Aaron Tube Guy
One fine morning, a man in a cap emblazoned with a drawing of a cannabis leaf adjusts the name tag spelling the name Aaron that is fastened his chest. Aaron opens the door to his cannabis shop, sits behind his shop counter, and begins to wait for his customers as usual. But the typical morning rush of people isn’t there. As the hour wears on, Aaron begins to wonder why his shop is so slow, and he notices a group of friends walking in front of his store carrying a bunch of cannabis products.
“This new store is really good!” comments one of the guys, and his friend walking beside him nods his head in agreement. “We'll definitely be back more often!”
In disbelief, Aaron decides to find out where those products are coming from. As he steps out of his store and looks down the street in the direction the men came from, Aaron notices a new cannabis store with an incredibly flashy facade. Crowds of people are clustered outside the new store, and Aaron recognizes several of his most reliable and longstanding customers in the line.
Aaron leaves his store and storms down the street toward the competing store. He pushes his way in through the door and looks around, stunned, at how full it is of people looking at the products and being served. Even on his best days, his store never turned such business!
An attendant taps Aaron on the shoulder and holds out a tray of cannabis treats. "Hello!" he says, smiling. “Would you like a free sample?” Still reeling from the flashy marketing of the store and the amount of people inside, Aaron turns away from the clerk without a word and shoves through the crowd and out the front door.
Throughout that day, Aaron continues to see people walk past his store toward the competing store at the end of the street. After a few hours pass with not a single sale, Aaron finally freaks out and runs out of his shop onto the sidewalk. He raises his hands in the air and starts yelling, "Hey, there's a cannabis shop here too!" People ignore Aaron and continue walking towards the store at the end of the street. The more people ignore him, the more impatient and furious Aaron gets, until he finally starts to wave his hands faster and faster. “Can't you guys see me?! Heeey!”
A man passing Aaron’s shop on his way toward the shop at the end of the street stops and looks at the yelping man. “Oh, there is a cannabis store here,” he says, smiling at Aaron.
Aaron sighs in relief. “Finally!”
The man glances at Aaron’s shop. “Wow, I barely realized there was a cannabis shop here. My attention was completely on that magnificent shop down the street.”
Aaron nods in begrudging agreement. “I have to admit, that store knows how to capture the attention of customers.”
Still staring down the street at the crowd and glittering lights, the man says distractedly, “Well... good luck with your business” and wanders on to the other cannabis shop.
Aaron stands there for a moment, perplexed by what he just witnessed. After finally forcing himself to accept the fact that his effort to attract attention was useless, Aaron turns towards his shop and walks to the door, mumbling with anger. He lets out an “oomf!” when he accidentally trips over an object.
Aaron looks back at what tripped him and sees some sort of red oil lamp, wreathed in a light layer of a strange Red Mist. Curious, he bends down and picks up the lamp. The moment his fingers curl around the lamp, Aaron becomes enchanted, and he walks into his shop through the door, admiring the beautiful object in his hands.
Aaron closes the door of his shop, puts the lamp on top of the counter, and lights a joint to try to relax from his anger. He breathes in for a long moment, enjoying the sudden lightness and headiness of the marijuana’s high, and slumps down into the chair behind the counter. Still entranced by the lamp, Aaron feels strangely compelled to rub it. He reaches out and runs a finger down its side, and it immediately starts to tremble and glow. Aaron’s jaw drops as the lamp begins to rise into the air and Red Mist begins to waft from its spout.
Aaron drops his joint on the counter and begins to back away from the counter, scared and unable to accept what’s happening in front of him. But the trickle of Red Mist emanating from the lamp suddenly turns to a deluge, pouring out and condensing into the whirling form of a tornado, which begins to pool into a cloud near the ceiling. Aaron rubs his eyes in disbelief at what he is witnessing.
Then, from within the cloud appears a smiling man, who says, “Hello! I am Krynshar!”
Frightened, Aaron presses himself against the shelf behind the counter and stammers, "K-Krynshar?"
Krynshar leans towards Aaron and then points with one hand towards the oil lamp "Yes, the magical genie of that beautiful lamp over there.”
Aaron stares at the lamp, then he looks back at Krynshar and asks, "Do magical g-genies exist?”
Krynshar smiles, glances toward the joint smoldering on the counter, and replies with an ironic tone, “Yes! Or otherwise, you should start cutting back on marijuana.”
His heartrate beginning to calm, Aaron steps away from the shelf. "So I have 3 wishes?"
Krynshar leans back and shakes his head. "Only one."
“Can I wish I had more desires?” Aaron asks curiously.
"No,” replies Krynshar.
“Can I wish I was a billionaire?”
Krynshar raises an eyebrow. “Neither that."
Aaron leans forward eagerly. “Can I wish I was immortal?”
“Definitely not,” replied Krynshar.
Disappointed, Aaron raises his hands and asks in a complaining tone, "So what can I wish for?!"
Krynshar folds his arms. "I grant wishes based on the strongest feeling a person felt during the moment they invoked me." The genie leans towards Aaron and a wide smile spreads across his face. "Anger!"
Aaron’s eyes widen in confusion. “A-anger?!”
Krynshar backs away, spins in the air, and says, "Tell me, why were you so angry?"
Aaron rolls his eyes and replies, "I was trying to get people's attention, but everyone was ignoring me to go to the competitor store that just opened."
Krynshar nods his head. "Your wish should be what you were most wishing for at that moment. Make your wish by beginning the sentence with the words 'I wish' and I will grant it immediately."
Aaron, impatient with all that talk, decides to get on with it quickly. "I wish it was easy to draw people's attention to me!"
Krynshar smiles evilly, his eyes begin to glow red, and then he says in a demonic voice, "I like your choice of words." The Red Mist of the cloud below Krynshar begins to expand.
Aaron starts to scramble backward, away from the genie, until his back is pressed against the shelf of the room and he continues to watch in mounting horror. As the Red Mist continues to build around him and trickle toward the edges of the room, Aaron’s fear increases, and he finds himself trembling.
"Why are you so scary like that?" he demands to know, but the fear in his voice is obvious.
Krynshar hovers in front of Aaron, looks him up and down, and breathes in deeply, seeming to savor Aaron’s fear while the Red Mist around him continues to thicken and densify. With a menacing smile on his face, Krynshar replies "What? I'll just grant your wish.” Then the Red Mist expands abruptly throughout the room.
With that, Aaron feels his feet leave the ground as he is raised into the air. He tries to thrash in horror, only to find that his suspended body is immobilized. Aaron feels the sensation of air suddenly begin to drift across his skin as his clothes start to turn into mist and evaporate. He’s soon left floating in mid-air, completely naked… except for his cap.
Aaron lets out a sudden groan as his head is filled with a strange sensation almost like air pressure – the more the pressure builds, the more his head begins to increase in size, swelling up on top of his neck until Aaron knows like he must look like a ridiculous bobblehead floating in the air. But the degradation doesn’t stop there: in horror, Aaron feels his hands retract into his arms, leaving his arms as nothing but useless tubes flopping at his sides. Like with his hands, his feet begin to retract into his legs, and Aaron groans as he feels his shapely legs widen and lose their definition until they’re nothing but ridiculous tubes dangling below his torso.
The changes progress from Aaron’s limbs inward toward his torso. His belly begins to thin, and his chest and belly become cylindrical, mimicking his tubular limbs. Not understanding what’s happening, Aaron attempts to move one of his arms in front of his face to see the changes, but when he’s unable to bend his elbow, the realization hits him that his arm is limp and very flexible. At not just his arm – both arms, and both legs, too, have become completely useless. The air around Aaron seems to thicken, compressing his chest and head until they become thinner and more cylindrical too. He finds himself completely unable to control his bizarrely warped body now.
As the transformations wracking Aaron’s body begin to slow, he notices that the red eyes – which were all Aaron could see besides the mist and his own weirdly altered limbs – seem to be growing larger and larger. Aaron watches in silent horror as they swell before him, and suddenly he finds himself falling lightly to the ground, where he lies, fully immobile, with his floppy limbs twisted awkwardly beneath him.
The Red Mist finally begins to dissipate, and Aaron sees the cannabis-filled room around him swim back into view. His heart thuds heavily in his chest as genie appears in front of him and Aaron realizes that the strange genie isn’t larger – it was in fact Aaron who shrunk.
Krynshar walks toward Aaron and bends down to pick him up. Lifted in the strange genie’s hand, Aaron feels the genie’s gaze wander over his altered body, and Krynshar gives a dark smile. Then the genie snaps his fingers, and a kind of small box appears in his hand amidst the Red Mist.
“I really liked your cap,” he tells the transformed and humiliated man in his hands as he fits Aaron’s legs into the small box and he puts Aaron gently on the counter.
Krynshar pulls back a little and smiles as he admires Aaron.
He leans forward to press a little button on small box that holds Aaron's feet, and Aaron’s eyes go wide as he feels the strange sensation of air begin to fill his body. The air trickles up through his feet and into his cylindrical torso and then into each of his floppy, hollow limbs, which begin to inflate and dance and sway.
Aaron can’t seem to understand why or how his body suddenly starts to move, or what the strange mechanical sound was that was coming from directly below him. Seeming to understand this, Krynshar grins, snaps his fingers and amidst the Red Mist emanating from his hand, a mirror appears. He places the mirror in front of Aaron.
The realization hits Aaron with a rush of horror, disbelief, and shame: he has somehow been transformed into a wacky, wavy, inflatable tube mini-man. And that isn’t all: he’s completely naked and exposed too! His cock is thrashing wildly around his body, being jolted by the wind machine attached to the base of his legs. Aaron wants to scream in terror, but he can’t do anything except move his eyes frantically and blink.
The genie begins to laugh as he watches Aaron. “Look at you, so ridiculous. But rocking your body like that, you're definitely going to get attention. I know, I know – you wish you could wish your first wish undone. But I said you only had one wish. This is your destiny now, forever. You should have been more careful what you wish for.”