Tickling the Giant Squid and other Grand Adventures

36. Avila

"It's sweet," I announced. "Like orange soda."

"Mine burned," Karou commented. Suddenly the sweetness turned too sweet, and I started coughing. "Too sweet?" I heard Karou ask.

I nodded to her and squeezed my eyes shut against the overly sweet taste of the candy. It had been fine at first, but all of a sudden, it was way too sweet, and it made me cough. As suddenly as it had started, the oversweet taste stopped, and my mouth didn't feel any different. All that was left was the fading taste of orange soda.

"What'd it change?" I asked, pushing my normal feeling tongue around my normal feeling mouth.

"Your hands." Karou said, covering her needle-toothed grin with one hand.

As soon as she said it, I felt it and I looked down. My hands had turned the same orange color of caramel, and my palms and the backs of my hands had turned scaly like a snake. My fingers had elongated and split into dozens of tentacles, each at least ten inches long, some longer. The ends were covered in yellow sucker pads like on an octopus, and little hooks tipped the tentacles.

I examined them for a moment longer before looking up at Karou and exclaiming, "This is the weirdest thing ever!"

"I know! This is awesome!" She ran her tongues across the back of her teeth, figuring out how to control them.

As I watched her, and idea dawned on me. "We should eat all of them, and see how many different things they change! Then we can go scare some people!"

Karou glanced up at me with a needle-y smile "Let's do it!".

We had a total of six candies, including the two we'd already eaten. Since I couldn't exactly open them anymore, Karou had to open them for me and put them in my mouth. It didn't take long for us to eat the remaining candies, two more each, and my eyes and nose were changed, along with Karou's ears and hair.

The next one I ate had been a shiny purple, and tasted like grapes. Karou had told me that my eyes were perfect circles, higher up on my face then was normal. They were also completely purple, and glossy like a marble. Apparently, when I glanced around without moving my head, she couldn't tell the my eyeballs were moving, which reminded me of demons - except their eyes were normal in size and place, and were actually a smokey black. I shook off the idea of demons.

My nose was the other thing that had changed, after eating a black one that had tasted of licorice, which I hated: It had completely disappeared, making my eyes look slightly less unusual, and if I'd been wearing glasses, they would have fallen flat on my face. My nose had been replaced by a single slit in the shape of a V just above my lips.

Karou ate a gold one, decided it tasted like her father's champagne, then her hair had changed: it had gone from long, straight, and brown with a yellow stripe, to short, wavy, and gold, orange, and red. It looked like fire, and was defying gravity in the process, floating above her head and flicking from side to side. Her hair glinted in the artificial light of the train, and when she moved her hair, the colors changed. Her hair genuinely looked like fire, frozen in one place.

It took us a moment to figure out what else had changed. This last one was her ears. The green apple-flavored candy had changed them so they were long and furry, like the pygmy goats I had seen in someone's yard once. The white didn't jump out too much from her fiery hair, but we were ecstatic when we discovered she could wiggle and move them to her heart's content. My friend looked positively demonic... which was more than a little disturbing. Again, I shook it off.

We stared at each other for a moment, before I remembered the time limit, and jumped up. We couldn't have spent more than two minutes eating the rest of the candies and examining what had changed, but I estimated that we only had six or seven more minutes before the first candies wore off, if that. "Come on, let's go scare some people before they wear off. And see if we can't find someone with a camera, I want a picture of this!"

We ran out of the apartment, and promptly ran into Aaron. He raised his camera, grinning widely, and said, "Smile!" Karou bared her teeth, and I raised my hands in response, and he took the picture. "That's fantastic," he laughed, " I was hoping I'd get to see it. I'll develop it over break for both of you if you like?"

"Yes, please!" I exclaimed. "I can't wait to send it to my family! I wish I could see their faces when they look at it."

"Yeah, that'd be great!" Karou agreed, stepping forward and hugging him. I snickered a bit at Aaron's expression; he looked like he was going to fall over right then and there. Karou pulled away before he could hug her back. "Thanks for the candies, by the way. We're gonna go scare as many people as we can. See you later!"

Together, we ran past him, and stopped in the middle of a group of fifth year girls. I waved, Karou smiled, they screamed. We ran on with a fist bump.

"That was the best thing we've done all year." Karou sighed in satisfaction. We'd just returned to our carriage, and had collapsed into our seats. "I miss my fangs, though. I want them back." She ran her tongue over her teeth for emphasis.

"I agree. Those eyes were awesome. I really liked your hair though. I bet we could recreate it. Imagine if that's how I went back to Hogwarts. Or back to my family for the summer!" I laughed. "They'd freak."

"We can work on that over break," Karou offered. "Maybe you can go back to Hogwarts with it! That would be awesome."

"It would." I yawned and looked out the window. It was still pouring, and the sound of the rain hitting the window calmed me. I hadn't slept much the last few nights, from excitement of going to Karou's and disappointment in my family. I absently wondered what they were hunting, as another yawn escaped my lips. "I'm gonna take a nap," I decided.

"Okay. I have a book I can read," Karou said with a nod.

I laid down on the seats, watching her pull her book out of her bag. Within seconds of finding a comfortable position, I had fallen asleep.