Danny sipped a warm cup of tea and blinked her bright blue eyes across the room as she focused on her surroundings with interest and curiosity about what this place was, perhaps for the first time she could even remember.

Her old identity groggily woke up out of what seemed like a horrible blurry nightmare. She glanced down at the pretty pink dress she wore with little white ruffly edges and white tights and shiny black flats, and she saw her doll Noonie laying there on the floor beside her in the big walk-in closet.

Veela, the kind woman who had been administering her these warm cups of medicine was off in another part of the house and unaware that this latest cupful of tea had been the one to finally bring Danny around to her senses once more.

Danny felt quite like a puppet who'd just come to life and had her strings cut off and in their place sprouted little butterfly wings to carry her off to freedom.

She blushed with the sudden recollection that she had been a teenage boy before and had been reduced to the life of a little girl in body, mind and spirit for all this time and had been behaving strangely through a will not her own up until now. Behaving as though being this way was normal and that her boy-way never existed at all.

She cried softly to herself as the memories poured back in one by one and gave her back her original sense of identity. The tea had worked but it had taken another two weeks to undo most of what the mind altering pills had done.

She remembered being a boy and her mind was trying to make sense all over again of the differences between the way she felt before as a boy and the way she felt now as a girl.

A few times last Februray Danny had gone to the beach with his friends and rented out some wetsuits and went boogie boarding, riding the waves in the thick froth of agitated Pacific stormy waters. The storms turned normal three foot waves into gigantic mammoths but the water was too cold that time of year to go at it in just swimming trunks so Danny and some of his friends took to the waves in wetsuits.

Being a girl felt comparable to wearing a wetsuit all snug and tight and smooth on the outside, only it was a bit more snug in the crotch but it felt almost just as weird and just as exciting and different as being out there in that numbing water rushing in on those waves. Only thing was this wetsuit couldn't be removed and it was tons more sensitive as it was girl flesh instead of cold, wet, elastic neoprene.

Danny's boy mind was back and intrigued with the strange newness to all this. The magic pills had made her artifically glad to be a little girl and she remembered all of that as clear as day but now she realized perhaps for the first time that being this way could indeed be fun, and it would be - if only she could change back to normal at least once in awhile and be this little pumpkin princess of a cutie-pie only when she wanted, and in secret so nobody else need ever know about it.

Right now, though, remaining this way was the last thing she wished for. She'd been made to be this way far longer than she had ever anticipated from the moment she changed into a girl by wearing that magic ring. Sitting down to pee for all this time was an especially humiliating memory but it reared its ugly head suddenly from all that tea she'd drank this morning and so Danny stood up and hurried off to the bathroom to relieve the mounting pressure in her bladder.

She climbed up and sat on the toilet seat and discovered another series of memories those drugs had made her casually overlook up until now, for she suddenly realized and remembered another humiliating thing about her and that was having to actually clutch onto the sides of the great big toilet seat for fear of actually falling in. She was that small of a girl that if she wasn't careful she would slip backward a few inches and maybe not fall all the way in but at least fall into an awkward slump at possibly the worst time ever.

She finished up what she had to do in the bathroom and washed her hands and returned to her bedroom once more. So much of this felt new to her after what those drugs had done that she felt compelled to kick off her shoes and go have a look in the large wall mirror nearby.

She saw an auburn haired little girl with big blue eyes gazing back at her in her reflection. Thanks to those pills she had grown quite accustomed to seeing that face and that little girl's body and recognizing it as the one she always had but now she was looking at herself through the eyes of a little girl and the mind of a teenaged boy and taking note.

Her stockinged legs felt weird in those tights and she was itching to remove them and wriggle her toes freely on the thick white throw rug. She glanced down and lifted up the front of her dress a little and wrapped her thumbs in the edges of the elastic waist band of her tights and she pulled them quickly off her and tossed the crumpled ball off to one side and wriggled her little pink toes freely in the wonderful soft fibers of the carpet.

Her dress felt funny too and looked just as odd to her newly awakened male mind. She rummaged through her closet and dresser drawers in search of something less feminine to wear but found nothing but more of the same types of little girl outfits, only in different colors and patterns.

So she took out a ball of yarn from a bag of knitting materials that Veela had brought up here before, and Danny hiked up her dress with a funny little yarn belt around both thighs and made it look like a pair of ridiculous looking shorts. Still frilly and girly but at least it wasn't a dress anymore.

With her boy thoughts mostly back in place she was a bit anxious to get the rest of her changed back to normal too and promptly hopped up inside the dumbwaiter and closed the doors and pressed the "down" button, sending her straight away to the kitchen. If she couldn't find a way into that basement and find a way to change back to normal then at least she could have more of that yummy warm tea.

Meanwhile back at Danny's real bedroom in Danny's real home sat a boy who looked quite like the original Danny Sweet only who had the mind and spirit of the evil wizard Merlok.

Jana, Merlok's half-sister and personal lab assistant, had tricked Merlok and forced his latest magic ring upon his own hand, changing him into a copy of Danny Sweet for the purpose of temporarily taking Danny's place until they found a way to change the original Danny back to normal again.

Jana was fed up with her older half-brother and decided it was high time to teach him a lesson.

"Do you realize what you've done?" Merlok asked, remembering back to what he said to her when the deed had taken place and he'd been reduced to a teenaged boy. "This magic ring can only be removed by me, Merlok, but as there is no Merlok anymore due to your traitorous meddling, I'm stuck this way. What's more I can no longer weild magic this way. And furthermore how will you explain all this to the high council?"

"You just let me worry about that now," was all she said in reply before she sent him back to Danny's house to face Danny's parents and get the grounding of a lifetime for "running away like that."

It had been over two weeks since that happened and the Merlok was still stuck as Danny. The little blue stoned ring sat there upon his finger still, stuck in place by the horrible ring curse he'd personally designed with pride. Even now the magic sent a faint but distinguishable pulse through his finger as the spell ever so slowly reinforced itself with every passing moment. If he remained in this form for too long he would be stuck this way for good. He couldn't go back to Jana for she would simply send him right back here until she ever got around to figuring a way to change that little girl back to normal again and put things right. Even if he could cast a teleportation spell he was sure that Jana would have taken the same precautions as he did and keep the magic blocking shield running most of the time. The only other way there to his estate was by sailing clear out into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and finding his island and that would be no easy task, especially for a teenage boy who had less than five dollars change in lunch money in his wallet and a secret magic weilding half-sister named Jana that could send him right back to Danny's house with the flick of her wrist if she wanted.

So it was a waiting game at this point. Merlok-Danny was fed up with the treatment he'd gotten since coming here to this place. He'd been made to do awful, horrible, dreadfully nasty chores like mowing the lawn and trimming the hedges and pulling the weeds and taking out the garbage and even eating all his vegetables or no dessert. That was the worst because he hated vegetables and especially collie flour, which every wizard knows is chocked full of nasty magic dampening poisons. Still, at least he was allowed to play his video games even though he was still grounded. That part was cool but there was no way he was ever going to get past level three of Duel Master's Challenge if his mom didn't keep blowing the circuit breaker by running that dumb vacume cleaner at the same time as the microwave and air conditioner and Springer Show all the time that's for sure.

He was sixteen now and not his normal four hundred and thirty-four year old self, and that was taking some getting used to for poor Merlok. He hadn't been this young since, well... since the Spanish Armada sank, and they didn't have video games then, or if they did they were really, really bad.

Merlok-Danny was going to have to have a long talk with Jana once he saw her again. It wasn't her place to make dangerous spur of the moment decisions like that, especially ones which could directly foil all of Merlok's carefully designed plans. Apparently his half-sister thought she could handle this situation better.

Back in Merlok's lab deep in the basement of his island home sat Jana at the wooden workbench under a single metal lamp overlooking Merlok's notes for possibly the hundredth time, trying to make sense of any of it as the fellow tended to write half his chicken scratch comments down in code.

Veela was there too as Jana had decided to take the woman into her full confidence and cooperate one hundred percent with the high council in finding a way to change Danny Sweet back to normal.

"This isn't getting us anywhere," Veela said, her patience growing thin. "You may need to bring Merlok back here and have him work on this problem himself. And explain why, again, you had decided it was best to have him be the temporary replacement for Danny?"

"The choice was simple, really," Jana said. "He's been male for far longer than I've ever been and knows how to act the role and besides... he needed to learn a lesson that it's not okay to kidnap people. That made him automatically the best choice for who was going to be Danny Sweet."

"Well you really should let the council decide what punishment best suits Merlok. Until then we need to get him back here immediately to work on this problem. We've got to get that child turned back into a boy and undo this horrible mess before we all lose our magic practicing licenses," Veela said. "So from this point on I think it best that I take charge of things and organize just how exactly we're going to get that girl back to normal. We're getting nowhere without the master of that spell around to tell us how to undo it. So I need you to fetch Merlok here right away. I don't care if you can change him back or not. We'll work on that later on. For now let's just get him back here and get him working on a reversal spell for Danny... oh for the love of... Has SHE been standing there listening in on this the whole time?"

A timid barefoot little girl stepped out from the shadows and waved at them.

"Honey, what on earth are you doing down here? And why in the world are you dressed up like that for?" Jana asked indicating the strange home made pantaloons the child had formed out of her dress and some length of yarn all knotted up around her legs.

"It wore off," the child explained. "It wore off. I'm me again inside and I came down here to get changed back to normal again, please."

Hilda stepped into the room nearly all out of breath and said,"Sorry ma'am but she swiped the key to the pantry out of the bread basket and got in. I was in the master bedroom changing the linens at the time and didn't discover anything wrong until a minute ago when I went back in the kitchen to start sweeping the floor. I'll take her right back up to her room, ma'am, I promise, and I promise I won't let it happen again."

"No, no. That's all right, Hilda," Veela said. "I think we'll keep her down here for now. We'll be summoning over Merlok back again to work on this and also I think it best we bring in a few more wizards to help get this all sorted out in a more reasonable time frame."

Jana saw Hilda's hesitation to follow the stranger's orders and finally Jana nodded and said,"It's all right, Hilda. It's been decided that Veela is running things around here for now until we get through this mess. So go ahead and prepare for at least three or four extra guests tonight."

"Yes, ma'am," Hilda said and turned and went to carry out the task.

Finally Veela smiled at the little girl and asked,"Feeling better, hun?"

"Much better, thanks," Danny replied.

"Why don't you hop up on that chair and rest awhile before you catch cold in your bare feet," Veela suggested. "What ever compelled you to run around like that for in the first place? You'll catch a death of cold wandering around in this part of the house like that. Anyway, nevermind that now. While Jana is busy fetching all the wizards here to help work on the counter-spell, how do you feel about taking a few reading and writing tests? We may as well check your math skills while we're at it, just to make sure."

Jana stood up and walked out of the room, heading to the teleportation chamber to de-activate the spell blocking shield and go fetch Merlok.

"Okay," Danny said. "I can do this."

"Good," Veela said pleased. "And then afterwards some more tea, m'kay?"

"Okay," Danny agreed.