Mat knows about the con

Mat stood in the line outside the booth for almost twenty minutes before he reached the front.

The sign above the door was plain: Character Experience. Temporary. Revert automatic Monday noon unless extended. Most of the people ahead of him were laughing, treating it like another photo op station. He wasn’t. He’d read the smaller print on the info sheet twice. Gender optional. Full physical change for the duration. Side effects listed in the fine print he actually finished. He’d come to the con alone, same as every year black hair still damp from the hotel shower, green eyes scanning the racks visible through the open side of the booth, medium build in a plain gray hoodie and jeans. Dating had never clicked for him. Apps went nowhere. Conversations at panels died after ten minutes. So he’d decided, weeks ago, that if the machine did what the rumors said, he’d spend the weekend on the other side and see if it felt any different. If it did, he’d stay. If it didn’t, Monday would put him back.

The tech at the counter didn’t ask why. Just confirmed the package and pointed him at the costume wall.

“Pick whatever fits the scan. Suit goes on after. You change yourself in the stall.”

Mat looked at the options. Rows of them, organized by fandom. He liked a lot of things games, anime, comics but standing there with the machine humming behind the partition, the choice narrowed fast. He picks shego then gos inside the machine. The space was small and bright white walls, a low platform in the center ringed with guide lights, a narrow mirror on the far wall. No costume yet. Just the empty bench and the low hum already running under the floor. The air carried a faint sweet-chemical scent.

He set his hoodie, jeans, and shoes on the chair. Cooler air raised goosebumps across his chest and arms once the shirt was gone. He pushed his boxers down and stepped out of them, medium build bare under the lights, black hair still a little damp at the nape, green eyes catching his own reflection for a second before he looked away. He stepped onto the platform. The surface was warm under his bare feet. A soft chime sounded.

Pink smoke began to vent from the base of the platform.

It rose in thick, slow curls, dense and luminous, smelling faintly of sugar and ozone. The first tendrils wrapped his ankles. Heat sank straight through the skin dense, liquid, not quite burning. His calves tightened as the smoke climbed. Muscles shifted under the surface; the bones in his feet shortened by fractions, arches lifting, toes narrowing until his stance felt lighter. The smoke reached his knees, then his thighs, clinging like warm silk. Between his legs the change began in earnest: familiar weight drawing inward, length and thickness receding while flesh reshaped and nerves rewired in bright new patterns. A deep throb started low in his pelvis and didn’t stop. Slickness gathered almost at once, the new anatomy already swollen and sensitive where the smoke brushed it.

The pink cloud rose to his hips. His pelvis spread bones shifting wider with a low internal pressure that made him gasp. His stance had to widen. Weight dropped and redistributed; his center of balance sank. The smoke poured higher, wrapping his waist. His stomach pulled flatter, the faint trail of hair vanishing as skin smoothed. Then it reached his chest. He watched in the mirror as the smoke sank into him and flesh gathered, swelling outward into full, heavy curves. Skin stretched taut and soft. Nipples drew tight, hypersensitive, peaking hard against the drifting pink. Every breath lifted the new weight; the sensation doubled when the smoke curled across them.

Shoulders narrowed. Arms lost mass, becoming sleeker. His hands shrank palms smaller, fingers finer. Height dropped steadily, three inches then four, until he had to look up to meet his own eyes. The smoke reached his throat. When he exhaled, the sound that left him was higher, lighter, humming differently through the new fullness of his chest. A green cast bled across his skin wherever the smoke touched longest—collarbones, the upper curves of his breasts, down his ribs, over the wider flare of his hips until the tint evened into a steady living green.

His black hair lengthened in the smoke, heavy strands sliding past his shoulders, ends brushing the sensitive new swell of his chest and making him shiver. Facial structure softened at the jaw and sharpened at the cheeks. Green eyes stared back, same color, set in a face that no longer matched the one that had walked in. The pink smoke finally thinned, sinking back into the platform vents. The last curls clung to his thighs and the undersides of his breasts before they dissolved.

The platform went dark. Mat stood there breathing hard, legs unsteady. Every inhale made his chest rise and shift, nipples still tight and aching. His hips felt wide; his thighs brushed when he moved. Between his legs the new flesh throbbed steadily, slick and swollen, twice as present as anything his old body had known.

A low mechanical whir started under the bench.

A panel in the base slid open. The costume rose from inside the machine on a short lift, still folded, dark fabric with the edge of green just visible, and settled onto the bench as if it had been there the whole time. Mat stared at it. Smaller green tinted hands reached out. He picked the bundle up the fabric heavier and smoother than it looked and carried it into the narrow changing stall at the side of the room. He didn’t unfold it. Just stood inside the stall, bare, holding the costume against his chest so the weight of his breasts pressed into the cloth. The throb between his legs hadn’t faded. Outside the machine the con kept running. No one in the halls knew he was still inside, standing in the body the pink smoke had rewritten, the costume the machine had just delivered clutched in his arms while he decided whether he was ready to put it on.