The woman stood there impatiently, her arms folded over her corset-boosted chest, idly scratching at the back of her calf with a stiletto heel while the middle-aged man in front of her dug through his suit pockets for his wallet. She rolled her eyes and tapped her foot as he carefully counted at the bills. When he was nearly at the full amount for the session, the woman stomped her foot down hard, the salaryman jolting his gaze up.
“Come on, would you! I don’t have all day to deal with swine that can’t even count!”
“O-of course, just one second, ma’am…”
“Queen, you filth!”
“R-right, of course!”
She smiled as the man’s shaky fingers quickly counted over the money again, trying to regain the count she’d made him lose. It was an extra service, as far as she was concerned. Something on the house.
“H-here you are, Queen Asami. Thank you again, as always!”
“Ugh, it’s disgusting how you always thank me. But I guess someone like you has to be grateful, don’t they? Not many people would spend time with you like this, even if they were getting paid, right?”
She ran her long nails against the man’s face as she demeaned him, the disgusted look on her face disguising the amusement she felt inside as she saw goosebumps rise on his skin.
“Now run along, swine. Your Queen has other business to attend to.”
“Y-Yes!”
The man hurriedly shuffled out of the room as she watched on. She waited until she was sure he’d gone before she let out a large sigh and walked over to the bed. Just as she was about to sit down, she shot up.
“Ow! God dammit! Everytime I try to sit on this thing I just get a spring in my ass. This is the crappiest love hotel I’ve ever been in. If that shithead didn’t pay so good, I’d have left before even getting in the elevator.”
She grumbled as she walked to the bathroom, taking advantage of the full length mirror to make sure the spring hadn’t broken skin.
“Good. Last thing I need is people asking why a dom has scratches on her ass. Or getting tetanus from this dive.”
While she was there, she glanced over at the vending display, full of the usual love hotel staples to help couples have an intimate, but safe, stay, but one item caught her eye.
“Huh, never seen one of these with smokes in ‘em before. Well, when life gives you lemons…”
She brought back some money from the bedroom, put them into the display and made her selection. A small pack of cigarettes with a matchbook attached dropped down onto the floor.
“Yeah, would have been too much to expect you to catch the damn things, huh?”
After checking the mattress to make sure it was free of loose springs, she sat down again, crossing her legs as she broke into the pack of cigarettes. She slipped one into her mouth, then lit it with one of the matches.
“Eh, not too bad for a hotel smoke, I guess. A hell of a lot better than I was expecting, at least.”
She continued taking long drags of the cigarette, watching the smoke lazily float up to the ceiling.
“Christ, my parents would be spinning in their graves if they could see me now. Their cute little Maika using a fake name while stepping on perverts in love hotels. I’m sure by now they’d have expected me to have found some dopey office worker to settle down with so I could just stay home and pump out grandkids for them. Hah, what a joke!”
Maika chuckled to herself as she tapped the side of her cigarette against an ashtray. She knew that her parents weren’t the most awful in the world, but she could never tolerate how overbearing and controlling they were, and took every chance she could to rebel against them.
In high school she cemented herself as a delinquent, wearing an old-fashioned long skirt and dying her hair blonde. She started smoking just a couple months into her first year, enjoying the harshness it added to her voice, as well as how cool it made her look.
It became a habit of hers to pick on boys, bullying the ones that got too full of themselves. She saw it as her mission to put them in their place, and she was very good at what she did. So good, in fact, that she entered the world of BDSM when she was old enough off of the recommendation of a friend. To Maika, the idea of getting paid for what she’d just do anyway was too amazing to turn down.
Maika worked hard to balance the dominatrix life of Queen Asami she’d picked up with her high school life. It was shortly before she graduated that her parents died from a collision with a drunk driver. Maika swallowed up the pain the best she could, focusing it outwards on Asami’s customers. She graduated, just barely, though she suspected her teachers’ pity played a part. Shortly after, she decided to focus on being a dominatrix full-time. She couldn’t help but feel a little nostalgic, thinking back on events that were half a lifetime ago.
She lifted the cigarette back up to her mouth and took another long drag, but this time the smoke was almost gritty in her mouth, causing her to cough harshly.
“Shit! What kind of crappy cigarette is only good for the first half? It’s like they filled the rest of this with sand!”
She made her way back to the bathroom, coughing the whole trip, so she could pour herself a glass of water. She drank it greedily, desperate to stop the coughing fit. After a couple of minutes, her coughing had finally died down.
“Jesus, about time…wait, what the hell is this voice?!”
Instead of the deep, husky voice Maika had gained after years of smoking and practice as Queen Asami, the voice that echoed in the bathroom was something entirely different. It sounded young, soft, reserved, sweet, and, worst of all, polite.
“I sound like a friggin’ kid!”
Her head started to feel cloudy and the room started to spin. She leaned her back against the sink to try and steady herself, looking at how flushed and sweaty she’d become in the long mirror in front of her.
“Heh, come on, I’m not old enough for hot flashes yet…”
She tried to joke her fear away, but soon she was gripped by nausea as well. Her breathing grew heavy as the room started to get bigger around her, Maika realizing it wasn’t just some illusion when she felt the cold sink higher up against her back. She watched on as her face changed, wrinkles and signs of age, well-hidden under her makeup, fading completely. Her cheeks rounded, giving her face a softness she was sure she hadn’t had since middle school.
“Great, now I look like some stupid brat, too!”
Maika snarled, best she could with her new voice, while she stared in the mirror, as though she could stop what was happening with the right glare. To her surprise, her eyes, though they’d become purple, hadn’t softened at all, her reflection looking just as fierce and angry as it had before.
“Well, then, I might be a pipsqueak I’ve never seen before, but at least I’ve still got some bite…”
Her good humor didn’t last, though, as her whole body started to burn up, a feeling more intense than the worst fever she’d ever had. She watched through half-closed eyes as the long, straight blonde hair she had changed to black, growing down to her thighs and puffing out. Her confusion grew as it seemed to form itself into its own style, two puffy blue ties splitting her hair into long, straight twintails at her shoulders.
She didn’t have time to wonder where the accessories had come from, as she soon felt a pressure growing all over her body. Maika soon saw and felt why, as her clothes started to feel loose on her body. Her chest, once nearly bursting out of the corset she wore, started to shrink, the corset sagging down without the breasts to hold on to, while her shrinking waist just made it sit more awkwardly against her body.
Her hips grew less wide, causing her underwear to slip, while her legs lost their plumpness and her fishnet stockings fell, clumping up around her ankles. Even her feet started to shrink, the stiletto heels becoming too large for her to maintain her balance. She fell forward, small hands smacking against the cold tile to break her fall. Maika couldn’t help but notice that even her nails had shrunk.
Maika found her balance again, making her way to her feet as the fog cleared her head. Irritated, she unlaced the corset and threw it to the ground with the rest of the clothes. She glared once more at the body in the mirror, no longer the sexy Queen Asami that had entered the love hotel, but the body of a much younger girl, one too small and sweet to ever be called a queen.
She stomped off to the bedroom, and sat on the bed, glaring accusingly at the cigarette, now burnt out in the ashtray.
“Did I really get done in by some shitty love hotel tobacco like this?” she wondered out loud, clinging to the only explanation she could think of while she dug out one of her own cigarettes from her purse, lighting it with a disposable lighter of her own.
Coughing filled the room as soon as she inhaled. Maika bitterly ground the cigarette into the ashtray to extinguish it.
“Well, I guess that’s one way to get someone to stop smoking. Christ, that’s foul. How’d I ever even start if they tasted like that?”
As she coughed the irritation away, she glanced up at the clock, realizing that her time in the room was almost over.
“Shit, I’ve gotta get out of here before someone comes and finds me. I don’t know how old this girl is, but I doubt I could just play off being here.”
Maika started tearing apart the room, taking out drawers, desperate to find something to wear. She threw open the closet door and saw a high school girl’s outfit in there. She grumbled at the obnoxiously pink outfit, with it’s yellow tie and dark blue accents, but tore it off the hanger and started putting it on, relieved that it fit.
“Great, at least I’m not naked, but I still have to get outta this dive without someone calling the cops on me.”
She glanced out the window, smirking to herself when she saw the fire escape outside. Maika opened the window and slipped it, carefully closing it from outside, then worked her way down to the sidewalk below.
Her mind raced as she walked through the city, uncertain of where she was going. With everything that had happened, the once familiar streets looked strange and different to her, and she felt more vulnerable in the small, younger body she wound up in. After what seemed like hours of aimless walking and thinking, she’d finally reached her limit, stopping at a small café to rest and collect her thoughts.
“Ah, welcome!”
A girl with long blonde pigtails wearing a blue maid outfit greeted her, showing her to a table.
“Oooh, it’s not every day we get a girl my age in here! My name’s Kaho. What can I get for you?”
Maika was caught up in her own world, not even registering the blonde’s comments, and simply ordered a black coffee without even looking at the menu Kaho had placed in front of her.
“O-of course, right away!”
The blonde bounced away, while Maika turned to glare at her.
“Damn kids and their energy. After all the shit that’s happened today, I can’t even find a normal café, can I?” she mumbled under her breath. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a wispy young man with blonde hair looking at her strangely. Her glare darted over to him and he quickly turned away. She smiled at the reaction.
“Yeah, that’s right asshole…” she trailed off as she saw the girl coming back to her table with the coffee she’d ordered.
“Here you are, Miss! Are you sure you don’t want cream or sugar with that?”
“Ah, no thank you, black is fine!” she responded, putting on a fake smile so she’d leave faster.
“Alright, just let me know if you need anything!” Kaho beamed back, bouncing her way over to another table.
Maika sighed and lifted the cup to her mouth, taking a long smell of the coffee before taking a sip.
“Well, it’s better than I’d expect from some creepy maid café, at least.”
The coffee helped calm her down, at least, allowing her to unpack her current situation more neatly than she’d been able to do while walking. She’d changed, that much was clear, into some high school brat, not simply gotten younger. Maika couldn’t explain why it had happened. It wasn’t anything that pig client of hers had done, since most of the session was just her leaving heel marks in his flabby stomach. The best explanation she could come up with was that it had something to do with the cigarette she’d had before it all started.
She laid out the timeline in her head, and that seemed to be the only explanation. As for what she did after this, Maika had no clue. She certainly couldn’t keep working as Queen Asami, and likely wouldn’t be able to go back to her current profession for a couple years. Her savings would likely take care of her for a while, but how long would that be? Would this all just wear off at some point and she’d be back to normal?
As she wondered, she noticed the man who was looking at her from early making his way over to her table.
“Tsk.”
She clicked her in annoyance and turned another gaze on him, certain that he’d back down like he had before. He stumbled a little as sweat started to bead on his forehead, but he didn’t back down, stopping in front of Maika’s table.
“E-excuse me, Miss?”
“Yeah? What do you want?”
“I… My name’s D-Dino and I’m the manager here.”
Maika swore in her head as she hurriedly changed her glare into a smile, lightly chuckling off the awkwardness.
“O-oh, nice to meet you! I’m Maika.”
“Maika? What a lovely name! It definitely suits a beauty like you.”
“Ahaha, you’re so kind!” Maika laughed, trying desperately to not roll her eyes.
“Anyway, I came over to ask if you’d maybe be interested in a position at the café? It would be a great way to get a little more spending money and I think you’d be a wonderful fit!”
“Eh? What do you mean, ‘a wonderful fit?’” she asked, only catching the irritated tone seeping into her voice after the words had left her lips.
“W-well, you see, Stile is a character café that mostly serves guys. All the workers here essentially play a different character. Kaho, the girl who waited on you, plays a character who is meant to be aloof and disinterested, but secretly very loving “
“Yeah? And guys go for that sort of thing?”
“Oh, absolutely! Our customers love our characters and everyone has their share of regulars that come just for them!”
“Right. So, if you had me working her, what would my character be, then?”
“W-well, u-um…with the looks you were giving earlier, I was thinking that…that you’d be a very good sadist…”
Maika couldn’t keep back the smug smile that spread across her face while her eyes narrowed at the man.
“Oh? A sadist, huh? Hmmm…you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Y-Yes! Very much!”
She snickered as the man’s face reddened. It seemed that, even in this body, she’d still be able to have men eating out of the palm of her hand.
—
“Maika, you’ve got customers at table three!” Kaho said, peeking into the break room.
“Right, coming!” she responded, straightening her uniform in the mirror before heading out to her regulars.
“Ugh, it’s you lot again.”
“Y-yes Miss Maika! We came to see you again!”
“Eh? And who told you I wanted that? I was on my break, but now I’ve lost my appetite, seeing your ugly faces.”
She glared at the three customers at the table, snickering to herself as their faces turned red and sweaty.
“Well, since you losers managed to get all the way out of the house to come here, I guess we should serve you. What would you like?”
“C-coffee, please! With two creams!”
“Eh?! TWO creams?! Huhuhu, what a darling, can’t even take your coffee black like me. And for you?”
“Omelette rice for me!”
“Pfft, and I bet you want me to draw some cutesy crap on it too, huh? What a baby. Alright, and you?”
“M-mild pork curry!”
“Mild?! Tsk, a man your age and you can’t handle a bit of spice. Fine, if you’re lucky. If not, you’ll be getting the extra spicy. And you’ll enjoy eating every little drop of it, won’t you?”
“Y-yes m-m-ma’am!”
Maika smiled ear to ear as she took the order back to the kitchen. She still wasn’t sure what had caused the change, or if she’d ever change back, but she was content knowing that, in their own way, things hadn’t really changed too much. Her body might be small, and she might not be stepping on or whipping anyone, but she was still, undeniably, a queen.
Hometown Publishing 