal the tailfin. Once the stocking was gone, the tailfin unfurled upon the bed in all its glory. It was heavier than Sophie had imagined, weighing the end of her fast developing tail down and forcing her to flex her muscles to move it around. But once she began, it was evident that the tailfin was far from inanimate due to its weight. Sophie found that she was quite able to twist and turn the fin in many different directions as its two halves worked independently of each other and responded perfectly to the demands of the ribs now attached to the nerves and muscles that had once animated her toes.

Sophie lay on her stomach and arched her tail forwards so that the fin flopped down over her head. Leaning on her elbows, she ran her hands over it and explored the thing’s texture and shape, all the time as aware of her hands upon the fin as she was the fin between her fingers. She had expected it to be cold and maybe a little slimy, but she found instead that it was warm and quite dry, even noticing the tiny and delicate veins that ran through it.

Feeling more than a little excited, Sophie eased herself off the bed and crawled over to her bags where they lay in a corner of the room. Most of the clothes she had brought were casual and quite ordinary, but not all of them. Sophie rooted around until she had found the items she wanted and then climbed back onto the bed.

Quickly she stripped her nightshirt off and cupped her breasts in a black strapless bra. The next piece of clothing took a bit more forward thinking as she attacked the toe of a pair of black tights with nail scissors and then balled them up ready to be pulled on. Sophie teased the ends of her tailfin into the leg of the tights that she had cut and then eased them through the holes she had made for them until they emerged from either side. She then pulled the leg of the tights up over her bare tail and to her middle and tucked the empty leg into the waistband. The outfit was finished off with a little black dress that fitted her like a dream. The ended well before her knees (or once had) and had never failed to impress.

Fully dressed, Sophie picked up the phone by the bed and dialled reception.

‘Reception,’ she recognised Gillian’s accented English, ‘how can I help?’

‘This is Ms Higgson in room twenty-seven. I missed the evening meal, please could you send me up something to eat?’

‘Certainly,’ Gillian replied, ‘what would you favour?’

‘Send me some seafood,’ Sophie stifled a laugh, ‘anything will do, as long as its seafood.’

‘Very well, someone will be with you within the next half an hour.’

‘You won’t be bringing it yourself?’

‘No, I’m afraid that would be quite impossible.’

‘Ok,’ Sophie resigned herself to the fact that she was not going to be able to shock Gillian after all.

She spent the next thirty minutes practicing and pouting in the mirror until she heard a knock at the door. One hand resting on her tail and the other cradling her head as she reclined on the bed she decided that she was ready.

‘Come in and put it down by the bed; you’re safe to come right in, I’m dressed.’

The door was opened by a young man not more than twenty and wearing the uniform of a male nurse. At first he seemed taken aback at the sight of Sophie as she moved her hand up to her breast and gave him a seductive smile. Then his eyes trailed down to the sight of her tail, naked of scales, but clearly visible for what it was beneath the black tights. Sophie flapped her tailfin as he stared open-mouthed and pointed at the platter he was carrying.

‘I’d bet you a pound to a penny that whatever you’ve got under there, it isn’t the catch of the day right now, is it?’ It was a line so predictable that it made her cringe, but it had the desired effect.

The nurse’s Adams apple bobbed for a second before he dropped the platter on the floor and fled the room.

Once she was alone, it took Sophie so long to stop laughing that the contents of the platter had gone cold.

The last day in the operating theatre began as the other two had with Sophie being wheeled through the doors and delivered onto the table in the centre of the room where Pickford greeted her. But this was the third day, when the final stage of the process would take place and for all intents and purposes she would say goodbye to the human being known as Sophie and become a creature conjured out of myth and fantasy. The same face would stare back at her from the mirror, but everything else would change from this day onwards.

Pickford would today engage in the delicate task of attaching the individually grown scales to Sophie’s tail, thus rendering the transformation complete and providing the world at large with its first genuine mermaid.

The end of her tail was soon strapped to a complex harness and hoisted off the table until only Sophie’s torso remained upon the table. The doctor explained that for this part of the operation he would be unable to turn her as he worked and instead needed to have the whole of her tail at his disposal.

‘I think that I’ll have outdone Barnum by the time the day is over,’ he joked.

Sophie laughed out of simple politeness, but Pickford’s casual joke sent her mind racing back over the events of the past two days once more. She realised that the intense changes wrought to her body and the speed with which they had taken place had left her somewhat stunned; despite all the care taken to stagger the operation over a number of days she had still been overwhelmed by the massive reality of her new physical appearance.

Only now as the anaesthetic took effect for the final time did she begin to contemplate the vast implications of what she had allowed Pickford to do to her. There was a part of her that still refused to believe his claim that her transformation would not be permanent, that she was being initiated into a strange kind of human zoo where she would have all the rights of an animal. Sophie recalled a time when she had visited an aquatic park on the continent, but now rather than tanks populated with dolphins and other cetaceans, she pictured herself on show and made to perform for the applause of the tourists. She worried that with the changes to her body would follow changes to her mind. Deprived of legs and forced to deal with the reality that a tail had replaced them, would she be able to think like a human being for long? Sophie had been sure changes had begun to creep over Kiera after she had returned from the Retreat, as if her usual playful nature had been absorbed into the provocative nature of the creature she portrayed on the stage, the creature that had replaced her former self.

While she swam in an ocean of her own thoughts, buoyed up by the effects of the drugs in her veins, Pickford had wasted no time in starting on the job at hand. On a shallow tray by the operating table lay row upon row of scales, each nearly identical to the original Sophie had seen in the consulting room. With a fine pair of tweezers in one hand and the spray he had employed the previous day in the other, Pickford moistened a spot on Sophie’s tail and gently attached one scale at a time. He began at the very point where the tailfin met the pink skin and laid the first layer half over the former and half over the latter as to disguise the transition from one to the other. When he had laid a complete band around the base of the tail, he then began another above it taking care to overlap the second layer over the first. In this way he proceeded, each new band growing wider as the width of the tail increased and each overlapping with the last so that no gap at all was visible. Sophie watched his progress as the effects of the anaesthetic clouded her thoughts and silenced the trepidation that had taken hold of her. All the anxiety and fear was reduced to the simple act of watching, and she counted each scale as a step on the road away from her former self.

As the scales reached her knees and then inched up over her thighs and finally reached up to encircle her waist, Sophie felt herself swallowed up by a feeling of deep calm. The completion of the tail seemed somehow to silence her doubts and resign her to the fact that this was now as much a part of her as the colour of her eyes, the curve of her breasts or the sound of her voice. As Pickford dotted the scales up her stomach and over her back to graduate the change from fish to flesh and finally released Sophie’s tail from the harness, she watched the whole thing move like an iridescent shirt of chainmail above the elegant shape of the tailfin. This was no costume that she could pull off at the end of the day; as she had predicted, her costume had become her skin.

It was a good month later when Sophie and Pickford met again. They sat in the same chairs, in the same room and drank coffee from the same cups. Only Sophie, out of all the pieces that made up the picture, had changed.

She sat proudly, with her tail gathered up beneath her so that the flukes of her tailfin fell over the arm of the chair. She wore a loose fitting dress that made no effort to conceal the shape of her tail and fell away to reveal the silver and blue of the scales as they caught the sunlight streaming in through the window. Her hair was gathered beneath a scarf wrapped around her head and also caught the light where Sophie had taken to entwining small beads and charms into the locks as her rehabilitation had progressed.

For his own part, Pickford was visibly impressed. Sophie tried to puzzle out whether his admiration was for his own handiwork or simply for the sight of a flesh and blood mermaid sitting not more than a few feet away. In the end she settled upon a mixture of the two.

Both knew that the past month had been a revelation for the patient. The sudden reality that she was now at the end of the tunnel had washed away all trace of the trepidation that had dogged Sophie through the days of the operation. And Pickford had been right, her previous experience had crystallised in her mind and overcome the shock of her new form. At times Sophie caught herself thinking that she had forgotten to undress at the end of the day, but all that had soon passed as the undulating motions of her tail and its hypnotic scales became far more than could ever be termed second nature. As she learned to move and cope with the freedoms and the limitations that were afforded by the tail, Sophie found a new confidence born out of the very changes that she had once feared.

‘I’m pleased to say that you have a clean bill of health and the physiotherapist reports that you’ve taken to the using of your tail like…well like a fish to water. So I’ll have no problem in seeing you off back to London as soon as all the details are finalised. I hear your employer has made all the necessary arrangements for you in advance?’ he glanced up from her file to ask the question.

Sophie nodded. Doug had been in contact and rattled on over the phone about the apartment he had laid on for her return. The place was apparently tailored to allow her every freedom despite the limitations that faced a mermaid stranded upon dry land. He explained that the backers of the club had been generous in advancing capital to ensure that the new attraction was maintained in the appropriate manner. The money was even enough to secure a small indoor pool as a further sweetener to the deal. She had enjoyed mastering the art of swimming with her tail in the Retreat’s own pool, and Sophie was particularly looking forward to the thought of a private pool of her own.

‘So the car will be here to pick you up some time this afternoon and I’ll be seeing you, hopefully, in five years time…which should give me plenty of time to grow you some new toenails to replace the ones that I did away with!’

Sophie leaned forward and gave him a conspiratorial whisper in the ear.

‘Who says I’ll want those; I may ask you for gills when five years are up…’

Costume: Part 1

Image provided by Tokyoboy

The door to the room swung open and banged against the wall with a dull thud that jarred Sophie’s teeth and reminded her of the headache she had woken up with more than six hours ago.

Silently she thanked empty space for the small mercy that her shift was finally over for the night. It might have been nothing to look at, but at that exact moment in time the six feet by four of the dressing room was the most welcoming thing in the world. It had everything she wanted, a door and four walls between her and the rest of humanity.

From her vantage point, Sophie could make out only the legs of the battered dresser and stool, the oriental screen in the far corner that swallowed up the rest of the room, hiding the tiny shower and toilet, was a blur of faded colour in the corner of her eye. The carpet felt far better on the palms of the hands than the cold tiles of the corridor as she pulled herself into the room towards the stool. When the exposed skin of her stomach rubbed across the carpet it gave her a fresh burst of energy and a second later she cast a hand out and took hold of the nearest leg.

She paused there for a moment to gaze back over her shoulder and regard the progress she had made. Half the battle was over as she had covered half the way into the room and her upper half was fully inside. The fact was that she needed to check her progress before trying to shut the door for fear of misjudging and slamming the damn thing on the length of her tail that still trailed out behind her into the corridor.

Sophie turned over onto her back and drew her tail up as far as possible so that the blue scales rested and inch or two from her chin and the paler flukes which flared out at the end crept into the room. Once they had joined her, she rolled onto her side and swung the door shut with a flip of the end of the tail.

Now she was alone, she paused and rummaged around in a drawer at the bottom of the dresser. Rummaging around among the contents she cursed under her breath as the webs between her fingers got very much in the way. A tone matching her tail-flukes, the webs churned through the junk in the drawer and made her drop the object of her search twice before she tossed a pack of cigarettes onto the top of the dresser.

Pulling her tail round and under her buttocks, Sophie wriggled around until the end and the flukes were right under her rear end. From there she heaved herself up belly-first onto the seat of the stool and spent the next few minutes struggling to work her body around till she was sitting comfortably facing the mirror that dominated the whole of the dresser and looked down upon a multitude of cosmetics arranged before her like votive offerings at a shrine.

Before her hand strayed to the dresser for the cigarettes or the various cosmetics, Sophie stared into the mirror and regarded the reflection as if looking upon a stranger for the first time. She traced the tresses of hair hanging down below her shoulders, a brown so strong and tending towards red it seemed ready to burst into flame. She gazed into the round hazel eyes and lingered for a time on the details of a delicate face. A hand drifted down towards her breasts, naked save for a few scales that dotted them, as blue as those more numerous upon the length of her tail. The hand travelled down and was lost from the view of the mirror as it found her waist. A solitary finger roamed over the scales that began as a lonely few dotted around her belly-button and grew more and more it descended over the tiny curve of her stomach until all trace of skin was lost beneath the fine overlapping scales.

Soon the other hand joined the first as Sophie explored the scales at her waist, feeling as if for something lost which must now be rediscovered with all haste. Finally both hands met below her navel and she slipped her fingers under hidden seam of her tail and lifted the edge of the costume, pushing towards her right side. The tail fitted her so well that the overlapping inches of skin tone after the scales ended was a near perfect match for her own, perfect enough to fool the naked eye and create the desired illusion. Her hands found their way to their goal and released the clip holding the monofibre seam together and the costume slowly yielded as she peeled it from her legs.

Sophie bit her lip as she delicately removed the costume and liberated her thighs at first, and then her knees re-emerged followed soon after by her feet, all still held together by the stiff Lycra stocking that served to restrict her movements and heighten the illusion that what lay beneath it did not exist at all. She gingerly laid the tail over the back of her chair, well aware of the fact that she could not afford to replace it were there to be the slightest damage whilst she was off stage. Next she rolled the stocking down to her feet with little regard for the more robust undergarment. As usual it was wet with perspiration, she tossed it into a corner where similar stockings were piled and rubbed the feeling back into her feet. She wriggled a little on the seat as she quickly pulled of the scales that dotted her skin, then winced as she yanked the larger scales away from her nipples, too tired to use the solvents arrayed among the make-up on the dresser to dissolve the glue that held them in place. At last she pulled off the webbing from her fingers one piece at a time with a curse under her breath for each one.

Once finished, and dressed now only in a thong – the only underwear that the costume permitted her to wear – Sophie padded across the tiny space of the room and disappeared behind the screen where she was able to wash away the sweat and grime as well as do something else that her costume made impossible.

Dressed and mercifully clean, Sophie stood outside the back door of the club and watched as the night sky turned a pale grey before dawn. She took a last drag from her cigarette before dropping the butt on the ground and crushing it under her battered trainer.
‘Penny for your thoughts?’

She glanced over her shoulder and saw that a fellow smoker had joined her in the alleyway.

‘What did I do this time, Doug?’ she said, trying to cut to the point.

Despite the fact that she felt no particular enmity towards her employer, Sophie was almost asleep on her feet and polite conversation was the last thing she wanted.

‘Nothing…nothing,’ he replied, ‘apart from you never leave your stockings out for the laundrette run, you constantly pester me for advances half way through the month and you stuck two fingers up at that yank the other week, nothing at all.’ His tone was light and he grinned as he spoke.

‘You were there, you saw; the bastard tried to cop a feel.’

‘I know, I know…only joking,’ he paused for a second, ‘It’s just that you looked like you had the weight of the world on your shoulders in there tonight, I was worried about you.’

Perhaps the kindest thing that could have been said about Doug was the fact that he had chosen to work in an industry where he at least looked the part. He was balding, a bit overweight, had slightly rounded shoulders and dressed in suits that would not have looked out of place on the set of a cheap gangster movie. Everything about him screamed sleaze; except for the fact that he was afflicted by a conscience and totally unable to stop himself caring for the welfare of his employees. When Sophie had first started to work for him, Doug had given her warm handshakes and friendly grins, which she had been sure, were a preamble to a clumsy effort to grope her when the chance arose. But when the much-feared fondling attempt failed to materialise and Doug talked away her nerves, she had begun to grow fond of his bumbling ways and cheesy sense of humour. Experience had taught her that she could always approach him with a problem, be it big or small.

‘The usual,’ she managed as she lit his cigarette.

‘Trouble in the bedroom?’

‘No, the other usual.’

‘Ah, money.’

‘Bang on,’ she lit another for herself, ‘they cut the electric off yesterday.’

‘Why didn’t you say,’ Doug’s hand went instinctively for his wallet, ‘how much do you need?’

‘What? No I couldn’t…anyway, it’s more than having to put up with candles and cold beans. It’s the same thing every month, after the electric, water, council rates and my mobile I have those old student debts leeching from me as well. I’m stuck in a bloody rut and I something to kick me up the arse and get me out of it before I go mad.’

Doug looked thoughtful for a few moments before he spoke.

‘I’d pay you more if I could, but then I’d have to give the rest a rise as well; can’t afford that right now, no way. So you’ll have to get another job, or else rob a bank.’

‘Have you seen the unemployment figures lately? By the way, do you have a spare balaclava I could borrow?’

Doug was quiet again, as if he were weighing things up in his mind.

‘You could always go full BM; then I could get away with paying you more. What do you think?’

Body Modification, the words were both the ultimate taboo and the ultimate turn-on depending on which side of the equation you were on. In the last days of the twentieth century genetic modification had been nothing more than a term that was bandied around in the media as eco-warriors and the captains of industry argued back and forth about twiddling with the genes of crops and the dangers of “Frankenstein foods” being sold for human consumption. But with the passage of time it had come to mean so much more; it had come to stand for all the clever little tricks that mankind had learned to pull with the genetic makeup of not only the lower orders of flora and fauna, but also inevitably upon his own.

In the sweltering heat of the underground, Sophie’s thoughts raced like the train as it wound its way through the bowels of London. Cramped into her seat, she stared down at the paper open on her lap, her eyes gazing right through the print as if it were not there at all.

There had always been an underground in the industry that catered for the more outlandish and offbeat of preferences; the titillation that would raise a few eyebrows were it mentioned in polite company, but was nevertheless tolerated so long as it never strayed from the unspoken bounds that were set for it. The dominatrix could wield her whip and clamp her punters nipples, the dancer could gyrate in her customer’s lap and even the men who got off on wearing bibs and nappies were pretty safe whilst they indulged themselves behind closed doors.

While these had all been commonplace for as long as the industry had existed, it seemed that the past twenty years since the turn of the century had seen even more colourful ideas emerge from the mass unconscious when it came to getting your thrills. One had been the advent of the “Costume Clubs,” where the emphasis was on the exotic dress of the dancers and punters paid to see in the flesh what they could only see as fantasy elsewhere. The clubs ran the gamut from small places where the girls dressed as Japanese schoolgirls for wild-eyed oriental businessmen to the big time operations, which rented out large premises and had the financial clout to rival the Hollywood studios when it came to the quality of their costumes. Some clubs were a mishmash of concepts and ideas, but others followed a strict theme and employed dancers to play specific parts such as the occupants of a nunnery, a women’s prison or even a school of gladiators, decking out the interior of the club to heighten the effect. The more outrageous the theme, the more outrageous the costumes.

It was into this particular category that Doug’s own club fell, doing a brisk trade catering for its punters with a group of dancers portraying the creatures of ancient mythology. Despite his not being able to raise the wages of his staff, Doug had managed to funnel enough cash into the place to make sure that the parts of the club that the customers saw was something out of the ordinary. “The stage,” as he called it, was a good-sized loft not far from the banks of the Thames. Once inside, the illusion was almost complete and might have fooled the worse for drink into thinking that they were sitting in a Greek forum on a warm summers night. Only a keen eye would have convinced the average customer that Homer himself was not likely to be sitting away in a corner reciting poetry. At the far end of the club was a stage from which an ancient tragedy might have been performed, but from which a far more sensuous art was actually indulged in.

Doug’s girls each had a creature that was their own, and the same money that had gone into the club also went into making sure that they looked the part whilst on stage. Fauns, centaurs, nymphs of all four elements, even snake-tailed nagas crept into the menagerie (though they were an import from the mysterious east and not native to the Mediterranean). And of course there was Sophie herself, the resident mermaid. They turned up, they got dressed, they danced for the customers and then they went home.

And when it was all over, the unpleasantness washed away and the money having changed hands, then everyone went back to their normal lives. If the willing participants, customer and provider of services, were to meet in the street then neither would dare to acknowledge the other in the real world.

But BM changed the rules; with it you could no more simply take off the costume and go home than you could take off your own skin. With BM the costume was your skin.

Doug had not lied when he spoke of the financial rewards, there was much demand for “the real thing” and people were willing to pay to see it. This was supposed to in some way balance the sacrifices that the subject had to make, the fiscal reward repaying the physical price. Sophie was also sure that he would pay her well were she to take that option; Doug had made it clear to his girls that the price of the treatment would go through the clubs accounts and their expenses would all be met.

She recalled as well the fuss and occasion that Doug had made when the first (and so far only) one of his employees had consented to the process. Kiera had returned from a long holiday in Africa and shown her face at the club only once before disappearing again amidst the whispers of the other dancers as to just what would return.

When the time came, Doug made sure that his investment in Kiera was worthwhile. Appearing on stage in a ludicrous toga and sandals, he announced to the eager crowd that he had just taken receipt of a rare specimen from the furthest reaches of the dark continent. At his command a pair of men dressed in similar togas (and feeling like a pair of prats) pulled a large cage covered with a rich red cloth out onto the stage. Without further ado, Doug whipped back the cloth and stepped back to reveal the contents of the cage.

Sophie recalled taking a breath in surprise.

There inside the cage was Kiera; the face was the same and the suggestive smile had not changed, even if so much else had. She wore a bra and loincloth made only of twisted black fabric, which was almost lost against the black and white stripes that crisscrossed her skin. A mane of black and white hair fell from her head and trailed away down her spine, narrowing all the way until it vanished just above the tail at the base of her spine that swayed back and forth. Far longer at the front, the mane fell down on the left side of her head, covering one eye whilst the other regarded the crowd with a mischievous glint. As she stepped out of the cage and made towards the edge of the stage, Sophie had cast an eye on her legs, seen that below the knee they bended back on themselves, and ended in black hooves, which clacked on the boards as she went.

Kiera was the new star attraction, she was worth more in wages than any two of her colleagues put together, she was exotic and alluring in a unnerving and alien way. But she could not go home, could not walk down the street, and could not ride the crowded and stifling underground back to her tiny flat in the soulless boroughs.

And it was that last memory which made up Sophie’s mind.

As the thronging crowds piled out of the train and carried her from the platform, up the stairs and out onto the street she was fumbling for her mobile and dialling Doug’s number.

A loud and persistent knocking at the door finally dragged Sophie out of bed. Though she did not bother to look at the bedside clock, the light lancing in between the slats of the blind betrayed the fact that it was the middle of the day. Silently cursing the nocturnal existence that her job demanded, she hunted around the room until she found a shirt to cover herself. The last remnant of an old relationship, the shirt was large enough to reach halfway down her thighs and would have to do, as her dressing gown was nowhere to be found.

The knocking at the door continued as she picked her way through the messy flat towards the door. Once there she stared through the peephole in the door and caught sight of the distorted image of a man in a courier’s uniform. As strange as the view through the hole made him seem, it was clear that the look on his face was one of impatience as he kept on pounding the door.

Putting on the chain, Sophie opened the door and peered round at the courier whose knuckles had stopped only an inch from the wood.

‘Ms S Higgson?’ he asked in a stressed tone of voice.

‘Yes.’

‘Package for you, luv,’ he proffered his palm-sized inventory, ‘just need you to swipe for it and then I’m gone.’

Sophie retrieved her ID card from the pocket of her coat, which was mercifully still hanging from the peg on the back of the door. She quickly swiped it in the slot of the inventory and was rewarded with a smile from the courier and a small cardboard box as he tapped the screen, recording the delivery.

‘Return’s been paid for, luv,’ he explained before disappearing, ‘call the number on the label when it’s ready to be sent back and they’ll send someone round to pick it up.’

And with that he was gone.

Sophie closed the door and carried the box into the living room where she sat down and cleared a space on the table. The address on the label was of course her own, but the plastic pocket attached to the box was filled with a small sheet of instructions and another label bearing an address in Kent for the return of the package.

Before she read the instructions, Sophie opened the box and pondered over the contents. Nestled inside the packaging, she found what looked like two test tubes with a plastic lids and a small book. She unscrewed the test tubes and noticed that the first had a swap attached to the lid, while the second hid a miniature syringe in the same place. Putting these down, she flipped through the pages of the book and was assaulted by a spectrum of colours. Each page was devoted to a different tone, from an intense colour at the one side and fading to paler tones at the other. All in all it gave the impression of a book of wallpaper samples, except for the fact that each page was perforated where it met the spine do that it could be removed from the book.

More than a little puzzled by these finds, Sophie skimmed through the instructions without bothering to read in any great detail:

…using sample containers provided, please supply a specimen of blood and skin cells for the purpose of genetic profiling (the inside of the cheek is advised as the most readily accessible source for the latter and can be collected using the swab provided)…having taken time to browse the pigment catalogue enclosed, please remove the colour of choice by tearing along the perforated line and placing this back in the box with the specimen containers after discarding of the rest of the catalogue…finally seal up the box, attach the label provided and return to The Retreat. Once we have taken receipt of the returned package we will contact you with further details…Thank you for your patronage…

“The Retreat,” that was the name of the place. Sophie had been wondering what to expect and when she would hear from the people who were to carry out the BM. Doug had been quite vague when pressed for details and simply insisted that they were a private and very exclusive clinic that dealt with each client on a one to one basis and in the manner that they felt best fit the situation.

Kiera had been no more help when Sophie had called in on her unexpectedly to pump her for information on her own experience. In the well-appointed apartment that her BM status afforded her, the zebra-girl simply reclined on a sofa in a silk dressing gown and refused to tell. She was the result of their handiwork, Kiera explained, and even in the twenty-first century the sacred oath of privacy between patient and doctor held weight. They were legally bound to keep her identity confidential and she was in turn bound to keep their unique methods and practices quiet so that they remained that way.

Before Sophie left, Kiera stretched out her legs and waggled her hooves before lying out on her side and warbling out a few lines in imitation of her colleague’s stage act. They were both the worse for more than one bottle of wine and Sophie had not been sure weather to be amused or insulted.

But for all her unanswered questions and misgivings she was committed now and determined no to turn back. The swap went round the inside of both cheeks, the syringe went in her arm with a yelp and she mulled over the book for a while before settling on a page where a deep blue faded into silver. With the page torn form the book and the box sealed up again, she stuck on the label and dialled the number for the courier service.

Within the hour the package was on its way back from whence it came.

From the back of the cab, Sophie caught sight of the imposing gates, as they swung open. The car turned in off the road and wound its way up a broad gravel drive hemmed in on both sides by trees. The cab driver muttered and cursed as his wheels threw up the gravel, which clattered off the bodywork, but Sophie ignored him and instead tried to get a better view of what was hidden around the next bend in the drive.

Train tickets and a letter informing of the appointed day for her to attend the Retreat had turned up out of the blue just as the package, from then on everything had been hurry, hurry. Doug had given her the time off without question and pressed a fifty-pound note into her hand for the taxi from the station. The letter’s directions had the grumbling driver winding his way down narrow country lanes and through tiny hamlets, until they had arrived at those tall, cast iron gates.

There had been no sign by the road declaring that this was in fact the place she was looking for, but as there was nothing else for miles around this had to be the place. The driver had been surprised to find no intercom on the gates, but a whirring camera turning in their direction from atop one of the gateposts was followed by the gates simply opening of their own accord as if they were expected.

As the cab rounded the corner, Sophie was presented with the facade of an elegant Victorian house. Built of red brick, it was perhaps too small to be called a stately home and a little too large to be a manor house. Long low wings of two stories ran off to each side and the entrance was reached by three wide steps before the circle where the drive came to an end. Like the driveway, the house was flanked by trees and afforded an air of privacy that seemed right for a clinic of its kind.

The driver pulled up by the steps and busied himself with Sophie’s luggage – which as it consisted of a holdall and a rucksack – took only a few moments. He accepted the money, grumbled again at changing the fifty-pound note and then disappeared down the drive leaving her alone in the shadow of the house.

Sophie shouldered the rucksack and dragged the holdall after her as she wandered through the open doors and into a hallway lit by an atrium window high above. Twin staircases wound up the sides of the hall leading to the first floor; black and white tiles checked the floor. The walls were hung with landscapes large enough to cover the space and on the borderline between average and bland so as to not attract too much attention, giving the impression of expensive background detail. Beyond the stairs, Sophie saw a lounge laid out with leather couches and a pair of doors leading out into a garden spreading out behind the house.

She was so busy taking in the hallway that she nearly jumped out of her skin when she heard a polite cough. Sophie spun round to see a raven-haired woman sitting behind a neat desk of dark wood. Tucked away to the immediate right of the doors, Sophie had failed to even notice the woman and she was embarrassed to realise the woman had been sitting quietly waiting for her to turn round all the time.

Sophie hauled her luggage over to the desk and pulled the now crumpled letter out of her jacket pocket. The woman smiled as she accepted the letter; a sincere smile it seemed to Sophie. As she quickly read the letter and tapped away at the tiny desktop computer upon the desk, Sophie sized the woman up as best she could. The name badge she wore simply bore the name “Gillian,” with no mention of the Retreat and no mention of her job title either. From where she sat behind the desk, Sophie could make out that Gillian was wearing what appeared to be a black dress cut in an oriental style with a short collar. The dress had long sleeves and hugged close to Gillian’s figure, a little fuller than Sophie’s own and impressive for a woman who seemed well into her forties. The desk was covered by a dark throw that hung down over the front and hid whatever impressive pins Gillian might have been concealing under her snug dress.

‘Ms Higgson?’ Gillian asked, betraying an accent that set Sophie thinking of Eastern Europe.

‘That’s me.’

‘Welcome to the Retreat; my name is Gillian, if you need anything during your stay just pick up the phone in your room and dial one for reception,’ she gestured at the desk before her and the telephone sitting beside the computer. ‘I’ll be sure to send someone up to see to you.’

I’m sure you will, Sophie thought.

‘You are scheduled to meet with Dr Pickford at twelve tomorrow in consulting room two. Your room is number twenty-seven, on the first floor,’ Gillian handed over an old-fashioned key. ‘Shall I call for the Porter?’

‘No need,’ Sophie picked her luggage up once more and started towards the stairs.

‘Meals are delivered to your room; I’m afraid we have no dining room. Just…’

‘Call reception?’

‘Call reception, yes,’ Gillian laughed to herself.

At the top of the stairs Sophie paused and glanced back down at Gillian, sitting at her desk and tapping quietly at the computer again. From where she stood, Sophie was able to see Gillian’s legs before they disappeared under the desk. If the dress she was wearing had seemed a little snug on her chest, it looked positively skin-tight on what could seen of her lower half. Sophie was sure that the woman could not have walked at more than an inch at a time. Shaking her head, she decided to leave alone the mystery of the receptionist in the tight dress and find her room instead.

‘Sleep well?’

Sophie nodded; she had enjoyed the first good night’s sleep in months of working nights at the club and was still finding being up and about in daylight as something of a novelty. Her room had been much like the hallway; well furnished, but nothing over the top. A double bed, sofa, ensuite bathroom and a TV, which she had studiously ignored in favour of sleep.

But in contrast, the consulting room was quite a surprise. She had been expecting a dark room dominated by a huge desk and walls lined with diplomas and certificates; instead she had walked into a room painted a neutral wheat shade and carpeted with a thick brown shag-pile. The only furniture was a pair of comfy armchairs, a set of wooden shelves in the corner and a sideboard holding a coffee machine and crockery.

Even Pickford himself had been somewhat of a surprise, turning round to greet her from where he stood before the shelves and motioning to an empty armchair. Rather than the drab and grey man she had thought would lurk in a dark office and bore her to tears with a maze of medical jargon and babble, here was a bright character in jeans and a black woollen sweater. His dark brown hair was slightly unruly, but there was no sign of grey even at the temples and Sophie figured that he could not have been much more than thirty-five. A pair of spectacles rested upon his head as if they had been left there and forgotten, a suspicion that was confirmed when he retrieved a file from the shelves and then stopped with a look of confusion on his face until he found them and hastily balanced them on his nose. So, Sophie thought, this is what all those crazy professors look like before they go bald and loose their looks.
As soon as she was seated, Pickford had dropped the file on the arm of the empty chair and offered her a cup of coffee. While he made them both a drink, he had enquired as to whether she slept well.

‘Good, very good…kill you quicker than lack of water, you know?’

‘Pardon?’ Sophie looked a little puzzled.

‘Lack of sleep, brain needs to reach REM sleep every night…if it can’t then everything starts to fall apart…’ he paused, as if aware suddenly that he had wandered off the subject at hand. A confused expression crossed his face as he handed Sophie her coffee and sat down in the vacant chair. His own cup nestled between his legs; Pickford glanced at the file and seemed somehow steered back on track by the sight of it on the arm of the chair.

Sophie found herself grinning at Pickford’s friendly and bumbling manner. It was a long time since she had been a student and she had forgotten the eccentric characters that filled the halls of academia. There was no way that he could have survived in the real world; but here surrounded by his modern Swedish furniture, making coffees and polite small talk with his patients he made an endearing character.

‘I hope that Gillian made you feel welcome when you arrived, showed you the amenities and all that?’ Pickford smiled after asking the question and took a sip of his coffee.

Sophie nodded.

‘Good woman, Gillian,’ Pickford went on. ‘Very good with people,’ he considered something for a moment and then added, ‘former patient of mine, still up and alive…reassuring for you, eh?’

A former patient, so that explained the curves that she liked to show off. If he could do that for a woman heading towards fifty, then he might work wonders for a younger model. But then this was far more than a nip and tuck in the right places, and there were no examples of Pickford’s more extreme creations wandering about for her to judge him by.

Pickford made a point of opening the file and leafing through the contents, stopping occasionally to scrutinise a particular point and then moving on until he had made his way through the whole thing. Then he looked up and caught Sophie’s eye, his face a strange mixture of concern and enthusiasm.

‘So I see that you’re the girl that I’m to make a mermaid out of.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Sophie, the words sounded so strange coming from Pickford’s mouth that she could not manage much more.
‘Well,’ he began, ‘I have to say that I don’t think I could have picked a better candidate myself.’

He glanced away and took a quick sip of coffee as Sophie realised that he was blushing. A man more than a decade her senior and a doctor on top of that, had turned red with embarrassment at paying her a compliment. The last thing she had expected was for the man who was going to perform intricate surgery on her to get bashful at the prospect of admitting that he found a woman attractive. After so long performing in front of crowds of leering men, shouting at her whatever filth and depravity they could think of, Pickford’s reaction came almost as a shock. But then she supposed that a man in Pickford’s position had to control himself no matter what he might feel; no woman would put herself in the hands of a doctor whom she could not trust to keep his hands where they were supposed to be. Still, the doctor’s red face seemed an endearing quality and Sophie found herself liking him all the more for his little show of human weakness.

‘Now then,’ Pickford tried to move the conversation on, ‘as all the papers have been signed and the specimens required were taken weeks ago, I think it’s time we got down to some of the practicalities.’

‘So is this the point where you whip out your magic wand and make my shoes redundant in a puff of smoke is it?’ Sophie joked.

‘Unfortunately not,’ Pickford smiled, sharing the joke, ‘if only I could. Actually, Sophie, this is going to take at least three days of intensive surgery and a good few intensive months of recuperative physiotherapy and rehabilitation before you’re back on your…feet. And you understand that this is a contract, which binds you for a full five-year term to remain in the form you will be adopting…a mermaid that is? You’ll be a mermaid for the duration of that time with no get out clause.’

This is it, Sophie thought, now we really are through the looking glass now.

‘I think it might help if you keep in mind the fact that this is just another form of surgery, genetic rather than simply cosmetic, but a straight forward process that has precedents all the same. In the past we have been limited to changing the surface details of our patients; tweaking their faces, removing unsightly blemishes and of course the ubiquitous enhancements in the obvious areas. But now we’re moving into an age where we can go further, actually take action at the root of whatever the patient believes is their particular problem. In time this kind of gene therapy could cure disease and make genetic conditions a thing of the past, but right here and now we’re discussing a use to which it has been put that has lofty – if not so noble aims. I’m not about to subject you to something that could kill you or go awry, I’d like to think that we know what we’re doing here.’

‘I suppose you didn’t kill Kiera,’ Sophie conceded.

‘Kiera? Oh yes, you have the same employer as the young lady who was with us not long ago. A colleague worked with her, but as I remember it involved extensive dermal work as well as alterations to the skeletal system.’

Sophie nodded.

‘Well I can tell you that what I’m proposing in your case is nothing nearly as drastic and invasive as all that.’ He rose from the chair and returned to the shelves, rummaged around for something and then sat back down with a covered Petrie dish in his hands. ‘Take a look at this,’ he said as he removed the lid and handed it to Sophie.

Inside was a tiny object about the size of a penny; slightly oval-shaped, it sat suspended in a layer of clear jelly, but the light still played off the intense colours as it faded from intense blue to pale silver. It was a scale, the exact same colour as the page she had torn from the little book and returned to the Retreat weeks ago.

‘This is…’ Sophie stopped, unable to find the words.

‘That’s a scale,’ Pickford smiled, ‘or to be more exact, it’s one of your scales.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s a scale grown from the cell sample that you sent to us, designed and grown in a culture right here to the pigment specification you chose yourself.’

‘How’s this supposed to help me become a mermaid? People don’t have scales now, do they?’

‘No, but mermaids do; well at least the type that you’re to become do. And if people did have scales, yours would be pretty much the same as this one on a genetic level. This scale has the exact same genetic makeup as your hair, skin, teeth and your whole body; we just tricked it into thinking that you were supposed to have scales as well. You see this way there’s no chance of rejection as the scales are as much a part of your genetic profile in the ways that matter as any other part of your body.’

‘So you’re not going to cut me open and give me gills instead of lungs, or whip out my leg bones and replace them with a dolphins nether regions?’

‘There really is no point,’ Pickford gestured with his hands, ‘if you don’t mind me saying, you’re not likely to have to spend the rest of your life living under the waves now, are you? As far as I understand it you really need to have what amounts to a pair of legs in the shape of a tail, or rather one leg that looks like a tail from the outside. To that end I think that the changes had better be external rather than internal, and seeing as you already have experience in performing as a mermaid the rehabilitation will be at least a little easier for you.’

‘I suppose.’

‘My aim, Sophie, is to make a mermaid who can sit on a rock and charm the stars down from the sky; not to create some kind of zoological curiosity.’ He fixed her with a smile. ‘And of course the procedure done this way will be ultimately reversible.’

‘You’re serious?’

‘Of course.’

‘Okay,’ Sophie took in a deep breath, ‘when do we start?’