A rain drop struck John’s face as he looked at the wide shallows. The others were taking a break and he’d had the most energy and so went ahead to scout further. That and he really just needed to be alone. The air was heavy with that damp smell of impending rain and the dark clouds rolling in on the cold wind did more than suggest at rain coming.
The storm looked like it would be a big one too. Right now he’d normally try to see if his friends, particularly Lu, wanted to hole up in one of their apartments and binge watch movies or play games. That or he’d spend some time going through reports or reading the latest on Emotional Intelligence as a Tool for Increased Employee Productivity and Retention or something similar.
He didn’t want to be with his friends at the moment. Especially Lu. It hurt that they accepted the changes so readily. Lu was even calling herself a man and didn’t seem too bothered! Plus she hadn’t even tried to help when he was being assaulted. Assaulted. He didn’t want the weird ‘Kid’ to die or anything, but he couldn’t just forgive her trying to undress him like that.
At the very first it had been so surreal and he’d got a tiny bit of a thrill from fondling such perfect breasts. The novelty turned out to be short lived as he realized what the changes meant. This wasn’t his body. He looked down at a still patch of water where a little pool had formed from something digging. The reflection was difficult to make out, but it did sort of look like his sister. About her age too.
It was not the same though. Somehow he was looking at like, the most perfect fantasy version of what his sister looked like. That and he had a very bad relationship with her. She’d always taken Mom and Dad’s side and called him a ‘pussy’ for going to therapy, getting a legal estrangement. He hadn’t spoken to his parents in more than a decade and even so they still sent his sister to harass him now and then.
He wouldn’t have minded having a relationship with his sister, it wasn’t her fault that they’d treated him that way, taken the side of his tormentors. Even after being patient, trying to get her to join him in therapy sessions, she just dug in deeper against him. Now he had her face, filtered through the lens of someone’s male fantasies.
It hurt. It hurt that Lu seemed almost as interested in playing around with their new body parts as she was with his emotional distress. John blamed Kid, the so-called godling. Why wasn’t everyone mad at her? She said she’d Summoned them. It was her fault! This was her fault too!
The little pool rippled from the tears dropping into it and John wiped his face with a bare arm. It was weird. He was smaller, yes. A little less ‘cut’ for sure. He felt… stronger though. The muscles in his arm felt almost like stone they were so hard. Lifting Alan onto the gurney and pulling him hand been downright easy. It might even have been faster to just tie his friend onto his back if not for the fact that John was like 5’ 7” now and Alan was at least the same 6’ or so, if not a little taller.
Plus Alan was pretty busted up. That worried John, the fight was goddamned terrifying and while he was afraid of some other elf monster soldier showing up, he was currently more worried about Alan even waking up at all.
Ugh, whatever it was about this body, strength or not, he was too warm all the time. The exertion of pulling Alan on the gurney had left him sweating and even now the cold air felt blessedly good on his sweaty skin, exposed except for the sports-bra. What the fuck was up with the clothing too? It’s like someone had picked up high end ‘workout’ sweats but with no imagination for color or style. Yeah, they were comfortable and at least there were undergarments to go with them, most importantly being boy-short style and not a thong, as was a plainly far too common choice by women at the gym.
John noted one thing though that he didn’t hate so far… the colors. That was one of those funny things that HR and Marketing often joked about, that if you had a guy design the marketing materials, it looked too plain. The women used colors the men didn’t see. Not that having the extra cone or cones in your eyes was truly exclusive to women, but John was clearly in the semi-color blind corner because… wow.
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It also helped that while he and Alan had sprung to get the laser eye surgery and ditch glasses except for reading, his vision was perfect now. Better than perfect! The shoot of a sapling pushing it’s way up through the soil in the forest sprung out with incredible detail. He could see the variation of color where it emerged into the light, the texture of the surface, smooth except for a single slight bulge where a branch would bud out from.
The soil itself was incredible to look at and through too. John pulled back the spongey layers with his hands, ignoring the feminine shape of them and the nearly hairless arms, focusing instead of the diversity of life within it. Alan claimed not to be a big nature nerd like his parent’s had been, but the way the guy casually talked about the soil strata, mike-o-whatever fungus, the beetles, worms, bacteria… the guy wouldn’t even kill earwigs or spiders if he could avoid it.
John could see some of the wonder that plain old soil held now though, details popping out he’d never noticed before. The thin white strands of the fungus ran throughout like some crazy network of spider silk. The fungus seems to particularly concentrate at roots or where something wasn’t fully decomposed. Beetles scurried by the dozens in just this small hole and worms frantically wiggled their way back out of the light.
There were sprouts too… so much life in such a small patch. It was truly wondrous and John couldn’t fathom why it had seemed so… like dirt, before. Thinking back on just before, he’d noticed a lot of things that would normally have passed him by unless he was trying.
‘Actively Observing’ was a term he’d often heard assigned to the skill an HR manager, as least a good one, needed to have when dealing with someone. You needed to capture the details. How a person did their hair on a good day, versus a bad day. What was their normal skin color? Were they ill? Low blood sugar? Had they been staying indoors all the time and not going outside?
Beyond that, what was their micro-expressions, particularly when talking about other employees and managers? Projects? Clients? He’d once caught on that a client was sexually harassing an inside salesperson due to noticing the small eye twitch that occurred whenever the client or the project was mentioned. When he’d asked her about it, she’d practically broken down with fear the company would fire her, but it was tearing her up inside.
Those sorts of moments made his job so worthwhile. Those same skills made it easy for him to get dates with attractive women too, they were easy to observe and manipulate. It made him feel powerful, even if he never had sex with them, except the one. It had felt so wrong. She’d practically ripped his pants off and yet… he’d been manipulating her on purpose, cold, calculating. You couldn’t argue she hadn’t consented and it didn’t matter, he felt horrible.
It also helped with the breakups. He was good and making them want to split and thinking it was their idea, ‘letting him down easy’. It was a lot easier than being honest with them, that he was acting out revenge against a group of women that they subconsciously represented. As soon as they became individuals, when he got to know them, it stopped feeling good.
Alan had done his thing that Alan was so good at doing without realizing it, in just the few days they’d been here. He’d opened the door to being totally honest and made it seem safe. If the man could do that on purpose he’d probably have made a great therapist. It was part of why Alan was Johns best friend, though he’d hid that from Alan. John always felt safe with Alan, even safer than he felt with Lu… and he loved Lu.
Even if she was being insensitive all of a sudden, he still loved her. They’d suddenly connected in a much deeper way than ever before and now he just wasn’t sure they could actually be together. Not unless they could change back. What if Lu didn’t want to change back? What if John went back and she stayed as a man?
What if she wanted to be together like this?
He picked up a rotting stick and threw it off into the river, watching it barely reach the water despite him being up at the top of the steep bank, the air easily slowing the spongey remains of some fallen branch. The rain was starting to fall light and steady now, reminding him of his original purpose for being here.
Quickly sliding down the bank and jogging along the shallows, it looked possible to cross, though it would be slippery. The deeper part of the river was maybe a hundred feet across, but this was easily three or four hundred. Would the rain bring with it an increase in water too? The storm was passing from to the side of where the river seemed to go, but if the flow increased they may all be swept along.
The three unconscious members of their group would drown if that happened. Either they were going to cross now and risk it, search further upstream for a bridge, or wait it out until the rain stopped and the flow was stable. Not a decision he could make alone.
John climbed up the bank to the less slippery and flatter ground in the forest and started jogging back to his friends.