Chapter 2
Sam

I came to in a normal looking room. That's not to say it was boring, the walls were stained wood specially planned so the wood grain formed pictures of faces, places and animals, something that would have to cost a fortune if it was done in the regular world. The bed I was in had, what I assumed were red silk sheets the same colour as Calandri's skin, they were so sleek I'd never felt anything like them before. The bed was better, it was the softest most comfortable I'd ever been in, it was almost like lying on warm air. I couldn't tell where the light was coming from, it just was.

But I didn't notice those things at first, that all came to me later.

The first thing I noticed was my body. When they were changing me, molding me into their play thing, I was in shock. My mind could only watch most of my body being changed like it was a movie. Until they touched my face they weren't doing it to me, they were doing it to someone on tv who just happened to look like me. Now, I could look down at my body. I could feel the changes, I could run my hands over my chest and feel the perfectly formed breasts. Now it was real.

I focused on my hands. My dad had said I had boxer's hands, they were big with thick knuckles, and short, blunt fingers that never seemed to match my body. Now they were anything but. My new thumb was about as big around as my old pinky finger, each finger was about an inch longer, almost pointed at the tip, with long perfectly rounded nails. My old nails were always bitten down to the quick. Flexing them, it seemed as if they were double jointed, I could touch my wrist with no problem and bend them backwards almost 90 degrees without any help or discomfort.

Sitting up, I saw I was wearing a skintight nightgown of the same material and colour as the sheets, the colour made my pale skin seem dead in comparison. I plucked at it uncomfortable, only used to having my socks and underwear clinging so closely to my body. Unconsciously giving my mind time to comprehend everything, I pulled and fidgeted in the nightgown for at least ten minutes, trying to make it comfortable, until I finally gave it up in disgust.

Rolling up the sleeves, I saw my arms were totally hairless, without the hair, little moles and freckles I used to have on them. Even the tiny birthmark that was suppose to be right above my armpit was gone. Rubbing my legs together they felt just as smooth. I stood up, needing to see just how much my body had changed even as my mind recoiled, remembering the feeling of being molded, the inhuman hands massaging my skin and muscle. The first thing I noticed was I had curves. They weren't enormous, but a very distant part of my mind, the part that still believed this was all a dream said that I looked better than every girl in my school.

As if they had a mind of their own, my hands went to the breasts that were hanging from my chest. They felt odd. I'd touched a girls breasts before, but only through a t-shirt and bra, these only had some thin fabric protecting them, and I felt my fingers artlessly drawing circles around the mounds, going towards the nipples that were almost poking through the fabric.

“Ahem, are you some kind of pervert?” a guy asked me.

My face turned red, as I realized that a guy who looked like he was sixteen with enough muscles to join the NFL, was staring at me as I was rubbing my body in a slinky nightgown. With a yelp I jumped back into the bed and covered myself with the blanket. “I-I...” I didn't have a clue what to say, and the high pitched squeaky voice I had, surprised me almost as much as the other changes.

“Have some decency girl and get some clothes on, please. We have work to do,” he said rolling his dark eyes.

“I'm not a girl!” I shouted, ignoring the obvious.

He sighed, which made his broad shoulders look even bigger, he could have broken me like a twig. “Ugh, another one. That's going to make my life so much easier. What's your name kid? You can call me Sam.”

“Where am I?” I asked.

His voice became deeper, harsher, “You're in hell, also known as the Bitter Wind Steading. Now what's your name kid? You can call me Sam.”

“Anthony, Anthony Burke. What are you doing here?” I squeaked.

Sam went to the wardrobe and started looking through it, I could just make out a lot of brightly coloured clothes, which seemed even more vivid against Sams' black skin. “I'm your guide. None of the Fair Folk wants to deal with teaching humans the basics of society, so they leave it us slaves to deal with the nitty gritty details.”

“Fair folk?”

“The ones who kidnapped you, bought you or tricked you into coming here. Fae is another name for them, if you want to get beaten you can call them elves. Ever since popular culture has made the elf into happy little children or tree loving primitives, they've hated that name,” he explained.

“I didn't think they were real. Why haven't the police or the military caught them if they go around kidnapping people?” I asked.

Sam snorted. “They're as real as your tits. And most people think they aren't real because for a few hundred years they had to stay out of sight. They hate iron, it's like poison to them, and for a long while everyone had iron, iron nails, iron tools, iron horse shoes, iron engines, iron everywhere. But over the last little while, there's been less and less iron, there's steel but it's not the same as human forged iron, it just annoys them. So they've been coming back, taking people where they wouldn't be missed.” His voice got quieter, “Street kids, people in refugee camps, people lost in the woods, those that wouldn't be missed or could be explained away.”

He turned back to the closet pulling out a brilliant red, knee length skirt and a matching leotard. “Here you go, you'll probably be most comfortable in these. Underwear is in the drawer beside your bed.”

My nose curled up automatically at the colours and the very tight leotard. I wouldn't be caught dead in something like that.

“You've got to wear something, and believe me when I say that everything else in here looks worse,” he said, a little sympathetically.

I hugged the blanket around myself, I'd seen what they did to my body I didn't want to think about what they might do if they got angry. “Aren't their any pants or something not so tight?”

“Nope, just dresses, skirts, and some costumes which are more revealing than you want to risk,” Sam said. “Honestly I picked out the only outfit you'll probably find comfortable, unless you like clothes that look like they're painted on.

“Do you mind if I take a look?” I asked.

He headed for the door. “Feel free, but I need you out here ready to go in ten minutes, so be quick and don't get obsessed with finding the perfect look. Until you're supposed to dance the fae don't care, and neither do the few humans here.”

The door closed, and I was left to myself. Walking felt a little strange, I wasn't used to having such wide hips, and my body didn't seem to move properly. Everything seemed looser, more bendy, and the tight gown made me have to take baby steps. Not fun. I stretched my arms, watching how the strange limbs moved so gracefully through the air, there was no way these could be mine.

I notices as I walked that my boobs didn't bounce like I thought they would, I felt them jiggling a tiny bit but when I looked down they just sort of sat there. Looking around nervously I started skipping, that got them bouncing.

There was a hard knock on the door. “Time is money! Stop playing with yourself and get dressed.”

How the heck did he know what I was doing? Trying not to blush again, I took a quick look at the wardrobe and as Sam had said the only clothes to be seen were skin tight leaving nothing to the imagination, too short, half see through, or had idiotic flames, flowers or animal pictures on them. With a sigh I grabbed some underwear from the drawer and put everything on. I hated how the leotard clung to my skin, I had never worn anything this tight before.

There was an assortment of shoes next to the door. They were all soft soled and looked like slippers. Slipping on a red pair I stepped outside, with no idea what was going to happen, but grateful that I was apparently going to be kept too busy to think about what was happening.

As I left my room I entered the end of a hallway that looked like it could belong in a nice hotel, blue carpet, ugly peach wall paper, a line of doorways that seemed far too close together. My room was huge, but the the next door was only a foot or two away. There was no way they could be there, I'd have to see the second door just beside the first one. How did they do that?

I looked at my door again as Sam impatiently tapped his foot. In the middle of the door was a girls face done up in bronze, her eyes were a little too large, more like a realistic anime girl, her cheeks were on the chubby side, with a sharp chin, and almost pointed ears, I'd say she looked a little catlike, but my grandma would say she looked like a pixie. It was so well done I had to touch it, my finger brushed its nose. I screamed and jumped back about five feet, my back hitting the wall painfully. Sam burst out laughing, doubling over and slapping his knee.

“WHAT THE HELL!” I shouted.

It took him a minute to catch his breath. “Sorry that never gets old. That face is you. It marks the room as yours' and will keep any unwanted humans out of it, along with any really unimportant fae.”

I looked at it again, touching my face, feeling out the new bumps and features, it seemed similar at least to the bronze face. My hand shook as I gently touched the bronze. Running my fingers over the ears, I felt a hand touching my ear, touching the metal eye made me close my own eye, it didn't hurt just annoying. “How?”

“Magic,” Sam said simply. “Everything here is magic, and just when you think you have something understood, it will change again. Get used to it or you'll go mad. You hungry?”

I backed away from the freaky face, and suddenly realized that every door had a similar bronze face. It seemed like they were all watching me. I leaned into Sam, he seemed nice and stable. Taking a deep breath I focused on him, ignoring the strange body, just deal with the moment. “Yeah I'm hungry, where do we eat?”

“Come on and don't step on my feet, I'll show you the cafeteria,” the teenager said walking away with his long stride, forcing me to almost run to keep up.

I counted about twenty doors, each one within two or three feet of it's neighbour. Where these for people like Sam and I? Was it just twenty humans against the fae? I wondered if I was the youngest, if I was the only one who'd had his body taken from him. Had anyone escaped before? I needed to know more, but I didn't even really know what I had to ask.

The doors were all on the left wall, and we turned left at the end of the hall. Immediately we were in a sunlit field. Large blue mushrooms the size of footstools with flat tops littered the field. Bushes and trees surrounded the field, woven so tightly together it looked like a wall. There were a few people sitting around the field, eating alone. They looked human at least, but they were exaggerated, like my thin, flexible body, or Sam's massive bulk.

One blonde haired woman was at least seven feet tall, as thin as I was and when she moved it seemed like she was dancing or the flapping of a butterfly's wing. A man looked at us with eyes that were too big, his body shrunken, yet with fingers that were grotesquely long. A person, I couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman had skin that looked tattooed with every colour of the rainbow and every colour in between, its' skin shimmered as it took dainty bites of a leaf.

Sam ripped off a large leaf from a tree by the entrance, and began pulling berries, fruits, leaves and even twigs from the bushes. I copied him, the large leaf was fairly solid, and with just a touch it came off in my hand. The same thing happened when I plucked anything from the bushes. As I went along I noticed that the bushes each gave off it's own smell. The one with thick leaves smelled like grapes, when I plucked a twig from a small tree the smell of pork filled the air. Green berries made my eyes water like I'd been cutting a jalapeno peppers. A coconut like nut smelled like fresh cream.

With the leaf overflowing with food I sat on a mushroom beside Sam and used another mushroom as a table. He bit into a twig and smiled. “If you close your eyes, this almost seems like you're eating a hotdog.”

I picked the grey, warty twig up from my own plate, closed my eyes and bit. It was moist and soft, there was a vague taste of meat, but I couldn't tell how he thought that it was a hotdog. I swallowed it and put the twig down. “How long have you been here, Sam?”

He glared at me as if I'd asked something wrong. “Don't ask that question. Most people here don't want to remember, it's easier if you just forget.”

I lowered my eyes, brushing my long black hair out of my eyes. That wasn't something I'd ever had to do before, no wonder girls always had things in their hair. “I'm sorry, I didn't know,” I said quietly.

“No worries, I don't mind. I'm not most people,” he said slowly and softly looking away from me.. “What year was it when you got captured?”

Wow, I thought, he'd been here long enough to forget when he was kidnapped, that didn't fill me with confidence. “2014,” I said.

“I was lied to and brought here in 1978,” Sam said.

“But you only look sixteen! How's that possible?” I blurted out.

He finished his twig before answering. “You saw what they did with your body. They can do anything they want in their land, make you older than dust or as young as when you were in your mothers belly. But they didn't change my age. I am sixteen. What they did was change time. To me, it's been one year since I was offered a a chance to be rich, famous, and loved, at the time I was working my fingers to the bone to survive and didn't have much of a future except more work, it seemed like a good deal.”

I really had no idea what to say, I couldn't understand how that was possible, how any of this was possible. It was like Alice in Wonderland on drugs. I started to eat the leaves and berries, each one tasted a little like a food from home, but they weren't the same, the texture, the smell, the taste, there was always something off about them.

“So this is the little dancing queen, is it?” a woman said. I felt long bony fingers encircle my head, long nails picked at my skin.

“Hey!” I shouted, trying to stand, but the fingers were like iron.

The blonde woman I'd seen earlier sat down beside me. “Hmm, you're a tiny one. Eyes are too large, cheeks too big. Your breasts are too large too. They'll get in the way when you dance. Tell me girl do you know how to pirouette, do you know the Troika, how to do the grand adage?”

I tried to shake my head, my eyes unable to leave her thin, bitter face or her tiny blue eyes. “I-I-I can't dance.”

She burst out laughing, it was wild, loud, harsh, like a flock of crows cawing all at once. She finally let go of my head, leaning back slightly, her long arms touched the ground holding her up. I wanted to leave, I wanted to run away screaming, but Sam put his hand on my knee forcing me to stay. Finally she stopped laughing, wiping her streaming eyes on the billowy sleeve of her shirt she smiled like she was sad for me. “Well I can see I don't have to worry about any competition from you. It's going to be fun seeing them try to train you. I hope for your sake you're a fast learner.”

“That's enough Paula. You've had your fun now leave Anthony alone,” Sam said standing up.

She smirked, “Anthony is it? Oh this truly is rich. Well they say birds of a feather. Still Anthony won't do, you need balls to be an Anthony. I know, you're so small I think I'll call you Ant.”

Sam growled, his hands turning into gigantic fists that seemed as big as my head. “I said leave her alone.”

She stood up, stepping over my head. “I do have things to do, good bye girls.”

Sam sat back down, picking up his plate again. I tried to fix my hair, it was back in my eyes thanks to Paula, it helped to take my mind off my anger. Finally I was calm enough to talk again. “Sam what did the witch mean calling us girls?”

He sighed, a dark look coming over his face. “My old name was Alexandria.”