Chapter One: The Knock(ers), the Jiggle, the Curse

  Marabeth Thistlebrae had survived two teenage daughters (18 and 19), one erratic marriage, a plundering of her pantry by sugar sprites, and five years on the JiggleMoor-High PTA without once raising her voice. She was that kind of woman, practical, composed, modestly busty, and profoundly unremarkable.

  Until the Tuesday knock.

  She opened the door of her quiet, vine-ced cottage in the Cleavendale suburbs to find a floating parcel wrapped in pink ce and an arming amount of glitter. No sender, no note—just the unmistakable shimmer of fairy mischief clinging to its ribbons like static.

  “Girls,” she called back into the house. “Is this one of your… goblin prank shop things?”

  No answer. Of course not. One was probably scry-arguing with her boyfriend. The other had been practicing her “therian roar” all morning. It was barely 9:00 a.m.

  With a sigh, Marabeth poked the parcel with a wooden spoon.

  The world erupted in sparkles and the smell of sugared watermelon.

  And then…

  Bounce.

  The sensation hit her like a hammock snapping mid-swing. Her breasts ballooned outward, surging past reasonable cup sizes in a single gasp. Her blouse cried for help. Her brassiere screamed. Her back gave an ominous twinge. She staggered, arms filing, as the pink magic cinched her waist with unsolicited perfection and thrust her new J-cups into the spotlight of reality.

  The worst part wasn’t the weight.

  It was the sound, a magical, rhythmic cartoonish BOOOIIIINNNG with every step.

  “Mother of modesty,” she wheezed.

  Her daughters arrived seconds ter.

  And stared.

  Open-mouthed. Eyebrows twitching. Hands slowly… rising.

  Marabeth shrieked, grabbed the nearest throw pillow, and backed into the pantry like it was a bunker.

  “Don’t touch me!”

  Day 1, 9:11 a.m.

  By the time Marabeth locked herself in the pantry, her daughters were pressing their foreheads to the door, murmuring apologies they couldn’t seem to finish. Each sentence began with “I’m sorry,” but ended with some variation of, “but they look so… soft,” or “do you think they feel like that goose pillow from Jigglemore?”

  The compulsion wasn’t full mind control—it didn’t override morality, just… distracted it. Like trying to diet next to a bakery window that somehow also smelled like childhood and ambition.

  And worse: the effect wasn’t limited to strangers or passersby. It hit everyone who saw her. Friends. Family. Daughters.

  And her husband.

  Reginald Thistlebrae came home from the spice market whistling a tune and holding a sack of cinnamon bark in one hand, completely unprepared for the physics-defying silhouette waiting in the pantry doorway like a bsphemous fertility idol.

  “Marabeth?”

  She hissed his name like a warning, but it was too te. His pupils dited. His feet carried him forward with the doomed grace of a man following a love song into a bear trap.

  “I, uh… wow.” He blinked. “I mean. Are you okay? Is it… are you okay?”

  His hand twitched once at his side. He stuffed it hastily into his coat pocket. It tried to climb out.

  Marabeth swatted him across the chest with a serving spoon. “You’re staring!”

  “I am!” he admitted, nodding fast. “But only because it’s polite to look someone in the… uh, general frontal region. I mean, eye. I meant eye. Your left eye.”

  Day 2By the next morning, she’d shattered three mugs, knocked over two vases, and smothered the cat with an apologetic left breast. Her own clothes no longer fit—she was wearing a bathrobe cinched with curtain ties, and every motion felt like slow dancing with a pair of unruly water balloons.

  Her husband had started cooking breakfast shirtless. She didn’t ask why.

  He offered her toast. She spped his hand.

  He smiled anyway. She didn’t.

  That night, when he rolled over in bed and his hand gently grazed her hip, she rolled him off the mattress entirely.

  “Out,” she said.

  Reginald, rubbing his elbow, muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “worth it.”

  Day 3Word spread.

  The neighborhood mailman tripped over his own feet. A passing monk dropped his prayer beads. Her former bridge partner left a note on the fence that said, “I’m sorry, but I must know what they feel like. For science.”

  Marabeth began yering veils, scarves, a coat, and an upside-down wicker basket. She couldn’t breathe, but at least the butcher’s apprentice stopped trying to “accidentally” drop things in her path.

  Her daughters stopped making eye contact entirely.

  But still… they hovered. Hovered and stared. Then blinked, confused and guilty, as if waking from a dream.

  Marabeth wept into a cereal box and resolved to leave.

  Day 4: The Ruffled Rest Inn She checked into a modest room on the outskirts of Cleavendale’s capital, a haven with reinforced privacy enchantments and staff too professional to comment. The innkeeper—a middle-aged Therian with bad knees and worse memory—gave her a knowing look and handed her a tray of tea.

  “We get cursed folks all the time,” he said. “Mostly hoof spells and sentient pants. You scream if yours get sentient, alright?”

  She nodded, and began her first night in exile, jiggling gently in her sleep. The BOING noise they made when they moved was hard to sleep through.

  Day 5The Ruffled Rest Inn was blessedly quiet—at first.

  Marabeth kept to her room, triple-locked and charm-warded. She hung a “DO NOT PERCEIVE ME” glyph on the knob, but even the enchanted linen curtains seemed nervous.

  It wasn’t the bounce that frightened her anymore. It was the whispers.

  A traveling merchant—some kind of potion influencer—caught a glimpse of her bust through a cracked door and immediately offered to rent them out by the hour. Said he had an amulet that transted “vibrational experience into coin.” Cimed it was a business venture, not a solicitation.

  She smmed the door and wept for an hour.

  Her breasts bounced sympathetically.

  She told them to stop.

  They did not.

  Day 6The inn’s privacy enchantments began… fraying.

  Other guests cimed to hear rhythmic squishing in the walls. A bard wrote a love song to a woman he hadn’t seen, based solely on the silhouette he glimpsed through the steam from his bath.

  Three chambermaids quit.

  The cat returned, but only stared.

  Marabeth tried binding herself in firm wool wraps and shame, but the curse thrived on attention. It wanted her to be seen. Each eye that glimpsed her added a shimmer, a bounce, a compulsion. Even the ghost in Room 6? passed through her door once and groaned, “Oh no, not again.”

  She read five pamphlets on counter-curse w. Burned four.

  Later that night she bathed in the deep bath. Of course her new assets floated. She reached out, exploring them more for the firs time. Good thing it wasn’t a ctation spell, they were so big she’d have trouble reaching her nipples to express. Oh and dear gods, if it had been a sensation booter? She’d heard of girls who’d get so intense the breeze would hit them and the next thing they were cross legged on the ground, red faced and needing a change of panties.

  Day 7Marabeth’s youngest daughter, Lissa, arrived at the inn with a satchel full of stolen scones and the look of someone who’d snapped out of it, and hated herself for what happened before.

  “I almost touched you,” she said, trembling. “And I wanted to. That’s not normal, Mom. That’s not me.”

  “I know, sweetheart.”

  “I told them it wasn’t right. The enchantment’s not just inappropriatem it’s destabilizing.”

  Marabeth blinked. “Destabilizing?”

  Lissa nodded. “Fairy compulsion curses of this type can disrupt moral anchoring. If someone vulnerable to suggestion gets close enough, they could lose behavioral boundaries permanently.”

  “Permanently?”

  “I filed a formal grievance with the Bureau of Enchantment Ethics.”

  There was a long pause.

  “…You what?”

  Lissa flushed. “I… may have filed an emergency petition to the Cleavendale Court of Magical Redress. And I may have begged Sealia the Layer to take the case.”

  Marabeth stared, eyes wide, bosom quivering with surprise.

  “She said yes?”

  “She said, ‘I smell injustice, cheap glitter, and an opening statement waiting to happen.’”

  By sunset, a letter appeared on Marabeth’s windowsill, sealed with a rose-pink wax stamp in the shape of a scale-tipped bancing scale.

  Her case had been accepted. A jury was being summoned. The Goddess of Mammaries herself would preside.

  The trial was set for Day 9.

  And Marabeth… wasn’t ready.