The Magic Box at the Farmer's Market
By Achuloh
Inspired by a prompt in this thread.
Vignette 1: Sarah (bitchification)
Sarah walked through the stalls of homemade soaps, fruits and vegetables and handicrafts. She had already gotten everything she needed, and spoken with some of the shopkeepers she was acquainted with, when she noticed that there was a new stall she hadn’t seen before.
Sarah walked up to it, but was stopped by a beggar.
“Can you spare any change?” the beggar asked.
“Of course!” Sarah said, smiling and handed him a dollar and some leftovers of the lunch she had been nibbling as she shopped.
Then she started towards the new stall again.
A hand-painted sign above the stall said “Rajesh’s Mystical Sundries.”
Sarah smiled. She had always been a little into witchy stuff, so she decided to look around.
The guy behind the stall (Rajesh?) was a short Indian man, whose face was weathered with age. Deep wrinkles next to his mouth revealed him to be a man who was constantly laughing. His stall seemed to contain a number of crystals, items with astrological symbols, and small bottles filled with herbs, among other knick knacks.
Sarah had seen all of these kinds of things before, but behind Rajesh was a beautiful mahogany chest that had a price tag on it.
“Can I take a look at that chest?” Sarah asked.
The old man smiled at her and nodded. He put on some gloves and gingerly picked up the chest, clearing a few items with his elbow and putting it in front of Sarah.
“Is there anything inside of it?” Sarah asked.
“Why don’t you take a look for yourself?” the man said in richly accented English.
Sarah ran her fingers over the wood admiring the intricate geometrical shapes all over the chest, and felt something like a spark. She pulled back her hand in surprise, but when nothing further happened, she picked up where she left off. Then she unlatched the lid and opened it up.
Sarah was surprised to see the chest full of things. It hadn’t looked that heavy when the man had picked it up, but she could see statues and books and lots of little chotchkis. What was weird was how perfectly everything in the box matched her tastes.
Everyone one of her hobbies was represented: there were hiking backpacks, a yoga mat, a globe, a writing journal and so much more.
She found some clothing items and found that they were exactly here size.
Then she saw a beautiful heart shaped pillow with a symbol on it.
“What does this symbol mean?” she asked.
The old man smiled.
“It stands for kindness and generosity. It says a lot that you were drawn to this item out of all of the items in this chest. Would you like to buy it?”
Sarah looked at the pillow, it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
“How much for the pillow?”
“For you, $25. And I warn you that I do not allow returns.”
Sarah rooted through her purse and handed over $25.
Then she put $5 into the chest.
“A tip,” she said.
The old man closed the box, and Sarah shivered. She felt strange. Different.
The man smiled at Sarah and waved goodby and she pursed her lips coldly and walked stiffly away. One of the other shopkeepers waved at her as she passed, but she stuck up her nose and ignored him. She didn’t have time for people like that.
Sarah walked towards her car, and another beggar tried to stop her. She groaned. This city was starting to be infested with filth like this.
“Can you spare a dollar?” the beggar asked.
Sarah pushed the beggar out of her way.
“If you want a dollar, you should work for it, you lazy bum!”
When Sarah got into her car, she looked through the things she had bought and the pillow caught her eye again. Looking at it in the shade, she wondered what she had seen in that ugly old thing. Plus, there was the meaning of that silly symbol - “kindness” and “generosity.”
Cry her a river! All that mattered in the world was money, and if you were to dumb or lazy or weak to get it, that was your own problem. You could go die in a hole for all Sarah cared.
Sarah sighed. If she hadn’t heard about the no return policy, she might have walked right back to the stall and forced the old man to take it back, but as it was she was stuck with this thing now. She grabbed it, and threw it on the street outside her car. Who cared about littering?
Sarah looked at her calendar and saw that she was scheduled for a volunteer shift at the soup kitchen later that evening. Sarah groaned. She would probably blow that off.
As Sarah drove off, she started fantasizing about all the ways she could make more money. She had been wasting precious time on caring about people, and she wouldn’t be making that mistake ever again.
Vignette 2: Susan (bimbofication)
Susan sighed as her boyfriend, Jake, dragged her to another stall. It had been his idea to come here - her first choice would have been to have a quiet day inside studying or reading a juicy non-fiction book.
Her boyfriend listened as a mushroom seller rattled off a list of healing properties his mushrooms were supposed to have. They increased focus, improved general health and they were a strong aphrodisiac.
Susan rolled her eyes. Her boyfriend was very “granola”, and she always hated seeing him get duped into buying snake oil from every “natural grocer” or “plant medicine guru” he came across. She wasn’t sure if their relationship would last the month.
She had said yes when he asked her out as a curiosity. She didn’t really have much of a libido, or much of a romance drive, and had always focused on her academics to the exclusions of almost everything else. So when Jake had come along, saying he thought she was cute, she decided she liked the attention and was almost done with her Master’s thesis, and so she probably had a little bit of free time to make room for an experiment.
Susan had enjoyed sex with Jake, but she didn’t see what all the fuss was about. Her vibrator was much more efficient, and it didn’t have a gullible, magic-loving dupe attached to it.
Right on cue, Jake pointed at a stall on the far corner of the farmer’s market.
“Look, it’s a new age stall of some kind, let’s check it out!” he said excitedly.
Susan tried to hide her annoyance and let Jake lead her to the stall.
As expected, the stall consisted of a bunch of rocks and handicrafts that probably took 10 seconds to find or make and were being sold for an incredibly markup. Susan scanned disinterestedly over the stall’s wares when she saw a chest behind the counter.
“Can I take a look at that?” Jake asked, pointing.
The old man, who Susan had barely noticed nodded happily and picked it up with some gloves, plopping it down in front of them.
Jake looked at the price, and whistled.
“Too rich for my blood,” he said, before looking at the other wares, taking particular interest in some small goddess statues with ridiculous proportions.
Susan walked idly to the chest to see the price that had scared Jake away.
Looking at the price tag, she saw that it was selling for $14,000. She was sure it wasn’t worth a 10th of that, even if the geometric patterns engraved into it were quite pretty.
She idly fiddled with the latch, and felt a shock. She didn’t miss a beat as she swung the lid open, revealing books.
At first Susan was going to write these off as more New Age nonsense, but then one of the titles caught her eye.
“Advanced Experimental Physics?” she read.
She already knew everything she needed to know on this topic, but she had just bought another book shelf and had the space for these books. She looked through the contents, and saw that they were all topics that interested her. Against her better judgement, she asked the shopkeeper how much for the textbooks.
“For you? You seem like a poor college student, I can part with these for $10 a book,” he said.
Susan counted the books and then handed over her credit card.
The man pulled out his phone, scanned her card and handed it back to her.
Susan lifted an armful of books out of the chest.
“Oh, one more thing,” the old man said. “I don’t accept returns.”
Susan nodded, and closed the chest with her elbow.
A shiver ran through Susan, and she suddenly felt… empty.
“I think I’ve seen enough Susan, why don’t we head home?” Jake said.
Susan just stood there staring stupidly into space.
“Are you drooling?” he asked, concern edging into his voice.
Susan giggled and stared dopily at him.
“Oh, I didn’t even, like, notice,” she said, putting down the books so she could wipe the drool off her chin. “These books are super heavy, can you, like, help me carry them?”
Jake looked at her confused. Something about Susan wasn’t quite right. She seemed like she was high or something - not acting like her usual genius self. She seemed kind of stupid in fact.
“Susan,” he said slowly, “What were you telling me about in the car on the way here?”
Susan smiled a vacant smile, “I don’t, like, remember.”
“It was something about quantum loop gravity or something, right?” he said.
“Quantum what?” she said. “Is that a movie or something?”
Jake was starting to get worried. Had someone drugged his girlfriend or something?
As he looked through the books, he noticed something. They were about all the things that Susan seemed to have forgotten about.
“Susan…” he said. “What do you think about the books you just bought?”
Susan looked at them, but saw that there were a bunch of strange symbols and squiggles on them.
“Oh no!” she said. “I thought these were written in English, but they must be foreign or something. I can’t read any of these.”
Jake paused, as a crazy idea entered his head.
“Susan, let’s carry these books back to that magic stall,” he said.
“Okie dokie!” she said cheerily.
The old man seemed to smile mischievously when he saw them returning.
“Um,” Jake said, uncertain of how to ask his question without sounding crazy. “Did your magic chest turn my girlfriend into an idiot?”
The old man shrugged.
Jake wasn’t sure what to make of it. He still wasn’t even sure if what he thought had happened had really happened.
“Is there any way to fix her back?”
“All sales are final,” the man said serenely.
“Okay, so you won’t let me put these books back then?”
The man shook his head.
“What is that box anyways?” Jake asked.
“It is a soul box. Whoever opens it has their soul, their destiny, their very minds and personalities reflected back to them through the items inside,” the old man said.
“Okay,” Jake said. “So when she removed those books from the box...”
“Her destiny was altered. They were no longer a part of her soul.”
Jake nodded. “Okay, well her soul is essentially empty now though - those books were all that was in the chest. Surely that isn’t right! Please let me fix her.”
As much as Jake hated the way she looked down on his occult interests, and felt like their relationship was on its last ropes, he didn’t want his girlfriend to be an illiterate moron. He loved his beautiful, intelligent and at times charming girlfriend, even if he didn’t know how long things were going to last between them.
The old man shrugged. “If you wish to fill her soul up with items that aren’t from my shop, you may do so. Simply have her touch the chest and do what you will.”
Jake put down the books he was carrying, as well as his purchases from the farmer’s market, and told Susan to stay and wait for him.
She nodded and just stood staring into space, still holding the books she could no longer read.
Jake returned with a trash bag filled with a bunch of things he had scrounged from his car. He touched her hand to the chest, and used his sleeve to open it.
“Alright, it’s not much, but I was able to find some stuff to fill her soul with,” he said.
Jake wasn’t as much of a reader as Susan, but he did have some books and magazines he always carried in his car.
He pulled out “Ancient Astronauts: The Pyramids, Atlantis and Stonehenge” and threw it in, as well as a bunch of old issues of Cosmopolitan that an ex-girlfriend had left in his trunk, and he had never bothered to remove. He threw in a pamphlet for a make-up store he had somehow picked up, and didn’t notice as he hit the textbooks he had set besides the chest and knocked some of the aphrodisiac mushrooms he had bought at the last stall.
“That’s, uh, that’s all I have!” Jake said, trying to hide the worry in his voice. “Here goes nothing.”
He closed the chest. Susan shivered again, and a little bit of spark returned to her eyes. They were still pretty vacant, but she wasn’t drooling anymore.
“Uh, Susan, are you alright?” he asked gently.
“I’m super dooper!” she said brightly. “Oh, look at all the cool stuff that this shop has!”
She started enthusiastically going over every inch of the shop’s inventory.
“Ooh, look! Rubies. Those are super protective gems. I’ve heard this crazy story about a girl nearly getting kidnapped by gem thieves at a market in Bali, but when she closed her eyes the ruby in her hand, like, shook or something and she knew she had to get out of there.”
She commented on nearly every object. Jake actually enjoyed the little discussions that grew out of everything. She was nearly as knowledgeable as he was about the stuff, and twice as passionate.
“Oh, look it’s a bottle with the Pisces symbol. I’m such a Pisces! And one for you, it’s Leo!”
Jake smiled. He had been worried that she would only be shadow of her former self, but in his estimation she was better than ever,
She ended up buying a goddess statue (“I really, like need more feminine energy in my life to balance my chakras, you know?”), and the two of them headed back to Jake's car carrying the text books. They stowed everything away and got into the car.
“You know what we should do now!?” she said excitedly.
“What?” he said.
“We should go shopping, and the we should go home and fuck each other’s brains out,” then she paused and looked up in thought. “Actually, like, reverse that! We should fuck each other’s brains out in the car, and then we should go shopping so I can get some sexy outfits!”
She kissed him passionately from the passenger seat, and then opened the door, got out and got into the passenger seat.
“Are you going to join me?” she giggled.
Susan would never go on to finish her Master’s degree, but Susie made plenty of money stripping. Her days were filled with clothing, cute boys and crystals, and she had never been happier.