Project Makeover

Chapter One

"Ready for your makeover, Charlotte?" the blonde one, a girl I had never met before today and would likely never interact with again, asked. 

"Let's get this over with," I said. 

"Glad you're excited about it," said the dark-haired girl beside her. 

"Yeah," echoed the blonde. "Yvette and I were thrilled when we heard you were going to help. I mean. We wanted someone pretty with a good figure, but we never figured someone like you would want to help."

Well, Blondie, I thought, you figured it right all right.

"Sure," I said, a bald-faced lie. I was only here for the extra credit I so desperately needed, and had made a deal with Professor Windsor to help out with some joint project between the Developing Technology Club and the Anime & Cosplay Club so I could pass my Science class. 

"What are you doing to me again... uhm... ?" I asked.

The blonde girl smiled. "Becky. And we're making you into an anime girl using a modification device we designed in the club and we worked with the anime folks to get a digital template we can basically print onto you."

"Print onto me?"

"Yeah, if this works, we'll be able to print onto people directly now, and with a little more time, we could probably 3-D print onto them too. Imagine what that could mean for folks who need prosthetics and stuff like that."

"Sounds good," I said, barely feigning interest. 

"Yeah, we're so excited. Thanks for volunteering."

Volunteering. Right. More like voluntold. 

"How long is this gonna take?" I asked. 

"Not long. Few hours maybe."

"Good. I've got a date tonight I can't miss."

Becky and the dark-haired girl, Yvette I assumed, giggled. I guessed nerds must have thought dating was something like a joke. I didn't care. I just wanted to be done and get my grade.

"Mind lying down on the table here?" asked yet another geeky girl, this one with bright blue hair. 

"My outfit okay? I was told to wear something that exposed a lot of skin and that I wouldn't mind getting messed up." As I spoke, I motioned toward the red string bikini that I had bought last Summer. Already out of date and unfashionable as far as I was concerned. Barely more than trash. 

"That's perfect," she said. "Maximum skin accessibility."

"You talk like a robot," I said.

"Thanks. I've been told that before. Oh, my name's Lydia, by the way."

"Hi," I said flatly. "Is this the whole geek squad?"

Lydia laughed. Then she motioned to another blonde, this one with a short bob. She might actually be cute without the clipboard and with a simple nose job. "That's Giselle, and yeah, that's all of us. The Anime club won't pop in until after you're prepped."

"Prepped?"

"Yeah, we have to build a baseline model of you from the scan, and then the digital artist will make any last-minute corrections so that the printing doesn't come out wonky."

"Wonky?"

"You know, Like printing a nose two inches to the left instead of right on your own nose. That kind of thing. Just to make sure all the stuff lines up."

"Oh," I said as if her mumbo-jumbo made any damn sense. Whatever. In a few hours, I'd be done, and I'd have my passing grade and could put Freshmen Physics behind me for good.

"Anyway," Lydia continued. "Just lie down on the table and we'll take care of the rest."

The table was a stainless steel one about six feet long and three feet wide. As I lay down with only my bikini, I could feel all the cold, and it didn't seem to me that it would warm up anytime soon. 

"What next?" I asked. 

Lydia smiled. I returned the smile. 

Just then I felt a prick as something jabbed me on my arm. 

"What the fuck?!" I yelled and started to get up. 

"Calm down," I heard Becky say. "It's just a mild sedative so you don't freak out during the procedure. You have to keep perfectly still or we'll have to start all over again. 

"Well, shit, I don't want that," I said, my words beginning to slur. Damn, that sedative acted fast. 

Before long, I discovered that my muscles no longer responded to my commands. As I lay on the table each of the girls fastened either my wrists or ankles to a plastic cuff and tightened it. Then they fastened on around my neck and forehead. Next came the one around my waist, then one on each of my thighs and each of my upper arms. 

I imagined that I must look like some sort of doll getting ready to be put into a box, only held still by belts instead of metal twisties. 

I wasn't that far off, as the next thing the girls did was to lower a clear plastic box with an open top onto me. They sealed the connection to the table all around to get it airtight, I guessed, and I wanted to ask just what the hell they were doing, but my mouth didn't work any better than the rest of me. 

"It's okay," Yvette said, suddenly gazing over me into my open container. "We just have to treat your skin with something that will make it respond to the printer. It uses very special ink, and it's very expensive, so we don't want to have to waste any on a misapplied coat the first time."

My mind was reeling, but thanks to the sedative, I remained much calmer than I figured I should have under the circumstances. I was passive, almost blissful, and a little curious about what was going to happen next. 

Well, I didn't have to wait long. After the geek squad set the sealing gel with heat from a few hairdryers, a rectangular machine that looked to match the size of my container descended from the ceiling and stopped a few inches above the open top of my clear tank. Giselle reached over me and pulled three hoses out of the machine and laid the nozzles in my box beside me. Then she pressed a button and my tank started to fill with an opaque gel. 

It continued filling until the gel was level with my nose and I waited for it to stop, but it didn't. 

Oh shit, I thought. I was going to drown. These bitches were going to fucking kill me in the name of science.

The gel kept rising, but in spite of my panic, I found that I could still breathe. How? I had no idea. Probably wouldn't understand it if it was explained to me. If science had been my strong suit, then I wouldn't have been in this mess in the first place. 

Once the gel level was several inches above me, the flow stopped and Giselle returned the hoses to their cases in the machine. She smiled down at me and gave me a thumbs-up. I tried to smile but I wasn't really sure if my mouth got the message and did what I wanted it to. 

Yvette came over and put a handwritten sign against the plastic. It read: 

1 hr to soak 

we'll be back soon

monitoring you on camera

Then she took the sign, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it into the trash. The last thing I saw was all four of them waving goodbye and shutting the door behind them. 

The longer I lay in the gel, the more woozy and relaxed I became. It was as if my body had turned into butter or ice cream or something that could melt easily. I wasn't actually melting, of course, but I just had the sensation of being able to melt. It was like no feeling I'd ever felt before, and melting was the best comparison I could come up with to describe, and even that wasn't very accurate. 

But I was at peace. 

I would be well rested for my date tonight. Hell, I might have to hit up the geek squad again for a soak in the gel when I felt stressed. It would save me a fortune on massages and counseling and was already feeling twice as effective as either of those. 

The girls returned at some point. I could only assume an hour later since there was no clock in my field of vision, and when they did, Becky pushed a button and drained the gel. Then she used one of the hair dryers again and any remaining traces were quickly evaporated leaving me and the table and my tank dry. 

I felt like a puddle of happy, relaxed young woman. 

Becky looked in a smiled at me. "Ready for the next part?" she asked. 

I couldn't answer, as my body didn't even begin to respond, and we both knew it.

A bright series of red lights flashed to life at the utmost end of the machine, near my head, and they started to oscillate back and forth across in a line, then stopped moving and formed a single, solid red line. After a few seconds, the line turned green. 

At that point, the line started to move down my body. 

Oh, I thought. It's scanning me. I laughed inside. I was on a scanner, a people scanner. That's pretty cool. 

It went down the length of my body and then came back up. Then it repeated the process twice more before the lines blinked red again and shut off. 

Becky pressed another button on the machine and it started to 3-D print another plastic container, this one in the shape the scanner had scanned -- my shape. Once it printed, the clear outline was about five or six inches deep and it was gently placed around me on the table. 

The girls went to work dissolving the sealant on the first set of plastic walls and stacked them on the floor. Then they applied the sealing gel to the connections where the new shape -- my shape -- touched the table. 

When they were done, Lydia typed in a few keystrokes and the machine whirred to life above me again. This time it printed a four-inch thick, solid plastic silhouette of my figure. The girls carefully removed it from the printer head and set it in place on top of me, lining it up with the contours of the walls that matched my pattern. 

I was confused but I couldn't help being curious. So much effort for a human printing, whatever the hell that was. 

"You're doing great, Charlotte. You're gonna look amazing." 

I already do but thanks for the vote of confidence, I mused. 

A white covering was put over the face of the machine, and when it was secured, it looked more like a slab of concrete than any kind of technology. Then it slowly lowered, edging closer to me. After almost a minute of painfully slow movement, the block touched the molded silhouette of me, and I felt a slight bit of pressure as the mold pushed down on me. No pain, but definitely enough pressure to know it was there. 

It stopped and the girls checked to make sure the plate was still on target to easily fit into the walls around me. How that would work I wasn't sure, but I still didn't care. I was curious and happy, not afraid at all, not even pondering the physics of what was happening. 

Once they were sure it was lined up, the slab started down again. It pushed and I felt my tummy gurgle as it was compressed along with my boobs. 

Becky waved her hands and told them to stop the machine. 

"Forgot about the bikini," she said. 

The top was raised again, and Lydia said, "That's right. Me too," then deftly untied my top and bottom and pulled them away from me, leaving me stark naked on the table. 

That's weird, I thought, then let it fade from my mind. 

Then they lowered the slab against and it pushed further. I felt it but felt no pain, and before I knew it, the silhouette of me was stopped and realigned with the outline around me and started up again. 

It made a perfect fit as one image of me moved easily into the other image of me. It didn't matter that it was doing that at a thickness of only six or so inches, and I knew I was much thicker than that, even as slim as I was. 

"Good," said Becky. "Keep it going." 

This time the pressure didn't stop until the top piece had gone completely into the bottom outline. I wasn't a math genius, but even I realized that meant I couldn't be any thicker than an inch or so. 

"I think we can squeeze another inch out of her," Lydia said. 

"That would be awesome," Giselle added. 

"Okay, let's give it a shot," said Becky. 

The machine fired up again and I was compressed even thinner. 

Then the girls left again, this time without so much as a note, not that I could have read it through the press that was holding me flat. Shortly after they left, I felt something warm beneath me from the table and wondered if I was baking or something like it. 

When they returned, Lydia checked some reading on a laptop and gave Becky a thumbs up. Becky pressed a button and the press raised. If I had expected to pop back into my natural shape, I would have been disappointed. I remained as flat as I had been beneath the me-shaped press plate. 

After a moment or two, Becky looked in and waved. "Obviously, we didn't fill you in on the specifics of the process," she said. "But trust me, you're fine. Nothing happened to you that can't be undone."

Giselle looked in beside Becky. "Oh, my God. She's so precious like that. She can't be more than an eighth of an inch thick."

Becky and Giselle moved and Lydia and Yvette took the plate off the face of the machine. 

Yvette lowered another nozzle and sprayed me with a liquid that felt a little bit like a sunburn. After giving me a good coating, she put the hose away and grabbed a sponge-like brush. 

"Think is this as bleach," she said. "When you bleach clothes, you erase everything that isn't stark white, well, at least if you used good strong bleach." She grinned. "Trust me, Charlotte, this is the best, strongest bleach you've ever seen." 

She brushed my body, then let any run-off drain into the corners of the table. 

Then she sprayed me again. After a second brushing, she held a mirror in front of my face. I looked like a poster that had been left in a sunny window for way too long. My color had faded and some of my details like my lips and nipples and eyebrows were almost gone. The brushing and spraying let me know I could still feel them just fine, but they were bleaching out, for lack of a better word, to a sort of pale peach color, much less dark than my usual tanning salon shade. 

"Looking good," Becky said after the fourth coating and rinsing. "Almost featureless. It'll probably only take another two or three before she's ready for the printer." 

Yvette nodded and sprayed me a fifth time. 

After a few more repetitions of the bleaching, Yvette showed me the mirror again. I would have cried out in shock if I could have. I had no features at all. I had the shape of hair, but no color or outlines to indicate any. My face revealed no eyes, no nose, no mouth. My chest had no lines, no nipples. My middle had no pussy, my hands or feet no fingernails or toenails. I had become a simple, pale peach silhouette of a human female as if I had been cut out of a pale peach piece of art paper. 

It was both alarming and amazing. 

"You look awesome," Becky said.

"You look generic," Lydia added, then under her breath but not so low I couldn't hear her. "Just like all of the popular, rich, bitchy girls like you." 

"Be nice," Becky said. "She did volunteer to help us."

"Like hell she did. She didn't have a choice according to Professor Windsor. That's why she was perfect for the test."

Test?! 

Becky glanced at Lydia and grinned. "Be that as it may, Charlotte is here now, and she has honored us with her lovely body for this experiment, so we can at least be appreciative." 

I wasn't sure how I could see without my eyes, but all I could figure out was that they were somehow still there, just rendered colorless by whatever they had sprayed me with. 

"Time for phase three," Becky said in a sort of sing-song without looking over at me this time. Of course, I figured I wasn't much to look at anymore, just a blank poster in the shape of a college-age woman. 

She grabbed her phone from her back pocket and pushed some buttons. "It's time," she said. Then she took a picture of me and sent it. Next, she took a photo of a readout on the screen of her laptop and sent that. "That should be all you need, right?" A long pause with a lot of nodding. "Okay, good. We'll be here waiting."

In about thirty minutes, two guys and one girl, obviously more geeks I thought, entered the room. The first guy, a black-haired, thin dude with glasses and a Scooby Doo t-shirt, gave Lydia a hug and a kiss, then handed Becky a USB thumb drive. 

"That the image specs?" she asked.

"Double-checked against the dimensions you sent. Everything should line up perfectly."

"Great," Lydia said. 

"I can't wait to see how she turns out," the guy said. 

"How it turns out," Lydia corrected. 

I had to admit it. That actually hurt my feelings a little. 

"Well," the girl from the anime club, a pink-haired short girl with a long braid that draped over the front of her shoulder, added. "Regardless, she'll be a different she once it's all done."

While Lydia and Becky went to work on the computer, Lydia's boyfriend -- I assumed anyway -- brought in a foam board that was in the same shape as the silhouette I had become. Giselle lifted my flattened form out of the outlining wall of clear plastic and draped carefully me over one arm. 

When I was clear of the frame, Yvette and the dude who had kissed Lydia gently lay the foam board where I had just been. 

"I got this, Dirk," said the girl from the anime club. 

"Thanks, Liv," said Dirk, who now had a name it seemed. 

With that, pink-haired Liv took a brush and a Mason-jar-sized container of glue and started to paint the foam board until it had an even coat with no lumps. Then Yvette and Giselle slowly and carefully put me back in the frame, this time on top of the foam board. Together, Giselle, Yvette, and the anime club folks made sure I had no folds or wrinkles and that my flattened form completely fit onto the stiff foam backing board. 

Then they left me for about another half hour. During that time they all gathered around the laptop screen and oohed and ahhed about whatever crazy anime girls were on the computer screen. 

"That one would be perfect," I heard several times, followed by, "Oh, wait, this one, yeah, this one." 

By the time they quieted down and returned to me, my peacefulness and bliss had started to wear off. However, I found that I still couldn't move. Whatever drug they had given me at the beginning of my ordeal, it was no longer sedating me or evening out my mood. But it was damn sure still keeping me from moving. Either that or I couldn't move because of the gel I had soaked in and then been smushed flat. And now glued onto a foam board that also rigidly held my new blank form locked in a single pose. Whatever the reason, I wasn't going anywhere, nor was I going to be able to say a goddamn word to complain about it. 

Together with Professor Windsor, they had tricked me, they had taken advantage of my need to improve my grade, and they had me at their mercy. 

I couldn't do a damn thing about it just lie there and take it. 

First off, no one knew I was taking part in the experiment. I wasn't exactly going to spread it around campus that I was helping the geeks, not with my rep. 

Second, I was helpless and flat. 

Third, I no longer had an identity. The crap they had sprayed on me and wiped every trace of what I looked like away. 

Fourth, I couldn't move. 

Fifth, well, fifth, they had some plan to put me on a sturdy board and print some new identity in place of my old appearance. 

After that, well, after that, I had no fucking idea what might happen. At best, I guessed they would take me to some geek competition or science fair to show me off or do whatever dweebs do for fun. At worst, I might end up in one of the anime dudes' bedrooms for him to gawk at as he wanked off. Most likely I would end up stored in a closet. 

Maybe, just maybe, they would eventually change me back. After all, Becky had told me that none of the process was irreversible. Of course, they had lied about other things, so why not that too?

Maybe I was stuck. Who the fuck knew?

So I lay there fuming, my anger building with no outlet to release it. 

I wasn't even paying attention when the machine whirred to life again and lowered onto me. There were several clicking sounds, and the hiss of printer tubes filling with ink. Then it attacked with all its CMYK might. 

Back and forth it went for what felt like hours. Each layer blended into my pale skin-colored form and bonded as a new part of me. Each pass only reinforced the new face and body I was receiving. Eventually, after I lost count of the number of times the printer heads went up and down my helpless form, I could feel a sort of heaviness from the sheer volume of ink that had soaked into me. That's when the printer stopped and was replaced by an intense heat which I guessed would dry and set my new identity. 

So I baked. 

I guess they wanted to be sure I was perfect because they left me halfway through the printer and I was alone with the printer head and a single overhead light long before the baking had even started. I must have been under the heat for a few hours as well because I had already drifted off to sleep from the mental exhaustion and exertion of the day. 

Becky, Lydia, Dirk, and Giselle arrived first, though I had no idea how much time had passed without a window in their lab room. During the night the machine had retreated back to the ceiling, and I was exposed in all my newly recreated glory on the table. They all looked down at me and smiled widely. 

"It turned out great," Lydia said. 

"Awesome," said Dirk. 

"Old school," said Giselle. "I  approve." 

"Well," Becky said finally. "I think we can certainly write this one up as a successful test."

"Now what do we do with it?" Lydia asked. "I mean I have a thousand ideas of what to do with something like this, but selling it to an anime or comic book as a decoration probably isn't what the club had in mind." 

At that, Becky took me off the table and carried me to one side of the room. Then she leaned me against the wall. As I stood there, she took out her phone and snapped a few photos.

"Figured you might like to see what you look like," she said as she turned the phone around. 

The transformation was astounding. There was no way anyone could have ever figured out or even believed that I had once been a living, breathing, three-dimensional woman. All I saw in the photos she showed me was a life-sized, flat standee of a cute anime girl with dark hair that hung loose on her shoulders the same way and color my hair had been before I was tricked and transformed. But the similarities between me and the flat poster girl were more subtle after that. Her eyes, while still blue, were much bigger and a far brighter blue that could only exist in cartoons and comic books. Her measurements matched my own, only by virtue of the outline the machine had created for me, but her skin was still pale pink and no longer my regular tan color. Her lips were practically nonexistent and her mouth was open in a sort of flirty smile. 

She wore a green Playboy bunny uniform without the ears, which she held in front of her waist in her left hand. The suit was cut up high on her hips like a French bikini and it showed off her long legs that were covered in dark-gray-toned fishnets that disappeared into black spiked pumps on her feet. 

I supposed she was as much like me as someone could get if they were making a version of me for some Japanese cartoon, but there was no way anyone who even saw us together would make a connection beyond a vague similarity. 

"You look great, right?" Becky asked and took the phone away. 

I did, but that didn't make me feel any better. I still had no idea what would happen to me, and honestly, I just wanted to cry. 

But my flattened, helpless, unresponsive body wouldn't even let me do that. 

Epilogue

After that, the girls of the Developing Technologies Club passed me off to Dirk and his fellow Anime and Cosplay Club members, and I found a temporary new home in their meeting room. The first thing I noticed was that I was right at home among the walls cluttered with posters of various Japanese comic book art of both girls and boys. There were fighters, Geisha, maids, butlers, monsters, human-monster hybrids, you name it. No one would ever think twice about whether or not I belonged there if they saw me in the room. I was made for just such a place -- literally in this case. 

The first thing Dirk did was hand me off to the pink-haired girl and she took me to a cluttered table and lay me face down. 

"Thanks, Mina," he said. 

"You got it, boss," she responded. 

Then I felt the slightest pressure in a line from about halfway down my back to the bottom of one of my legs. After that came a lot more pressure and I found my face, chest, and everything else smushed against the table. When the pushing stopped, I felt several heavy rectangular objects placed on me.

Not once did anyone talk to me. Not once did anyone treat me as a human being. They knew, but they didn't care. I had ceased to be anything but a... 

Ah. That's what they were doing. It hit me out of the blue that all the pressure had been applied to glue the stand-up part to me so I stand on my own without needing to be propped against a wall. 

I waited on the table while they watched a show loudly in, I assumed, Japanese. The geeks were probably reading subtitles like a bunch of crazy people. 

When it ended, someone removed the weights -- books, I guessed -- from my back and opened the cross-beam part, and carried me to a corner of the room. It was Pink-Hair again. She stood me up, stabilized me, and then left me alone. 

"Perfect," said the boy who wasn't Dirk. 

"Damn right," said Pink-Hair. 

"Okay. That has our mascot Lila taken care of, but we still have two days until Campus Day, so we've got a lot to do to get ready." 

Mascot!? Lila!? Had I heard that correctly? All of this science and technology bullshit was to turn me into a mascot for the cartoon geek club!? And I didn't even get to keep my own name? 

That's when I noticed that I wasn't the only, well, me in the room. I hadn't paid attention when they brought me in, but now that I had a commanding view of pretty much the whole room I saw a stack of boxes not far from me. A t-shirt draped over the top box, and it had a bright, smiling picture of my new identity on the front. On a table near the door, there were several much smaller versions of me, only in various outfits I couldn't make out from so far away. To the right of the boxes were three other standees, all featuring yours truly. One wore a maid outfit and held a feather duster. Another was dressed in a school uniform with a skirt that was far too short and thigh-high white stockings. And the last had a blue swimsuit with the Anime & Cosplay Club logo over the left breast. That one was taking off one of her flip-flops and making a V-sign with the fingers of her free hand. 

Holy shit! I really was the club's mascot. They had planned on this all along. Had they just gotten lucky that I had the same hair color as the one they had designed? Or had it been their idea all along to use me in the first place? Had I been targeted, not randomly chosen?

Any answers would have to wait because they ignored me as just another bit of paraphernalia to store in the clubroom. The more I thought about it, the less I figured I'd ever really get answers. I was just property now, and what property deserved answers or even human dignity?

Over the following week, I stood in my corner through club meetings in the afternoon, where they mostly just watched anime and played video games while Mina discussed her plans for the costume she was designing for Campus Day. No one bothered to check on me or speak to me. They just entered, turned on the light, met for about an hour, and then turned off the light and left me alone again. 

That was my life.