Jacqueline's Cheap Shorts - Chapter 1 (Patreon)

My teaser about this story was a little deceptive. As you might realize as you read, John is nowhere near as nice and well-manufactured as the shorts in this picture!

Jacqueline’s Cheap Shorts

Chapter 1 - Consciousness in Stitched Form

Jacqueline Renquist tapped the Enter key on her keyboard and the musty basement filled with the gentle, almost soothing hum of machinery.  

“You’re sure this thing’s….safe?”  John Sanders took a small step backward as the winding of the motors accelerated and the pitch heightened as if they were about to explode. He didn’t sound nearly as confident in this behemoth, taking up most of Jacqueline’s parent’s basement–not nearly as confident as he was in himself.  

Jacqueline poked her head up from behind the complicated array of circuitry like an adorable Asian whack-a-mole. Overtop of her dark-blue button down shirt was a small-sized white lab coat–a gift she’d received from her chemistry teacher in her first year of high school over 4 years ago.  She took excellent care of the coat and despite bringing it with her to her every science and chemistry lab all throughout high school and even into college, it still looked brand new.  

“Oh, absolutely safe!” She chirped, her tone enthusiastic as she made a few last minute adjustments to the reticulation wheel.  She had to properly enter the height, weight, and body fat percentage she’d gathered from John when he arrived.  It was only a few moments ago that he was playfully joking about her needing a stepping stool to get an accurate height measurement but his demeanor had changed a lot since then. 

“Yeah…” The word oozed out of John as he rubbed his shoulder.  

Oh, no.  Was he considering backing out?  He can’t back out!

Jacqueline bee-lined for John, taking position at his side to watch the door slowly open. He was easily a foot taller than her so there was no way she could stop him if he decided to leave so she’d have to do something she was still learning to do: use her charm. 

She’d never considered using her femininity to her advantage before but when John Sanders expressed a modicum of polite interest in her experiment, she saw a montage in her mind–a parade of beautiful women all in line to be on John’s arm. And John was not picky either!  He seemed to like attention from all girls. Jacqueline had even caught him looking at her a few times in Engineering Ethics once or twice, which she thought was strange considering the fact that she wasn’t anywhere near as…voluptuous and well-endowed as some of the other girls he cozied up to.  

“Don’t worry at all, John.  I’ve got this all under control. Jacqueline asked.  Her hands fidgeted with poorly concealed excitement as she reached up to pat John’s shoulder.  

My goodness…that’s a big shoulder! Firm, too…

“Isn’t this exciting?”

John laughed nervously. “I don’t know if ‘exciting’ is the right word, Jackie.  When you said that you’d be ‘scan-mapping’ me, whatever that actually is…you didn’t tell me that it would be with something so…”

The cute college boy didn’t finish his sentence but as he gestured toward Jacqueline’s creation, he really didn’t need to say another word.  Jacqueline knew exactly what he was talking about.  The futuristic pod looked out of place in the dusty, unfinished basement. The structure looked almost like a four-foot tall Pepsi can and there was so much electrical wiring snaking around the pod that it was near impossible to tell what it was even made out of.  

“I know, I know.  It’s a bit…spaghetti-esque at the moment.  But fear not!  Ms. Dempsey in the metal shop is helping me design some panels to make it look less scary. But don’t worry, John. I’ve tested this thing a bunch and it works perfectly!”

She hastily grabbed an iPad and swiped to show a matrix of values that only she understood. “Have a look-see.  Remember when I waved that wand over you? All this info here–it’s..well…you.”

“Those 1’s and 0’s?” John asked. She couldn’t tell if he was really interested or if he was just being polite.  Was this how he treated the pretty girls in school that gushed at the opportunity to hang out with him?  Maybe he wanted to kiss her.

“Yes! And now that I’ve loaded it onto the machine, it’s going to restructure those 1’s and 0’s into an improved pattern.”

“Oh, so you’re going to improve me?” John chuckled and flexed his right bicep.  Jacqueline’s eyes bulged almost as much as the veins in the college frat boy’s arm and forearm.

He could pick me up with just one of those big, strong arms…I’m sure of it.

She cleared her throat and forced the silly, distracting thoughts from her mind and focused on the science.  “It’s just a test!”

He smells so good.

As confident a face and tone she’d put on when addressing John’s valid concerns about her invention, Jacqueline had no idea what to expect as she ushered him in through the open door.  It was cute watching him shuffle in–she’d had no problems sitting in there a week earlier when she was soldering but John looked like a big sardine in a small can.

“Okay, here we go! Sit tight, John; this should only take a minute.”

Aww…he’s hugging his knees.  He looks so nervous…

The process was swift and explosive.  It was so much quicker than Jacqueline’s math said it would be. After feeling around in the dark for the electrical panel–an easter-egg hunt that took far longer than she cared to admit–she finally found the electrical panel and reset the main circuit breaker. The cold basement light fixtures flickered back on, still gently swinging from the powerful oscillations of the machine.  Seconds later, the pod and its accompanying peripherals came back to life–whirring, blinking, and chirping but with a fresh, yellow warning on her display.

Warnings were okay. At least it wasn’t a critical failure.  She could look at the warning later on.

 Jacqueline peeked into the small plexiglass window and waited long enough for a view of the white bench to become visible through the cloud of purple that currently filled the pod.  Sure enough, the big sardine was nowhere to be seen.  With trembling hands, she opened the pod door. The hydraulics hissed while crudely bonded metal screeched, seeming to have warped during the machine’s first run.  

When the heavy cloud of lavender vapors and smoke dissipated into the open air of the basement, Jacqueline spotted John on the floor of the pod.

Or rather…what John had become.

Wow, those are really cute.

Jacqueline's eyes sparkled with delight and her heart raced with excitement. A thrill shot through her veins as her tingling fingers as she reached for her hunky classmate, lifting him from the confines of the pod with a sense of triumph and pride.

Just moments earlier, she was reaching up to pat John on his delightfully large and solid shoulder muscle. Now she held him up to her eye level, pinched between her thumbs and forefingers. He had been transformed into a cute pair of short shorts.

The shorts were blue, and the size was quite small.  The garment was so short and small that Jacqueline suspected that John might have actually transformed into a headband instead of shorts.  But after thoroughly inspecting John’s temporary new body, she determined that he did indeed have leg holes.

“Holy cow..I think you’re too small even for me.” Jacqueline marveled out loud. 

Not that she would have put him on or anything like that!  It was such an interesting quirk of the technology; of all things to transform its occupants into, clothing seemed the least likely but to try and engineer a solution around that inevitability of the calculations was way beyond her sophomore year in college!

The deep, beautiful blue color of the shorts contrasted nicely with the discrete, tiny white logo above the left hip. She recognized the logo to resemble the Converse logo but below the star and chevron was the word “Converge”.

How silly that her machine not only transformed this boy who she barely knew into a cute pair of short shorts, but it also had the capacity to insert a clever pun!  Jacqueline was really onto something here.

But as her fingertips danced along the fabric, a frown crept upon her lips. The material felt soft and comfortable, yes…but it was flimsy beneath her touch.  Shoddy craftsmanship. Why did they feel so cheaply made?  This wasn’t right.

With a sigh, Jacqueline lowered the shorts to her side.  She gently swiped several of her pet projects to the side–all but one tangentially related device–making space on her tech workbench for the new pair of shorts she’d created, her disappointment palpable. 

“He was big and tall. Handsome and smart.  Why would he come out so cruddy?” Jaqueline muttered to herself. “Maybe something to do with that warning.” 

Could it have been some debris that found its way into the pod?  Maybe it had something to do with the surge of current…perhaps tripping the circuit breaker at the worst possible moment?  Whatever it was, John’s entire body and conscious experience was restricted to these bright blue, cheaply made short shorts.  At least it would only be for a little while; the pod only needed an hour or so to recharge for restoration. 

In the meantime, Jacqueline wanted to find out more about what John was going through.  

“John, I’m not sure if you’re attempting verbal communication.” Jacqueline said, most of her focus on that tangentially related device she’d not swiped away from her work surface.  “But if you are, save your energy!  I won’t be able to hear you. Ooo! But fear not…there’s a way for me to kind of see how you’re feeling…”  Jacqueline carefully opened a device that resembled a craft cutting board.  Like the transformation pod, the board was littered with circuitry, wires, diodes, and transistors.  “And fear not again because you’re in good hands.”

She applied firm pressure to John’s new blue body. She smoothed him out over the mat, which had a thin layer of sticky gloss meant to secure crafts in place for cutting, sewing, or gluing. 

In this case, it was securing her fratboy acquaintance John, and it was for the purpose of checking to see how he was doing. Definitely not for cutting! The thought alone of her mother’s craft shears slicing through John’s fabric body was enough to make her cringe.  Even a small tear might be enough to…no…best not to think about that!  

“Okay, let’s see how you’re doing in there.” Jacqueline bit her lip as she connected an alligator clip probe to the elastic waistband of the shorts. “Sorry if this stings.”

Jacqueline’s eyes widened as she watched the readout of John’s metrics dance over a neighboring computer monitor.  

“Holy crap…it looks like the material of the shorts is too cheap to retain your consciousness!”

She could only imagine what kind of panic that statement inspired in John. The ‘off-the-charts’ stress indicators on her computer monitor spoke volumes about his feelings on the matter.

“You’re…being spread out too thin.” Jacqueline ran a finger along the width of the tiny blue shorts.  “We need to…condense you…”

Ohmeters, oscilloscopes, power supplies…resistors, capacitors, and partially constructed circuit boards…all of it littered the floor as Jacqueline frantically looked through her cluttered drawers. “I’m prepared, John!  I promise I am!  Not to freak you out but I kinda accounted for the possibility of this happening…if I could just find where I put it….Oh, shoot…where the heck is it?  Did I leave it at school?  It’s gotta….oh! It’s here!!”

Anyone else looking, John included, would have seen something that looked like a sloppy, half-disassembled soldering iron and a pair of bulky, tinted goggles.  But they’d be wrong.  She hurriedly pulled the goggles over her face and adjusted them over her eyes. She resembled a brainy, scientific bug with the way that each eye portion of the tinted goggles, now lighting up a dim red, nearly took up half her face.  She smoothed the tiny blue shorts out over the craft mat once more.

There can’t be any creases. I’ve got to smooth him out perfectly.

“I’m sorry John..I didn’t mean for it to happen this way.  I hope you can forgive me when I change you back…” She really did mean it, from the bottom of her heart. “And just…uhh…so you’re prepared…”

She lowered the sparkling point of the handheld device toward the cheap material of John’s body, the metric readouts on her monitor suggested that John was fully aware of what was going on.  “...I can’t really do any sugar-coating here. This is going to hurt.  A lot.”

She winced every time the device’s tip sparked against John, and through her prototype goggles, she could see the spread-out, nearly translucent presence of John’s consciousness respond.  The world appeared black-and-white through the lens of the goggles.  Everything was gray…except for John.  His consciousness, feelings, senses, memories, and identity manifested as a nearly translucent pink, brilliant and flowing like water along the surface of the shorts.  Each spark inspired a reflexive response in John’s consciousness, causing the accumulation of pink nearest the sparking point to abruptly move away.  She continued the sparking, corralling him as if he were cattle into a stable.  

He needed to be concentrated.  

He needed to be focused within a single area. 

She bit her lower lip in concentration as she continued, violently scaring his existence out from the leg holes and the waistband, ensuring that all parts of his essence had vacated the hips and the seat of the shorts.  She meticulously and methodically sparked every square millimeter of him out of each cheap stitch, her heartfelt apology on repeat. Jacqueline was making some progress, but it felt like 2 steps forward and 1 step back.  Each time she sparked a new section of John’s essence, the last part she’d sparked would slowly begin to retreat back.  It was as if she was trying to squeegee rain water into the corner of a flat surface!

The speakers on her computer monitor screamed and the relatively calm metric readings were blaring red.  John was panicking.  John was hurting.  But worst of all, judging from his dimmed luminescence, John was fading out of existence.  

Ever the quick thinker, Jacqueline did some mental math and, based on John’s luminosity, she deduced that John’s entire essence and conscious experience would need to be concentrated into three square inches of the cheap fabric.  It was like huddling into a small bathtub to outlast the devastating effects of an earthquake, and she continued to spark him into a concentrated mass.  

“Hold on, John!  We’re almost done!”  Her voice quivered as she sparked him more rapidly..the more concentrated he became, the more that the forces of physics tried to make him disperse to occupy the full surface area of the shorts.

Not on her watch.

WIth a final, long spark, Jacqueline realized she was the closest that she was going to get.  With surgical precision, she popped up a transparent cap from the top end of the sparking device, revealing a small purple button.  She forced it down into the center-mass of John’s terrified essence, concentrated into a three square inch blob in the crotch of the shorts, and she pressed the little purple button.

A ripple, only visible through the goggles, reverberated through the shorts, wrapping back around the backside and creating beautiful constructive and destructive waves.  

But with all that complicated motion…she was relieved to see that there was one thing not moving at all.

John.

She pulled the goggles off her face.  “Now that was a close call!” Jacqueline wiped sweat from her brow and tossed the devices back into the drawer.  John’s stress readouts on the monitor were returning to normal (at least for someone who had been transformed into shorts).

“Shhhh…you’re okay now, John.  You’re okay.” She stroked the crotch of the shorts with her index finger, watching out of the corner of her eye to see the stress levels plummet.  She was making him feel better!  “I know this was probably scary, but don’t worry.  I’m going to change you back right now okay?  To heck with waiting for the installed one to charge back up; I think I have a spare battery for the pod up in my room.”

Jacqueline unclipped John from the craft mat and climbed up her creaky basement steps, trying her best not to swing her arm too much as he dangled at her waist. 

What first started as a gesture of kindness and compassion soon became a pervasive, albeit vaguely distracted interest as she continued rubbing John’s new body between her fingertips.  

She didn’t want to harp on it too much lest she come across as rude to the poor boy, but she just couldn’t believe how cheap he felt!  John was big, strong, handsome, and intelligent!  It didn’t make sense that he should come out this flimsy and frail…this thread-bare and shoddy.  

When she pushed open her bedroom door, only partially closed over, the scent of warm vanilla washed over her.  And along with it…a little excitement.

~