Everyone, please welcome Penny to the stage! Pause for applause...So, you've wanted to try yoga, flexibility, strength, oneness with the universe, all that?"
"Sure...who couldn't use a bit more flexibility in their life? It's just...intimidating, maybe?" Penny tried to hide her smirk.
"Well, I think we can grant your wish tonight. If you could just hop up onto this table," he said, motioning to the apparatus behind him. There was a large steel table, about seven feet by four feet, perhaps two inches thick. As Penny approached, before turning away to push herself up, she saw there was another steel table behind the first, slightly shorter but otherwise identical aside from a small open oval near the top. Both were attached to an odd collection of metal arms and joints, and there was an outline of a spread-eagled body stenciled onto the table she was sitting on. "Great, now lie back, arms up, feet apart...is it ok if I remove your shoes?" Penny nodded and the magician slipped them off, setting them on the floor nearby, while she flexed her toes a bit. The magician eyed her position critically. "Scooch this way a bit?" Penny complied, and Miles moved around to the other end of the table. "Now raise your hands a bit further," he instructed, guiding her wrists while watching. "There, perfect. Just one more thing..."
He moved away from the table to approach a vertical frame and rotated it, showing the "audience" that it held a large piece of white paper, held taut at the corners. At the base of the frame was an odd apparatus, a low rectangular box with a couple of wide open tubes that curved upward from each end. The magician rose to his toes to reach over the top of the frame and withdrew a japanese sword. He crossed in front of the table again, then faced the garage doors.
"Kids, never run with scissors. 17th century authentic samurai swords are fine though, pause briefly for laughter, then" he interrupted his own stage direction to yell and rush at the paper, sword held high, slashing downward in a complicated curve as he leaped through the frame. He turned the frame again, and Penny and the "audience" could see that a perfect outline of her position on the table had been cut out of the paper. "Pause for mild applause and laughter..." Miles unclipped the paper from the frame and then carefully laid it over Penny, and indeed it settled right down onto the table underneath her, barely brushing her where it passed.
"So, Penny," he said, leaning over the end of the table close to her head, "Have you ever seen a magician do an illusion called 'Origami'?" Yes, Penny thought, from the inside, too, but shook her head 'no'. "Well, the assistant gets in a box, and then there's a few folding panels, but the core of it isn't really origami, it's just squishing a girl in a box into a smaller box. There's usually a bunch of dancing and some swords and other filler, but I thought of a way to make it more authentic, and the squishing part could go much faster."
At the word "much", he straightened, and pressed a button underneath the table. The hydraulic arms underneath heaved convulsively and the other table rotated up and over with alarming speed. Before she even really saw it coming, it slammed down onto Penny with incredible force, smashing her flat instantly between the solid steel plates. Or almost flat...about two inches of her fingertips and toes were past the edges of the second panel, as well as her face. But the latter only protruded an inch or so from the open oval in the second table, as the rest of her head had been flattened along with the remainder of her body.
"Brief pause for shock, Penny, are you still with us?" he asked casually, again holding his imaginary microphone near her face.