A short story inspired by Narubi's awesome TF sequence A Thief's Reward. Updated with the artwork I commissioned (do commission Narubi yourself if you can) and a new twist at the end!

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The Tale of Camilla Pardali

"Hey, did you pay for that?" The museum rent-a-cop approached with a stern look on his face.

Camilla Pardali turned and batted her big, blue, innocent eyes at him. "Pay for what?" she said.

"I saw what you were doing in there," the guard said. He looked down at Camilla sternly--he wasn't that tall, but at five-three in heels Camilla was often looked down at. "You took a bottle of water and a bunch of that repro Egyptian stuff."

"I looked at that stuff, sure," said Camilla innocently. "But I put it all back." As the rent-a-cop's gaze was distracted by her best who-me expression, Camilla passed the bottle of water and five assorted pieces of reproduction Egyptian jewelry ($50 MSRP apiece) from one hand to the other behind her back with a sleight-of-hand flourish.

Clearly enjoying this rare chance to deal with a real malefactor rather than the shouting six-year-olds and smooching horny teens that doubtless were his usual beat, the guard persisted. "We'll see about that," he said in a voice that would have been authoritative if it weren't high pitched and coming from a squat man with 75 extra pounds and acne. "Open your hand."

Camilla moved to open the hand she'd emptied a moment ago.

"You other hand," the rent-a-cop said with a canny gleam in his eye. Camilla meekly obliged, still making her best aw-shucks eyes at him.

Her hand was empty. The guard did a double-take; he did not, however, ask Camilla to turn around--why would he, after all?--so he missed the collection of jewelry and bottled water currently being held to the small of her back by the elastic waist of her capris. She'd smoothly passed it there when her interrogator's eyes had briefly alighted on her other hand, which she helpfully opened to show that there was nothing in either mitt.

The shock on the guard's face turned to annoyance. "Turn out your pockets, then" he said.

"Don't have any, sir," Camilla said as politely as possible; she patted the place they would have been to show her sincerity.

Still suspicious, the guard looked her over. Camilla could see the cogs turning in the cuckoo clock that passed for the man's brain: she was wearing a short-sleeved closely-fitted tee, so nothing could be up her sleeves. Her hair was trimmed coyly short, so there was no place to twist any small items up in it (as she sometimes saw amateurs do). No socks to slip small items into either; Camilla was in sandals despite the museum's air-conditioned chill. That was another trick for amateurs; Camilla prided herself on being able to hide items from even the most prying eyes by sheer sleight-of-hand.

"…all right then," said the rent-a-cop, clearly disappointed that he wouldn't be able to make a citizen's arrest or unholster his whistle. "You're free to go."

"Thanks, mister," Camilla said brightly. "Sorry for the mix-up." She gave him her widest, winningest smile. He returned it, clearly concluding that there was nothing sinister about the unassuming girl in front of him. As he began to walk away, Camilla pretended to start in the same direction and briefly jostled him.

"Oh! Sorry, miss," the guard said. He was trying to be polite to make up for his earlier attitude, she sensed, now that he'd gotten a good look at her. He'd also used the bump as an opportunity to "accidentally" lay a hand on her small but firm breasts.

Camilla ignored it though; after the guard wandered away, she produced his museum keycard from the palm of her hand with a flourish. The alarm went off at the museum entrance; through her peripheral vision Camilla could see that the guard had set off the anti-theft alarm at the museum entrance; despite his pleas, his fellows quickly tackled him. Clearly they were as anxious for action as he, and clearly the Egyptian rings she'd slipped into various pockets after their "accidental" bump had done their work well.

Her work done, Camilla visited the ladies' room, where she slipped on the remaining rings after cutting off their anti-theft tags using the serrated edge of a paper towel dispenser and popped open the water bottle for a quiet drink while she browsed the exhibits.

Camilla Pardali was nothing if not a good thief.

During a court-mandated counseling session after the first--and only--time she'd been caught shoplifting, Camilla had insisted that she wasn't a thief but rather a kleptomaniac. "Thieves steal for material gain from anybody they can," she had insisted. "Kleptomaniacs steal for the challenge and love of the game from fat cats that can afford to lose them." And, true to her word, Camilla had boxes of unwanted acquisitions in her apartment, everything from jewelry to car keys to expensive designer pens (you don't want to know where she had to hide those to evade a particularly zealous department store detective). Frankly, once she had acquired something, it ceased to be an object of desire and quickly became boring. In occasional moments of candor she admitted as much, and allowed that such feelings might also explain why her boyfriends lasted about two weeks on average.

But pinching bits and baubles had begun to grow stale, even with the restrictions she placed on herself--no pockets, no sleeves, no shoes. Camilla felt that she was in danger of stagnating, of losing the only thrill in a life otherwise dominated by big-city dullness and accountancy classes at the community college. That was why she was at the City Museum, after all: a truly difficult, truly impressive score. A few weeks back she had been wandering from taking digital cameras from an electronics boutique and ripping off Starbucks tip jars for kicks downtown and cut through the museum and its current Treasures of the Ebony Coast exhibit.

The centerpiece had taken her breath away, and she had to pinch it. Weeks of planning, days of warming up, and stealing a museum keycard had all been leading up to that score.

She timed her visit to the exhibit to coincide with a tour group moving through to give one last opportunity to case the exhibit before making a move. "The Ebony Coast may be in political turmoil today," the tour guide said to her group in a tone of voice that suggested she'd learned her lines by rote, "but it was at the center of a thriving empire a thousand years ago. Gold from the mines was worked by artisans into jewelry of immense craftsmanship depicting religiously important figures. Most were taken and melted down by the Portuguese during the 1500s; the Twiga Necklace, so named by the Swahili traders who eventually sold it to western collectors, is the only extant and whole gold piece known to exist."

Even though she tried to keep her eyes downcast, Camilla was drawn to the necklace at the center of the display. The exquisite golden giraffe on a leather chain strung with cowrie shells, glinting under the museum lights…the only one of its kind in the world…she had to have it. She simply had to. Nothing else would do, and it represented a much-overdue powering-up of her kleptomania skills.

The guards nearby ignored her. Camilla was pretty, but she dressed plainly and though she was pushing 25 she had the build of a dancer and was regularly mistaken for someone much younger, to the point that the guards sometimes asked if she'd gotten separated from the classes of high school seniors that routinely came through on Free Fridays. She could glitz it up with smile and eyes if it came to that, but a much better skill was that of being invisible.

"Experts think that the high priest of the empire wore the Twiga Necklace, using it to commune with ancestral spirits and spirits of the land," the guide continued in a monotone. "Legend has it that terrible magics were placed on it to keep the power out of the wrong hands."

Camilla, who had heard the spiel a dozen times, was quite sure that hers were the right hands. And she was sure to get them wrapped around that precious bauble before the day was out.

It was a simple plan. First, Camilla padded up behind someone who was leaving the exhibit and looked particularly clumsy. A quick, "accidental" jab to their hamstring with her big toe was enough to make Mr. Clumsy stumble and pinwheel his arms out for support. By quickly rocketing past him, the thief removed herself from the position of being felt up by fat and unattractive dudes twice in one day; instead, the man grabbed the only thing that was within arm's reach: a fire alarm. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the guards springing into action, excited as their compatriots had been to flex their rent-a-cop muscles.

That took care of any prying eyes. Camilla doubled back and swiped the stolen guard-card through the staff entrance closest to the Twiga Necklace display. The area was narrow, just large enough for the museum curators to work in while arranging the glassed-in exhibit; her extensive casing of the area had shown that, unlike the permanent collection, the temporary exhibit space had no video security. Only a cheap chrome cylinder lock stood between Camilla and her prize; rather than waste precious seconds trying to pick it, she just pulled it out of the display case with her nails. The glue holding a lock in was always weaker than the lock, after all, and her kind oh-so-dull fellow accounting students were always praising Camilla's thick and crack-reisistent nails (lamenting their own easily destructible ones and treating that simple observation as high praise for Ms. Pardali).

The young kleptomaniac darted her lithe hand in and out of the case so rapidly that it was little more than a pale blur. There was no time to glory in her conquest; she wrapped the Twiga Necklace around the water bottle like a cheap lanyard and let herself out, depositing the museum card in the trash as she did so. Fire sirens and later police sirens echoed in the neighborhood for hours, but Camilla was free and away. Gleefully, she rushed back to her small apartment uptown, pausing only to kick off her shoes and dump her now worthless Egyptian warm-up jewelry in the trash.

"I did it, I did it, I did it!" she crowed to no one in particular, jumping up and down and hugging her sides in a paroxysm of glee. "It's mine, all mine, the only one in the world!" A deep and pragmatic part of her noted that she'd soon tire of the Twiga Necklace, but she waved those doubts away as she danced through her living room and kitchen. Camilla sang nonsensical songs about necklaces, pinching things, and giraffes while pirouetting with half-forgotten ballet moves from the classes she'd given up in favor of shoplifting at the mall next door to the dance studio and blowing the lesson money on arcade games. Finally, exhausted, she went into the bathroom to try it on.

Camilla's cheeks were flushed from celebration as she draped the necklace around herself, fixing the simple loop clasp and letting the tiny golden giraffe hang just above the neck of her fitted tee, glistening from between the tiny bit of cleavage that showed (and which she could easily enlarge through careful posing when a distraction was needed.

"Oh yeah," the girl said, admiring herself. "Looking good, Camilla. Looking good." She ran a finger along the inside of the necklace, feeling the smooth porcelain of the cowries and grinning impishly.

"Itsh shtunning on a schweetie like me," she continued. The words came out strangely muffled, and Camilla paused her celebration. Her tongue felt awfully thick and swollen in her mouth; was she having an allergic reaction? She hadn't even eaten any shellfish, and stroking cowrie shells shouldn't have produced a reaction. There was an epi-pen in the vanity, but Camilla decided to have a closer look first. She opened her mouth, but couldn't see anything; for some reason, no matter how she moved her tongue or shone the light, the inside of her mouth seemed to be impenetrably black.

"Thatsh odd.." Camilla whispered. "I wonder it it'sh-BLEH!"

She was interrupted by a sound somewhere between a cough and a hiccup, and a long, dark tongue lolled out of her mouth--impossibly long, reaching past her chin. It twitched and jerked, seeming to grow thicker and longer each moment Camilla looked at herself in the vanity mirror. Even as she struggled to register the shock of what she was seeing, though, a sudden wave of nausea overtook her, and Camilla grasped her stomach, instinctively trying to sooth her roiling insides.

"D…don't…feel..shoo…good…" was all she could manage; in light of what she saw next, the kleptomaniac's complaint seemed almost trivial.

Looking down at her aching stomach, she saw that the lithe pickpocket's hands cradling it were starting to alter in bizarre, frightening ways. Her nails were darkening as if an invisible coat of black lacquer were being silently applied layer by layer; they were also thickening at an alarming rate, one that would have sent her boring nail-admirers at school into a tizzy. The feeling and mobility were draining out of them; horrified, Camilla felt a similar feeling in her feet and looked down. Her petite toes were undergoing the same bizarre changes, darkening even though she never polished them, and thickening grotesquely. A gap was also growing between the second and third toe on each foot, pushing them into painfully constricted clusters around the big and pinky toes respectively.

"I…shomthing'sh…what…" Camilla, normally so quick with a comment or judgment, was all but speechless in the face of the bizarre changes wracking her svelte body. There was a painful spasm in her spine, too, and the girl suddenly felt the floor drop a dizzying inch or two lower. She was growing taller; her capris and tee didn't even come close to touching anymore, exposing her smooth and sculpted midriff and stolen belly ring, nicked from a tattoo parlor while the proprietor was busy installing the piercing. Camilla's capris were shorter too, almost like shorts, and she could hear the fabric groaning under the pressure of her growing legs.

Camilla stumbled, her balance impossible to maintain on feet in the process of becoming something very different. Looking desperately into the mirror, she saw her ears begin to prick and twist into larger and shapelier forms, and at various places around her shoulders and cheekbones her normally subtle freckles seemed to be spreading, merging into larger dark splotches. The racking aches and pains continued, and the floor abruptly dropped even further away from the erstwhile thief. It wasn't until she saw the short blonde locks parting near the top of her head to reveal emerging bums that rapidly transformed into a pair of knobby horns that the horrible truth became clear.

"I'm ch-ch-changing!" Camilla cried, her long dark tongue still hanging out of her mouth but now strangely much easier to control. "Into..a-a…"

The floor dropped again and Camilla was wracked by a fresh wave of pain and chimeric changes. "…GIRAFFE-AFFE-AFFE…" she wailed, her sobs drawing the word out into a painful series of stutters.

Her neck cracked and lengthened once more, bumping painfully on the low ceiling and forcing the girl to stoop. Her fingernails and toenails had continued to thicken and merge even as the rest of her feet and hands grew longer, thicker, stronger: there were only a few stubby barely mobile fingers and toes on each now. All the rest was hard and dark, though there was some lightening as the fusion progressed.

Tears and runs appeared all along her tee and capris; so well fitted before, they were both disintegrating under the weight of Camilla's change. She could see patches of sandy and darker sage fur spreading beneath the clothes through the widening rips; the sensation as it spread and subsumed her pale complexion was a mild ticklish relief from the aches that prevailed everywhere else. She doubled over further at it became harder to maintain a semblance of balance even leaning on the bathroom counter; save for a few patches here and there, everywhere she looked was fur. An uncomfortable squirming sensation right above what had been her meticulously toned rear resolved itself as her capris were destroyed; she felt the end of her spine push out beyond her back, and moments later could see a tail waving in the mirror, its edge rapidly growing a tuft of thick fur.

The worst was her face, though. Camilla watched as her fine cheekbones and ever-so-slightly upturned nose stretched and elongated, as if trying to catch up to the long tongue that her short human features had no change of containing. Her hair, already short, was receding and spiking itself as if a team of demented and invisible avant-garde hairstylists were hard at work on it. The platinum blond color, its natural hue, faded to a dull brown. Her bangs were the last to go, persisting a minute longer than the rest; Camilla held out a faint and muddled hope that at leas that part of herself would be unchanged, but after a few unwary moments with blond bangs in front and a spiky giraffe mane in the rear--the ultimate reverse mullet--the last of her human hair shrank and straightened to match.

It was clear as the necklace worked its terrible changes that the bathroom wouldn't hold Camilla's expanding girth much longer. She stumbled clear of it, shattering the mirror with an errant foot--now all but transformed into a cloven hoof as the last toes were assimilated into it--and tearing apart all that remained of her clothing. Stumbling and crashing, Camilla managed to get to her balcony door. Her front hooves scraped uselessly at the handle, all of their former dexterity having faded, but the emerging giraffe was able to work the latch with her tongue and open it. The railing was a final hurdle, but luckily Camilla lived on the ground floor; she emerged into the deserted courtyard to complete her change.

"Urk!" Long as they were, her neck and legs hadn't finished growing, and neither had her muzzle. She continued to utter strangled, unintelligible cries as first her rear and then her forelegs stretched to their full length. Her neck followed suit, and the ground was so far away rough now to make Camilla dizzy. The accursed necklace, source of all her problems, couldn't handle this final lengthening and thickening of the neck and snapped; Camilla watched in silent horror as the cowrie shells slipped off and disintegrated to dust; the golden giraffe itself exploded in a shower of yellow sparks when it hit the dewy grass.

At long last, the incredible sensations dulled and finally ceased. Camilla was now tall enough to look in one of the second-floor windows; a blue-eyed giraffe, young and not full-grown, stared back. Even so, her new form was far larger than her old, and of staggering height and girth to what had once been a short and slim girl actively recruited by dull ballet teachers all over the city. She took a first halting step and found that her new hooves sank into the soft sod of the (thankfully empty) courtyard with each step.

And then, even then, her long black tongue stuck out, writhing about with a mind of its own.

Her human mind was intact--she might even be able to speak, if it came to that--but the first overwhelming urge in the former kleptomaniac's mind was to stick her tongue into the green leaves of the courtyard's great maple tree and devour every succulent green morsel on it. There was so much energy to replenish after such a rough change, after all; it was only natural. And even then it wasn't her tree; as a giraffe Camilla's kleptomania was every bit as strong as it had been in her human form, it seemed.

Gulping down the stolen leaves by the mouthful, Camilla tried to ponder her next move, dazed and exhausted. She could remember the guide monotoning about the Twiga Necklace what seemed a thousand years ago, when she had been tiny and pink and lithe with freckles instead of fur.

"The necklace would supposedly punish the unworthy by forcing them to undergo a trial," the guide had said. "The worthy and the penitent could supposedly forgiven, while the wicked and unjust would, in the words of the oral tradition, remain in the form of the spirit forevermore."

Observing from a discreet distance, a museum guard nodded. "Got another one," he sighed. "Well, let's see if this one fares any better than the others."