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The morning is proceeding as normal, and he's just about to head out for work, when it becomes apparent that their daughter hasn't come home from the party last night.

Events then follow a predictable path in which they call all her friends, or at least the ones whose numbers they know and who are there, trying to find out where she is. The ones they can reach swear that they definitely saw her at the party, so she made it all the way there, but it sounds like it was a drawn-out affair and none of them stayed all the way to the end.

In the background, muted, the morning news scrolls past on the TV as the events of the day so far, which isn't much, are narrated by a pretty blonde talking head from teleprompter. "...and now in local news, there was a very minor blackout in some areas of the central city last night, but power was soon restored. Officials are questioning whether...."

They manage to get the address of the frat house where the party was supposed to be happening, and he phones in to work to let them know he'll be a little late today. He was dressed up and ready anyhow, so it's not a stretch to pull out the truck and go in search of a direct answer.

Finding the frat house isn't too hard. It looks deceptively like a normal suburban home, low wood timber bungalow and past its prime, except for a poorly-maintained lawn and more trash empties than you'd normally see lying around. Predictably, there's a half-filled inflatable swimming pool in the front, which probably started out with beers and ice and is now tepid water of questionable cleanliness. Deciding on the direct approach, he steps up onto the decking and knocks.

He keeps on knocking, patiently, but progressively harder and louder, until the door rattles in its frame and he becomes impossible to ignore.

"Oh, hey dude...."

"Hi. What's your name?"

"Oh, um, ah... Chad. Yeah, I'm called Chad."

"Hello Chad. I would like to know something. What happened to my daughter?"

"Tall, middle-eastern jackal, kind of lean and curvy? Looks kind of like you, only... um, kind of the opposite build?"

"I see you've met her."

"Uh... I'm afraid she lost a bet and has to spend some time as a table."

~*~

'Chad' which he doubts is his real name, he looks more like a 'Jake' or something, leads through the wreckage of the party and shows him to a area with several dingy leather couches scattered wide around an excessively large flat-screen. Atop a ratty stained carpet, in the middle of the open space is an incongruously elegant low coffee table, now scattered with discarded bottles and cans and featuring rings of dried beer that haven't quite fully congealed.

A game is on, someone passing to a wide receiver in muted silence, in honor of hangovers being nursed by the brothers of the fraternity following last night's party. Blown-up pixels resolve, only at couch distance, to armored white pads jogging across a field of neon-green grass, propelled on a journey into enemy territory by a muscle-bound black jaguar.

It takes some time for it to sink in, but once it has, yeah, there's no doubt it's her, in some undefinable way that's difficult to explain. The table has smooth slender legs that bow outward at the corners, narrowing as they descend for the curve to turn inward again, ending in decorative paws at the corners to hold things up. Currently the reflected light of football is playing off the sleek and smoothly polished curves, but that's definitely her. Around the base of each leg, around the 'ankle' if you prefer, is a crisp enameled white cylinder approximately the size of a napkin-ring with a raised and rounded edge decorated in slightly worn gilt-leaf, just like the sort of bracelets she's fond of wearing on arms and ankles.

Clinching it is that one leg has a slender tail curved spiraling down it, like an artists conceit, even down to the little scrape and groove marks where someone would have chiseled it out of a larger piece of wood, and there's a deep gash on the adjoining leg which has been filled in expertly with some other substance and polished down to match, visible only because the fill is slightly darker and has fractured at the surface just a little over the years. Yes, that'd be the scar on her left arm, where she fell and cut herself on a broken glass as a child.

He stoops down to confirm, since that seems like what you'd do. At this level the reek of beer and used smoke is even worse. Although it's hard to tell due to all the bottles and cans, the top of the flat surface has vaguely muscular pattern, as though the tones of the natural grain just happened to resemble her back, and underneath where no-one would normally be looking there are a set of six symmetrically arranged brass nubbins, providing support for the superstructure. The rims at the edges on the longer sides have a faintly ribbed appearance, in and out like scalloping, whereas the rims on the shorter sides have the same number of irregularities packed into a smaller space, darker and coiled like her hair. In the very center of the underside there's a small dangling brass ring that has no functional purpose, but reminds him of the argument they had over her pierced bellybutton, which she knew full well was a fait-accompli when she'd already done it.

"How?" he demands of Chad or whatever the hell his name is. He starts to reach toward the guys collar, with intent to lift. This kid may be younger, but he's older and bigger.

'Chad' sees the look cross his eyes. "Physics department, man," he explains hastily, unconsciously moving back just a little out of reach and trying to pass the buck. "See, this guy owed us and when he couldn't talk his sister into coming to party, he gave us one of the gadgets he'd been working on instead. It turns stuff into other stuff, only temporarily, but that's all you need. Like, cheap beer can get turned into awesome beer, as long as you still have a bottle of the good stuff. Won't matter if it goes back to being cheap once you're using the head, am I right?"

Following the direction of the frat boy's panicked glances shows the gadget in question, sitting on a proper kitchen table nearby, with scorch marks. It appears to have shorted out, caught fire, and then had half-a-can of whatever was handy poured on it to put it out, following its misuse.

"It got late, and we were playing beer pong, and we decided to use it for a bet, and she totally lost, and we were trying to decide what we should turn her into, but she'd had a few and she pressed the power button and she was still holding the table so she wouldn't fall over and well..."

"You know, 'Chad', after this is sorted out we are going to have a little talk."

"It wasn't my fault! There was a power surge or something!"

"But first, you are going to help me carry my daughter out to the truck."

~*~

After carefully removing all the bottles and cans, and a mini-pizza box covered in greasy stains of cheese, he performs a rough inspection for any obvious damage and finds none, much to the relief of the frat boy, then they ever-so-cautiously lift her out to the truck.

The table is surprisingly heavy, for its size, and he suspects intuitively but based on no particular evidence that it probably approximates her weight and support strength as much as it is possible to do so, whilst being a table. The thought of her kneeling there supporting cans and beer-bottles and pizza is one that irritates him slightly. They should at least get her home and cleaned up.

After several perilous encounters with doorways and lifting her high to clear other low furniture, they carefully position her in the flatbed. It's fortunate he bought the truck; there are those heavy woven straps intended to fasten a load down so it won't slide about.

It's just lucky that they didn't change her into one of those tall free-standing lamps or something. Driving her home as an art-deco topless sylph would be awkward, not least for her reputation at school. At least as a table, she has a low profile and it won't go too much remarked.

When he gets her home, it takes a certain amount of explaining but his wife, like him, knows that it's her the instant she sees her, as though by some instinctive recognition. They unload her, carry her to the bathroom, where his wife takes charge of the cleanup, and gently begin to wipe away all the rings of congealed beverages and bottle-marks that mar her surface.

Some of the creamier, thicker stains on the short edge turn out not to be beer, and she resolves to have a word with her daughter about what she gets up to at parties, once she's back to normal.

Until then, they put her in the spare guest-room, where it's quiet. It's the sort of room you'd want to wake up in after getting trashed at a party, clean, fresh, lots of white linen and soft duvets, and a thick woolen rug on the floor that muffles footsteps. It's not entirely clear what effect impacts in her tabled state might have in the long run, but accidents happen, so best to be safe.

Calling up the school and explaining that their daughter may not be in for some time, because she lost a bet and is now a table, proves considerably harder without the proof of seeing it with your own two eyes. Some of the teachers are not exactly up-to-date with events, preferring to imagine that it is still whatever year their own youth occurred in, and so they're not really au fait with the very latest technologies. In the end his wife agrees to let a female vice-principal visit them and see for herself what is going on, like letting social services see the bruises, a showing to make it clear that this is not just some act of confabulation while he finally heads off to work.

He resolves not to tell any of his co-workers what happened. He'll brush it under the rug as just a minor family emergency, his daughter staying out too late at a party, and let their imaginations fill out the rest with the predictable arguments of mother and child that happen when your daughter is not a table. She'll swing back to normal eventually.

~*~

After the first few weeks, after it gets a bit lonely at the dinner table, and they end up having an unofficial meal in the spare room, kneeling either side of her for the sake of companionship, they check with specialists, but the official opinion is the same. One of the best, Schlemowitz, provides a surprisingly concise summary of how it all works.

"You might have seen mimics on TV. You know, those things that disguise themselves as furniture and hide in old buildings and ruins, waiting for someone to touch them? They're not actually from this planet, they're higher-dimensional ambush predators that sometimes survive the fall, making themselves into a rock to withstand the impact. They like older buildings because they're still and unchanging over long periods of time, dry air that doesn't move much, and so on. In the open they don't last too long before someone panics and hits them with a wrench.

"They researched some a while back and found out how they did it, but it doesn't work as well for bigger and more complex organisms. Instead of being any box or lamp or coffee cup, we can only be something similar to us, by some indefinable quantum criterion of identity. You've maybe seen a car or phone and thought 'yes, that's very me' or 'yes, that's exactly her'? Same principle. It's the lowest-energy solution, but it still takes up a lot of power, and that means it doesn't wear off for a while. When it finally runs out she'll snap instantly back to being herself, but it'll probably be, oh, two or three weeks at least, maybe even a couple of months. They're new at this, it's not an exact science. There hasn't been time yet to establish a proper baseline."

Schlemowitz knows what he's talking about, but even so, it's nearly three full months, an entire business quarter, before they hear her voice one morning and rush down to hug her and check if she's okay. It seems that she woke up on the rug sometime during the night, was understandably confused and disoriented because it was earlier rather than later, crawled into bed and slept it off. Explaining that she's been a table for three months is less awkward than it might have been, since they've had a lot of practice and know exactly what words to use, but still has an impact.

After all, she's missed three months of classes (probably not a big deal) but also three months of gossip and her friends and her favorite shows (very much big deal). And there was probably also a boyfriend, who is probably not her boyfriend anymore after all this time and with someone else, although she's a little evasive on this point and he never came looking.

She's very interested in what she looked like when she was a table, whether an innocent interest or a troubling concern with the integrity of her own body, during a time she can't remember. They have some photos, taken for coverage purposes, so they show her what she looked like, and she seems fascinated by the resemblance between the table and herself, as though it were some kind of weird avant-garde self-portrait, 'suburban daughter as a coffee table.' She takes one and insists on putting it in her purse, next to her phone (monthly subscription expired) and a low-limit credit card they gave her for emergencies (well, at least that's still good).

In the end, they don't stop her from going to the next party, simply because it seems like it would do her good to get back on the social scene and, really, what are the odds that your daughter could get turned into a coffee table twice? The equipment that did it got burnt up, and local government at its most granular has pushed through a few minor repairs to the aging power infrastructure, so it seems extremely unlikely that the whole thing could repeat itself.

But word trickles back eventually that she has developed an odd new habit, at least in situations where family isn't about, in which instead of working the party, and drinking, and getting into the usual trouble you'd expect of a teenage girl, she finds far more satisfaction in pausing herself still in the center of a busy environment with plenty of foot traffic, and encouraging people to put stuff on top of her, like drinks and snacks, or use her as their footrest. It's become her party trick, with reports she's been experimenting with her new boyfriend at being his living furniture, and getting into a rather unusual scene with other people who share similar interests.

Eventually his wife is obliged to sit her down and have a bit of a chat with her about it.

"I wish you'd stop letting them objectify you like this," she begins.