Chapter Text
“Angel, could you come down to the lab when you have a chance, please?”
Angel hit the reply button on his intercom. At least he thought it was the reply button. For all he knew he may have just called out to order a pint of Howlitt demon blood, or a sacrificial goat. Stupid intercom.
“Sure, Fred. What’s this about?” He leaned over tentatively and spoke at the machine, while glancing furtively at the door, making sure that Spike wasn’t standing there. He was finally starting to figure out how to use some of the complicated systems at Wolfram and Hart, and he didn’t need Spike making fun of him again for using the stupid intercom the wrong way.
Fred’s sweet voice came through the speaker, her faint Texas twang sounding slightly tinny. “I think I may have solved the issues I was having with the Transmogrification Cannon that I was working on for that client. You know, the High Cleric of the Basmoonian cult? He wants to use it to transmogrify all of those giant, pet gloakler grubs that the Illustrious One keeps as his Valentine’s Day present to her. If he can transmogrify them into kittens for her, she said that she’ll agree to his marriage proposal, and their two factions will declare peace.” Angel heard a clunking sound, like Fred had dropped something heavy. He hoped it wasn’t expensive. Or broken. Or both expensive and broken.
“Oops,” she said. “Personally, I don’t think it’s the best use for transmogrification, but then again, what do I know, I’m just the inventor of the darn thing……”
Angel glanced down at his daily agenda, written out in some kind of sparkly pink ink by Harmony. It looked like his meeting with the Jorvik demons had definitely been canceled. He sighed in relief. The odor that exuded from their pnuemostones was horrendous, and Gerald, the night custodian, still hadn’t managed to get all the slime coat out of the chair upholstery.
“Okay, Fred, my last meeting was canceled, so I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
He clicked the button to end the call, or at least hoped it was the button to end the call, and stood up from his desk. Angel took a deep, unnecessary breath as he headed over to take the elevator down to Fred’s lab. He couldn’t seem to shake off the feeling of mounting pressure that he’d been under lately. Everything had felt like it had been slowly spiraling out of control, and the weight of figuring out how to pull everything back together was slowly crushing the unlife out of him.
As the elevator doors opened to admit him, he was almost bowled over by a grinning tornado of energy with bleached hair.
“Hey, Spike, watch it! You almost knocked me over,” he scowled.
“Sorry, mate, but I doubt that. Knocking you over would be like trying to knock over an elephant. Where are you headin’ off to? Don’t you have a big meeting with those Jarvis demons today?”
“Jorvik. They’re Jorvik demons. And no, it got canceled.”
“Oh, lucky on you then. Those things smell like a mix of month-old piss and burnt hair. Right, then. I’m off.” Spike was like a live wire. Angel could almost see the energy crackling off of his slight frame. It was exhausting just looking at him.
“Where are you going?” Angel narrowed his eyes suspiciously and moved a step closer to Spike, half-blocking him from darting off down the hallway. Spike trying to leave before bringing his blood to the metaphorical boiling point meant something was up. Something most definitely bad. “Did you wreck another car? Is that why I haven’t seen you around here much? Are you hiding something from me?”
Spike’s bright blue eyes were wide with feigned innocence. “What? Me? I didn’t know you cared so much, Angel. And no, I haven’t wrecked a car since your beloved Viper, so I’ll thank you to not go around makin’ accusations. I’ve actually been making some plans for Valentine’s Day, I’ll have you know. Got someone who could use a little of that old Spike thoughtfulness to cheer them up.”
“Fine,” Angel growled, “just try to stay out of trouble, please, Spike. I have enough going on right now without having to worry about you, too.”
Worry about Spike? Where did that come from? Thankfully the bleached menace didn’t seem to notice, and just spun away with a cocky grin and a swirl of black coat.
Angel stepped into the elevator, relieved that Spike hadn’t misinterpreted his concern. He never would have heard the end of it. Of course, he did worry about Spike, just like he worried about everyone on his team. They were family to him. Well, technically Spike was actual family. Vampire family. They had a history together that he didn’t share with anyone else, alive or undead. And lately, Spike had been less and less annoying and more and more…thoughtful. Huh. That was funny. The exact same word that Spike had just used. Angel shrugged his shoulders and pushed thoughts of the blond terror out of his head. It was strange how those thoughts had been popping into his head more often, lately. Especially since that embarrassing catastrophe involving Fred’s Van De Graaff machine.
He had to prioritize right now, and Spike certainly wasn’t a priority.
The elevator doors pinged open, and Angel stepped out into the unusually quiet lab. It was off hours, and the large space contained only a single red-headed lab tech and Fred, who was contorted awkwardly into a position reminding him of a giant praying mantis, as she hovered over a large piece of machinery.
“Oh! Hi there Angel!” she exclaimed, as she tucked back a few wayward strands of her long brown hair, and pushed her glasses up her nose. She carefully stepped down off of the raised platform that the machine was sitting on, and turned a radiant smile towards him.
“Thanks so much for coming down! I know you haven’t come down here very much since that incident with my Van De Gr-“
Angel held up his hand to stop her. “Please. Fred. Stop. We all promised to never bring that up again, ever,” he said painfully. “And please, tell me you found those pictures and burned them.”
“Oh, sorry.” Fred said, crestfallen. “Um, actually, no, I haven’t.” There was a slightly awkward pause, and then she gestured back to the machine. “Well, anyway, I think I may have the feedback problem solved. I mean, the Transmogrifier is a dynamic system, and once I realized that the signal phase was actually out of phase by 180 degrees, I realized I was getting negative feedback instead of positive feedback…and well…you can imagine what that would do to a closed system…and… sorry, I’m babbling again, aren’t I?” She smiled nervously at him, and Angel gave her back a little smile of reassurance.
“Fred, you know I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I still love hearing you do it.”
Fred’s grin widened as she stepped back over to the machine and began tapping buttons. “Great! Well, I just have to do one final test, and I think we’ve got it. Chuck, could you please hand Angel some safety goggles…..oh, thanks…I’m going to transmogrify that philodendron over there into a kitten. We need to try it on a living organism for the final test…oh, hey you two might want to step back in case the feedback….”
There was a brilliant arc of blue light that spewed forth from the machine in a wave. In an instant, the arc had enveloped Fred, Angel and Chuck.
As the arc passed through her, Fred felt her body instantaneously shrink, and she fell down into the exterior casing of the machine that she had been hovering over. Her shoes and glasses kicked under the platform base of the machine, and her clothes, including her lab coat, caught on a protruding armature, appearing as if she had just walked away and neatly hung them on the Transmogrifier.
Angel and Chuck underwent a similarly disorienting experience, only to find that they were both tangled and trapped in the heavy, currently oversized clothes that they had been wearing when they were fully demon-sized.
While all three struggled to free themselves, the lab door swung silently open as the night custodian backed his way through with his cleaning trolley. His rotund form shuffled slowly around on his thick, leathery tentacles until he faced what appeared to be a twitching pile of living clothing.
“What do we have here?” he mused aloud, as he slowly used his tail to grab a laundry bag off of his trolley. He carefully moved over to the pile and poked at it gingerly with his mop handle.
“Kittens?” The custodian grumbled in surprise, as a small, fuzzy orange face peered out at him from underneath a shirt. All he could see of the other kitten was its fluffy back end, while its front end appeared to be tangled up in and fighting furiously with a shoelace inside of a men’s black dress shoe.
He scooped up the first, docile, and apparently confused kitten, and carefully placed it in the bag. He then scooped the second, angry black kitten up, shoe and all, and dumped it in the bag as well. He looked around at the empty lab and said, more to himself than the kittens, “These clothes look pretty expensive. Guess I’d better turn them into lost and found. Hopefully you two fuzzies didn’t ruin them by playing around in them.” He picked up the clothes, folded them neatly, and placed them on his cart.
He took one last look around the quiet room and muttered, “Lab looks pretty clean tonight. Guess I’ll just take out the trash and head home.”
Gerald emptied the trash, placed the two bags carefully on the top of his trolley, and silently wheeled his way out of the lab.
______________________________________________
“Fred? Are you still down here? I know you’ve been working late on the Transmogrifier, so I brought you some coffee, if you’d care for some.”
Wes set both paper cups of coffee down onto one of the large work tables and looked around the lab. The lights had come on automatically when he entered, and it was then that he noticed Fred’s lab coat hanging neatly on the Transmogrifier. As he walked over towards the bulky machine, he thought he detected some faint scratching sounds coming from it. As he got closer and peered down, he saw a small, fluffy tabby kitten pulling itself out of the exterior metal casing.
“Well, where did you come from, little one?”, he asked in surprise.
He helped the tiny kitten all of the way out and tucked it neatly into the corner of his elbow.
“Fred,” he called out, “did you know you had a kitten running loose in the lab?” He walked back to Fred’s office. No Fred. “Hmm”, he said, looking down at the little tabby, “I suppose she’s gone out for a bit. Do you think she’ll be back shortly?”
As he sat down on one of the stools in the main lab to look over some of the notes that Fred had recently written, the kitten squirmed out of his arms and onto the large steel table. It leapt down to the floor and raced over to the Transmogrifier, where it began to run around the machine in circles.
“Here, now. Get back away from that. You were lucky once that you only got stuck inside. It could have been much worse.” Wes got up to get the kitten, but it ran under the edge of the platform to avoid him. As it came out from under the edge, the cat was batting something along with its tiny paws.
“Are those Fred’s glasses? What are they doing there? Here, let me take them and put them up so you don’t scratch them.” As he moved forward to retrieve the delicate frames, the tabby leapt up, snagging Fred’s lab coat with its sharp claws. The coat, along with the clothes underneath, tumbled to the floor. Wes stopped, and looked at the pile that the kitten was now wrestling with.
“Are those the clothes Fred was wearing earlier?” he asked, confusion etched across his face. “What has happened here?”
Wes slowly turned around, carefully studying the lab. The lab looked fine. The only thing amiss was a loose kitten, and the appearance of Fred’s clothes without Fred in them. Said kitten now appeared to be pushing one of Fred’s shoes out from underneath the Transmogrifier, and was trilling and chirping desperately at him.
Wes hunched down and carefully made eye contact with the tiny bundle of fur. “You’re trying to tell me something, in your own way, aren’t you? Did you see something happen in here, to Fred?”
The kitten, who by now had one paw placed in a dainty woman’s shoe and the collar of Fred’s lab coat draped over its tiny back, peered up at him through Fred’s glasses, which it had carefully maneuvered and positioned on the floor. The round, deep brown eyes blinked both anxiously and intently at him.
Comprehension suddenly dawned on Wesley’s face. “Good Lord! You are Fred! You’ve transmogrified yourself into a kitten!”
Fred leapt into Wesley’s arms, purring fiercely and rubbing her head into the crook of his elbow.