Give Her a Gun, But...

You sigh.

"Come on, she's getting out of her car!" exclaims Sarah, holding her hand out.

You think of a gun, which appears in Sarah's hand.

She quickly rolls down the window, leans out, and fires at the policewoman.

Instead of a "bang," it makes more of a "whoosh" sound; instead of a bullet, what comes out is a red laser beam, the cliché of hundreds of sci-fi movies.

The beam hits the policewoman square in the chest. Stunned, she stops walking.

"What is this, some 'Star Trek' gun?" demands Sarah.

The policewoman changes before your eyes. Her uniform pants merge and shrink drastically into a leather miniskirt, as her sensible shoes grow platform heels and extend up her legs to become thigh-high vinyl boots. Her belt and its accessories become merely a silver chain around her waist. The badge and name tag disappear from her uniform shirt, which shrinks and ties itself off just below her breasts, which themselves appear to grow a couple of cup sizes. Her hat shrinks on her head until it's a tiny little cap, through which her black hair magically pulls through, styling itself into a ponytail.

An invisible hand appears to quickly paint her face thick with makeup, as large hoop earrings pop into her earlobes, and a charm dangles from her now-pierced navel. Behind her, her police car morphs into a completely undistinguished Japanese coupe, a few years old.

Able to move again, she puts a hand to her temple and you notice her long, manicured fingernails. She shakes her head briefly and then continues toward your car.

Sarah leans over a bit, hiding the gun beneath her, as the woman leans on your door.

"Ooh, so you both are lookin' for some action?" asks the woman.

"What?" responds your bewildered girlfriend.

"You're lucky I was just gettin' here to start my shift," says the woman. "I'm very happy to swing both ways. Now, is he gonna join in or just watch the two of us?"

"I don't know --" and then it apparently dawns on Sarah. "No. No! God, no. None of it."

"Then why the fuck did you pull over here?" demands the suddenly angry woman. She points toward the curb, and you look to see an official-appearing sign on a post: "NO PARKING - PROSTITUTION ZONE."

Sarah's eyes go wide. "Sorry, sorry," she says. She quickly starts the Lamborghini and zooms away, squealing around a corner and into a convenient parking space on a side street.

Once she's turned off the engine, Sarah holds up the gun. "All right, what the hell?" she asks.

"I said I wasn't gonna give you a gun, like one with bullets, so I made something else up," you say. "A gun that turns people into hookers was the first thing I came up with."

"Jeez," mutters Sarah, shaking her head. "But what about that sign -- it looked like it was from the government, like it was legal."

"I didn't do that," you say. "Maybe that's part of the way my powers work -- in order for there to be a hooker coming up to our car right then and there, my powers had to make it be legal."

"Hmm," Sarah muses. "So what's the explanation for me having a gun that can magically change people?"

"Maybe for something like that, there is no explanation, or maybe it's something totally ridiculous, like you found it in a crashed UFO."

"Ha!" chortles Sarah. She holds it up, sideways like she's in a bad movie or a rap video, sneering at herself in the car's side-view mirror. She suggests, "Maybe you should change it so there's a dial on the side that --"

The gun goes off. With the red flash, in the first instant you can't tell if the beam ricocheted off the mirror and hit Sarah or you, or if she hit one of the few passersby on this fairly quiet commercial street. But then someone starts to change.