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Description
A little something different today! I still haven't been able to write much due to tendonitis, but I was able to commission my pal Moonsting to write a story to go along with some art she made for me last year!

Moon is taking commissions right now, so go give her a shout if you want something like this for yourself! You can see her original art here .

Laurel plastered a benign, non-threatening smile onto her face as the meeting came to a close. She had to pretend she was completely fine with what had just transpired, even if she was aware hardly anyone was bothering to give her even a passing glance after that performance. It occurred to her that she had just lost a very promising career path at a Fortune Five Hundred company – all because she dared to speak up in defense of ethical responsibility.

Straightening imaginary creases from her satin coat dress, she stood up and made for the door as the last of her coworkers filed out from the room. Acting as if nothing were wrong, she turned right where most had gone left, and instead of returning to her office, she retreated to the atrium on the eastern side of the building. She kept the smile in place until she was through the glass doors and alone. It was quiet in the atrium, despite its many hard won acquisitions from rarely accessed places, and she needed a moment to gather herself.

They were going to fire her, Laurel thought with mounting panic. They didn't care about environmental regulations, they cared about a bottom line for the shareholders. None of this should have been a surprise to her and she should have known to keep her proposal buried in the bottom drawer of her desk.

She had just been so certain it was a safe proposal, and that her background in engineering would assuage any possible apprehension from her boss, and from there the 'higher ups.'

Her proposal had been such a simple thing, really, and while not a negligible investment, it would have gotten them some solidly decent PR optics and indisputable, if only minor, benefits to the air quality around their factories.

Laurel had wanted to replace obsolete filters on a handful of smoke stacks. That's all she had been planning to bring to her boss, a VP, and it should have been a fair shot.

Her presentation had gone almost immediately into a tailspin. She had pulled out the folders she had personally reviewed just that morning in her office, and then been stunned when all of her figures had been off. Way off. Her boss had balked, going pale white in the face, as he had looked over the bulleted points. As much as she had tried to salvage the errors, his mind remained immutable from the initial shock.

What had happened? How had her numbers been so completely wrong?

Her whole team was at risk for this too – all their names had been on the proposals. ...Hopefully her boss had been too focused on numbers to recall any other attached individuals. She wouldn't be able to stomach taking them down with her.

“I'm going to lose my job,” Laurel worried aloud. “And for something so impossible! They'll think I don't get this business at all... But... How? Where did those numbers even come from...”

She was deep in the labyrinthine pathways of the excessive, exotic atrium, and did not expect any answers to her frantic worrying.

Laurel jumped a little when she got a response.

“Not so mighty now, are you? I think you gave O'Malley a heart attack with your little presentation.”

She soured at the voice and sudden appearance of her coworker, Sperry. He was gleaming with unrestrained triumph as he scurried out from his spying place behind a particularly sizable palm tree. More than ever, he seemed to saunter towards her, almost preening like a blue ribbon rooster. He ran a hand through dark blond locks and gave her a cheeky sneer. Everything about him, from his tie to his wristwatch, from his loafers to the sailor's tan on his forearms, to his self-indulgent expression, screamed with sputtering insistence, 'Aspiring Member of the Old Boys' Club.'

They had never gotten along.

Laurel always suspected Sperry resented her for having a better resume and even a slightly better salary – which wasn't always something a woman like herself could very easily acquire. Black women, statistically, didn't usually get the perks she did, while people like Sperry, with his family connections, could have a pretty easy go of it with even half a brain and a smidgen of business savvy.

But her boss, O'Malley – himself from humble beginnings and a fellow engineer once upon a time – actually liked Laurel and held zero affinity for self-important types like Sperry.

“What are you doing here?” She asked Sperry, refusing to step back even though she instinctively felt the need to as he continued to approach her. “Isn't there a bit of cheese in a maze somewhere you should be sniffing out?”

You rat, went unsaid, though he seemed to hear it anyway.

What she said struck a chord in Sperry and his gleeful boasting turned to a cold, calculating consideration. “Have you figured it was me, then?”

Laurel withheld a sharp breath, putting together the truth of her failed proposal. She hadn't yet figured that at all, but it made sense that Sperry had been the one to sabotage her work. He had almost magically spun the meeting to his benefit after her disastrous appeal. As if he had known what was going to happen, even.

“Now I'm certain it was you. But how did you switch out the papers?” Laurel kept her voice confident and steady, not willing to show him any more vulnerability.

Sperry had to have made the swap between her assistant dropping the folders off on her desk, to when Laurel put them in her satchel for the meeting. Or had it been during the meeting? She had placed the satchel at her feet and then the portfolio on the table in front of her. She had never noticed any interference with either. In fact, there was barely enough time at any point for Sperry to have been so sneaky that morning.

It really was like magic.

“Why pick this project to ruin? Why this one? It is a harmless, helpful change we could make.”

“'We could make,'” he repeated, mocking her. “Get over yourself, Laurel, it's time for you to go. I'd like the rest of the deal to go ahead now.”

Laurel frowned, lost at Sperry's last statement. He had always been a selfish pain in the you-know-what, but he was rarely so hard to follow, being a rather simple-minded person in general.
It turned out he wasn't speaking to her, though.

A new voice broke the quiet atmosphere of the atrium, and it seemed to come from the palm tree beside Sperry. It was high-pitched, a bit melodic, and also a little bored. “That's it? This was a lot of trouble for so little pay off. Your so-called 'enemy' isn't even that bad. She's like the butterknife of swords.”

The owner of the voice was a tiny person that materialized from the bark of the palm tree. She was a foot or so high, and very delicate in appearance. On her back were two pairs of sheer, glittering wings that kept her lithe body afloat with quick flutterings.

“I'm more formidable than a butterknife...” Laurel quietly protested, feeling just a bit underestimated. If she had to deal with the sudden appearance of a fairy, she really would have rather they didn't insult her right off the bat. ...She had been the top of her class, she had been head-hunted for several cushy jobs. And once, in high school, she had even taken a jiu-jitsu class. Well, she had gone that one time – but Laurel was not a butterknife...

“Of course you are, sweetheart.” The little sprite-like woman gave her a pitying look as she gently nodded her head. Turning her attention to Sperry, she said next, “you want her out of your way, right? The Big Bad Wolf here really got your straw house in a tizzy?”

“I got the meeting to go my way, and yeah, getting her out of the picture was also a part of the deal. I thought that would have come first.”

“We did make a deal,” the sprite agreed. “I'll be sure to honor my end. Now I'd like you to honor yours.”

Laurel watched the two interact and tried to understand what was happening. Based on observation and deductions further informed from decades of general knowledge, she thought she knew what had transpired – and if her instincts were right, things were not going to go so well for Sperry from here. Making deals with magical beings typically had unexpected developments unless one were very thoughtful with one's words. Sperry was....less than clever...and she wondered how he had misjudged the circumstances this time.

Sperry seemed to see the doubt on Laurel's face and his sneer returned. Responding with some proud confidence, he said to the sprite, “you asked to see me as my true self. Well – what you see is what you get.”

“He's not that deep,” Laurel confirmed. Some would say he was more like a two-dimensional caricature, but she didn't want to lean on that too much.

“What I get is what I want, actually,” the sprite told Sperry. Her bored tone became a little more excited. She smiled in an unkind sort of manner. “After seeing all this unfold, I think I'd like you to go along on your own now, little rat. Shoo, shoo.”

As she waved her hands at Sperry, dismissing him, he blustered and raised his voice. “I'm not going to leave until she gets what's coming to her.”

The words started off with some passionate insistence, but they seemed to fizzle as something in his voice broke and changed. Each word started to sound squeaky, almost, until it was hard to discern what he was saying at all. It sounded smaller, and then he was even looking smaller, too.

He noticed the shift in his tone, how little and weak he was starting to sound. “What's happening?”

“Sperry...” Laurel said, suddenly sympathetic for the man's situation. Her instincts were right: He had made a bad deal. “Sperry, it's not just your voice. Your ears. Your...face...”

The list could have kept going, but the changes happening to Sperry were too fast for her to keep up. He seemed to deflate like a balloon, silently collapsing into himself as his clothes vanished, and he dropped from the height and build of a healthy human male to the stumpy body of a plump little rat. His whiskers and tail twitched as his paws raked over his new body, patting at himself to see if it were real.

He chittered, sounding very distressed.

“I said, 'shoo,' before I turn this one here into a kitty cat.” The sprite was unimpressed with Sperry, especially now that he was fully revealed to his truest form – at least, according to her opinion.
Laurel wished she had worn her flats that day, because as she tried to discreetly take a step away from Sperry's (once more) scurrying form and the looming threat of the sprite woman, her heel clicked very noticeably on the polished stone flooring.

“Are you leaving?” The sprite asked her, turning away from watching Sperry flee to land her inquisitive, crystal blue eyes on Laurel. “I'm not really going to turn you into a cat.”

“Oh, good, thank you –”

“I don't think that form would suit you at all.”

Laurel agreed. “I would say the one I have currently is fine enough.”

“You could upgrade, though, if you'd like. I would say you earned it. You could get what's coming to you that way.”

Sperry had just been turned into a rat before her very eyes, so Laurel did her best to remain calm and act as polite as possible to the powerful, magical sprite. There was just one problem – she couldn't recall if it were rude to disagree with a fairy creature. Would that be offensive enough to warrant a sort of retribution?

Ah, too bad she had been top of her class in a subject entirely unrelated to her current predicament. She should have gone into Humanities.

“That's what Sperry asked for, specifically?” Laurel wondered why he wouldn't have been more direct.

“Yeah, and then he did this,” and the sprite moved one of her fingers across her neck, miming the action Sperry had made to indicate something rather sinister. She then blinked very obviously. “Except, I don't know what he meant by that, so I'm free to take it however I'd like, I figure.”

Laurel, stuffing down her repulsion at Sperry and the lengths to which he felt necessary to go in order to usurp her position, revived her benign smile for the sprite and raised a shoulder in a friendly gesture. She said, as honest as she could be, “sounds reasonable.”

Please don't kill me, she thought.

It was good, she supposed, that Sperry only ever did anything by halves; he was too lazy and entitled to make even a magical deal to his best interest. He always assumed others would take care of everything for him, that others would always be able to meet his needs without him having to lift a finger.

Laurel was not about to make the same mistake. She could figure out a way to walk away from the sprite without losing too much.

She couldn't expect to gain anything...

“You wanna be a unicorn?” The sprite asked her, interrupting Laurel's thoughts.

“I...” Laurel hesitated. “You mean like a real living version of the mythical creature?”

The sprite nodded along as Laurel carefully laid out exactly what was being offered. “Yeah, that's what I mean. Not like a drawing of one, or a statue of one, or anything like that. Listen, I think you're pretty alright. I like what you tried to do in that meeting. You're a good one, as they say, you know? Compassionate for others, got a genuine interest in helping the environment. You're pure of heart, all that jazz.”

Laurel blushed. She thought over this new proposal for a moment. Her parents had passed away within months of each other last year. Her brother was a successful defense attorney with a family of his own. She was about to lose her job. It had been months since she had gone on a date. The lease she had just signed on for a new apartment was for a foreign owned property that had been part of an “arts district revitalization” project that was really just the city's excuse to squeeze a certain demographic further out from the downtown area. Climate change was still a raging problem with no viable solutions in sight – companies and countries acting as they did, not even bringing themselves to replace broken filtration systems on smokestacks. And O'Malley was one of the decent people in the business.

Personally and ideologically, she was weighing her options.

Looking at the sprite, Laurel nodded. “Yeah, okay, I would like that then. I'll be a unicorn.”

The sprite clapped her hands, sending bursts of glittering dust into the air, and did a little cheer. “Fun!”

Laurel gasped as the magic enveloped her. It was warm and soothing, slinking over her skin like a steady beam of sunlight, inspiring a thrill of raised hair in its wake. As it had been for Sperry, the change was nearly instantaneous. Her clothing disappeared first, unravelling from her body and drifting away to nothing. Her head tingled as her hair grew long down her neck and back, keeping the silky smooth texture of her perm and keratin treatment. She resisted the urge to poke at the odd sensation, but then her skin was itching too much for her to think about her new mane.

“I don't know about that,” she said as her arms and hands seemed to lighten, but it was a blanket of soft white fur that started to rise from her dark skin. “Oh, that's not too bad...”

Her nails turned from pale pink to dark brown and she watched them elongate into proper hooves. For a moment her arms were disproportionately long, but they felt more natural as her posture shifted with a change in her spine. Her legs changed too, and as she felt a distinct redistribution of weight in her upper body, her hips moved to accommodate the quadruped stance. She felt the base of her spine as if it were being pulled at the end of a string, and a tail formed, long like a rope with a tuft of hair at the end just as healthy and shiny as her mane.

More than her face pushing forward, or her neck stretching too long for her immediate liking, she felt the pressure of a point forming from her forehead. Laurel went cross-eyed as she watched with a bit of awe as the horn grew in. And then she wrinkled her nose and sneezed as the length of her jaw rushed out.

It was a moment later and she was on four hooves, her head just as high as it had been, but her whole body was so, so different.

“I can still talk?” She said, amazed that words could come from her new mouth. She didn't really feel them form physically from her tongue and lips, but the effect was still the same.

“It's a perk of being magical. We get away with all sorts of things.” The sprite was pleased with the change, and she gave Laurel a wide smile. “See? Like this.”

The sprite changed her own size, growing just large enough so she could comfortably sit in the new dip of Laurel's back.

Laurel stiffened and had an urge to protest, but then realized she had never really made a deal, she had just negotiated some terms for Sperry's unfortunate exchange. She had never said anything about not being ridden around like a child's pony.

“I told you guys, I get what I want.” The sprite congratulated herself. “Now, let's get out of here!”

Laurel thought her day hadn't quite gone as she had expected, but things could be worse. Technically she had never been fired, so there was that.

...And, with the horn on her head, she definitely couldn't be called a butterknife now.

Description
A little something different today! I still haven't been able to write much due to tendonitis, but I was able to commission my pal Moonsting to write a story to go along with some art she made for me last year!

Moon is taking commissions right now, so go give her a shout if you want something like this for yourself! You can see her original art here .

Laurel plastered a benign, non-threatening smile onto her face as the meeting came to a close. She had to pretend she was completely fine with what had just transpired, even if she was aware hardly anyone was bothering to give her even a passing glance after that performance. It occurred to her that she had just lost a very promising career path at a Fortune Five Hundred company – all because she dared to speak up in defense of ethical responsibility.

Straightening imaginary creases from her satin coat dress, she stood up and made for the door as the last of her coworkers filed out from the room. Acting as if nothing were wrong, she turned right where most had gone left, and instead of returning to her office, she retreated to the atrium on the eastern side of the building. She kept the smile in place until she was through the glass doors and alone. It was quiet in the atrium, despite its many hard won acquisitions from rarely accessed places, and she needed a moment to gather herself.

They were going to fire her, Laurel thought with mounting panic. They didn't care about environmental regulations, they cared about a bottom line for the shareholders. None of this should have been a surprise to her and she should have known to keep her proposal buried in the bottom drawer of her desk.

She had just been so certain it was a safe proposal, and that her background in engineering would assuage any possible apprehension from her boss, and from there the 'higher ups.'

Her proposal had been such a simple thing, really, and while not a negligible investment, it would have gotten them some solidly decent PR optics and indisputable, if only minor, benefits to the air quality around their factories.

Laurel had wanted to replace obsolete filters on a handful of smoke stacks. That's all she had been planning to bring to her boss, a VP, and it should have been a fair shot.

Her presentation had gone almost immediately into a tailspin. She had pulled out the folders she had personally reviewed just that morning in her office, and then been stunned when all of her figures had been off. Way off. Her boss had balked, going pale white in the face, as he had looked over the bulleted points. As much as she had tried to salvage the errors, his mind remained immutable from the initial shock.

What had happened? How had her numbers been so completely wrong?

Her whole team was at risk for this too – all their names had been on the proposals. ...Hopefully her boss had been too focused on numbers to recall any other attached individuals. She wouldn't be able to stomach taking them down with her.

“I'm going to lose my job,” Laurel worried aloud. “And for something so impossible! They'll think I don't get this business at all... But... How? Where did those numbers even come from...”

She was deep in the labyrinthine pathways of the excessive, exotic atrium, and did not expect any answers to her frantic worrying.

Laurel jumped a little when she got a response.

“Not so mighty now, are you? I think you gave O'Malley a heart attack with your little presentation.”

She soured at the voice and sudden appearance of her coworker, Sperry. He was gleaming with unrestrained triumph as he scurried out from his spying place behind a particularly sizable palm tree. More than ever, he seemed to saunter towards her, almost preening like a blue ribbon rooster. He ran a hand through dark blond locks and gave her a cheeky sneer. Everything about him, from his tie to his wristwatch, from his loafers to the sailor's tan on his forearms, to his self-indulgent expression, screamed with sputtering insistence, 'Aspiring Member of the Old Boys' Club.'

They had never gotten along.

Laurel always suspected Sperry resented her for having a better resume and even a slightly better salary – which wasn't always something a woman like herself could very easily acquire. Black women, statistically, didn't usually get the perks she did, while people like Sperry, with his family connections, could have a pretty easy go of it with even half a brain and a smidgen of business savvy.

But her boss, O'Malley – himself from humble beginnings and a fellow engineer once upon a time – actually liked Laurel and held zero affinity for self-important types like Sperry.

“What are you doing here?” She asked Sperry, refusing to step back even though she instinctively felt the need to as he continued to approach her. “Isn't there a bit of cheese in a maze somewhere you should be sniffing out?”

You rat, went unsaid, though he seemed to hear it anyway.

What she said struck a chord in Sperry and his gleeful boasting turned to a cold, calculating consideration. “Have you figured it was me, then?”

Laurel withheld a sharp breath, putting together the truth of her failed proposal. She hadn't yet figured that at all, but it made sense that Sperry had been the one to sabotage her work. He had almost magically spun the meeting to his benefit after her disastrous appeal. As if he had known what was going to happen, even.

“Now I'm certain it was you. But how did you switch out the papers?” Laurel kept her voice confident and steady, not willing to show him any more vulnerability.

Sperry had to have made the swap between her assistant dropping the folders off on her desk, to when Laurel put them in her satchel for the meeting. Or had it been during the meeting? She had placed the satchel at her feet and then the portfolio on the table in front of her. She had never noticed any interference with either. In fact, there was barely enough time at any point for Sperry to have been so sneaky that morning.

It really was like magic.

“Why pick this project to ruin? Why this one? It is a harmless, helpful change we could make.”

“'We could make,'” he repeated, mocking her. “Get over yourself, Laurel, it's time for you to go. I'd like the rest of the deal to go ahead now.”

Laurel frowned, lost at Sperry's last statement. He had always been a selfish pain in the you-know-what, but he was rarely so hard to follow, being a rather simple-minded person in general.
It turned out he wasn't speaking to her, though.

A new voice broke the quiet atmosphere of the atrium, and it seemed to come from the palm tree beside Sperry. It was high-pitched, a bit melodic, and also a little bored. “That's it? This was a lot of trouble for so little pay off. Your so-called 'enemy' isn't even that bad. She's like the butterknife of swords.”

The owner of the voice was a tiny person that materialized from the bark of the palm tree. She was a foot or so high, and very delicate in appearance. On her back were two pairs of sheer, glittering wings that kept her lithe body afloat with quick flutterings.

“I'm more formidable than a butterknife...” Laurel quietly protested, feeling just a bit underestimated. If she had to deal with the sudden appearance of a fairy, she really would have rather they didn't insult her right off the bat. ...She had been the top of her class, she had been head-hunted for several cushy jobs. And once, in high school, she had even taken a jiu-jitsu class. Well, she had gone that one time – but Laurel was not a butterknife...

“Of course you are, sweetheart.” The little sprite-like woman gave her a pitying look as she gently nodded her head. Turning her attention to Sperry, she said next, “you want her out of your way, right? The Big Bad Wolf here really got your straw house in a tizzy?”

“I got the meeting to go my way, and yeah, getting her out of the picture was also a part of the deal. I thought that would have come first.”

“We did make a deal,” the sprite agreed. “I'll be sure to honor my end. Now I'd like you to honor yours.”

Laurel watched the two interact and tried to understand what was happening. Based on observation and deductions further informed from decades of general knowledge, she thought she knew what had transpired – and if her instincts were right, things were not going to go so well for Sperry from here. Making deals with magical beings typically had unexpected developments unless one were very thoughtful with one's words. Sperry was....less than clever...and she wondered how he had misjudged the circumstances this time.

Sperry seemed to see the doubt on Laurel's face and his sneer returned. Responding with some proud confidence, he said to the sprite, “you asked to see me as my true self. Well – what you see is what you get.”

“He's not that deep,” Laurel confirmed. Some would say he was more like a two-dimensional caricature, but she didn't want to lean on that too much.

“What I get is what I want, actually,” the sprite told Sperry. Her bored tone became a little more excited. She smiled in an unkind sort of manner. “After seeing all this unfold, I think I'd like you to go along on your own now, little rat. Shoo, shoo.”

As she waved her hands at Sperry, dismissing him, he blustered and raised his voice. “I'm not going to leave until she gets what's coming to her.”

The words started off with some passionate insistence, but they seemed to fizzle as something in his voice broke and changed. Each word started to sound squeaky, almost, until it was hard to discern what he was saying at all. It sounded smaller, and then he was even looking smaller, too.

He noticed the shift in his tone, how little and weak he was starting to sound. “What's happening?”

“Sperry...” Laurel said, suddenly sympathetic for the man's situation. Her instincts were right: He had made a bad deal. “Sperry, it's not just your voice. Your ears. Your...face...”

The list could have kept going, but the changes happening to Sperry were too fast for her to keep up. He seemed to deflate like a balloon, silently collapsing into himself as his clothes vanished, and he dropped from the height and build of a healthy human male to the stumpy body of a plump little rat. His whiskers and tail twitched as his paws raked over his new body, patting at himself to see if it were real.

He chittered, sounding very distressed.

“I said, 'shoo,' before I turn this one here into a kitty cat.” The sprite was unimpressed with Sperry, especially now that he was fully revealed to his truest form – at least, according to her opinion.
Laurel wished she had worn her flats that day, because as she tried to discreetly take a step away from Sperry's (once more) scurrying form and the looming threat of the sprite woman, her heel clicked very noticeably on the polished stone flooring.

“Are you leaving?” The sprite asked her, turning away from watching Sperry flee to land her inquisitive, crystal blue eyes on Laurel. “I'm not really going to turn you into a cat.”

“Oh, good, thank you –”

“I don't think that form would suit you at all.”

Laurel agreed. “I would say the one I have currently is fine enough.”

“You could upgrade, though, if you'd like. I would say you earned it. You could get what's coming to you that way.”

Sperry had just been turned into a rat before her very eyes, so Laurel did her best to remain calm and act as polite as possible to the powerful, magical sprite. There was just one problem – she couldn't recall if it were rude to disagree with a fairy creature. Would that be offensive enough to warrant a sort of retribution?

Ah, too bad she had been top of her class in a subject entirely unrelated to her current predicament. She should have gone into Humanities.

“That's what Sperry asked for, specifically?” Laurel wondered why he wouldn't have been more direct.

“Yeah, and then he did this,” and the sprite moved one of her fingers across her neck, miming the action Sperry had made to indicate something rather sinister. She then blinked very obviously. “Except, I don't know what he meant by that, so I'm free to take it however I'd like, I figure.”

Laurel, stuffing down her repulsion at Sperry and the lengths to which he felt necessary to go in order to usurp her position, revived her benign smile for the sprite and raised a shoulder in a friendly gesture. She said, as honest as she could be, “sounds reasonable.”

Please don't kill me, she thought.

It was good, she supposed, that Sperry only ever did anything by halves; he was too lazy and entitled to make even a magical deal to his best interest. He always assumed others would take care of everything for him, that others would always be able to meet his needs without him having to lift a finger.

Laurel was not about to make the same mistake. She could figure out a way to walk away from the sprite without losing too much.

She couldn't expect to gain anything...

“You wanna be a unicorn?” The sprite asked her, interrupting Laurel's thoughts.

“I...” Laurel hesitated. “You mean like a real living version of the mythical creature?”

The sprite nodded along as Laurel carefully laid out exactly what was being offered. “Yeah, that's what I mean. Not like a drawing of one, or a statue of one, or anything like that. Listen, I think you're pretty alright. I like what you tried to do in that meeting. You're a good one, as they say, you know? Compassionate for others, got a genuine interest in helping the environment. You're pure of heart, all that jazz.”

Laurel blushed. She thought over this new proposal for a moment. Her parents had passed away within months of each other last year. Her brother was a successful defense attorney with a family of his own. She was about to lose her job. It had been months since she had gone on a date. The lease she had just signed on for a new apartment was for a foreign owned property that had been part of an “arts district revitalization” project that was really just the city's excuse to squeeze a certain demographic further out from the downtown area. Climate change was still a raging problem with no viable solutions in sight – companies and countries acting as they did, not even bringing themselves to replace broken filtration systems on smokestacks. And O'Malley was one of the decent people in the business.

Personally and ideologically, she was weighing her options.

Looking at the sprite, Laurel nodded. “Yeah, okay, I would like that then. I'll be a unicorn.”

The sprite clapped her hands, sending bursts of glittering dust into the air, and did a little cheer. “Fun!”

Laurel gasped as the magic enveloped her. It was warm and soothing, slinking over her skin like a steady beam of sunlight, inspiring a thrill of raised hair in its wake. As it had been for Sperry, the change was nearly instantaneous. Her clothing disappeared first, unravelling from her body and drifting away to nothing. Her head tingled as her hair grew long down her neck and back, keeping the silky smooth texture of her perm and keratin treatment. She resisted the urge to poke at the odd sensation, but then her skin was itching too much for her to think about her new mane.

“I don't know about that,” she said as her arms and hands seemed to lighten, but it was a blanket of soft white fur that started to rise from her dark skin. “Oh, that's not too bad...”

Her nails turned from pale pink to dark brown and she watched them elongate into proper hooves. For a moment her arms were disproportionately long, but they felt more natural as her posture shifted with a change in her spine. Her legs changed too, and as she felt a distinct redistribution of weight in her upper body, her hips moved to accommodate the quadruped stance. She felt the base of her spine as if it were being pulled at the end of a string, and a tail formed, long like a rope with a tuft of hair at the end just as healthy and shiny as her mane.

More than her face pushing forward, or her neck stretching too long for her immediate liking, she felt the pressure of a point forming from her forehead. Laurel went cross-eyed as she watched with a bit of awe as the horn grew in. And then she wrinkled her nose and sneezed as the length of her jaw rushed out.

It was a moment later and she was on four hooves, her head just as high as it had been, but her whole body was so, so different.

“I can still talk?” She said, amazed that words could come from her new mouth. She didn't really feel them form physically from her tongue and lips, but the effect was still the same.

“It's a perk of being magical. We get away with all sorts of things.” The sprite was pleased with the change, and she gave Laurel a wide smile. “See? Like this.”

The sprite changed her own size, growing just large enough so she could comfortably sit in the new dip of Laurel's back.

Laurel stiffened and had an urge to protest, but then realized she had never really made a deal, she had just negotiated some terms for Sperry's unfortunate exchange. She had never said anything about not being ridden around like a child's pony.

“I told you guys, I get what I want.” The sprite congratulated herself. “Now, let's get out of here!”

Laurel thought her day hadn't quite gone as she had expected, but things could be worse. Technically she had never been fired, so there was that.

...And, with the horn on her head, she definitely couldn't be called a butterknife now.