Jose Makes Another "Test"

Jose held the gun carefully in his palms. He'd just seen a woman, her clothes, and a car be transformed by a shot from this device, with the woman seeming not to notice -- she hadn't even noticed the red flash when the gun fired, as far as he could tell.

He inspected the dial. "GLAMOUR" was the setting.

He fully intended to return the gun to the owner of the Lamborghini, honestly he did, but surely it wouldn't hurt to give it at least one more try?

He clicked the dial over to "RACE CHANGE," wondering what the result would be, since it didn't specify race. He wondered if it would create a Latina hottie, but he figured just about anything would be more interesting than the nearly all-white clientele the hotel attracted.

He slid the gun into the inside pocket of his uniform jacket and got out of the Lamborghini, putting its keys in a pants pocket.

Telling himself that he was just taking the "long way" back to the valet office in front of the hotel, he started making a loop through the entire self-parking area when he heard a car door slam. He looked toward its source to see a blonde woman, casually dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans, crossing behind a car she'd just exited, apparently needing to get something out of the passenger side.

He ducked behind the front fender of a nearby car, where he would have a good shot at her over the hood. He got himself set, and as the woman was leaning into the open rear passenger door, he raised the gun and fired.

It was then that he saw that she was taking a child out of a car seat.

As she lifted what appeared to be a toddler boy out, her hair went from blonde to black like it was soaking up ink, her skin darkened to a caramel color, and her facial features altered a bit, most notably her eyes, which became almond-shaped, the irises darkening to brown. Jose was awed -- she'd changed to Asian. She'd even, he realized, become a couple of inches shorter and seemed to have shrunk slightly all over, making her more petite. Her clothes must have shrunk with her, since they still fit.

Still peering over the hood of the car he hid next to, Jose then saw that the boy had gone from blonde to having dark brown hair and brown eyes that were slightly almond-shaped. As the woman reached down for the boy's hand and the two started to toddle off, he puzzled over that for a moment -- he'd seen that the "laser" shot from the gun had only hit the woman, so why would the boy have changed?

Then the answer came to him -- if the boy's mother was now Asian, that meant the boy must have to be at least half-Asian. So this gun -- it didn't just change people, it's like it went back in time to change things, to seem like they'd always been that way.

And he realized the woman and the boy were walking slowly enough that he could get a couple more shots off without being seen.

He took careful aim -- didn't want to hit the boy -- turned the dial to "SKIMPIER CLOTHES," fired, quickly turned the dial one more click to "ENLARGE BREASTS," and fired again.

It wasn't until he carefully slid the gun back into his jacket pocket and stood up that he got his first look at the results. The woman was now wearing a skirt that went to mid-thigh, a top that was showing some midriff, and he wasn't sure what kind of shoes she'd been wearing before, but they were now wedge sandals with very high heels.

"Excuse me," he said, as he was walking up behind the woman and the boy. She turned around with a wary expression on her face, and he had to stifle a gulp -- her top was a skimpy V-neck T-shirt, revealing both her flat stomach and the deep cleavage created by a melon-sized pair of breasts. Her expression softened when she saw it was a hotel employee.

He had to **** himself to look into her eyes, not down where he really wanted to look. "Uh, could I give you a hand with something?"

"Oh, no thanks," she said with a smile, nodding toward the boy. "I've just got Aidan."

As they walked toward the elevator that led up to the hotel lobby, small talk revealed that she was staying with her husband while he was at a business conference; she'd taken her son for a morning visit to the city zoo, but now he was about ready for a nap.

Jose rode up to the lobby with the two of them, thinking that he hoped her husband would appreciate the changes that had been made to his wife -- but realizing that, if he was right about the way this gun worked, her husband would never know there was a difference.

Maybe, Jose thought, he could do a few more things with the gun before he returned it to its owner -- try to do a few things that would be a benefit to himself.