Magic

“I’m sorry, but it’s about the principle of the thing,” the middle-aged bureaucrat explained. “The way she transformed you was illegal. There are processes for these things, you know. There are processes.”

“But I didn’t want to be changed back!” Nigel protested. “I liked being Nigella! I told your cops that.”

“They’re not ‘my’ cops, thank you very much,” the bureaucrat said, “and that’s just standard procedure. We can’t be making exceptions for every little thing. There’d be chaos if we did!”

“What if I just asked another magic person to change me back?” Nigel asked. “It’s fine if they have my permission, right?”

The bureaucrat emphatically shook his head. “Some individuals have… dangerous and peculiar desires in terms of their morphology. I’ve seen cases of people who wanted to be turned into a squirrel or a sandal. What if they had later changed their mind? They could hardly communicate that to request being turned back. They could easily be lost forever!”

“But I can communicate,” Nigel pointed out. “And obviously turning me back was pretty easy, right?”

“There’s a process,” the bureaucrat said. “We don’t yet know if you’re sound of mind.”

“Well, can I do that process, then?” Nigel asked.

The bureaucrat muttered something to himself before retrieving several sheets of paper from a filing cabinet behind him. “You can fill out an application to have a consultation about intra-species polymorphing, after you fill out and submit your registration with the ministry. I’ve included both forms, as well as a waiver and an informed consent sheet. You need to thoroughly read through, fill out, sign, date, and return every one of these documents to us. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I understand,” Nigel said. “I just don’t understand why there need to be so many, or why this all seems so slow–”

The bureaucrat cut Nigel off. “In that case, I have other clients I need to get to. There is a line, you know. You can drop those forms off at window 5-B window once you’re done.”

“5-B”, Nigel muttered to himself as he tried to find a chair. “Fuck, they didn’t even give me a pen.”