Charlie’s Angel
~~by Bobbie Cabot~~

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Charlie was an idealistic LA policeman fresh from the police academy, out to reform his corrupt precinct. So the corrupt cops in the precinct decide to get rid of him, but in a unique, untraceable way - via a demonic curse. But they didn't count on his guardian angel and a magical mix tape...

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Police officer Charles Townsend was a good cop, and did his best to live on the straight-and-narrow and be an upstanding police officer. But police officers don’t really make a lot of money so it’s sometimes hard not to take advantage of his position. Many of the guys were on the take, but, though he wasn’t one of them, he was a team player so he had no intention of busting them.

Still, if you were on the take, would you trust a goody-two-shoes not to blow the whistle on you, even a good kid like Charlie?

It wasn’t surprising to find Charlie in that second-hand car lot that Saturday. It was full of a lot of really bad second-hand cars, but that was the only kind he could afford on his salary. A couple of the guys in the precinct tried to bribe him with really good cars – they were his but only under certain… “conditions.” He politely declined, as he usually does these things. And then, the worst of the bunch, Detective Eric Knox, gave him a tip about a place that sold second-hand cars. He didn’t trust Knox much, but there was no harm to check it out. He desperately needed a car, after all.

When he got to the lot, it was pretty scary. The owner was this creepy guy who wore a cape and had his hair slicked back. He wore what looked like devil contact lenses, and actually cackled when he told him that he was sent by Det. Knox to look at a car.

The man threw his arm up and thunder and lightning exploded all around him despite the fact it was a sunny Saturday afternoon. Charlie jumped and started to shake a little.

“Pick whatever you like,” he said in a deep, echoing voice, and Charlie almost ran just to get away from him.

He looked over his selection of crappy cars and gravitated to the Mustang at the very back. He didn’t know why, but it was like the car was calling to him. It was a white ’76 Mustang Cobra II with two blue stripes down the middle. He inspected the car and it turned out to be as bad as a forty-year-old car could be – faded paint, rust, scratches, dings and dents, almost-bald tires with mismatched rims. But the owner suddenly appeared by his elbow and insisted he try it out.

It was actually not too bad. Sure he had a lot of stuff to fix, but the car was basically sound – the engine sounded fine, and the shocks were okay. So he forked over the cash, got the papers, threw his backpack into the back seat and drove the car out of the creepy, decrepit lot at high speed.

After a while, his fear faded away and he slowed the car down a bit.

-----

After half an hour of driving, he started to get bored. He looked at the dash and saw that the car had a radio-tape deck. Just his luck, the radio wasn’t working.

He rummaged through the glove compartment full of junk. He found an old cassette tape. The hand-written note in the plastic case liner said: “Charlie – pop the cassette in the player now! Otherwise, you’re dead. Jill.”

The hair on the back of his neck stood on end. That was scary. He took the cassette out. It was labeled “Jill’s mix tape.”

“Why the hell not,” he thought, popped it into the player, and, wonder of wonders – it ran!

He didn’t bother to rewind (because he didn’t know he had to with cassettes) and the first song he heard was an old song, “That Old Black Magic,” as sung by Frank Sinatra.

He had forgotten his sunglasses so he lowered the sun visor. A little note, hidden in the visor, fell onto his lap. It said “for Charlie” on top. He unfolded it and the note said the following:

“So, Charlie. Hope you enjoy your new car, even though you’re not going to have it long. You see, a few minutes after you read my note, you’re going to die. That’s because the car’s been cursed. Any man who touches the car will die. You thought you were better than us, huh? Well, this is what you get. Goodbye, Charlie – Eric Knox.”

After he finished the note, the paper burst into flame in his fingers and crumbled to ashes. After it did, he heard the cackling of a crazy man. It was the cackling of the owner of the car lot! And as the cackling grew louder and louder, the car started to swerve out of control.

Charlie grimly held onto the steering wheel and did his best to control the car, but it fought him, and was steering him into opposing traffic. In the background, he could hear Frank Sinatra singing.

“That old black magic has me in its spell,” Frank Sinatra sang. “That old black magic that you weave so well. Those icy fingers up and down my spine. The same old witchcraft when your eyes meet mine.”

In desperation, so that he didn’t hurt anyone else, Charlie deliberately steered away and to the right.

When he did, the speakers squealed, and Frank was cut off mid-song.

The old Mustang smashed through the guardrail and crashed into the sandy strip between the sea and the rocks bordering the highway.

-----

After an indeterminate amount of time, he woke up again, woozy but mostly okay. He thought he was a goner. As he sat up, he noted that the car seemed to be incredibly in one piece, and as he looked around, he found that the mix tape was still running, because a new song started to play.

As he looked himself over, looking for broken bones or whatever, he heard the beginnings of a song he recognized.

“A Goddess on a mountain top,” the girl sang, “was burning like a silver flame. The summit of beauty and love, and Venus was her name.”

It wasn’t the version he remembered. A different band was singing, but it was okay.

“She's got it. Yeah, baby, she's got it... Well, I'm your Venus. I'm your fire, your desire. Well, I'm your Venus, I'm your fire, your desire.”

He noticed that, as the song played, odd feelings raced through him. He looked at the rear view, and it was like his face was changing.

“Her weapons were her crystal eyes,” the girl on the mix tape sang, “making every man mad.”

His eyes turned bright green and his hair started growing longer.

“Black as the dark night she was,” the singer sang. “Got what no-one else had. Wow!”

He looked down and his t-shirt started to change, growing shorter and tighter. He could now see his tummy, which had grown smaller and tighter.

“She's got it. Yeah, baby, she's got it, Well, I'm your Venus. I'm your fire, your desire.”

The top of his shirt started to bulge. He had breasts now.

“Well, I'm your Venus. I'm your fire, your desire.”

More changes raced through the rest of her.

“She's got it. Yeah, baby, she's got it. Well, I'm your Venus. I'm your fire, your desire. Well, I'm your Venus. I'm your fire, your desire…”

The song faded away, and the weird feelings faded away, too. He opened the door and stepped out to see things a little better. As he stood, nothing felt normal anymore. Looking down, he saw breasts pushing the top of his new cutoff t-shirt out. He noticed that his arms were now slimmer and his black diver’s watch was replaced by a slim white women’s sports watch. And his fingers…

He saw his legs and noticed that he wasn’t wearing his old jeans anymore. A pair of tattered women’s cutoff jean shorts replaced it, and instead of his old high-tops, he was now wearing women’s high-heeled low boots.

The hip-hugging pants displayed his new, slimmer, smoother and sexier legs to full effect, and with the boobs…

He jumped back into the car, slammed the door and looked into the rearview.

Staring back at him was someone he didn’t recognize - a beautiful girl’s face, beautiful crystal-green eyes, long, blonde hair styled in a long-layered feathered shag, with large, loose curls.

Wow.

He didn’t know what to do, but he definitely didn’t want to stick around. He started the engine and was about to step on the accelerator when he heard the next song on the mix tape - ZZ Top’s eighties hit, “Legs.”

“She's got legs,” the song went, “she knows how to use them. She never begs - she knows how to choose them. She's holdin' leg wonderin' how to feel them. Would you get behind them if you could only find them?”

As he listened to the song, Charlie looked at his new legs. He had to admit he had thosw kind of legs now.

He drove off the sand and onto the access road. He had to drive a little slow because of all the people and kids. They were all looking at him.

When he got back on the highway, he gunned the engine and drove on towards his little apartment.

“She's got hair down to her fanny,” the song continued. “She's kinda jet set, try undo her panties. Every time she's dancin' she knows what to do. Everybody wants to see if she can use it.”

Charlie wondered if his hair was down to his fanny now, and he squirmed a bit as he felt his new cutoff jeans had climbed up between his legs. He reached down and pulled it out to be more comfortable.

As he drove on, newer songs on the mix tape played. There was Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” followed by “Centerfold” by the J. Geils Band.

Charlie was starting to see a kind of theme to Jill’s mix tape. “Wonder if it has something to do with these changes,” he thought. He looked down at his new boobs and the driver of the car beside him leaned on his horn. He jerked the wheel and got back in his lane.

Eventually, Charlie pulled up in front of his apartment. He switched off, stepped out and reached into his jean’s pocket for the apartment keys but it wasn’t there. He reached for his backpack, which had mysteriously turned into a tiny fuchsia girl’s backpack. Inside was his key ring.

He then went to the apartment door but when he looked, he couldn’t find the key. He tried all the keys but all of them didn’t work. He went back to the car defeated, and sat in the driver’s seat.

He decided to look in his new backpack and found a little white girl’s wallet. In it he found a driver’s license for a girl named Jill Munroe. Blonde hair, green eyes, 5’7”, 130 pounds, et cetera. She had the same birthday as him, and the picture was for the girl he appeared to be now.

Noting the address, he started the car again and drove there.

-----

Months later, an incredibly attractive blonde wearing a police academy uniform - long-sleeved light-blue shirt with patches, tie, belt, navy-blue slacks and patent-leather shoes - climbed up the steps to the LA Times offices.

Thirty minutes later, she left the newspaper office, got into her mint-condition white vintage ‘76 Mustang Cobra II with two blue stripes down the middle, and drove away towards the LA Police Academy compound.

Charlie had just dropped a packet of correspondence, forms, reports, financial documents, and surveillance material at the LA Times office, all relating to Detective Eric Knox. She was confident that the crooked, evil cop will soon be out on his ass and charged with several criminal and homicide charges, one of them the murder of Police Officer Charles Townsend. Six months ago, the body, her old body, was found on the beach where she crashed through the guardrail, the victim of multiple gunshots.

The LA Times people promised that they wouldn’t use her name, but she wasn’t worried even if her name leaked out. “Just let Knox and his goons try something,” she thought. She was more than ready for them now.

“Knox was right,” Jill thought. Any man who touched her car would die. Good thing she wasn’t a man…

Charlie was getting used to her new life as Jill Munroe, and it wasn’t such a bad life. She had a lot of friends now, typical for a hottie like her. And soon she’d be graduating from the Police Academy, and would start work as a full-fledged police officer. She was hoping she and her new best friends, Sabrina Duncan and Kelly Garrett, would be assigned to the same precinct. Who knows?

Jill parked her Mustang in the outside parking lot and hurried to her next class.

She wasn’t worried about her car anymore. Lots of guys have touched it and even ridden in it since that “accident,” and nothing bad has happened to them. She was sure that Jill’s mix tape, the original Jill, that is, had gotten rid of the curse somehow. Someday, she’ll look into it, and maybe find out more about her, her car and her magical mix tape.

Jill rushed. She couldn’t afford to be late. Some of her classmates hooted and whistled as she passed (they wouldn’t have dared if they were inside, otherwise they’d probably be booted out of the academy). But she was used to that by now. They couldn’t help it. She was an incredible hottie, after all.

In her head, she heard that song again from the mix tape - “Venus” by Shocking Blue. Truth be told, though, she liked Bananarama’s version, but the original was still okay.

“She's got it,” the song went. “Yeah, baby, she's got it. Well, I'm your Venus. I'm your fire, your desire.”

“Yep,” she thought “I definitely got it. Maybe I should change my name to Venus.”

She giggled as she stepped into the classroom. She waved to Sabrina and Kelly, and took her seat beside them. The three of them had become fast friends, and had been inseparable since they became classmates in the Academy. She wouldn’t be surprised if they’d be friends for a long, long time.

---end---

Note - The pictures used were collages made from publicly accessible pictures of the Charlie’s Angels TV show. No ownership is claimed. No IP infringement is intended.

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Charlie’s Other Angels
~~by Bobbie Cabot~~

Jill, formerly Charlie, has been a beat cop for over a year. By now, she's had more or less adjusted to being changed into a sexy policewoman by that magical mixed tape. But then, during an almost disastrous stakeout, she finds out that what happened to her happened to a lot of other people, too.

— what happened before ---

Jill had been living as a girl for almost two years, the past year as a police beat cop. She was more-or-less comfortable in her new life as Jill Munroe now, but, in many ways, she was still Charlie Townsend, the young, idealistic cop that got killed by Eric Knox, a corrupt police detective, by means of black magic.

His mysterious guardian angel, someone named “Jill,” rescued him from sure death via a magical ‘70s cassette tape, by turning him into “Jill Munroe.”

Now, here she was. She wasn’t Charlie anymore, but at least she was alive. Now, she was a newbie lady cop, and as hot as any girl she had ever seen. She also has two new best friends - Sabrina and Kelly, whom she met at the Police Academy. Her quick adjustment to her new life and identity was probably due to them. And, now, truth be told, she wouldn’t have it any other way.

--- that morning ---

As the three of them walked into the squad room, they greeted everyone. The three of them were by far the most popular in the squad. After all, they were the hottest-looking among the girls in their squad (even in their police uniforms), and everyone’s ‘good morning’ to them were quite cheery.

Their squad’s police sergeant, Sgt. Tom Bosley, began their morning meeting. He said their friends from the detective squad needed some help. They had a big bust that night -- a Mexico-based sweatshop ring operating in the LA area was their target -- and they were short some people.

This was nothing new. With the manpower shortage, this kind of thing happened all the time. The captain had volunteered three from their squad to help out, and the ones next in the “rotation” were Duncan, Garrett and Munroe…

--- that night ---

“Okay, guys,” Jake Peralta, the lead detective in charge of the bust, briefed everyone in a little empty garage a few stores away from the large warehouse where the ring was making knock-off Gucci bags, Christian Loubotin shoes, and D&G belts.

“Grab some seats,” he said, and everyone made themselves comfortable.

“Sgt. Bosley has assigned us three of his officers to our little operation. These here are Police Officers Jill Munroe, Kelly Garrett and Sabrina Duncan.”

Jill and her friends nodded. They were in casual clothes, of course - jeans and jackets over Henleys or tank tops – the de rigeur uniform for police officers on stakeout. They could put vests on under the jackets and it wouldn’t be too obvious. Of course, when they go in, they’d be replacing the jackets with ones with the legend, “POLICE” on them.

Peralta introduced his team – Detectives Amy Santiago, Rosa Diaz, Charles Boyle, Michael Hitchcock and Norm Scully. Sgt. Terry Jeffords was currently in the van that they were using for surveillance.

“The objective tonight is to get video and audio,” Jake said, “and to get them to admit that they’re working with Doug Judy, the notorious ‘Pontiac Bandit.’ Doug Judy has expanded his illegal activities to include knockoff designer products. So Amy and Rosa will go in as prospective buyers and get them to admit that they’re working with Doug Judy.”

“Excuse me, Detective,” Jill interrupted, “but why is that important? Seems to me, you already have the goods on these people. Why is this important?”

“Well, we have Doug Judy in custody already, but we were hoping to connect him to this particular sweatshop. With this connection, we can establish a logical connection to several other sweatshops, and then we can shut them all down. It’s a big deal, actually, so we really need to do this right.”

The girls nodded.

“Okay. This is how we’ll do it. Detectives Hitchcock and Scully will have the alleyway beside the warehouse staked out while officers Munroe, Garrett and Duncan will watch the front. Sgt. Jeffords will continue recording, while Detectives Diaz and Santiago will go in to talk to the suspects. They’re the best to do it since they speak Spanish and have the right look. Detective Boyle and I will be at the back entrance ready to back them up just in case.

“Jill: you, Kelly and Sabrina will remain in front and keep a lookout in case they call in reinforcements. When our sister precincts did similar busts, they were taken by surprise when gunmen came in and shot up the place. You three will be our lookout to prevent us from being taken by surprise, and to provide backup.”

“Right, Detective,” Jill replied.

“Okay, let’s get ready.”

Everyone donned their vests and, while they did so, Charles Boyle came closer and tried to appear suave and debonair to the girls, but just ended up with egg on his face.

Jake just waved him away while he swooped in to try and make time with the three new girls, only to be clipped by Amy. Clearly, those two had some kind of relationship.

The three just laughed and got ready.

--- later that night ---

The three of them were parked just outside the warehouse in Jill’s white ’76 Mustang Cobra II. Stakeouts were boring.

“You know, Jill,” Kelly said as she sipped at her cup of coffee, “I can understand you keeping your car as close to original as you can, but I don’t understand why you don’t replace the tape deck with a nice DVD-MP3 player at least.”

“Well…” Jill hesitated.

“Really.” Kelly said. “I didn’t even know there were cassette tapes still available.” She pawed through the glove compartment, which was full of cassette tapes.

“Oh, sure!” Jill replied. “You can buy them through the internet. There are tons. And there were some people in the precinct that helped me transfer my favorite albums onto tape. But I’m buying my own recording deck as soon as I find a decent one.”

“Why go through all that trouble, Jill? Just upgrade.”

“Guys!” Sabrina said, tapping the two on the shoulder. “There are three men walking towards the warehouse. And it looks like they’re carrying shotguns!”

Jill whipped up her surveillance binoculars while Kelly borrowed Sabrina’s.

“One of them looks like Eric Knox…” Jill murmured.

“Who?” Sabrina asked.

“One of them looks like Ray Carter,” Kelly said.

Sabrina looked at Kelly. “You mean the Ray Carter who…”

“Yes.”

“Jill! Get the girls and Sgt. Jeffords on the radio. Tell ‘em there are guys coming.”

Jill pulled out her police radio. “Amy!” she said into the walkie-talkie. “Sgt. Jeffords! This is Jill. Heads up! There are three guys with shotguns walking towards the warehouse!”

“Okay, Jill,” Terry Jeffords replied. “Do you hear that, Amy? Wrap it up. I’m calling backup.”

“It’s okay, Sarge,” Rosa Diaz responded. “We just got the foreman to say what we needed. We’re done here.”

“Good work, Rosa,” Jake said. “We’re coming in. Get your suspects to safety.”

“Bri,” Jill said to Sabrina, “what do we do?”

“We back them up, that’s what.” Sabrina brought up a couple of police-issue shotguns that she got during the briefing, and gave them to the others. “Let’s go!”

Armed with shotguns, they got out of the Mustang and sprinted for the warehouse. In their earphones, they could hear Jeffords calling for backup, and the dispatcher responding. Backup’s ETA was ten minutes, but ten minutes might just be too late.

They heard shotguns firing, and Jill hit the front door with her shoulder. The three of them poured in and saw the workers crouched behind some of the tables and Charles, Jake, Amy and Rosa engaged in a firefight with the three heavily armed men. They were clearly outgunned.

Jill saw the one that looked like Eric Knox wave his hand and Amy and the other three were magically thrown backwards.

Jill, somehow, wasn’t surprised, given what she knew and what happened to her. She quickly peeked at her two friends and they didn’t look surprised, either.

“This is the police!” Sabrina called. “Freeze!”

One of them, the taller one, turned around and made a gesture similar to Knox, and it threw Kelly and Sabrina back, as well. Jill was, however, able to duck under the tables.

She peeked over the tables and saw them walking over to her, but she had to duck down since the three used up all their ammo trying to get her. When they ran out, she raised her own shotgun and fired several shots. The tall one got hit on the shoulder while Knox was hit in his arm, making him drop his gun.

Jill ducked down and reloaded her shotgun. Looking over, she noticed Sabrina and Kelly were still woozy. She knew she couldn’t expect any help from them for a while.

Jill grabbed Kelly’s shotgun and hefted both hers and Kelly’s. She took a deep breath and stood up. The shortest of the three – the one that wasn’t hit yet – faced her. He gestured with both hands and fire flew from them and straight towards her.

Jill ducked at the nick of time and the fountains of fire just missed her. They splashed on the brick wall behind her and broke up, leaving smoldering burn marks.

After the fire had dissipated, she stood up and fired both shotguns. She hit the guy point blank and he fell backwards.

This gave Jill time to run to her right and drag her friends to a more protected location. She stood and continued to shoot. The remaining two made their own gestures but she knew what to expect now, and was able to dodge properly. The wall behind her exploded in certain spots as whatever-they-were that emanated from their hands hit the wall.

Jill pushed the questions in her head away, concentrated on the here-and-now, and continued firing as she got closer and closer to the two remaining bad guys, but, for some reason, the buckshot wasn’t hitting them this time.

Eventually she ran out of shots. But by then she was close enough to the two to hit them with her fists. But, instead of fists, she swung her two shotguns like baseball bats and hit Eric Knox on one side of his head, and then the other side. This dropped him like a sack of potatoes.

She breathed hard, trying to catch her breath and control the adrenalin rush. It wasn’t over yet – there was still the tall one. But her shotguns were both out of ammo. She backtracked, trying to find a table where she can hide behind or something, but the bad guy was too close.

“I got you now, girlie,” the tall man laughed evilly.

“Freeze, you son of a bitch!” Sabrina called. “Step away from her!”

Jill looked down and she saw Sabrina woozily standing, along with Kelly. She had her shotgun pointed at him while Kelly had her service pistol out. Knowing these two, Jill knew they’d be firing at the slightest provocation so she crouched down.

The tall man raised his hands to fire a couple of fireballs at them, but the girls fired first.

The first shots went wild but the follow-up shots hit true. The tall man was hit with buckshot center mass several times, as well as hit in the neck and shoulder with Kelly’s shots. Maybe Knox was the one with the force field thingy. The tall man fell.

“Jill!” Kelly called. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine!” she called back. “How ‘bout you two?”

“My head’s spinning.”

Well, don’t fire. I’m standing up, ‘kay?”

“Okay…”

Jill stood and ran over to them. They were both sitting down on the concrete.

“I’m not feeling so good, Jill,” Sabrina said.

Jill cradled the two girls in her arms and waited for the cavalry. She broke down and cried, just from the reaction and relief for her and her friends. Sgt. Jeffords crashed into the warehouse with several officers behind him, and he saw the girls exhausted beyond exhaustion. He gestured to them and some of the officers checked them out.

The sarge slowly walked in and noticed the workers and their foreman crouching in the corner. He signaled and several officers went over.

In the middle of the warehouse, he saw the three men who came in, and they were dead or dying. He saw the damage on the walls. Whatever happened here must have been epic.

--- after all the shooting and shouting was done ---

Jill was in Sabrina’s house where both she and Kelly had been staying, to recuperate from their concussions. Jill decided to have a chat.

Jill said that, during that night in the warehouse, Jake Peralta and his people were unconscious the whole time and they didn’t see anything while their backup only arrived after everything was over.

But that wasn’t the biggest thing that they discussed.

It seems the thing that happened to Jill happened to the other two as well. Sabrina used to be Bill Duncan, another policeman, and Kelly Garrett used to be Dr. Alan Samuelson, and in both cases, just like Jill, they were going to die in similar circumstances. And, like Jill, both were turned into girls via a cassette tape. Sabrina’s said “Bri’s Mix Tape” and Kelly’s was “Kelly’s Mix Tape.”

Aside from Eric Knox, the other two that they brought down turned out to be Seamus O’Grady, an Irish gangster that was responsible for Bill Duncan’s death, and Ray Carter, an ex-US marshal that was responsible for Alan Samuelson’s death.

And there was Eric Knox… Why were they working together? In fact, why were Jill, Sabrina and Kelly together? What did it all mean?

Jill tried to lighten the mood. She asked if Kelly and Sabrina got cool retro cars as well. The two frowned. Kelly got a fairly-okay-looking ’76 Ford Mustang II, except it was beige. Kelly made a face when she said “beige.”

Sabrina’s expression when she told Jill what she got was even worse. That’s because it was an orange-and-white ’76 Ford Pinto. It seemed that Jill was the only one that got a good one. They all wondered why the cars were all ’76 models.

In any case, the three knew that there was no way back – their male bodies were found dead a day or so after they found themselves transformed, and rather than try to recapture something that they couldn’t… they all decided to forge ahead.

The following Monday, all three of them were back on duty. At the Monday meeting, their entire squad gave them a round of applause for their work. But, before they started, Sgt. Bosley took them aside and told them that they were invited to attend a kind of meeting on Saturday. He handed Sabrina a slip of paper with a date, a time and an address.

“What meeting is that, Sarge?” Jill asked.

“You’ll find out,” Bosley said. “it’ll answer a lot of your questions.”

“What questions…” Sabrina started to say, but Bosley made a shushing motion.

“Later,” the sergeant said, “It’s time for the meeting.”

--- that Saturday ---

Jill and Sabrina rode together in Jill’s Cobra II (Sabrina was still embarrassed to use her little orange Pinto) while Kelly met them at the hotel using her beige Mustang.

Together, they rode the elevator to the big function room at the hotel’s top floor.

When they entered the auditorium, there were other girls already there. There must have been thirty of them.

Sabrina went to the reception desk and the man there handed her three nametags.

“How did you know our names?” Sabrina asked.

“You three are the last. So…”

“Oh.” Sabrina handed Kelly and Jill their nametags.

“Hello, hello…” someone spoke over the PA. They all looked towards the stage and they saw Sergeant Bosley at the mic, but this time he was wearing an expensive-looking business suit.

“Good afternoon, ladies. Now that everyone’s here, please take your seats so we can begin. Please take your seats.”

Everyone took their seats, and when all the murmuring died down, Bosley began.

“I am sure you all know me,” he said. “My name is Tom Bosley. And I am also sure you are all aware of the Charles Townsend Detective Agency.”

Jill’s eyes went wide. That was her old name when she was still a man!

“Some of you are actually employees of the agency, right?”

Except for the three of them, everyone else answered with either a “yes” or a “right.”

“What the hell?” Jill murmured.

“That’s right,” Bosley said, talking to her. “Except for three of you, everyone else are all employed by the Charles Townsend Agency. But what you didn’t know was that the agency actually has seven branch offices, and the other girls around you are like you: private investigators of the Townsend Agency.”

This was greeted with a rising murmuring.

“First, let me introduce our investigators from our L.A. office. We have Julie Rogers, Tiffany Welles and Kris Munroe. Girls, can you please stand?”

A brunette and two blondes stood. They were quite attractive. Actually, Jill thought, everyone in the room was all quite attractive. And then her brain did a double take. “Kris Munroe?” She thought. “Munroe! What has she go to do with…”

Bosley continued. “From our Miami office, there’s Kate Prince, Eve French and Abby Sampson. Girls?” This time, an African-American girl, another brunette and another blonde stood.

“Then, from our DC office, there’s Natalie Cook, Dylan Sanders, Madison Lee and Alex Munday. They also brought their two trainee investigators – Ashley and Kate.” This time, two blondes, a brunette and an Asian-American girl stood. The last to stand were two diminutive blondes.

“Six girls this time,” Sabrina whispered to Jill and Kelly. “Their DC office must get a lot of business.”

“From our San Francisco office, there’s Connie Bates, Bernie Colter, Pam Ryan and Trisha Lawrence.” Two blondes, a brunette and an African American stood this time.

“We also have three international offices: a German office, a Taiwanese office and a Latin American office.

“We have Betty, Cindy, Annabelle and Angie from our Taiwan office, and Elena Sanchez, Adriana Vega and Gina Navarro from the Mexico City office.” The seven girls then stood.

“And then, finally, we have Chris Rabe, Franziska Borgardt and Lena Heitmann from our office in Germany.” This time, it was a dark-haired girl, a brunette and a blonde that stood.

“We have also been joined by three others from the LA Police Department. They’re Police Officers Sabrina Duncan, Kelly Garrett and Jill Munroe.

“The reason Jill, Sabrina and Kelly are here is that, about two weeks ago, these three were responsible for eliminating three very dangerous individuals which the Agency has been trying to get for a long time, and these girls have done it.”

Someone, the blonde girl from the German office, raised her hand.

“Yes, Lena – you have a question?”

“Mr. Bosley,” the blonde said. “What’s all this? Why keep everyone secret from the others? And why let everything out now?”

“I will answer that presently, Lena.

“You see, aside from all of you being private detectives of the Townsend Agency, you all have one other similar thing. You all have undergone, shall we say, a major change in life. Let me ask Officer Jill Munroe to come up to the stage. Officer Munroe?”

“Bri,” Jill said. “What should I do?”

“I think it’s okay,” Sabrina replied. “Go ahead, Jill.”

Jill nodded, stood up and walked to the stage.

Climbing up, she went to Bosley, who handed her a microphone.

“You’re not really a police sergeant, are you?” Jill said to Bosley.

“No,” he chuckled. He brought up his own microphone. “Now, Jill, please tell everyone what happened to you two years ago.”

Jill’s eyes grew large. She looked at Bosley. “You knew?” she said.

“Yes. But it’s all right. Please tell them. Trust me, Charlie.”

Charlie… “He called me Charlie,” she thought. Jill looked at him, the same face that she’d known for a year. She sighed and decided to take him at his word.

“Hi, everyone. I’m Jill Munroe. I’m a police officer like Sergeant… sorry, I mean Mr. Bosley, said. But I wasn’t always Jill.” Without telling them any names, she then proceeded to tell them the whole story. The entire function room grew quiet as they listened to her tell them she used to be a man, and how an evil, magical curse made by an evil, evil man almost killed him. She was saved with the use of a magical mix tape from a guardian angel also named Jill, but, in doing so, she was turned into Jill Munroe.

She then introduced her two best friends, Kelly Garrett and Sabrina Duncan, and before they could ask, she told them that they also used to be men, and were almost killed, too, except for their own magical mix tapes. Jill nodded to Kelly and Sabrina. They brought out their mix tapes and held them up. And she explained that the ones responsible for them being this way were the three that they killed in that bust the week before.

The murmuring grew louder.

“Ladies,” Bosley said into his mic, “can you all bring out your own, ummm, ‘mix tapes?’”

Slowly, the girls all brought out their own ‘mix tapes,’ except that not all of them were in cassette tape form.

Though the girls from the LA and San Francisco offices held up cassette tapes, the others held up CD disks instead while the girls from the Miami office held up memory sticks.

“Ladies,” Bosley said, “everyone in this room has gone through the same thing, that all of you used to be men, but were turned into women to save you from death. We had not told anyone your individual stories out of respect for you, and to protect your new lives, especially from those who tried to kill you. But things have now changed. For whatever reason, three of these people that were responsible for the, ummm, death of three of you, have joined forces. It’s our conclusion that all of those that were responsible for your changes are teaming up.

“That means we have to do the same thing. We have to, finally, join forces as well, and finally get rid of these evil people. But we have to do it under the radar. No one must know, of course, because people will think we’re crazy, or it might cause a panic or something. So we’ll do it under the guise of our detective agency.

“So, let’s all start our planning. Let’s…”

One of the girls from the Miami office, a totally gorgeous blonde, raised her hand.

Bosley nodded. “Yes, Abby?”

“Mr. Bosley, you keep saying ‘we.’ Who’s the ‘we?’”

“Well, me and Charlie Townsend, of course.”

“Will we finally get to meet Charlie today?”

“I don’t think so…” Bosley said. He then clapped his hands to break the mood. “Okay! So where were we…”

--- after the meeting ---

After the meeting and everything was hashed out, everyone filed out to the adjoining function room for a bit of dinner before going home. Jill, Sabrina and Kelly were chatting with Bosley, discussing some of the details of how they’ll transition from the police department to the New York agency, when one of the girls from the LA office came over and tapped Bosley on the shoulder.

“Hi, Kris,” Bosley said. “Glad you’re here. Jill?”

“Yeah?”

“Jill Munroe, I’d like to introduce you to your sister, Kris Munroe.”

“What!?! Sister?!?”

---end---

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---------------

About the story: As you may have seen, I’ve thrown a lot of names in but they are far from random. Over the years, there have been several reboots of Charlie’s Angels, the TV show. Aside from the original series that ran from 1976-81, there was a short-lived reboot in 1989. There was also a Hispanic version called “Angeles” in 1998, a Taiwanese movie in 2001, a German series called “Wilde Engel” in 2003, two movies in 2000 and 2003, and yet another reboot series in 2011. (There is actually a new movie being made right now, which is going to be directed by Elizabeth Banks.)

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to use the names of the characters from all of the past shows.

I kept the three so-called “replacement” angels from the original series (Chris, Tiffany and Julie) in LA. As for the others: I invented a San Francisco office for the angels from the ‘89 series. I put the angels from the “Angeles” series in Mexico City, the ones from “Wilde Engel” in Berlin, the Asian angels in Taiwan, the ones from the movies in DC, and the girls from the 2011 series in Miami. As for the original three angels (Sabrina, Jill and Kelly), I invented a New York office for them. And if you’re curious about how they look, see the collage at the end of the story.

However…

Please know that this story is only loosely patterned after the Charlie’s Angels plotlines/storylines so this has no real connection to the TV shows/movies. No copyright or IP infringement is intended: the sources are fully acknowledged here. The images and character names used are from the Charlie’s Angels TV shows and movies. Some of the character names used are from Brooklyn Nine Nine. Their source is hereby also fully acknowledged, and no claims of ownership are made. This is a re-imagination fanfic so the characters have no story/plot connections to their sources. They are used here mostly as a tribute and inspiration. And a big “thank you” to my dad for lending us his Charlie’s Angels DVD box set… which started me on this Charlie’s Angels thing in the first place. lol.

Note that the pictures used were collages made from publicly accessible pictures of the Charlie’s Angels movies and TV shows, as well as other pictures. No ownership is claimed. No IP infringement is intended.

Charlie and the Angel
~~by Bobbie Cabot~~

Jill Munroe, formerly Police Officer Charlie Townsend, had more or less adjusted to being changed by that magical mixed tape. But after finding out some very important facts about her change, had quit the force and started working at her new job as a private detective. She, along with her best friends, Sabrina and Kelly, were excited to start working on their first assignment…

-----

Jill pulled out of her parking space in her new condo building on Barrow Street, and started her drive to the new office on East 69th.

She didn’t need Waze anymore since she had memorized the route by now – down Barrow, left on Washington, right on Houston, down West and through the Battery Park Underpass and onto FDR. She eventually crossed FDR and onto East 61st, right on 1st, left on East 67th, right on Park Avenue and then eventually to East 69th.

As an LA native, she was used to driving long distances, but this route was ridiculously complicated for a five-mile drive, and she was only able to memorize it because she had been navigating the same route for a week now.

She’d started thinking that maybe her best friend, Sabrina, did the right thing by picking the less fancy apartment the company found, but which was just a ten-minute walk to the office. But no – she had to pick the fancy one just because Bosley said it was the best he found.

As for Kelly, she found her own place herself, which was a loft on West 66th near Tucker Square. She liked it for the Farmers’ Market on Saturdays, and the twenty-minute one-mile walk through Central Park to the office. Which was just as well since she had no parking and had to park her classic beige ’76 Mustang in a rented spot in a parking structure near the office.

Jill was about to go into the parking structure, too, but luckily, there was an empty spot right in front of the building.

She pulled in, just in time to see Kelly.

“Hey, Kelly!” she called. She stepped out of her mint-condition ’76 white Mustang Cobra II with the blue racing stripes, locked it and went to Kelly for a hug.

“Good morning, Jill,” Kelly said, putting an arm over her shoulders. “How was your drive?”

“Not as fun as you might think,” Jill said. They went to the front door.

“Good morning, Charlie!” they said to the friendly old doorman. This greeting was rapidly becoming a tradition, now.

“Good morning, Miss Garrett, Miss Munroe.”

“How are you this bright Monday morning, Charlie?” Jill said.

“Doin’ really great!”

“I take it Sabrina’s here already?”

“Miss Duncan’s been here since seven-thirty, Miss Munroe.”

“Damn!” She turned to the brunette. “You know, Kelly,” Jill said, “I think Bri likes doing this to us. One of these days, I’ll beat her to the office.”

Kelly giggled. “Let’s go, girlfriend. Hopefully, Bosley will have an assignment for us today.”

They went to the suite for the Charles Townsend Detective Agency’s New York office and, as usual, Sabrina was there.

“Hey!” Sabrina said and gave them a Cheshire cat smile.

“Yeah, yeah,” Jill said and gave her a hug. “You beat us to the office again.”

“Sabrina?” Kelly asked, “do we have a case today?”

“As it happens,” Tom Bosley said, “you do.” The ex-police sergeant came into the office in his now-normal suit and tie. “Good morning, girls. Please take a seat so I can start the briefing.”

The girls found seats in the well-appointed office.

“Bosley,” Jill said, “before you do: a question - why is the company called the ‘Charles Townsend Detective Agency?’ Who’s Charles Townsend?”

“Well, Jill, obviously, Charles Townsend Sr. is our employer.”

“But that was my name when I was… who exactly is… wait – you said ‘senior?’… ”

“Please, Jill,” Bosley said, “we need to start our briefing. Let’s leave that for later, okay?”

“’Kay…”

With that, Bosley dimmed the lights, turned on an LCD projector, and started telling them about their first case. And, apparently, their first case was going to be a ghost hunt…

-----

Sabrina stepped out of a limousine, dressed in a conservative but extremely expensive outfit. She exuded the image of a young, very well-to-do professional. Extremely well-to-do, actually – filthy rich, in fact. Kelly then followed, this time dressed in a very chic “secretary outfit” – a very clean-cut, form-fitting skirt and suit - and walked a few paces behind her. Their disguises were perfect.

A couple of actors playing the part of security guards in suits also stood by a few discreet yards away, with radios and prop guns in belt holsters to hide the orange muzzle (besides hiding the orange muzzle, Jill had suggested the belt holsters because, even though they didn’t look 100% authentic, the guns would be visible, and that would have a bigger impact).

The owner of the company came out to greet her.

“Good evening, Miss Duncan. I’m Aaron Bowen, owner of the Bowen House.”

“Good evening, Mr. Bowen. Thank you for meeting with me so late in the evening. Call me Sabrina. This is my personal assistant, Miss Garrett.” She gestured to Kelly. “May I call you Aaron?”

“Of course. Thank you for your interest in donating to Bowen House. I don’t mind telling you, we badly need it ever since the trouble a couple of months ago. If you will follow me…”

“I hope you don’t mind, Aaron, I’d like to have a tour of Bowen House.”

He nervously looked at his watch. “Ahh, perhaps it would be better to get a tour of the house tomorrow morning? It’s pretty late…”

“I prefer to do it now, please? I have heard about the, ummm, ‘trouble’ you have been having.”

“You have?” He looked worried.

“Yes, and I’d like to get a look at this “new” ghost of yours that have been making trouble. Frankly speaking, I doubt the existence of ghosts, especially one that causes so much trouble. So, before committing to donating a couple of million, I insist on seeing this troublemaker ghost for myself.”

“But…”

“It comes out at around ten, right?”

“Well…”

“Great! That means we’re early.”

Aaron looked sad. “Well, if you insist.”

“If you don’t mind waiting for a few minutes, we are short one person. And, ah! Here she is!”

A beat-up Toyota pulled up, and a disheveled blonde got out. She went to the back, got out a bunch of equipment and walked up to them. It was Jill, in full disguise, but despite the unkempt look, her beauty shone through.

“Ahh! Miss Munroe,” Sabrina said in practiced, high-class snootiness. “Aaron, let me introduce you to Dr. Jill Munroe – parapsychologist and ghost hunter extraordinaire.”

“Pleased to make yo’ acquaintance,” Jill said in a very pleasing southern accent, and shook Aaron’s hand.

“You’re a ghost hunter?” Aaron asked.

“Ah prefeh the term ‘para-psychologist,’ mahself.”

“I have hired the services of Miss Munroe so that we can get to the bottom of this haunting,” Sabrina said.

“Well,” Aaron sighed, “if you insist…”

-----

“So, anyway,” Aaron said as he led Sabrina, Kelly and Jill into the inside of the building to begin his tour.

“As you know,” he said, while they walked, “the Bowen House Foundation supports pro-LGBT and pro-minority organizing and advocacy. We mostly provide legal defense and representation for disadvantaged or unrepresented sections of our community, including the LGBT community.

“Donations from private citizens provide funds, but what mostly funds the foundation is tourist trade from the Bowen Mystery House. The house is one of the most famous mansions in the state of New York, and was once the residence of my great-great-grandmother, Jillian Mae Bowen, a famous Civil War-era figure, who was later found to actually be a man. This fact has become the basis for the popularity of the house, and, of course, the ghosts.

“The house is a Queen Anne-style Victorian mansion from the late 1800s, renowned for its size and its architectural curiosities and, ever since its construction, it has been reputed to be haunted by ghosts from the Civil War. Many visitors say they’ve seen the ghosts, but I and my staff haven’t seen any, except for the one that started appearing two months ago.”

“Ah see,” Jill said as she played the role of ghostbuster, waving around little blinking props and buzzing devices. “Why do you think this ghost came out now?”

“We don’t really know.”

“Did anything happen recently?”

“Well, there was this company. We’ve always been at the edge, financially speaking, and then there was this guy from Tate Holdings, a large land and real estate developer based out of Manhattan, who offered to buy the entire property. They’re planning to build a large hotel and this is the only property in the area large enough.”

“Ahnd?”

“And… a week after we turned down his offer, that’s when the ghost started making trouble.”

“That’s a big coincidence…” Sabrina said.

“Can you tell us what this ghost has been doing since it showed up?” Jill asked.

“Basically, it just scares visitors by making sounds or appearing out of nowhere. It never did hurt any of our visitors when it first showed up, but in the past weeks, eight visitors were hurt. Some of them claimed they were pushed down the stairs and falling objects hurt several others. Last week, though, someone almost died.”

“What!”

“Yeah… It seemed that our ghost tried to push someone from the balcony. It was a miracle that man didn’t die.”

“That doesn’t sound like a ghost,” Jill said.

“Is that your expert opinion as a ghostbuster? Sorry, Miss Munroe. I’m not exactly in the best of moods.”

“It’s all right. What does this ghost look like?”

“Those that see it say that it’s a pale blonde wearing a turn-of-the-century evening gown with short sleeves, short gloves and a very wide skirt with hoops and petticoats. If the accounts are to be believed, the ghost sounds like how Jillian Mae is supposed to look like. The ghost also wears a large necklace of pearls, just like Jillian Mae.”

“Part of the controversy, Ah suppose.”

“Yes.”

“So, is this where the ghost comes out?” Jill gestured to the surrounding area.

“Around this hallway, yes.” He pointed to a door in a secluded end of the hall. “It… she… usually comes out from that part of the hall, and then walks across to the other side. She’s usually glimpsed from the window gliding from one side to the other.” He pointed to the large window. “That window, in fact.”

Jill tried the door.

“It’s locked,” she said.

“That’s strange,” Aaron said as he unlocked it. “This is usually left unlocked.”

Jill opened the door and noted something on the floor. She also noted the small access door.

“What is that?” she asked.

“That’s the fire escape door. There’s a small fire escape ladder outside that leads to the back lawn.”

“Ah see.” She went to the window and peeked outside. “Sabrina?”

“Yes, Jill?”

“Ah need you and Kelly to go to the back lawn. Wait for mah signal, okay?”

Sabrina nodded and they walked downstairs.

“What was that about?” Aaron said.

“Oh, nuthin,’” Jill said. “By any chance, do you have any rope?”

-----

Jill and Aaron had retreated downstairs, had coffee in the sitting room just below the hall, and chatted. Jill was hard put to invent enough details of her fictitious ghost hunter job, but talking to Aaron was fun.

After a few minutes, they started to hear a moan.

“Oh, my God!” Aaron whispered, and stood up. “It’s true! There’s a ghost!”

Jill pulled him down.

“Jus’ stay calm, Aaron,” she said, pulling him back down on his seat. “We jus’ need to wait.”

Jill sipped her coffee while Aaron fidgeted.

“Wooooo….” they heard the ghost moan.

Aaron was about ready to jump out of his skin, but Jill calmed him down and held his hand.

“It’ll be over in jus’ a sec.”

“Wooooo…” the ghost moaned even louder. Jill giggled.

“Wooooo…” the ghost seemed to moan at the top of its lungs (that sounded weird but that was how it sounded).

“Wooooo… oh!”

After that exclamation, they heard the loud sound of someone tripping, and then a scream.

Behind them, someone in a period costume fell.

Calmly, Jill raised her walkie-talkie.

“Okay, Sabrina,” she said into the radio, “you can go to their car, now. Aaron? Can you call the police, and ask them to send an ambulance, too?”

Jill calmly finished her coffee, stood up and walked to where the person fell. She brought out her little revolver and pointed it at the moaning man in the 1800s evening dress and blonde wig.

“My God,” Aaron said in recognition, “that’s the guy from Tate Holdings!”

“Ah know,” Jill said, pulled back her gun’s hammer, and pointed it at him. “Sorry, dude,” she said in her normal voice and accent. “But you’re busted.” She turned to Aaron. “I wonder if this counts as ghostbusting,” she giggled.

-----

Later, Jill, Sabrina and Kelly came clean, and explained to Aaron who they were, and that they were investigating this supposed haunting. They were glad they were able to unmask the “ghost.”

Apparently, the man was doing all he could to force the owners of the Bowen House to sell, so his company could start construction on their hotel. Tate Holdings had disavowed the actions of their employee, and said they would start their own prosecution of the man.

Aaron nodded. “But I don’t understand how you pieced it together, Jill.”

“Well, the fact that the ghost only came out after you turned down the offer was a big clue, but what clinched it was what I saw in the little storage room, and out back.”

“What did you see?”

“I saw a car with a driver parked outside, conveniently hidden under a tree, and a skateboard in the storage room.”

“A skateboard!”

“Yep! It’s what he used to smoothly ‘drift’ from one side of the hall to the other, and make people think it’s a ghost.”

“And…”

“And, he got tripped up by the rope we stretched across the hallway.” And everyone laughed.

-----

Jill turned over the two million dollar check that was promised, but it was actually in the name of the Charles Townsend Detective Agency. Aaron gratefully accepted the check. Sabrina said that their boss was very interested in helping the Bowen House Foundation in its work and, besides, this was tax deductible. Aaron laughed.

Aaron asked who had hired them, and Sabrina explained that it was someone from the Bowen House Foundation’s board, but he asked his identity to be kept confidential.

As Aaron walked them to their cars, he pulled Jill back a little.

“Jill,” he said, “I cannot say how much I appreciate what you girls have done.”

Jill shrugged. “It was nothing, Aaron. It’s our job.”

“But also, I’m curious - your name…”

“My name?”

“Did you know that Munroe is actually a Scottish name?”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Yes. Jillian Mae’s family was from Scotland. And the reason I know is because her full female name, before she got married, was ‘Jillian Mae Munroe.’ I guess her husband didn’t know she was really a man.”

“Huh?”

“I’m saying my great-great-grandmother was also named Jill Munroe.”

“Jill!” Sabrina called from the limo. “Look!” She pointed back to Bowen House.

In the moonlight, they could see the silhouette of a woman in a period dress standing on the roof.

In moments, she spread a pair of wings and flew away.

“What was that!?” Jill exclaimed. “A ghost?”

“It was an angel,” Aaron said, “an angel named Jill.”

---end---

Note - The pictures were collages made from publicly accessible pictures of the Charlie’s Angels movies and TV shows, and other pictures. No ownerhip is claimed. No IP infringement is intended.

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Doctor Who?
~~by Bobbie Cabot~~

If you knew about the Doctor and you saw a 60s blue British police call box, you'd probably come to the conclusion that the time-travelling Doctor is around somewhere, trying to save the world from the Daleks again, or maybe from the Cybermen, the Sycorax or the Judoon.

But this time, this isn’t the Doctor. Not exactly…

-----
“Well, I don’t know why you had to regenerate me as a girl!” the tall, slim, very pretty blonde complained while she walked down the row of stores in the open-air mall.

“I didn’t regenerate you as a girl,” her companion, a shorter brunette answered crossly as she followed the blonde. “No one regenerated you! Didn’t he explain that there’s really no controlling regeneration? ”

“But why a girl!! Of all the things…”

“Like I said, no one can control regenerations!”

“Seriously, Binky. A girl?”

The brunette raised her arms in frustration. “I give up!” She reached out and swiped at the flashlight-thing that the blonde was holding. “Gimme the sonic screwdriver, for God’s sake! You don’t even know how to work it.”

“Hey! Gimme that back. I do so know how to work the screwdriver! I was the one who got the brain dump.”

“Well, he said that would take time to take effect. In the meantime…” She flicked something on the flashlight and the top opened up like a four-pronged pair of pliers with a green light in the middle.

It made a kind of warbling sound, and the brunette followed the sound like one would a geiger counter’s clicks.

“I think I found it!” She waved the blonde to follow. “Quinn, stop shopping and come on!”

The blonde looked up from the vintage, striped brown, off-shoulder blouse she was looking at. She returned it to the hanger along with the rest of the blouses in the shop’s display and hurried after her friend.

-----

The brunette that Quinn called “Binky” stood in front of a vintage music store. The sign said “Groovy Tones – musical curios from the 40s to the 70s.” She was waving the buzzing flashlight with the green light at the store’s glass display front.

“So, it’s inside?” Quinn asked.

Binky nodded. “Apparently.” She went into the store, and Quinn followed.

The tinkling of the door’s old-fashioned chimes greeted them, and an old man in a bathrobe that seemed to be his uniform came over.

“Good morning, Quinn, Mary Elizabeth. Welcome to Groovy Tones. What brings you two here?”

“Good morning. Are you the one that runs the place?” Quinn asked.

“Not usually,” he said. “But my shop is currently in… ummm, let’s just say it’s in a state of temporal flux at the moment, caught between two planes of reality. So, while I wait for it to turn up, I’m here helping out a friend, and taking care of his shop.”

“Hold on… you know us? How did you know our names?”

The old man chuckled. “It’s magic! More like a magic spell, actually.”

Binky frowned at him.

“You don’t believe in spells?” he asked her.

“Arthur C. Clarke’s third law says ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’”

“Arthur C. Clarke again,” the old man growled. “What does he know?”

“So, you know us?” Quinn asked.

The old man harrumphed. “Of course! You’re Doctor Quinn Valentine, who recently completed his residency and doctoral thesis, and just acquired his doctorate at the University of Cambridge, and you’re with your best friend, Mary Elizabeth Kristensen, and she is a doctoral candidate also in Cambridge.”

She was about to nod and congratulate the man for his knowledge but paused.

“Wait! You said ‘he’…”

“Well you were, weren’t you? A ‘he,’ I mean. Before your regeneration made you into a girl.”

“Hold on a second! You know about that, too?”

“Of course I know! You should be more careful. Your regeneration’s your own fault, you know, letting your TARDIS land on you and crush you.”

“It wasn’t my fault! How would I know it would take off straight up and then come crashing back down? We just finished assembling it, and we were still testing it, after all.”

“Well, anyway, what can I do for you today?”

Quinn looked at him for a second, made the decision to ignore any questions she might have tor the old man, and to just concentrate on what they were after.

“We’re looking for something,” she said.

“Well, duh, of course, you’re looking for something. I mean, what are you looking for, specifically, and maybe I can help you find it?”

“We’re, umm, looking for a cassette tape. You know what that is, right?”

The old man sighed. “Well, yes, of course I know what a cassette tape is. You ARE in a vintage music store, after all. You know, for a doctor, you don’t sound too smart.”

The old man led them to a table piled high with a lot of music knickknacks and odds-and-ends. He pointed to a cardboard box full of used cassette tapes in the corner. Some of them were still in their cases but most weren’t.

“Here’s our selection of cassette tapes,” the man said. “You can have the entire box for five hundred dollars.”

“Five hundred American dollars for a box full of moldy, used tapes?” Binky said in a very crisp, northern English, Lancashire accent. “I think not.” She started rooting inside the box. After a moment, she found the one that they wanted.

“Aha!” she said, and held up the beat up-looking cassette tape. It was labeled “TARDIS Mix Tape. DO NOT ERASE! - The Doctor.”

Quinn turned to the old man. “We only want this one. How much?”

“That one? How about fifty cents?”

Binky reached into her jeans’ front pocket and brought out a bunch of coins. “Bugger! I don’t think I have any American coins!”

“Here,” Quinn said, and handed her two quarters.

Binky stuck her tongue out at Quinn. “Americans…” she muttered, and gave the coins to the old man.

“Thanks, m’dear. Anything else?”

Binky put her hands on her hips. “Hello? Receipt?”

The old man gave her a dirty look, but after a moment, turned back to an old-fashioned manual cash register on the front counter, punched up some buttons on it, pulled a lever, and it spit out a small piece of paper. He handed the receipt to her.

“There! Happy now?”

“Ta... Umm, thanks,” Binky said.

“’Kay, let’s get outa here,” Quinn said. “Thanks, mister.”

“Let me help you,” the old man replied. He snapped his fingers and they found themselves being picked up by something invisible, and then they were floating towards the front of the store. The door swung open and they found themselves outside.

“Whoa!” Quinn said. “That was like magic!”

The old man chuckled. “That was nothing. I’m great at magic. Spells are us, you know. Now, goodbye!”

The door slammed closed.

They looked at each other.

“Rude,” Binky commented. “What did we say?”

“Let’s not find out and just get back to the phone booth. That dude’s pretty creepy, and I’m scared what else he’ll do with his ‘magic.’”

Binky suited words to action, and they rapidly walked back to the edge of the little open mall where a red telephone booth stood. Most British people would have recognized the red telephone booth with the legend “TELEPHONE” near the top, but it was weird seeing a red, British one in California.

The two didn’t hesitate and opened the booth’s doors.

“Boo!” a bunch of uni freshers exclaimed, and leaned out the doorway as a soon as Quinn and Binky opened the doors.

“Oi!” Binky said, and tried pushing them all back in. “You lot! Back in there!”

There were at least a dozen of them trying to lean out of the door. Someone from the outside would wonder how a dozen people could fit in a tiny phone booth (or, more appropriately, a red London “telephone box”), but TARDISes, even home-made copies of old, outdated, broken-down ones, are still larger on the inside than on the outside.

“We’re hungry!” one of them said. “Did you get chips at least?”

“Shut your mouth!” She turned to Quinn, in an almost accusing manner. “You didn’t have to bring your bloody students!”

Quinn shrugged. “They didn’t want to be left behind. And we wouldn’t have been able to finish the TARDIS if it weren’t for them. We owe them.”

“Bloody students…” Binky muttered, shoved them inside, and stepped in herself.

When everyone was inside, Quinn took the opportunity to look her new TARDIS over. She would have preferred the chameleon circuit to be working, but what could they do? They were building a copy of the Doctor’s TARDIS, but that one’s chameleon circuit wasn’t working, so her version wouldn’t have a working one either. At least they were able to update the look so, instead of a 50s police call box, hers was disguised as a contemporary, red, London phone box.

At the moment, her TARDIS could only fly through space. But, with the data cassette tape they just acquired, it’d be able to fly through space AND time. Hopefully…

“Anyway,” she thought, “time to get back to the lab and finish up the final pieces of the TARDIS. Besides, I’m sure the Doctor is getting impatient by now.” Maybe next time, she’d be able to come back and stay longer. She sure did miss LA.

She stepped into the box, closed the door and, in moments, the red box slowly disappeared accompanied by a mechanical, groaning kind of sound.

---end---

Note that this is a fanfiction story of Doctor Who. The TARDIS
and the Doctor, as well as the original Doctor Who logo,
are properties of the BBC. No ownership of these properties
is claimed. No IP infringement is intended.

-------------------------------

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Doctor Who? - Bigger on the Inside
(or “Trapped in a Phone Booth in a Space Station”)
~~by Bobbie Cabot~~

The Doctor has disappeared, but he left his newest apprentice on 21st century Earth to help the humans while he was away, Dr. Quinn Valentine.

This is the story of Quinn’s first mission as the Doctor’s pinch-hitter. And she comes with her new sonic screwdriver, her own companion (best friend Mary Elizabeth “Binky” Kristensen), and even her own TARDIS, except Quinn’s TARDIS looks like a red London Phone Box.

-----

1. About Quinn and Binky

It’s been ten months now since that day, or maybe that’s not right. Maybe I should say it’s been three years and ten months… Or actually, if you’re going by the calendar, I should say three months.

Confused? Well, that’s nothing new for me.

Hi. I’m Dr. Quinn Valentine, recently appointed associate professor of astrophysics in Cambridge University’s Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, England.

And, as my best friend, doctoral candidate Mary Elizabeth Kristensen (who I call Binky just to be annoying), and I sit in this holding cell, I can’t help but reminisce on how we ended up here.

Almost four years ago (going by the elapsed time in my head), I was still a he then, and Cambridge’s newest wunderkind.

I was controversial, not for anything I had done, but simply because I was American. And in the hallowed halls of Cambridge, an American physics-slash-astronomy professorial candidate was almost unheard of. Despite my obvious brilliance (as you see, I am very humble, heehee), my application would have been passed on, if not for the man my professors called “the Doctor.”

The Doctor had apparently taken a shine to me, and, with his sponsorship, I eventually became one of the Institute’s few American professors.

From then on, this mysterious “Doctor” became a fixture in my life, and things would never be the same for me again.

2. About The Doctor

No one in the university really knew him, except that he was very important to the university higher-ups, and was allowed anything he wanted.

The Doctor was actually a “Time Lord” – an alien from Gallifrey, a planet located in the constellation Kasterborous, within a parsec or two from the center of our galaxy. Time Lords are able to travel to any place and time in the known universe through the use of amazing time machines called TARDISes (TARDIS stood for “Time and Relative Dimension In Space”).

The Doctor was a tall, thin, salt-and-pepper-haired crotchety old man that didn’t seem to do much of anything except fly around in his TARDIS, but when Binky and I found ourselves whisked along with him on some of his trips around space and time, I realized I was totally wrong.

Apparently, the Doctor was a kind of Robin Hood, or maybe a Batman or a Green Arrow, and he went around helping people in situations that needed help. Many times they were like world-shaking emergencies or disasters, and he traveled the universe helping where he could.

Apparently, humans had a special place in his heart because he seemed to have taken on the role of the Earth’s protector, helping to stave off invasions, disasters, the depredations of would-be dictators and other assorted bad guys.

We weren’t destined to be like the so-called “companions” that the Doctor has had over the centuries (and yes, I did say “centuries”) – simple bystanders along for the ride; he had a definite plan for us.

After that disastrous thing with the “monks” a couple of years ago (betcha can’t remember, right? But don’t fret - most of us had more-or-less forgotten what happened already), the Doctor had started looking for a sort of pinch-hitter to help him because he knew the Earth was going to need some help to get through some tough times in the 21st Century. And, apparently, I was to be this pinch-hitter.

And so began my apprenticeship.

3. About Quinn’s TARDIS

Binky and I got to join him in a few of his “adventures,” and were introduced to several of the baddies that Earth would again be facing– such as the Daleks, the Cybermen and the Martian Ice Warriors. But, most of all, we got a crash course in galactic history as well as comprehensive lessons in the care and feeding of the Doctor’s Type 40-TT TARDIS – apparently, I was going to get my very own TARDIS and needed to know my way around one.

But, instead of going to Gallifrey to get one (something I found out even the Doctor couldn’t swing, given his reputation among the Time Lords), we ended up going to a kind of Gallifreyan boneyard of discarded Gallifreyan tech at the edge of the galaxy, which included broken-down TARDISes, TARDIS parts and other things.

TARDISes were never made - they were actually “grown” in labs on Gallifrey. But that didn’t stop anyone putting one together, provided he knew where to get parts from old TARDISes.

So, under the guidance of the Doctor, my students and I found a derelict Type 40 and scrounged up all the parts we would needed to make it functional. We then used the Doctor’s own TARDIS as our reference (apparently, you couldn’t get blueprints for TARDISes, especially for obsolete versions like the Doctor’s own Type 40). We soon had a working TARDIS (although the word “working” wasn’t completely correct).

My TARDIS was essentially lacking the stuff that gave a TARDIS character, but the Doctor said I’d eventually accumulate that over time. But the Doctor did select a “desktop theme” that he thought was nice (it was similar to the theme that his eleventh incarnation preferred).

One thing that we never did get used to was the fact that a TARDIS was bigger on the inside. On the outside, it looked like a ten-foot-tall metal cylinder, but once its chameleon circuit was engaged, it would look like some normal feature or object from its immediate surroundings. So, when the Doctor landed in 1960s London, his TARDIS took on the appearance of a British 1950s police callbox. However, apparently, its chameleon circuit was damaged so it was stuck like that ever since.

As for my TARDIS, since we were using the Doctor’s TARDIS as our pattern, we inadvertently copied its stuck chameleon circuit as well. But, at least, my TARDIS was able to update itself a little – mine now looks like one of those red telephone phone booths that you see in London. Thank goodness it didn’t look like a 1950s police box. But, like the Doctor’s, mine was stuck as well.

On the inside, though, it was as if the space inside the TARDIS was infinite. I didn’t really understand the Doctor’s sketchy explanation, but I didn’t care. All I needed to know was that there was enough closet space for all the clothes I would eventually be buying.

4. About Quinn’s Regeneration

After we got my TARDIS working, it was then that the Doctor revealed the second part of his plan.

Through some contrived pretext, he exposed me to something called The Eye of Harmony for a whole week (something you shouldn’t do), and I became a sort of human analogue of a Timelord, somewhat similar to the infamous Dr. River Song. This was essential because, in order for my TARDIS to start working, it needed to imprint on its Gallifreyan pilot, and that was to be the transformed me.

Furthermore, I discovered that I could also undergo what are called “regenerations” - you see, real Gallifreyan Time Lords could regenerate their physical selves when they found they were close to death. And, apparently, even “fake” Time Lords like me also regenerated. My first regeneration was necessary so that I would be able to survive the “brain dump” that I was going to be given, like the brain dump that Donna Noble, one of the Doctor’s old companions, experienced, but since she was just an ordinary human, she almost died because of it until the imprinted knowledge was erased.

So, the Doctor arranged for an “accident” to trigger my first transformation.

Of course, no one told me about the regeneration, the data dump, the fact that the regeneration would turn me into a physically different person, and that the change would be completely uncontrolled. Oh, well. I guess there are worse things than turning into a blonde bombshell, right? As well getting the attendant blonde bombshell attitude and personality: Binky said I’ve turned into a bimbo, but I don’t think so. She’s just jealous. (Although I do seem to have this new instinct to start wearing sexy clothes. Heehee.)

Anyway, soon after the regeneration and brain dump, the Doctor told us about this old-time cassette tape we had to pick up in LA (see my story from our third Mix Tape post - Bobbie), and as soon as we left, he disappeared to parts unknown, along with his friends Bill and Nardole. And we never saw him again.

Anyway, instead of the hoped-for plans to fix my TARDIS, it turned out the cassette was full of instructions for our first, ummm, “mission.”

The cassettes said we’re supposed to investigate this space station currently orbiting the planet, and to stop whatever nefarious plans its builders had for it. What the station was, who its builders were, and what they had planned for it, we didn’t know, except that it was going to be something “very, very bad,” as the Doctor said in the cassette.

Well.

5. About the Mysterious Space Station

Anyway, it seemed that we were all alone on this one - no Doctor to help - and Binky and I began with some reconnoitering. Not difficult if you had a TARDIS.

We went through all the Internet feeds and channels, and I found, in the secret ones run by the government, that people were already aware of the station. They were trying to find out who sent it up, but they weren’t having luck. Some were backtracking and tracing all rocket launches in the last few years. Their theory was that it was assembled from parts sent up and assembled in orbit piece by piece. But then, how come no one saw it being assembled? In fact, it was only found by accident a few months ago, courtesy of some high school kids with a homemade telescope.

The natural conclusion was that it was of alien origin.

But, looking at its picture in the TARDIS’s monitor, it was clearly of human origin. In fact, it looked like the ISS, except for a ginormous module attached to it – a big tin can-shaped thing about the length and width of a football field. It was so large it was as long and wide as the rest of the station.

There was like a kind of scaffolding that connected the flat side of the can to the ISS part, and it had four equidistant rows of ports on its curving wall.

“What are those?” Binky said, pointing at the ports. “Thrust vents or something?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. I then flipped switches in a certain sequence. The knowledge of what to do seemed automatic to me now.

Binky looked at me. “So,” she said, “the brain dump is finally working, huh?”

I shrugged. “Well, not completely. I seem to be getting bursts of stuff, but it’s all random. Anyway – look.” I pointed to the screen.

The close-up shot showed that the ports had something stuffed inside them. Binky squinted. “Those look like rocks inside the ports.”

“Yes, they are. And look at this.”

A kind of shuttle was fast approaching the space station. As we watched, it laboriously maneuvered and parked itself right above the flat side of the tin can. It then opened its bay doors and mechanical arms started transferring rocks into the tin can via a large hatch. And the shuttle’s cargo bay seemed full to the brim with rocks.

“Now why would they be collecting rocks?” Binky asked.

Putting two and two together, my blood ran cold.

“I think I know why,” I said. “Hold on!”

Almost instinctively, I reached for a lever and pulled it down. The familiar wheezing sound reverberated through the control area.

6. About Breathable Air

After a few moments, we felt the TARDIS land, and the sound slowly diminished.

Binky and I looked at each other. “You coulda’ warned me, you blasted…”

I waved her down. “No time for that.”

I started walking back into the inside of the TARDIS.

“Now, where are yeh going?” she asked exasperatedly.

“To change outfits, of course!” I exclaimed.

In a while, I came out wearing a little black dress with a short skirt, heels and smoky tights, and with my dark-blonde hair in kicky little ponytail. I thought it made me look professional, not to mention cute.

“You have your equipment with you?” Binky asked.

“Yes,” I said as I typed a long email on my phone and then pressed send. “I got my psychic paper, sonic screwdriver, makeup kit…”

She sighed in irritation. “Dammit…”

“Here,” I said, and handed something to her, mostly to shut her up.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a modified cellphone. So we can keep in touch with each other if we get separated.” I then put my Wayfarer sunglasses in my outfit’s breast pocket, my phone, my girl-wallet, a packet of tissues, my special compact makeup clutch, the psychic paper and, of course, my sonic in various other pockets.

“Why not use a purse for all your stuff?” Binky waved her own purse.

She’s right, of course. Now why didn’t I think of one? Clearly, I’m still done regenerating yet.

Before I could open the doors, Binky put a hand on my arm. “Wait! Is there air out there?”

“You’re forgetting – the TARDIS makes its own atmosphere. We’re safe to walk out.”

She shook her head. “No, I’m not forgetting. I didn’t know it in the first place. That brain dump must really be working on you now, huh?”

I shrugged.

We stepped out and started looking around. Apparently, we materialized, or “landed” as the Doctor might say, inside one of the station’s landing bays. (Mentally, I was congratulating myself for my piloting skills – I landed us in the place I was aiming for.)

That fact alone was impressive – as far as I knew, humans haven’t been able to build anything in orbit large enough to even have a landing bay. And, of course, if there’s a landing bay, then there were ships that would make use of the landing bay. Seeing the words “Bay 02” on the wall also told me there was at least one other landing bay. Wow.

Binky pointed to the sign. “English,” she said. “Definitely a human station, then.”

I didn’t bother to point out that, having come from inside the TARDIS, everything we would see would be translated to English, but since I knew that the sign was indeed in English script, I just let it go.

I took out my new sonic screwdriver and waved it around.

“Well,” I said, “the station itself is fully pressurized, including that attachment we saw. But no one’s around in this part of the station. Everyone’s on the other side.”

“You can tell all that with the sonic screwdriver?”

“Well… yes?”

“What is that attachment anyway, do you think?” Binky asked.

“Well, essentially, it’s a bomb bay. They’ve set up this station into something like an orbital bombing platform. They’ll be able to drop rocks onto the planet like bombs. And with the speed, size and mass of the rocks, they’ll have enough kinetic energy that they could be like little nuclear bombs exploding on top of cities.”

“Oh, my god!”

“Not planet-killer size rocks, though – those ports we saw are too small for those.”

“What do we do, Quinn?”

“Well, offhand, I think we have to destroy the station, or at least that bomb bay. The question is, how?”

“Yes, indeed, that is the question,” we heard a deep voice with an Italian accent emanate from the intercom speakers.

“Oh, my god,” Binky whispered, “they know we’re here!”

7. All About Captivity

We looked around in the little holding cell we were put in. Nothing except the bunks and the chairs.

Binky took a sip of her drink.

“It’s ironic,” she said. “We’re trapped in a space station, and the drink they left us with is Tang.”

We both giggled at that.

“Eat your heart out, Neil Armstrong,” I said.

We heard someone open the door of our cell.

“Good evening, ladies,” the man at our door said. It was the man from the intercom. The thick Italian accent was a giveaway. “Hope you are feeling well today.”

“We’re doing okay,” Binky said, and nonchalantly sipped her so-called orange juice.

“I’m pleased to meet you,” he said, nodding to Binky, “but I’m even more pleased to meet the famous Doctor,” he said and bowed to me, “and his magical phone booth. In my organization, you, Doctor, are quite famous. I do love the new you, though. Excellent regeneration.” He wagged his eyes suggestively. “And I have so wanted to perhaps see the inside of your TARDIS?”

“I’m sorry, but you have me mistaken for someone else.”

He laughed. “I doubt that – we find two women in my station without spacesuits, with no spaceship parked anywhere near, a strange phone booth parked in my landing bay, and one of these women carrying one of these.” He brought out my brand-new sonic screwdriver.

“You know,” he continued, “we’ve heard of what your sonic screwdriver is capable of. Still, none of my people can figure out how it works. I would ask you for a demonstration, but I don’t know if that’s safe.”

I shrugged. “How about our other stuff?”

“You mean these?” He gestured to the other guy, who brought out a Ziploc bag with all our stuff. “I’m afraid I can’t let you have them, either, my dear.”

I decided to use another tack.

“You know,” I said, “you seem to know all about me. But I’m afraid I don’t know anything about you. I think that’s a little unfair.”

The man laughed. “Of course, you’re right. Let me introduce myself, then. I am Tomas Stelisto, from the beautiful and historic city of Milan, and formerly of the United States Space Program. I’m fairly sure you don’t know me, but I’m sure you know my employers – the Slitheen Family of Raxacoricofallapatorius? Goodness – that is indeed a mouthful.”

“The Slitheen? No wonder. I take it this station is theirs?”

“Ah, no. It’s mine. I built it, under contract to the Slitheen.”

“So, you built a space-based meteor-bombing platform for the Slitheen. Did they tell you why they wanted one?”

“Well, not really. I can assume they want to enslave the human race – use the station as their bargaining chip, perhaps.”

“Well, no. The Slitheen don’t really want the people. All they want is the planet itself.”

“Well, whatever. I never did plan to give it to them. So, I took their gold, used it to get whatever I needed to build the station, but I never intended to give it to them. No one is going to be taking over the Earth anytime soon, except for me.”

“I don’t get it. So, it’s not good for aliens to take over the planet, but it’s perfectly fine if a human did?”

“Sure. Especially if that human happened to be me.”

“What made you think the Slitheen would just leave you alone after you take their station?” Binky interjected. “Do you even know what they’ll do to you once they find out what you’re doing?”

“Ahhh! That’s why I called UNIT. Anonymously, of course. They’ll chase away the Slitheen for me, which they already have, according to my mole. Now, I’m free to do what I want.”

“UNIT,” I said. “I imagine they already know about your station.”

“Hah! We’ve been constructing the station for years now, and, during all this time, they never even knew we were here.”

“How is that even possible?” Binky asked.

“Because of this.” He then brought out a little device about the size of a pack of cigarettes.

“That looks like a Slitheen cloaking device,” I said. “They’re pretty effective.”

”Indeed, it is,” the Italian said. “This one little gadget allowed me to hide our station.”

“That small, little thing?” Binky said incredulously.

“This was all we needed. The anonymity of my entire operation depends on this one little device.”

“That’s all I needed to know,” I said.

I reached out suddenly, grabbed the little box and threw it against the bulkhead. It smashed into little bits and, just for a second, the lights blinked out.

“There,” I said. “You are now visible to Earth-based radar and other detection stations.”
“Why, you…”

While he was still reacting, I reached out, grabbed my sonic from his hand and pointed it at one of the control panels on the wall.

8. All About Running In the Dark

The station’s power was turned off, but I made a slight miscalculation – since it was spin gravity, we didn’t start drifting up when we lost power, as I was intending it to, hoping to distract the people that way. So I made some slight changes in my plan.

Despite the total darkness, I knew where Binky was. It was like I had a photographic memory now. I grabbed for her hand and knocked Tomas aside. I then reached out to where the other man was and grabbed the bag with our stuff and ran through the open door. The two fumbled around in the dark, trying to grab us.

“Owww!” Binky exclaimed when she hit her shoulder on the jamb, but I didn’t stop and continued running down the hallway.

I randomly pointed my sonic to the wall, hoping to hit one of the control panels. As I waved the sonic about, I was able to trigger one of the panels. The lights and power came back on. I went to the nearest panel, punched up the satellite plans and looked for the route getting back to Bay Two.

“Stop!” one of the people that saw us yelled. Dammit!

I switched the power off again, but I was sure of my bearings now.

“Binky,” I said, “just hold onto my hand and follow my lead, okay? Don’t get scared.”

“Okay, Quinn,” she said. “I trust you.”

“Now, run!”

In complete darkness, we were actually running.

We collided into several people, however, and Binky bumped into some walls, but I didn’t let up, knowing they’d be able to turn the lights back on soon.

9. About UNIT

We were at Bay Two’s main doors when the lights finally came on. Thank goodness for that.

The people around us were starting to get their bearings but I didn’t wait for them to notice us. I slammed my hand on the Door Release, and the blast door slid open.

I pulled Binky inside, closed the door, pointed my sonic at the controls and short-circuited it. It felt good to finally be safe. But…

“Umm, Quinn…”

I looked around and found us surrounded.

Thinking quickly, I lifted my sonic again and pointed it at them. The sonic’s warbling was loud inside the landing bay.

“Don’t move!” I said, “unless you want some of this!” I waggle the sonic.

They complied, and even raised their hands.

“Okay, now move away from the phone booth!”

They backed away from my TARDIS. I opened the TARDIS’s door with my key, and we jumped in.

As soon as we were secure inside, I went to the main controls and started the TARDIS. In moments, we heard that familiar groaning noise, and we materialized back into outer space, about eighty kilometers from the station.

Binky laughed. “Would the sonic have really hurt them?” she asked.

“No,” I giggled.

Binky turned on the monitor and saw the station.

“What’s that?” Binky said, pointing to half a dozen metal slivers approaching the station.

“I imagine that would be UNIT’s missiles. I called them earlier saying I’ll take care of their cloaking.”

“Ahhh…”

A light started blinking on the panel.

“A message!”

I turned the monitor on, and a video message from the Doctor was displayed.

A blonde woman was looking at us. “Good work, Doctor Quinn. Congratulations. Now, I need you and Ms. Kristensen to go somewhere. There’s another cassette tape you need to find.”

“Dammit!” I exclaimed.

“Did the doctor regenerate?” Binky asked.

---end---

Note - The picture was a collage made from publicly accessible pictures of the Doctor Who logo, The Agent G character and other pictures: No ownership is claimed; no IP infringement is intended.

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Doctor Who? - There’s a Cat In My TARDIS!
~~by Bobbie Cabot~~

The Doctor has disappeared, but he left his newest apprentice in 21st century Earth to help the humans while he was away – this was Dr. Quinn Valentine.

But she’s having some problems with her TARDIS…

-----

Quinn had heard of UNIT, of course, both from her own research and from stories of the doctor. She was of two minds regarding UNIT. Clearly, UNIT, or the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, had played a major part in the Earth’s survival against several alien invasions in the past, and as the doctor told her, it would do so again in the future, but it had also precipitated several near-apocalyptic disasters, and it was largely because of UNIT (and a clandestine organization called Torchwood) that the ill-prepared human race was now a potential target of several belligerent races in the galaxy.

So when she got the latest “mix tape” cassette from the doctor instructing her to contact UNIT, she didn’t know whether or not she should.

Currently, her TARDIS was drifting in space, floating somewhere between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, safely away from people as she tried to figure out how to fix it: at the moment, her TARDIS was unable to travel through time, except linearly and moment-to-moment, just like all regular things in the regular universe. If she didn’t get this licked, maybe she should just change the name of her TARDIS to DIS or something…

“Oi,” her companion, Elizabeth “Binky” Kristensen, said, trying to get her attention, “co, what will we do? Call UNIT?”

Quinn played the cassette tape over and over, trying to understand what the doctor wanted her to do. But, as usual, the doctor was being unclear. She was left none the wiser about what the right decision was.

“Oh, what the hell!” she said, and impulsively threw a lever forward. The TARDIS then started making that characteristic groaning that meant it was moving through space-time, or, in this case, just space.

A few moments later, the red TARDIS rematerialized in a big, airplane hangar-sized space in Cardiff, which was the British headquarters of the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, or “UNIT,” presently under the command of the so-called Osgood Twins, Petronella and Bonnie Osgood.

Quinn and Binky opened the TARDIS door and stepped out, and soldiers in US Marine-type uniforms immediately surrounded them.

“Doctor?” a bespectacled girl with a long knitted tartan scarf and white lab coat asked. “Is that you? Thank God! How did you know we needed your help?”

“Well,” Quinn answered, “I’m a doctor. But if you meant THE doctor, I’m sorry to disappoint.” She extended her hand. “Hi! I’m Quinn Valentine, astrophysicist, nuclear physicist, medical doctor, biochemist, history buff, amateur philologist and Spice Girls fan from the University of Cambridge, at your service.” She gestured to her companion. “This is Elizabeth Kristensen, doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge. And you are?”

“I’m Dr. Osgood,” she said. “I run UNIT.” She shook Quinn’s hand.

“Ohmigod!” Quinn enthused. “You’re THE Osgood!” She moved closer. “Tell me, are you the human or the Zygon Osgood?” she whispered.

Osgood laughed. “What do you think?”

“I’m sorry, the doctor never told me. Anyway, how can we help you?”

“Well, I was actually hoping to talk with the doctor?”

“The doctor is currently unavailable,” Binky responded. “We’ve been assigned as his temporary substitute while he’s away.”

“While ‘she’s’ away,” Quinn corrected. “Anyway, what seems to be the trouble?”

“Wait! What do you mean ‘temporary substitute!’ What do you mean ‘assigned!’”

So Quinn and Binky went through how they, together, came to be the doctor’s “substitute.” (note to reader: for more information, please refer to the story “Doctor Who?” in “Through the Fire and the Flames - A TG Mixed Tape.”)

“So you’re telling me…” Osgood said, “that you’re…”

“Yes,” Quinn replied.

“And that is a new TARDIS?” She pointed at Quinn’s TARDIS, which looked just like a regular red telephone booth – the kind you see in London all the time.

“Yes,” Quinn replied again. “Well, it’s sort of new…”

“And you made it into another phone booth?”

“It wasn’t up to me. If it were up to me, I’d have preferred it to look like a nice Porsche or something. And the doctor’s TARDIS wasn’t a phone booth – it was a police call box.”

“Dammit!”

“Well… well… now that you know, how can Binky and I be of service to UNIT?”

“And why Binky?”

Quinn shrugged. “That’s just what I call Elizabeth. To irritate her.” She giggled. “And it’s working.”

Osgood shrugged, as if saying it wasn’t any of her business. “It’s just this, Dr. Valentine – for the past few months, people have been disappearing from the London metropolitan area. Police and local authorities have not been able to find out what’s been happening, and have not been able to track down the missing people.”

“So why are you in Cardiff?”

“And, from what we know of UNIT,” Binky continued, “that does not sound like something you folks would get involved with. It sounds more like a matter for Scotland Yard.”

“Normally, yes,” Osgood said, “but not when the missing people are several thousand already, and some of those missing people are Earth Zygons. This is just on this edge of a national disaster for Great Britain.”

Quinn and Binky looked at each other.

“Any clues?” Quinn asked.

“Well, we managed to retrieve these.” Osgood gestured, and a uniformed UNIT soldier came over pushing a cart. On top of the cart were several chrome devices that had the faint look of mechanical chrome rats.

“Quinn,” Binky asked, “are those, what do you call them, cybermats?”

“Yes, they are, Miss Kristensen,” Osgood replied for Quinn. “Don’t worry, these particular ones are deactivated. Or dead if you prefer.”

Quinn pointed her sonic screwdriver at them, and nodded. “Yep, they’re dead.”

Osgood explained that several of these cybermats were found near locations where several hundred people had disappeared. Other than that, they had found a kind of greenish-gray, viscous residue. Osgood held up a small vial containing a little of the residue.

Quinn whipped out her sonic screwdriver again and ran it over the vial. “Hmmm,” she went.

“We haven’t found out what it is,” Osgood said, “except that it’s a unique combination of amino acids, long protein chains and what curiously looks like a kind of long-chain liquid polymer.”

“Long chain liquid polymer?” Binky asked.

“She’s saying it’s a kind of liquid plastic,” Quinn explained. She looked at Osgood. “Like, maybe from the Autons?”

Osgood shook her head. “No, not the Autons.”

“May I?” Quinn gestured at the vial.

Osgood handed it over, and Quinn retreated back into the TARDIS. After a few minutes, she came back out with a computer printout that she handed over to Osgood. She had also taken the opportunity to change outfits. She now looked like some kind of marine commando, that is, if marine commandos wore tight miniskirts, high-heeled boots, fishnet stockings and bolero jackets in place of flack jackets. Prominent on her jacket was the nametag, JR DOCTOR, and she had UNIT’s official patches on her shoulders and on her beret, except hers were the defunct 70’s logo that said “United Nations Intelligence Taskforce.” She also had on insignia that showed her to be a brigadier-general in the British army.

Osgood looked at Quinn with a raised eyebrow but didn’t make a comment.

“Just ignore her,” Binky said. “It’s part of her regeneration.”

Osgood read through the printout. “It seems that residue we got is similar to the residue from the Lazarus Experiment back in 2007.”

“What’s that?” Binky asked.

“It was an experiment that the famous geneticist Dr. Richard Lazarus did in the early 2000’s, the objective of which was to extend human life by changing a person’s DNA. A high-tech equivalent to the fountain of youth.”

“Oh?” she said. “Did it work?”

“Sadly, no. It seems his process changes the human DNA so fundamentally that the person is turned into a literal monster. A murderous monster, at that.”

“Well, maybe we can ask him about it?”

Osgood shrugged. “He’s dead.”

“Oh. Bugger…”

“So what’s next?”

“Can you give us all the information you have, Doctor Osgood?”

She nodded and walked them to her office. As she showed them all that UNIT had on the matter, alarms started blaring.

“Oi!” Binky exclaimed. “What’s that?”

Osgood looked at her screen. “It’s a relay from nearby Torchwood. Seems whatever is behind the missing people, it’s followed us here to Cardiff. We’re under attack.” She lifted a phone receiver on her desk and pressed a button. “Alert Doctor Kate Lethbridge-Stewart over in Geneva HQ,” she said into the phone. “Tell her we’re under attack, and that it’s a red level emergency.”

“Show me,” Quinn said after Osgood hung up. Osgood punched a few keys and the big screen on her wall showed a video of several half-humans -- different kinds of half-humans -- outside the gates of UNIT.

At their lead were what appeared to be half-human, half-hippo hybrids. Their immense strength and bulk allowed them to knock down walls and barriers. UNIT soldiers fired several non-lethal rounds into them, but the half-hippos just shook them off.

Flanking them were what looked like half-tigers, but, later, it would be found out that they were actually half-cheetahs. These fast half-cheetahs flanked the soldiers and, using baseball bats, beat them senseless. And right behind the hippos were what appeared to be half-gorillas and other kinds of mutants.

Quinn knew enough that this was like a classic military deployment. Their “tanks” in the front to punch through the opposition’s defenses, fast flankers to pick off outlying units, and the main infantry to follow the tanks.

She knew they were in trouble.

“Dr. Osgood,” Quinn said, “is your facility supplied with standard tear gas grenades and military respirators?”

“Respirators?” Binky said.

“Gas masks.”

“Ahhh.”

“Yes, we are,” Osgood replied.

“Distribute the respirators to all your people, and show me where your cleaning supplies are.”

Osgood gave some instructions and brought Quinn and Binky to a large storage area.

Quinn grabbed several plastic containers of bleach and other bottles. “Grab some of those bottles, Binky,” she said, “and come with me.”

They went to a large storage room full of military supplies. The tear gas grenades were just in front of Dr. Osgood.

“Do you have medical supplies, too, Dr. Osgood?”

“What do you need?”

“Lots and lots of disposable hypodermics and lots of electrical tape, and as many off-duty people you can find.”

She called over a soldier and gave some orders.

“Binky,” Quinn said, “I’m gonna show you what I need you to do, and I want you to take charge of these soldiers and get them to do the same thing, okay?”

Quinn used a hypodermic and stabbed a bottle of bleach, sucked out some of it with the hypodermic, and did the same thing with several other bottles. She shook the hypodermic, injected the liquid mixture into a specific spot on one of the tear gas grenades and covered the hole with electrical tape.

“Got it?” Quinn asked. Binky nodded and, as soon as the soldiers showed up, she taught them the same thing.

As for Quinn, she went with Osgood and watched how the enemy spread through the compound. Clearly, the mutants didn’t know the layout of the compound, judging by how randomly they went through it.

“Good for us,” Quinn said. “And they haven’t broken into any of the buildings yet.”

Osgood pointed to a few really weird-looking enemy soldiers. “What kind of half-humans are those?” Osgood asked.

“Well, those aren’t half-humans,” Quinn said. “Those are half-Zygons.”

“Oh…”

Quinn’s cellphone rang and she flipped it open.

“Yeah, Binky?” Quinn answered, and Binky said all the grenades were ready.

“Okay, split the grenades into ten lots, and get your guys to bring them to the ten major entrances of the compound. People will meet them and get ready.” She hung up.

“A flip-phone?” Osgood said, laughing. “Really?”

“Hey, don’t knock my flip-phone! My flip-phone has unlimited signal. You can call anyone you want regardless of where in the universe you are. Can your fancy smartphone call people from the edge of the universe?”

Osgood looked at Quinn, mouth hanging open. She mouthed the words, “Oh my god.”

In the meantime, there were no more active UNIT personnel outside the buildings. All that were remaining were the people inside.

Osgood made sure everyone had gas masks, and she had everyone wear them, and, at her signal, the soldiers with grenade launchers started firing the modified tear gas grenades.

Each one exploded within the ranks of the mutants, and the mutants started falling down asleep, even the half-Zygons.

A few mutants weren’t gassed and they started to run. Several of the UNIT soldiers gave chase and, in less than half an hour, all the mutants were knocked out.

“Okay,” Quinn said, “in a few minutes, the gas will break down and it’ll be safe to take off the masks. Now, those mutants should be asleep for at least twelve hours. That’ll give you time to bring them all in. Make sure each one of them is in handcuffs, not just on their wrists but around their ankles as well.”

“What about the big ones?”

“Well, you’re gonna have to use rebar or something – weld them around their wrists or ankles. That’ll hold them until I can reverse their mutations. Shouldn’t be difficult actually, but I need time. Can you do that?”

“I believe so.”

“Okay, make it happen. Binky and I will go after the one who started all of this.”

Quinn brought out her flip-phone again. “Binky, meet me at the TARDIS. We’re going after Mr. Big?”

“Mr. Big? Who’s Mr. Big?”

“You know… the head honcho? The big enchilada? It’s just an expression, okay?! Oh, just get to the TARDIS!”

In a few minutes, the TARDIS materialized in the middle of an abandoned candy factory.

“A bloody abandoned factory,” Binky said. “Talk about cliché!”

Quinn giggled. “But it’s an abandoned candy factory,” she said. “That has to count for something.”

Binky snorted.

Suddenly, the factory reverberated with the sound of machine gun fire.

“Bloody hell!” Binky swore as they dove for cover. The bad guy was standing on a catwalk thirty feet up in the air, giving him a clear view of everything.

“Now what?” Binky asked.

“You know my new sonic screwdriver?” Quinn said. “It’s special.”

“How special?”

“Mine works long distance. Watch this!” She pointed it at an overhead crane fifty feet away. She pressed a button and one of the crane’s locks opened. One of the large hooks swung down and the blunt part hit whoever was firing in the face.

“Bollocks!” the bad guy cried, and they heard his machine gun clatter to the ground thirty feet below.

“Ha!” he said. “Do you think that’s all I have?” He held up what looked like a kind of rifle.

“You know what this is? This is version two-point-oh of my formula! This one is not reversible! So if I catch you with this, then you’re mine! Forever!”

He started firing his rifle, which turned out to be a kind of high-tech dart gun. The difference was, it fired gas cartridge darts like a machine gun, forcing Quinn and Binky to duck down as little darts started peppering the walls around them. The little cartridges went “pfffft!” as they injected their tiny chemical payloads into the cement.

“Ouch!” Binky cried. “Quinn! I’m hit!”

“Don’t let yourself get hit a second time,” Quinn said. She raised her sonic again. “Now, let’s see if I can be lucky a second time…”

This time, she targeted the bad guy. When she pressed the button, all of the gas cartridges in the gun were triggered at the same time causing the rifle to explode. Quinn pointed her sonic down a bit and the man’s entire supply of darts in his backpack was triggered.

“Aaahhh!” he screamed a big puff of air puffed out the pack and several darts injected their contents into his back and he collapsed. Quinn and Binky ran and climbed up to the catwalk, with Binky limping a little bit.

Then they saw the bad guy changing, but instead of changing into a half-human, half-animal hybrid, it was like he was changing over and over, like his body couldn’t decide what it wanted to be.

“Good lord,” Binky said, “is that what’s going to happen to me?”

Several weeks later, after Quinn was able to synthesize a cure, all of the victims – over three thousand of them, including about three hundred Zygons, were cured.

After they were cured, however, none of them could remember what happened.

As for the bad guy, who turned out to be an old lab assistant of Dr. Lazarus, his body continued to morph endlessly, and whatever Quinn tried, she couldn’t stop it. Quinn explained that, because of the quantities injected into him, his morphing was put into overdrive. Unfortunately, however, if the continuous morphing didn’t end soon, the man would eventually die from something she called cellular fatigue. All they could do for the guy was pray that the thing would run its course soon, and that the guy would the ordeal.

As for Binky, because the chemical used was a newer and more powerful version, Quinn couldn’t completely cure her. But at least she was able to keep Binky’s mind intact, and was able to moderate the effects of the chemical. So, although Binky wasn’t completely normal, she looked really close. That is, if one could ignore the thick, luxurious fur-like hair, the cat ears and the tail. But, with the right haircut and the right clothes, Quinn was sure Binky could camouflage them.

“Well,” Quinn thought and smiled, “At least she’s still cute.”

Quinn threw the TARDIS’ main lever and they rematerialized in Cambridge University’s main quadrangle. After all, Quinn had classes to teach, and Binky had to finish her thesis.

As the two best friends walked back to campus, Quinn couldn’t help but think of what their next adventure would be. Also, she needed to know how the Cybermen were involved in this recent incident, but she had to leave that for later.

She threw her arm over Binky’s shoulder and Binky wrapped her tail around Quinn’s waist as they walked to the main hall.

“You know,” Binky said, “I really don’t appreciate you calling me ‘Binky’ all the time…”

Quinn laughed and laughed. “Finally!” she said. “I can’t believe you lasted this long!”

---end---

Note - The picture was a collage made from publicly accessible pictures of the Doctor Who logo and other pictures. No ownership is claimed. No IP infringement is intended.

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A Ghost At The Movies
~~by Bobbie Cabot~~

Debbie Delaney, professional photographer, had just transitioned into her new chosen gender, but didn’t have time to get used to the new her – she just got a new assignment. Of course, this wasn’t like any kind of photo assignment that she ever had before…

-----

I was moving into my new place. It was about a month after the operation, and though it still hurt, and I had some more healing to do, my gender reassignment surgery was more-or-less complete. I was done. One would assume that I would be happy now that it was over, but the pain was something extraordinary. In the beginning, it was blindingly painful. Literally. And it’s colored my expectations from the surgeries.

I had thought the expression “blindingly painful” was quaintly funny, and that I rarely heard it used anymore. But the expression was apparently not just an expression. After my operation was done and I had eventually gone home and slowly weaned myself away from the painkillers, there were times where I felt shooting pains from my groin that was so debilitating I collapsed and actually went deaf and blind from the pain for a moment.

But that was several weeks ago. I still had pain, but not enough that I was rendered immobile. In fact, I felt good enough that I had already gone and had my cheek implants and the trachea shave a week ago. And I had started dilating already.

The stitches on my neck from the tracheal shave were taken out yesterday, and all that remained of that was a small bandage like a big Band-Aid. There was no need to take out the stitches used inside my mouth from the cheek implant since they used the kind of sutures that dissolved.

I could have waited until I felt better before I had the implants and the tracheal shave, but I wanted to get everything over with. And, as it is, I am now weeks ahead of my own personal “schedule.” I was essentially “done” now. All that’s left now was the final healing.

“It was all a little bit anticlimactic, actually,” I sighed as I looked at myself in the mirror. I’d assumed it would feel more satisfying. But I don’t regret it.

-----

I directed the movers where to put most of my stuff, and left the boxes of clothes, personal items and knickknacks in their boxes for the moment. After they had left, I had a quick lunch, a quick shower, got out a very office-y kind of outfit, but no pants – instead, I wore a knee-length pleated skirt, my fancy, new high-heeled boots and my favorite leather jacket, which I put over a formal kind of long-sleeved cream blouse and necktie à la Angelina Jolie at the BAFTAs. I picked a skirt as the slight pinching of pants still hurt.

I lightly spritzed myself with perfume, ran a brush over my hair, clipped it into a ponytail using a blue butterfly clip, and inspected my face. I decided that the minimal makeup I had on was good enough.

Someone rang my doorbell.

“Who’s there?” I called.

“Miss Delaney?” someone said through the door.

“Yes, I’m Deborah Delaney,” I replied.

“I’m Leonard Smits, the building superintendent.”

I hurried to open the door.

“Hi, Mr. Smits. I’m Deborah Delaney. I got the email saying to expect you. Glad to finally meet you.”

The tall, friendly-looking handyman smiled and shook my hand. “I just wanted to stop by to say hi, Miss Delaney, and introduce myself. Welcome to the building. If ever you need me, I’m in unit six on the sixth floor. My door is the sixth one to the left from the elevators.”

“Call me Debbie. Thank you, Mr. Smits. Appreciate you letting me know.”

“I see you’ve already moved in,” he said, peeking in.

“Just about. But I have to leave the unpacking for later. I’m heading out - I have a project.”

“Oh? What is it that you do?”

“I’m a photographer. I do a lot of stuff for fashion and travel magazines, news outlets and science journals.”

“That’s great! Would I have seen any of your stuff?”

“I doubt it, unless you subscribe to women’s fashion catalogs or travel magazines.”

“I’m afraid not,” he said apologetically.

“Oh, wait! Are you a National Geographic subscriber? My pictures were featured there six months ago, on a piece about old houses in New Orleans.”

“I do, actually. Six months, you say? That would be the May issue. I’ll dig it up later and take a look.”

I was able to leave the friendly Mr. Smits, eventually (nothing worse than a chatty, friendly handyman, LOL), and rushed down, my camera travel kit backpack over my shoulder.

My Uber ride arrived as I stepped out of the building, just as my app said it would, and it was a short thirty-minute trip to the Flagstaff University grounds (it’s not in Arizona – it’s just the name). A campus security guard pointed me to the Spengler Hall, the home of the university’s Department of Parapsychology.

I, of course, had the normal preconceived notions about parapsychology – you know: all that nonsense about ESP, ghosts and goblins and the laughable characters in the Ghost Hunters TV show. But I did some research – apparently, Spengler Hall was more known for its contributions to the very serious science of Neutrino Particle Detection, and many of the researchers here had worked in a lot of high energy science projects, most notably on the LHC project in Geneva, the Thorium research project of the NEA, and the development of nuclear leaks management policies for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Japanese Nuclear Regulation Authority.

I eventually found the right door, knocked and stepped in. A cluttered room greeted me, typical of the faculty offices of the academics you see on TV or in the movies. A tall, bespectacled man was sitting at a desk, working.

“Dr. Lewis Tully?” I asked. “I’m Debbie Delaney. The photographer? I’m here for the photography job.”

“Ah! Miss Delaney!” the science-y-looking man said. “Just in time. Let’s go.”

And with that, he stood up, shook my hand perfunctorily, and started walking me out.

“Wait, wait!” I exclaimed. “Where are we going?”

“To the theater, of course!”

Huh?

He asked me what camera I used and I said I used a Canon DSLR camera (I didn’t have an MILC yet).

We stopped at a lab for a second, where Dr. Tully picked up what looked like a camera lens bag, and handed it to me.

“There,” he said, handing it to me, “those are the EOS compatible ones.” Ahh. I was right – camera lenses.

He was walking so fast, I was having trouble keeping up. I just gritted my teeth against the ache and walked more rapidly.

We then had a quick ride to the airport, boarded a plane, and after an hour-long trip, we landed.

On the way, Dr. Tully briefed me. Apparently, we were actually going on a ghost hunt – what I was dreading. Apparently he was a crackpot.

He saw my expression and said that, if I didn’t want my name used or mentioned or connected with the project, he could make sure of that. He was used to the reluctance of people being connected with ghosts and ghost hunting and he understood. I felt a little small for wanting it, but I accepted and thanked him.

Apparently, we were heading for the Paramount Theater, an old movie house that opened in 1915, and, over the years, had hosted stage shows and music and film festivals. Though they still do that, what really pays their bills are the movies that they show nightly.

Anyway, their operations had been almost completely halted because of a haunting. Yep, a haunting.

In the past, the Paramount had been known for the Lady in White, whose sad face was usually spotted during pre-production of stage plays, and the Man with the Cigar that paces the the opera boxes in clouds of billowing cigar smoke.

Actually, this had helped attract patrons. Dr. Tully doubted if these were real ghosts. They were probably just a case of wishful thinking. But six months ago, a new spectral entity had appeared, and had been causing trouble. Several people had been hurt already, and one had almost died, all attributable to attacks by this new entity. Naturally, the owners tried to get help, and the Parapsychological Association contacted them when they couldn’t do anything about it.

Dr. Tully and his team had been working on the case for a month now, but they couldn’t understand how this entity was able to manifest itself in this way, and, more importantly, why was it attacking people?

Normally, research into the history of the entity would help in the usual techniques that most “psychic investigators” (the kind that everyone made fun of) used to banish these spirits. However, this one was completely unknown. And these “charlatans” (that was Dr. Tully’s word for them) used that excuse for not being able to get rid of it. For the moment, Dr. Tully and his people had taken to calling the ghost “Jane Doe.”

“So, Doctor,” I asked, “why was I called in? I don’t know anything about ghosts…”

Apparently, they needed a photographer to get better pictures of Jane Doe so they can try and find out who it was - they hadn’t had much luck getting pictures. So they decided to get a professional to help, and apparently, I came highly recommended.

“Plus,” he said, “you’re a girl…”

“Girl?” I asked. What has that got to do with anything? And besides, I don’t know if I…

“You see, Jane only attacks men. Women and children haven’t been attacked.”

He then showed me a bunch of Polaroid shots and they showed a creepy, transparent girl wearing what was, frankly speaking, a very weird kind of outfit – long-sleeved, high-necked blouse with a long skirt that reached the floor. The clothes seemed contemporary, so the spirit was probably from this time. But what girl would wear that kind of outfit?

And, if you can believe it, Jane was wearing what looked like a coronet of flowers on her head. And that made her outfit look even more bizarre. She looked more than a little off. She must have been the ugliest ghost I’d ever seen.

But there was something very familiar about her. I couldn’t put a finger on it.

The shots were pretty scary, with the ghost in various poses that showed she was attacking the photographer, or attacking the men in the shot. But the picture of the girl was always a bit blurry, especially around the face.

I then took out the lenses that he gave me earlier. They looked like pretty standard EOS lenses except that the front lens was bright green. Apparently, the lenses were a special kind of arrangement of filters that makes the energy that makes up ghosts visible. So, they worked like any normal lens except that you can see ghosts with them.

Sure, you can…

I attached one of them to my camera.

-----

It was nighttime already by the time the cab from the airport let us off at the old-looking structure. At the front, over the entrance was an old-fashioned marquee surrounded by big light bulbs. A big sign above the marquee said “The Paramount” in big, bold, three-foot-high letters.

On the unlighted marquee itself, it said “CLOSED FOR RENOVATION.”

“It looks pretty conventional,” I said. “Nothing scary at all.”

“How about you pose in front of the entrance and I’ll take a picture?”

I shrugged, not really minding, and he snapped a picture using my camera with his special lens.

He then handed me my camera and I saw my picture in the camera’s little LCD display. There was a ghostly image of a scary, partially transparent apparition behind me. The girl in the Polaroids!

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end and I involuntarily spun around to check. But, of course, I didn’t see anything there.

I shivered, but tried to act normally. I took my camera from Dr. Tully and looked at the picture again.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “The entity has a kind of boundary. She won’t leave the theater.”

I nodded. But even with that assurance of safety, I couldn’t stop shivers from racing up and down my spine.

“What now?” I said in a shaking voice.

“I’m waiting for my team. I’ve already called them. They should be here in… Ah! There they are now.”

A trio of grad students was walking down the deserted sidewalk towards us.

“Hey, Doc!” the one in the lead, a diminutive little brunette, called and waved. The blonde and the tall, dark-haired guy with her just waved.

“Guys, this is Debbie Delaney,” he said when they got to us. “She’s our photographer.” There was a flurry of handshakes all around.

“And guess what? She’s already had an encounter with our Jane Doe.”

“She did?” Jackson, the tall guy said. “But it’s only eight PM!”

“Yeah. She’s out early tonight,” Helen, the blonde, commented.

“Maybe she’s reacting to Debbie’s presence?” Lucy, the other girl, said.

“Whatever it is, we’ll start early tonight. Maybe we can start now.”

The three nodded, went to a van parked nearby and started getting their equipment.

In a few minutes, they were ready. No proton packs for this bunch. All they had were backpacks filled with recording equipment, cameras and lights. I got ready myself: I replaced my Speedlight flash with my big Neewer LED video light, attached my battery grip and replaced my camera strap with a Black Rapid strap. I also made sure I had extra battery packs and spare SD cards in my jacket pockets. With that, I shouldered my own camera kit. I looked as close to a ghostbuster as they did.

“So, what are we doing now?” I asked.

“Ghost hunting, of course!” Helen giggled.

I shivered again. But I wouldn’t be shown up by these pseudo-eggheads.

“Dr. Tully,” I asked, feigning bravery, “what would you like me to do?”

“Just keep close to the team, Debbie,” he said. “Take pictures – as many as you can. We need clear shots of Jane Doe.”

“How will I know if the ghost is around?”

“With Jackson and I here? You’ll definitely know if she’s around. Trust me.”

I nodded, as if I understood.

Lucy led our group inside. She unlocked the metal accordion gate that served as the security door. Jackson pushed it aside and we filed in, with Lucy at the lead.

“Do we have to navigate this place in the dark?” I asked.

“No,” Dr. Tully answered. He went to a room at the back of the snack counter. He probably switched on some breaker because the lights switched on, but there were a lot of areas still in shadow.

“Not all of the lights are on, doctor,” I called.

“Oh, that’s not the light breakers,” Lucy said. “That’s damage care of Jane.”

The lights did reveal a lot of glass on the floor, upturned trashcans, and broken fixtures and furnishings.

“Okay,” Dr. Tully said. “Let’s break up into two teams. Jackson – you and Lucy go into the theater itself, we’ll take the other areas starting here.”

Jackson nodded and they walked through the main theater doors, moving the velvet ropes aside first.

I looked around and I saw lots of movie and TV posters on the walls. One wall was, in fact, covered from top to bottom by these posters. I thought that was a great gimmick – it looked like fancy wallpaper. But some of the posters were ripped, across the face of the people on them, although most were okay.

I tapped Helen on the shoulder and pointed to the poster wall.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s Jane.”

“But most of the posters are intact. Why did she tear up those particular ones?”

She shrugged. “Just a random thing.”

I looked at the ripped up ones. Something told me they weren’t random. For example, there was a set of the “Lethal Weapon” movie posters side by side. All of them were ripped up, but the rest weren’t. And I noticed that all the Mission Impossible posters were ripped as well, but the surrounding posters weren’t.

That couldn’t have been random…

Putting that aside for the moment, we searched the snack bar and the surrounding areas.

I saw Helen grab a Milky Way. I was about to say something but she rang up the cash register and put some money in the cash register’s drawer. I giggled at her honesty and fastidiousness.

We looked around some more, but it was clear things hadn’t been touched for a while here.

We then looked at other places – the theater manager’s office and the utility room, to name a couple. We then started for the bathrooms. Ekkk…

Just before we were to enter the ladies’ bathroom, I felt a peculiar kind of coldness just in front of the door.

“Wait!” I said, just as what felt like ghostly fingers raced up and down my spine.

“What is it, Debbie?” Dr. Tully said.

“I’m feeling something. Right here.” I pointed to the spot where I was standing. But it was gone, now.

“I felt something at this spot, too,” Helen said, “all the time.”

“You did?” Tully asked. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

She shrugged apologetically. “Sorry, Doctor… I didn’t think it was significant…”

Tully sighed exasperatedly. “Okay. Check the database. See if anything happened here.” He turned to me. “We’ve downloaded all the information we could about the theater. Anyway, turn on your camera and check around if you see Jane.”

I waved it around slowly. I shook my head. “No, nothing at all.”

After typing on her tablet for a while, Helen turned back to us. “There was a short news item, Doctor. I put ‘bathroom’ and ‘paramount’ as keywords. Apparently, about eight months ago, someone got beat up here, in front of the women’s bathroom. There was a 911 call, and the man was sent to the hospital. Someone named Kevin Nyland.”

“Ah. Then that probably isn’t our ghost.”

“Will do, Doctor.”

“Wait,” I said. “Why doesn’t that have anything to do with the ghost?” I got Helen’s tablet and looked at the information.

“Well, it’s a guy, so it’s not our Jane Doe. But you’re right - we need to do more research. We can work on that some more tomorrow.”

I checked the net and looked for anything about Kevin Nyland, and I found an obituary.

As I was about to tell Tully about it, we heard someone scream. It wasn’t Jackson or Lucy. It was blood-curdling and terrifying - it was the high-falsetto sound of the ghost screaming.

The doctor and Helen rushed towards the theater. I followed, but more because I didn’t want to be left alone.

We entered the dim theater, and we saw Jackson being pelted by stuff. Mostly trash and detritus like old soda cans or popcorn boxes.

I brought up my camera and saw the ghost in the little LCD display in all her ectoplasmic glory. She was throwing the trash at Jackson, but was virtually ignoring Lucy. By her movements, clearly, she was getting more and more frustrated since the trash wasn’t really hurting him.

I kept on snapping pictures while Helen and the doctor gingerly approached Jackson and the ghost.

And as the ghost got more and more frustrated and angry, she was becoming more visible. Eventually, I didn’t need my camera to see her. But I continued to snap pictures.

But she didn’t become visible all the way. You could see through parts of her, and see the bones and muscle underneath.

She was screaming louder and louder, and I was actually wincing every time: it was so high, loud and piercing.

Jackson had retreated to the stage below the curtained screen, but he wasn’t really being hurt.

But the ghost was running out of junk to throw. I looked at her and we could see her looking around for other things, but she couldn’t find anything.

The ghost looked down, saw the movie house chairs and wrapped her ghostly fingers around one.

With a long and loud, high-pitched falsetto scream, she tore the chair, in fact a whole row, off its bolts. The chairs were connected to each other apparently.

With incredible power, she threw the entire row at Jackson. Jackson jumped to the right, dodging the chairs, and they hit the edge of the stage with great impact, cracking and splintering the stage’s wood surface. The whole row overbalanced, tipped up and then fell into the orchestra pit with a great metallic “clang!”

Instinctively, my finger was hardly moving from my camera’s shutter button, and I was catching everything on camera.

“Jackson!” Dr. Tully yelled from where we were standing. “Are you okay?”

The ghost, upon hearing the doctor’s yell, flew to us, screamed and backhanded the doctor across his face.

Tully flew back and fell among the chairs. Helen ran to him to see if he was okay. I looked at the ghost and saw her absentmindedly adjust her coronet of flowers, then fly towards Jackson. And then it clicked.

“Stop!” I yelled. “For God’s sake, Kevin, stop it!”

-----

The ghost stopped.

“Yes, I know. Oh, Kevin, I know…”

The ghost looked towards me.

“We’re the same, Kevin,” I whispered, as she floated near me.

“I’ve felt what you’ve felt,” I said. “I’ve gone through what you went through. I know, Kevin. Believe me.”

I found myself holding my hand out. The ghost looked at it, like she wanted to take it, but at the same time, looking like she was afraid.

“Growing up not feeling like things were right, growing up like you didn’t belong. And when you tried to, you were rejected. Your classmates would hurt you or beat you up, girls you tried to be friends with would think you weird and make fun of you. And your folks…”

She looked at me, and the half-transparent skin started to become more solid, and she started looking more and more normal.

“So you pretend and try and be more ‘normal,’ more like a real boy. And soon, it becomes like a habit. But the pain – the hurt – the longing and the wanting – it grows. Eventually, you say to yourself, you don’t care what people think anymore, and you come out, and try to live the way you want to, but no one understands.”

She floated near me, looked me straight in the eye.

“But the haters and the losers – they’re still there. They haven’t gone away. And one night, at the movies, they catch you when you went to the bathroom.

“And they beat you… they beat you to death…”

I couldn’t stop myself, and I started to cry. The ghost reached for my hand. It was like it was made of smoke. It was cold, but I didn’t pull away.

“But you know, it’s all over now. It’s done. No need to fight anymore. Oh, honey, it’s over now. No need to hold on to it. No need to hold on to the pain, and the hurt, and everything.”

I sighed. “It’s done, Kevin. It is. Let yourself believe it, and you can move on.”

She looked at me, with a question in her eyes.

“I promise you, we’ll find out who did this to you, and we’ll make him pay. On my life, I promise.”

After an eternity, she nodded. Behind her, there was a light. She looked behind her and then back to me.

“They’re calling you, huh?” I said.

She nodded.

“Then you should go.”

She smiled.

Slowly, she moved closer, and gave me a hug. It was like I was surrounded by smoke, but I didn’t shrug it off.

She let go, smiled at me and drifted to the light.

“Hey!” I called.

She stopped and turned to look at me.

“What’s your real name?” I asked.

“Anna Marie,” she said, and slowly disappeared away.

“Goodbye, Anna Marie,” I whispered.

-----

A few days later, we were in the local hospital visiting Dr. Tully.

He’d sustained some broken ribs, a broken arm and a concussion, but he was mostly okay now.

They had been poring over the pictures that I had taken, and were marveling at the quality of it. The pictures of Kevin, I mean Anna Marie, were pretty clear, and there were details that I caught that were never seen before. Dr. Tully said that this could open up a whole new range of psychic investigations.

I shrugged. I didn’t care, one way or the other. As far as I was concerned, this was my first and last ghost project.

“But I don’t get it, Deb,” Jackson asked, going back to what we were discussing. “How’d you find out?”

“There were signs, actually,” I said. “It was there, if you knew what to look for.

“The fact that she only attacked men…”

“Not a good enough clue, if you ask me.”

“Also, only certain posters were torn up in the poster wall.”

“Explain that.”

“Only the movies that starred gay bashers were torn up.”

“Wow…”

“Also, the ghost’s entire look. Didn’t she look a little, you know, off?”

“Yeah!” Helen said. “I was just thinking that, but I thought it wasn’t important.”

“Also,” I said, “did you see how she moved, and her voice? It was obvious it was a boy in drag. She was even wearing a wig.”

I reached for the pile of pictures, looked through them, selected the one where I caught her adjusting her coronet and her wig, and showed it to them.

“Ahhh!” Jackson and the girls said in belated acknowledgement.

“It was so, so obvious.”

“Well, it wasn’t obvious to me,” Jackson said.

I shrugged.

“Good work, Debbie,” Doctor Tully said from his bed.

“Thanks, Doc,” I said.

“Hey,” Helen said, and put her arm through mine. “Game for some lunch?”

I blushed. “Sure,” I said.

“Let’s go!”

After saying our goodbyes to Dr. Tully, we left his room, and I allowed Helen to lead me towards wherever we were having lunch. Jackson and Lucy trailed after us, maybe about a dozen feet away.

“I still don’t believe that she used to be a guy,” I heard Jackson say.

“Oh, shut up!” Lucy said in exasperation.

---end---

Note - The picture was a collage made from publicly accessible pictures of the Sena Kashiwazaki character and other pictures. No ownership is claimed. No IP infringement is intended.

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My Night At The Cemetery
~~by Bobbie Cabot~~

Being known in one’s professional circles helps to get gigs and assignments, but this kind of gig wasn’t what Debbie Delaney, professional photographer and reluctant ghost chaser, was hoping for. That’s because this assignment involved visiting a cemetery…

-----

The recovery from my SRS (or GRS) procedures was slow, but recover I did. And, aside from the need for regular dilation (which I am supposed to taper down eventually after a year or so), I was practically, ummm, done.

Today was my first time to jog again (well, not jog but more a brisk walk) and I had just got back to my apartment. I had a few twinges, but I knew these twinges would be happening for a while. Par for the recovery. That’s fine - I can live with that.

“Hi, Mr. Smits,” I said to my building manager.

“Hello, Ms. Delaney,” he said. “Had a nice workout?”

“Pretty great. I was just gonna grab a bottle of water. Wanna come in for a drink?”

“Thank you, but I’m pretty busy.” He indicated the ladder he had on his shoulder. “No rest for the wicked,” He said and chuckled. For some reason, that phrase stuck with me, and had me worrying about Mr. Smits.

“Okay,” I nodded, stepping into my place. “Have a nice day.” Though a very nice guy, there was something off with Mr. Smits.

As I drank a cold bottle of water from my fridge, I picked up my mail, which I had dumped into a little bowl beside the door earlier before I went for my run. And there was a bunch of letters from the Parapsychological Association mixed in with the usual ones (as I found out when I met the guys from Flagstaff, the association was the main authority in the country on ghosts and goblins and monsters and anything that went bump in the night).

After participating in that thing with Flagstaff University’s Parapsychology Department last year, I suddenly found myself on the mailing list of the association. I had been getting emails and phone calls from their members until I changed phone numbers and installed a filter app to screen all my emails. It’s nice to have fans, but this isn’t exactly the fan base I wanted. Would you?

But there was no stopping them from sending snail mail to Flagstaff University (thank God I had kept my new address unlisted), and the University people would dutifully forward my letters to me. At least only a few letters a week arrived, and it had been tapering off for a while.

I looked at this week’s batch and dismissed most of them, but there was one that caught my eye, simply because the envelope was clean and neat, and my name and the return address was neatly typewritten instead of freehand in pencil, crayon or magic marker.

Thinking that I would regret it, I decided to open it and read the letter.

Minutes later, I was on the phone and talking to Dr. Tully.

Days later, I found myself on the road with Dr. Tully and his team, on our way to yet another haunting.

-----

“So, Debbie,” Helen, the tall bubbly blonde said while giggling, “the old team back together again! Fun, huh?”

I was sitting in front with Dr. Tully driving. I could see her from the mirror in the visor. She was looking at me expectantly so I stuck my tongue out at her, and she responded with yet another giggle.

There were five of us in the van: Dr. Tully, Jackson the big guy with curly hair and the deft touch with electronics, Helen, the tall, giggly blonde, Lucy the brunette who, I think, was the bravest of us all, and me.

“We’re almost there, Ms. Delaney,” Dr. Tully said. “Why don’t you brief us again about why we’re here?”

I nodded.

“Well,” I began…

I explained (again) that I’d gotten this letter a week ago, and it came from this family that found their little town being terrorized by some kind of entity. Almost half of the town had already relocated while the rest all lived in fear of this whatever-it was that terrorized the town.

The man who wrote was an English teacher from the town’s one remaining school (the other two had shut down for lack of students). He had been living with this fear for over a year now when the association referred him to us.

The townies (as the teacher called the townsfolk) believed that the whatever-it-was came from the town cemetery, and the… terror usually started to happen at around eleven o’clock to midnight. Many people who were out and about at night reported being chased by some night creature - maybe some wild dog or wolf - and others were actually attacked. This couldn’t be corroborated because they were soon infected with some kind of wasting disease, like tuberculosis, and passed away in less than three weeks.

The rest listened to my recitation politely until I was done, and then Jackson said, deadpan, “we already knew that.” And everyone started to laugh.

-----

We arrived at the cemetery at around ten in the evening, and the man that wrote to me was impatiently waiting for us by the gates. After some quick handshakes, he gave us a quick tour of the deserted cemetery. Clearly, he didn’t want to be there because he rushed us through the cemetery and its main sections. After which, he jumped into his car.

“Wait! Where are you going?” Lucy called after him.

“It’s almost ten thirty!” he yelled back. “The fun starts about midnight. I only have about an hour and thirty minutes to get home! Sorry I can’t stay! Have fun!” He waved through his car window and sped home.

The cemetery was indeed spooky: headstones all over, covered with moss, and the rest of the cemetery overgrown with creepy plants and trees trailing little vines and rootlets. The guy said the cemetery hadn’t been in use for at least a year, and no one came and visited their loved ones anymore. It was disused, and it looked it.

There was no sound at all except for the wind, and all of us shivered in the cold.

“Dammit, it’s so cold!” I exclaimed.

Helen giggled. “Well, who decided to wear a miniskirt to a ghost hunt?”

“Haha. Very funny. Now what?”

We looked at each other sheepishly, at a loss of what to do next.

“Well…”

“Ms. Delaney, bring out your camera,” Dr. Tully said.

“What?”

“Just do it.”

I brought out my Canon DSLR that had Dr. Tully’s lens attached, switched it on and peered into the viewfinder. I gasped.

-----

In my camera’s little viewfinder, I saw the cemetery in the greenish cast of Dr. Tully’s special lens and saw that we were practically surrounded by the ghostly spectral figures of people In normal everyday clothes, but all of them were clearly dead.

They weren’t gory or anything like the zombies from The Walking Dead, but they were standing like they did in that show, heads tilted and looking at us with blank expressions. I could see gravestones and trees through them. I’ve seen many ghosts since that first time in the theater and, though they still gave me the willies, I didn’t jump out of my skin. At least not anymore.

I started clicking the shutter. “Oh, my God,” I whispered.

And as I clicked, they lifted their arms and pointed to one direction.

I put down my camera and brought out a flashlight.

“Come on,” I whispered and gestured for the others to follow me.

From time to time, I would check my camera and followed where they pointed. We were slowly getting closer to the center of the cemetery. I pointed my camera to where we were apparently making for, and I saw one of the larger grave markers.

It was about seven feet tall, and had a large cross on top, or what should have been a large cross if the left side of the crossbar hadn’t crumbled away.

As we got close, we noticed that the dirt covering the grave of whoever this was, was actually disturbed.

I looked at Dr. Tully and he nodded.

“Jackson,” he said, “dig this up. I would help but I need to do something.” With that he walked away.

Jackson and the others looked at each other and shrugged. He picked up one of the shovels we brought and started digging.

I looked around and felt cold again.

I lifted the camera to my eye and looked into the viewfinder again. The specters were now all around us, looking at Jackson and the grave as he continued to dig.

Lucy, the most scholarly among the three, used her tablet to take a picture of the gravestone.

“What kind of writing is that?” I asked.

“Cyrillic, I think.”

“So. Russian?”

She consulted her tablet. “It’s Serbian. It says, ‘Ovdje lezi Petra Plogojovitz. Neka Bog oprosti njoj zbog svojih grehova, a ne dozvoljava joj da opet ugrozi zivot.’”

I giggled a bit. “What?”

“In English, it says, ‘Here lies Petra Plogojowitz. May God forgive her for her sins and not allow her to afflict the living again.’ The gravestone says she was buried in 1725.”

“Wow. More than fifty years before Independence. This grave is almost three hundred years old.”

I reflected on the translation. “Afflict the living?” I thought aloud.

-----

When Jackson was almost three feet down, Dr. Tully returned. “I know what we’re up against,” Dr. Tully said. “Here.” He then handed each of us what looked and felt like pieces of wood, or rather, more like branches from a tree.

“Good thing we’re in Virginia,” he said. “Ash trees are plentiful.”

“What’re these for, Doc?” Lucy asked.

“I’m sure you can figure it out.”

“Oh…”

Helen searched around and handed us large rocks.

“Now, what are these for?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “it’d be pretty hard to pound down a stake with your bare hands.”

“Are you done now, Jackson?” Dr. Tully asked.

“I think so, Doc,” he said. “I hit something. Sounds wooden and hollow.”

“I would have assumed the coffin would have disintegrated hundreds of years ago. Let me help. See if you can open the thing. And hurry, Jackson, it’s almost midnight!”

Jackson pounded on the side of the coffin and he eventually grunted in satisfaction. He must have gotten it open.

“Doc!” He grated. “Help!”

He was in trouble!

“Hold on, Jackson!” I cried. I was the nearest so I got there ahead of the others. Looking down, I saw him being strangled by a woman in a tattered black cloak inside the coffin. In the dark, her eyes seemed to glow. The others crowded around me and peered down as well.

For some reason, I lifted my camera and took several pictures. Is there anything like a photographer’s instinct?

But that was just for a moment. Another kind of instinct took over. Dropping my camera and allowing it to hang from my neck, I grabbed Lucy’s rock and stake and jumped in. Transferring the rock and stake to one hand, I grabbed Jackson by his collar.

With all my strength, I was barely able to wrest him from the… thing’s grip on his throat, and I leap-frogged over him.

Without thinking, I rammed the rudimentary stake into the woman’s chest, causing her to fall back.

With that, it gave me an opportunity to use my rock and start pounding it onto the top of the stake.

The rough point that Dr. Tully had carved wasn’t too sharp, so I wasn’t really doing much. But Jackson grabbed the stake and rock from me and, with his stronger muscles and larger size, he was able to pound it into the creature.

A scream like a banshee’s echoed through the cemetery and she tried to pull the stake away from Jackson. I squeezed in beside him and tried to hold down the woman’s arms. The feel of her skin was unpleasant - she was cold and a bit slimy, and as I increased my grip, her skin started to tear.

I guess I was helping because Jackson was able to pound the stake in deeper. And, with each strike of the rock on the stake, the screams became weaker and weaker until the screams faded away.

Not taking any chances, Jackson continued pounding, and only stopped when he felt the stake punch through and into the wood. At which point, I let go of the woman’s arms.

In Dr. Tully’s flash, I saw that I really had torn the skin of the woman’s wrists. I saw what looked like bone and muscles exposed but, curiously, no blood.

We looked at the woman but she wasn’t moving.

“So,” Helen called down, “is she dead?”

-----

We stayed there for the rest of the night, taking turns watching over the body and waiting for dawn. Dr. Tully had also asked us to document as much as we could, so we started treating the thing like a kind of archeological dig. For me, I acted like it was more like a crime scene and I was a CSI photographer.

While we worked, the Doc just stayed in the shallow, three-foot-deep grave and watched over her with another stake in hand. “Just in case,” he said.

As we worked, I couldn’t help but notice that we were still surrounded by dead people, but, somehow, the atmosphere around us had also changed despite the ghosts.

I looked through the viewfinder and a lot of them were still there. Some looked down into the grave and walked away, and as they got further away, they faded into the night.

But dawn was coming, and they were starting to thin out.

One of them, a tall man in a suit and tie, looked at me. He looked like some well-to-do businessman who was just on the way home or something. The only thing that ruined it was the blood dripping from his mouth, and the fact that he was a transparent ghost.

I couldn’t hear it, of course, but I knew he said “thank you.” I could read his lips.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

He nodded to me and smiled, turned and walked away. I followed him with the camera until he faded away.

“Who were you talking to?” Lucy asked.

“Oh, no one. Just some guy.”

And then the sun peeked over the horizon.

---end---

Note - The picture was a collage made from publicly accessible pictures of the Sena Kashiwazaki character and other pictures. No ownership is claimed. No IP infringement is intended.

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Someone’s In The Library
~~by Bobbie Cabot~~

Libraries are good places to study. They're also good places to meet people. Including ghosts.

-----

After that thing with the vampire, my reputation, and the reputations of Dr. Lewis Tully and his team, have just continued to grow.

That became painfully obvious when I made my way to the student dorm where Dr. Tully got me a room to stay in for the duration of the event. There were about three dozen people by the gate, apparently waiting for me. At least they were polite enough, but as soon as they saw me, they started badgering me about how it felt to fight the “malevolent” ghost in the movie house, or how I killed the vampire.

I didn’t know how to respond, and had to wonder where they’ve been getting their information. I asked them this point blank, and they said they get the Parapsychological Association’s quarterly newsletter. One of them handed me the latest one, and I leafed through it and found the piece about “the real ghostbusters” – obviously, it was about us, though it didn’t mention anyone by name except for Dr. Tully.

Before I could do anything except scan the article, the girl who handed it to me asked me to autograph the magazine. I didn’t know how to turn her down so I just signed it and gave it back.

My “fans” couldn’t follow because only residents were allowed in, so I had a bit of a respite, and I had time to prepare for this shindig. Any excuse to wear a dress, you know, lol – one gets tired of pants all the time. I even got Dr. Tully to reimburse me for the one I just bought… I’m attending this thing for him, after all. The least he could do was buy the dress for me, heehee.

Per instructions, I got my camera and fitted one of the special lenses – guess he wanted to show off his tech. I picked the 80-125mm - a good walking-around lens. The camera incongruously hung around my neck, and didn’t complement my haute couture dress. Oh, well.

I met up with Helen, Lucy and Jackson in the university’s Dana Barrett Memorial Library, a very large library whose walls were lined with shelves full of books, and appointed with rich carpeting, expensive-looking vintage lamps, fixtures and furnishing, and large, expensive-looking oil paintings. (I wasn’t enough of an art connoisseur to recognize the names on them.) With the study tables and chairs removed, the place was big enough to play basketball in.

Dr. Tully and I, Jackson, our electronics guy, Helen, the tall, giggly blonde who’s our designated hacker, and Lucy, our ass-kicking brunette, made up doc’s own little ghostbusting team.

We didn’t use proton packs or like that, and except for my camera lenses with the greenish glass, we had nothing in the way of ghostbusting tools. Nevertheless, after taking down that vampire in the cemetery, rescuing that ghost from that movie house, and “properly” documenting them, we were at least genuine ghostbusters. The guys were jazzed about that, whereas I tried to keep a low profile to maintain my reputation as a legitimate photographer and newsperson. No one had twigged yet except those who read that damn newsletter apparently and, to use a phrase, that lunatic fringe didn’t count.

Anyway, here we were, standing around in this fancy library and sipping drinks. Mine was just Sprite in a tall Collins glass so I could walk around and not get drunk and fall on my ass. Walking around in a tight dress was a skill I hadn’t mastered yet.

This was the university’s little yearly fundraiser, when the faculty brought out their pet projects and paraded them to potential patrons and sponsors. This year, it included Dr. Tully and his electromagnetic detection and ranging technology. The technology jumped weather detection, radar, ECGs, and X-ray imaging by at least a generation, and, incidentally, allowed us to see ghosts and other paranormal stuff through the doc’s funky camera lenses (other than that, though, they worked pretty fine as regular EF lenses).

So we smiled and shook hands with the academics and captains of industry that filled the place, and we listened to the boring speeches. Dr. Tully’s speech was the best of the lot, but that didn’t say much.

Instead of just standing around and pretending to have a good time, I thought I could actually be useful. An undergrad had been drafted to be the event’s photographer but he clearly didn’t know what he was doing, so I decided to help out.

So as I took pictures of the speakers (with special attention to Dr. Tully, of course) and the VIPs, I noticed one particular woman across the room.

She was very beautiful, in an aristocratic kind of way. And was dressed vaguely like Jackie Onassis when she was still Jackie Kennedy. She was so drop-dead gorgeous, that I wondered why the PHDs and doctoral candidates and CEOs and VCs weren’t all over her and vying for her attention.

She noticed me and smiled in delight, and started vamping and primping for me. I laughed and started taking lots of pictures of her.

She clearly enjoyed the attention, and acted like it was a fashion shoot just about her.

And as I happily clicked away, and she laughed and primped and giggled, I slowly made my way across the room to get close to her. The people who kept walking in between us were irritating me, and I needed to get closer since I only brought the 80-125. I should have brought the super-zoom one.

I continued clicking away, and as I did, one of the guests – the academy president, I believe – approached her, and actually walked through her!

I stopped in shock, and as I looked at her, she looked at me with incredible sadness, and faded away.

-----

Later, after the event was over, Dr. Tully and the team met with me in a nearby bar, and I told them about it.

The guys looked at each other with expressions that said, “Ohhh! So that’s why Debbie was taking pictures like that!” Because all they saw was me taking pictures of nothing.

Everyone took their turn with my camera and looked through the pictures I took, the doc being the last.

“You know,” Tully said, “I think I know her.”

He brought out his big valise and got out what looked like a thick, glossy catalog, but instead of being a fashion catalog, it was the Barrett Conservatory’s newsletter from last year – which was all about the institute and the programs it was helping to fund.

He opened it to an article about the Dana Barrett Memorial Library, and along with text describing it as a “haven for brilliant academics and intellectuals,” there were several pictures of the library. In the beginning of the piece was a portrait-picture of Mrs. Dana Barrett, the young wife of the patron and benefactor of the library, former Senator Barrett, who passed away in 1966. The ghost was Dana Barrett.

-----

We agreed to meet up in the library later that night, and per the doc’s instructions, I brought my camera with the doc’s widest wide-angle lens attached, and a gorilla pod.

Having changed into something lots more comfortable, I rushed over. I was the last to arrive.

The guys had arranged five chairs on one side of a large table, and a big projector and screen on the other, but about five meters away.

Dr. Tully had me mount my camera on my little tripod, put it on the desk on the opposite side from the chairs, and facing away. I set the focus-point midway between the camera and the screen. And switched on live-view. Jackson then attached the camera to the projector. And we saw Jackson projected on the large screen, with the picture-in-picture-in-picture effect that you get when you focus a camera onto a TV screen. I adjusted my angle so we only saw one Jackson instead of dozens.

Belatedly, I noticed a laptop on a coffee table near the screen, as well as a monitor on the table.

We took our seats and waited. And after 15 minutes of waiting, we started to feel silly.

“Mrs. Barrett?” I called, a bit impatiently. “I’m Debbie Delaney. I was the one who took your pictures earlier. Do you remember? I’m with Dr. Lewis Tully from the university, and my friends Helen, Lucy and Jackson. Please don’t be frightened. We mean no harm. We just want to meet you, maybe get to talk to you. Please come out…”

After minutes of cajoling, the ghost relented and her image faded into the screen. And with a good angle to and from the screen and the camera, it was like we were looking at her in real life.

She waved and said hello. We could tell by the lips. And then she said something longer and we couldn’t understand it.

“Mrs. Barrett?” Dr. Tully said, “we cannot hear what you’re saying. Can you see if you can type on that keyboard over there? Maybe we could talk that way.”

She went to the laptop and typed, but clearly it wasn’t working.

“Oh… that’s too bad,” he said. “Well… anyway, let’s forget that for now. I’m Lewis, as Debbie said, and we know who you are. But… do you know who you are? I mean what you are now? That you are a ghost?”

She nodded sadly.

“Well, how long have you known?”

She held up her hands, palms facing forward and fingers splayed.

“Ten? Ten years?”

She closed them into fists, then splayed them again.

“What… oh, you mean another ten. So twenty?”

She popped her hands again two more times.

“My God, you’ve been stuck here for forty years?”

She nodded again, sat down and cried into her hands. It was sad to see her like that. The fact that there was no chair for her to sit on…

“But Mrs. Barrett,” I asked. “Why? Why stay here? Why not move on?

She held her hands palm upwards and shrugged. She said some more but we couldn’t understand it. Still, we understood from context.

“She doesn’t know how,” Lucy said to Helen. Helen, the most emotional among us, started to cry quietly.

-----

Over the next few days, we learned some more about what happened, about her plane accident, and, for our part, we updated her on current events. None spent more time with her than Dr. Tully (I think the doc had a crush on her, heehee). In fact, a PC with a modified Airbar, adopted to work on the doc’s EM tech, allowed her to surf the net, update herself with the latest news, watch movies and TV shows, and, most importantly, allowed us to communicate with her more easily.

The doc had it set up in a secluded part of the library where no one would notice, and during nights and on weekends, the guys and I could spend time with her and learn more about her and about ghosts and, ummm, the ghostly realm. Lol

More than that, it was pleasant chatting with her, and we all became close friends. We only noticed that we’d been “chatting” the whole night because the sun started to come out. I guess our little team had acquired a new member. I can’t imagine how our next ghost case will go.

---end---

Note - The picture was a collage made from publicly accessible pictures of the Sena Kashiwazaki character and other pictures. No ownership is claimed. No IP infringement is intended.

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Me And Marilyn
~~by Bobbie Cabot~~

Halloween costume parties are pretty fun things, Debbie Delaney, professional photographer, thought. Of course, the costumes need to be good, and as close to being realistic as possible. But this is taking realism too far!

-----

 

I could have been doing something better tonight, especially in New York City, but here I was standing around the entrance of a big fancy ballroom, waiting for my two friends. If our boss hadn’t said it was mandatory, I wouldn’t have come.

I was dressed as Marilyn Monroe, complete with the bright red lipstick, overdone lashes and the permed bright-blond hair, and I was wearing a duplicate of the dress she wore in The Seven Year Itch. It was a Halloween costume ball, after all, I thought, and if I had to wear a costume… Yeah, yeah, I know – it’s a bit of wishful thinking, but I can dream can’t I? For a transgender girl, Marilyn was more than just an icon.

“Now where the heck are my guys!” I said as I took pictures. I was the photographer, after all. “It’s almost seven PM!”

Looking at the end of the hallway, I finally saw Pete and Simone come out of the elevator. Thank God!

Pete was the photography technician that was assigned to me, and Simone was the department’s EA. I called them up earlier in the week and roped them into going with me to this shindig. I won’t be the only one wearing a costume!

“Thank God you’re here!” I said. “The director’s about to start the program.”

I looked them up and down. Pete was wearing leather pants, boots and a leather jacket with spikes on the shoulders, and a big chain wrapped around his shoulders. As for Simone, she was wearing a black halter top, black jeans, a silver ankh on a chain around her neck, and a henna tattoo of the Eye of Horus around her right eye. Over it all, she had a gray-brown hooded robe with the hood thrown back.

“Who are you guys supposed to be?” I asked.

“I’m Teleute,” Simone smiled, “the Angel of Death from Sandman.”

“How about you, Pete?”

“I’m the Ghost Rider! Cool, huh?”

“Yes, you are,” I said impatiently. “Now, let’s go and get this over with already!”

 

I dropped my little Canon Powershot into my clutch – the one with Dr. Tully’s lens attached. Also in my clutch was my wallet, a tube of lipstick, a comb, some other little things, plus my wayfarer sunglasses with the experimental lenses, also from the Doc.

Dutifully, I turned off my phone’s ringer. Everyone knows that at formal fund-raising occasions like this, one’s supposed to turn off her phone, just like at the movies. Otherwise, you might, gasp! Interrupt some dowager as she made her point to some social-climbing mid-level politician or something.

I looked around and only half of the people were in costume. Dammit! It wasn’t mandatory!

Most of those in costume hadn’t put in much effort into their outfits, though – policemen, firefighters, construction workers, punk-rock guitar players and that kind of costume. For the girls, there was the slutty nurse, the Arabian princess, the cheerleader, Hermione from Harry Potter and a lot of ho-hum outfits. In my own humble opinion, I think I looked far better than most of them.

 

To me, this was the lamest of all cocktail parties ever, but you do what you need to do. Otherwise, I might lose my standing as staff photographer.

It had been more than three hours already, but somehow, I didn’t feel too tired. A while ago, I felt something weird – my breast implants suddenly felt different and the little twinges I still felt from time to time because of my gender realignment surgeries sort of disappeared. I also felt, I don’t know, looser, you know, down there, and my panties felt fuller behind me. I was glad I’d worn the full 60’s-style panties. And, I don’t know, I felt gigglier and more flirty. I thought I could last a couple more hours, especially with all this attention from everyone.

Anyway, I ignored the weirdness of it, and we continued standing around drinking watered-down drinks and eating little cubes of ham, pretending they were fancy canapés. I made the expected polite hi’s and hellos to the directors and the other bosses.

I sure wished that guy in the werewolf costume would stop bothering people with his leering and wolf-whistling and slobbering. Clearly, the guy in the Dracula costume was getting fed up with him, as well.

I decided to get another glass of champagne.

 

There were a few interesting costumes, though, and after hours of milling around and chatting, we all picked out our favorites for the best-in-costume contest. And, surprisingly, Pete, Simone and I were in the top twenty.

The twenty of us found ourselves ushered on stage as the director, in a lame Emperor Napoleon costume, stood there saying all the expected boring blah-blahs, and thanking everyone for the generous donations and contributions that the foundation had been receiving all year round, and toasting everyone.

He did an excellent French accent, though. I thought he wasn't French. Hmmm.

 

As we listened to the director drone on in his weird mish-mash of English and French for more than thirty minutes, I looked through the room. I changed my opinion. Most of the people in costume had actually done a good job with their outfits, after all. Very realistic!

“Everyone looks so cute!” I said to Pete.

He looked at me in a funny way. “I guess,” he said.

“You’re no fun!” I said, and leaned to my right. “Don’t you think so, sweetie?” I said to Simone.

She looked at me funny, as well. “’Sweetie?’ What’s wrong with you?” she said. “Why are you talking like that?”

“Huh? What do you mean?” I said breathily.

It would be so wonderful when they announced the winner! I hope I win!!! Heehee!

Suddenly, someone screamed. I couldn’t help myself and reacted as well with my own scream.

We looked down the line of people standing on stage and we saw the one in the werewolf costume struggling with the one in the Dracula costume. After a final punch at Dracula, werewolf guy leaped off the stage, screamed at everyone and ran to the fire exit. He ran on all fours, like a real wolf.

At the last moment, he turned back to us and howled. We all gasped at that, and he again turned and loped out of the fire door.

“My goodness!” I exclaimed.

“You shall not escape me, you foul denizen of the night!” the Dracula character declared in very over-acted yet authentic-sounding Transylvanian Bela Lugosi tones. What a cornball... He jumped off the stage and, with cape outstretched, like he was trying to take off, he ran after the werewolf.

Several of the others, mostly the ones dressed like policemen and soldiers, chased after them. “Come on, you jarheads!” the one dressed like a World War II marine yelled and waved for us to follow. Talk about stereotype GI dogfaces. Heehee.

Even the girls that were dressed like the slutty policewoman and the sexy soldier followed.

“I don’t understand what’s going on!” I exclaimed loudly in high, girly but sultry and sexy tones. Everyone turned to look at me, especially the men. Their expressions were unmistakable, and it made me want to hide or something. What had made me yell that! Why am I acting like a bimbo?

 

Suddenly, someone slammed open the ballroom’s main doors – I think it was our department’s assistant director - and ran into the room. He was carrying what looked like a TV remote control. He went directly to the director and whispered into his ear.

Clearly, the director didn’t want to believe and they had a short argument, the director’s faux-French accent echoing in the room.

“I can’t hear what they’re saying!” I whined plaintively, and one of the men near me, this one wearing a Prince Charles-esque costume, reached for my hand and patted it comfortingly.

“There, there, child,” he said in RP English. That was strange…

After a few minutes of arguing, the director turned back to us.

“Mesdames et Messieurs,” he began, “I have just been told ce qui s'est passé – umm, what has happened. I shall let l'assistant directeur explain.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the man began, “about thirty minutes ago, this was broadcast on CNN and the three major networks nationwide. Normally, this would just have been laughed at, but the proof is all around. Here, let me play it for you.”

He pointed to the ceiling with the remote control and a projection screen started coming down. In a few moments, the news piece started playing.

Apparently, magic was real, and there were still witches and warlocks still around. And a bunch of these witches that called themselves the Shapers’ Coven had, for funzies, made a little magic spell. Well, not ‘little...’

Anyway, apparently, everyone that was affected was quite literally turned into the person that they were dressed as.

Oooh! So that’s why I was acting strangely! Goodness!

There were other details, but I didn’t think of any of that. I reached into my purse and pulled out my phone. But my phone had mutated into a retro something that someone like George Jetson would have used.

I dialed Dr. Tully’s number and fidgeted while it took its time connecting.

“Hello?” Dr. Tully said from the other end.

“Oh, Dr. Tully,” I said breathlessly (and sexily), “thank goodness you’re there!”

“Who’s this?” he responded.

“It’s me, Dr. Tully!” I said. “Don’t you recognize me? It’s me! Debbie!”

“Oh, no, Debbie,” he said. “You’ve been affected!”

“I knoooow!” I moaned, just like Marilyn Monroe would have. “I don’t know what to dooo!”

“Debbie, calm down! I know what’s happened. Keep it together!”

“But, but, but…”

He sighed. “What are you wearing?”

“I’m wearing a Marilyn Monroe costume!” I said excitedly, giggling. “You know? From that movie, The Seven Year Itch? It’s that one where Marilyn was wearing this white dress and, while she was walking over a subway grate, the air blew up and flipped her skirt up?” I giggled. “It was so funny but so sexy, too. And then…”

“Debbie, Debbie! Stop! Keep it together – whatever compulsions you have now, you can control it, Debbie! Just remember who you really are and you’ll be fine!”

“Oh, Doctor! Will I ever…”

“The ones on the news – those Shaper witches – they said that everyone that was affected will change back to normal at sunrise so long as you keep your costumes on and intact until sunrise, so just keep telling yourself you’re Debbie Delaney, and in a few hours you’ll be back to normal.

“But, Doctor… there are some people here…”

“I know. It’s happening all over the country. The authorities are doing their best to take care of it. Did anyone there change into anything dangerous?”

“Well, nooo… most of the people here had very lame costumes, so we’re mostly okay, except… oh, my goodness! There was one dressed like a werewolf and there was one like Dracula, and…” (I couldn’t seem to stop talking like Marilyn, darnit!)

“Say no more. Helen, Lucy and Jackson are actually on the way to you now. Sit tight – they’ll help you round up those Dracula and werewolf characters, and whoever else needs help.”

“Yayyyy! But… you know,” I whispered, “will the ghost be coming with the guys?” I remembered our new ghost team-mate.

“Dana?”

“Ummm, yes?”

“Yes, she is. So keep your camera handy. Did you bring the sunglasses?”

“Yes?”

“Good. Use them. You'll need the glasses and the camera to see Dana. I have to say goodbye for now – lots of other calls on the line.”

“Oh! All right. Thank you, Doctor.”

“And, by the way, you sound so cute right now.”

I couldn’t stop myself and giggled.

 

Pete, Simone and I sat at a table and drank some of the party’s remaining prosecco, and I looked into my bag. It seemed that my Canon Powershot had morphed into a vintage late-model Leica M-Series camera, but the lens’s material was still Dr. Tully’s lens, and my Wayfarers had turned into vintage cat eye sunglasses, but the lenses were also still Dr. Tully’s. I giggled at that.

Sitting beside me was Pete, and he was almost fuming. His head hadn’t really turned into a skull like Ghost Rider, with fire surrounding it. Instead, his face had turned so gaunt that it might as well have turned into a skull, and his face was so bright red, he looked almost apoplectic in barely-contained anger.

I put on my fancy sunglasses and, through the glasses, I could see a vague nimbus of something like fire surrounding his head.

“Yikes!” I exclaimed.

He did something and his skull-like head returned to normal, and the ghostly fire-aura disappeared.

I turned to Simone, and she looked pretty normal, even through the sunglasses, but I could feel a kind of cold coming off her.

She smiled at me as she sipped her prosecco. “I’m fine, sweetie,” she said, apparently reading my mind.

Well, I thought she was more than fine. She looked much thinner and cuter than before she changed.

She had complained that she was feeling warm and wanted to doff the cloak, but I was able to stop her in time. If she did that, she’d be like this permanently.

“Sunrise was like five hours away, honey,” I said. “You could take it off then?”

As for Pete, he wasn’t complaining much. Since he mostly looked like himself (when he wasn’t in his “Ghost Rider” persona), he didn’t mind it much.

As I was looking at him though my Jackie Kennedy glasses, I saw Dana fly through the doors and float towards me, smiling and waving.

I waved back, and I didn’t care if the people around me thought it was weird I was waving at nothing.

Dana stopped and floated in front of me. She gestured at me, up and down, and wolf whistled.

I giggled and waved her away in false modesty. Pete looked at me like I was crazy while Simone smiled in an indulgent way. Clearly, she knew to whom I was waving.

Seconds later, my friends, the rest of the unofficial Ghostbuster team of Flagstaff University, burst into the ballroom, and went directly to me. (Just to be clear, though, Flagstaff University isn’t in Arizona – it’s just the name.)

There was Jackson, our electronics guy, Helen, the tall, giggly blonde who’s our designated hacker, Lucy, our ass-kicking brunette analyst and all-around toughie, and, of course, our newest ghostly member, Dana, floating right beside me.

The girls gave me a hug, and Jackson wolf-whistled. “Wow, Debbie – you look super-sexy!”

I smiled and preened.

“So, Debbie,” Lucy said, “Doc said there were some people that were changed…”

“Oh, nothing dangerous except maybe for these two” – I gestured to Pete and Simone – “but they’re okay.” My guys nodded hello to the two. “Oh! There was also one who was dressed like a werewolf and another one like Dracula.”

“That could be a problem,” Helen said. “Where are they now?”

“Last we heard, they were running through the offices upstairs, being chased by Hogan’s Heroes.”

“Hogan’s heroes?”

“Oh, just a bunch rejects from the Police Academy movies,” I giggled. “Guests dressed as soldiers and policemen.”

Just then, we heard several shots.

I looked up and saw Dana waving towards the fire exit.

“Come on!” I said. “Dana’s signaling us to follow her!”

I got up and everyone followed me as I minced to the fire exit. Keeping in mind what Dr. Tully had said, I switched to normal running instead of the mincing, tapping fast-walk I’d originally fallen into.

I followed Dana up the stairwell as she floated up to the roof, and we came to the roof deck’s door. One of the people from the party that was dressed like a marine was blocking it.

“I’m sorry, Miss,” the man said, “I can’t let you through.”

“But we have to get up to the roof!” We heard several other shots.

“You’re very pretty,” the man said, “but this is a military operation. Please…”

Pete came up and slugged him in the face. The faux-marine fell down like a sack of potatoes.

“Military operation, my ass,” Pete growled.

“Petey!” I exclaimed. “You didn’t have to do that!”

What was I saying? I thought to myself. Petey? Really?

Anyway, I peeked around the metal door and saw several of the fake marines and police on the ground either dead or unconscious while the rest that were still standing were firing at the Dracula lookalike.

Dracula just stood there absorbing the shots, but he wasn’t really invulnerable – the bullets were actually hurting him but, for some reason, he was still standing.

Dracula had his right hand at the throat of the werewolf lookalike, the werewolf struggling in his grip, while he had his right arm wrapped around the sexy faux-policewoman as he fondled her. She was also struggling to escape.

It seemed that Pete couldn’t leave it alone. Taking the chain from around his shoulders, he used it to rush the vampire-lookalike, his face looking like it was about to burst into fire, and wrapped it around the Dracula-wannabe’s neck, forcing him to let his prisoners go.

The werewolf fell on the ground, unconscious, while the girl escaped and limped away. Helen and Lucy grabbed the girl and pulled her to safety.

Having let go of his prisoners, Dracula brought both his hands down and around Pete’s neck, and the two struggled, whoever choked the other first would be the winner. The others stopped firing so that they wouldn’t hit Pete, and tried to find a clear shot.

Dana floated in front of me to catch my attention, and waved to two of the unconscious fake policemen’s belts. I saw their handcuffs and tasers, nodded to the floating entity, grabbed the cuffs and tasers, and then ran towards Pete.

I crouched down and snapped a pair of handcuffs around werewolf-man’s wrists and another around his ankles, and then signaled Jackson to drag him away.

I then turned my attention to Faux-Dracula. I stood up, pressed both tasers against his temples and pressed the triggers.

That sent electricity directly into his brain and, after shaking in electric shock for a minute, he fell down unconscious.

After a beat, I giggled into the silence. “Wow! I’m good, aren’t I.”

A beat after that, I saw Dana giving me a razzberry.

 

A few hours later, the real military had come over and taken the affected people away. I was told that they were going to be put into holding cells until the morning, and since the witches said that, for those who were lucky enough to have stayed in their complete costumes, they should revert back to normal when the sun rose.

However, for the others who didn’t, the military would keep them isolated until the witches who’d started all of this could take charge of them.

As for Pete, Simone and I, we went home to my apartment while Jackson, Helen and Lucy went back to Flagstaff.

It was sad, though – Pete was permanently stuck the way he was. Simone, too.

Since Pete had inadvertently taken off his chain during his fight with Dracula, he couldn’t change back to normal anymore, but since he mostly looked like he used to, I think he didn’t really mind.

As for Simone, she had taken off her robe earlier, too, so she was stuck as well. But since she looked very similar to her old self, she could just pass for normal, and just pass as herself later after all of this is over, and just say she'd had a bunch of plastic surgeries, tattoos and a lot of liposuction to the people who knew her.

At present, the two of them were in the living room – Pete was sleeping on my couch while Simone was sitting and watching TV.

I looked at them from my bedroom door – Pete snoring and Simone munching popcorn. Without turning, Simone waved to me – she didn’t need to look: she just knew I was there.

I knew enough of the Ghost Rider comics that I knew what Pete could do now, but I didn’t know much about the Death character from Sandman. I guess I’d find more about it later.

As for me – well, I didn’t really have any special abilities, except to look and sound sexy. But at least I knew now that I didn’t have to act like a bimbo if I didn’t want to.

But if I did, I knew that I could make most guys do anything I wanted just by asking. I guess that’s enough of a super power for me.

But at the moment, I had a question I needed to ask myself.

I could now be a real girl if I wanted. My only worry was that I might lose my photography skills, and whatever other talents I had learned or accumulated over the years if I permanently stayed this way. And, of course, I’d have wasted the thousands of dollars I spent for my GRS and other operations… Well, not really.

I took my little Canon camera, which had changed into a vintage Leica film camera. Nope – this camera won’t do.

I grabbed my other camera, the DSLR, and tested things – taking pictures of my bedroom, living room, the buildings outside my window, and everything else inside the apartment. I grinned – seemed I hadn’t lost any of my photographer’s magic.

Hmmm…

I guess I’ll take a shower, i said to myself.

I took off my white dress as well as my underwear, went to the bathroom and had a long, refreshing shower.

After my shower, and as I rubbed the water from my bright-blonde hair with my towel, I watched the sun peek over the horizon.

“Good morning, Marilyn,” Simone said.

“No,” I replied. “It’s Debbie, actually.”

---end---

P.S. The picture was a collage made from publicly accessible pictures of Marilyn Monroe, Ghost Rider, the Grim Reaper and other pictures. No ownership is claimed. No IP infringement is intended.

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