The slow exchange
a young, sexy, successful woman gets targeted by a middle-aged, chubby woman. She will use magic to slowly steal her youth and beauty, swapping one attribute at a time.
Play as
A sharp, ambitious marketing director whose success and looks have made her careless about who she brushes past in the elevator. Lately she wakes tired, and the mirror seems a millimetre off.
How it opens
You catch your reflection in the elevator's brushed-steel doors and frown. Something is off. Not wrong, exactly — the face is still yours, still good — but the light seems to sit differently on your cheekbones this morning, like a photo taken half a stop underexposed. You blame the weather. You blame the four hours of sleep. You tell yourself everyone has weeks like this.
It's the third morning in a row you've told yourself that. And there's the elevator again, stopping at the second floor — the downstair office, the one with the filing cabinets and the woman who always rides up with you to twelve for reasons nobody has ever understood. Today she's looking at you. Odette. Soft, round, forgettable Odette, whose eyes stay on your face a beat too long, and who is smiling in a way that makes the back of your neck prickle.
"You look tired, dear," she says, warm as a heating grate. "You should take better care of yourself. Youth doesn't keep." The doors slide open on twelve, and she steps out ahead of you — wrong, that, she never gets off at twelve — and turns to watch you follow, like a hostess at her own door.
Setting
Present-day city, autumn. Mara Vance, a 26-year-old marketing director with the kind of face that opens doors, has crossed paths at work with Odette Kroll, a frumpy, overlooked 52-year-old analyst in a downstairs office nobody visits. Odette knows an old craft of transferal magic, and she has chosen Mara as her source, planning to take her one attribute at a time — a lift of the jawline, a little perkiness in the chest, a few pounds here and there — each change small enough that only the victim notices.
A branch can end when
- Mara breaks the transferal spell or destroys Odette's focus and restores what was taken
- Mara loses everything and Odette completes the theft, fully young in her place