Shifting the Sci-Fi Guy
[10]
That statement contained plenty of ambiguity, but I still understood what it meant. We had caught the writer of that parchment, the one who made the switch, and transformed all of us.
She wasn’t quite what I was expecting. Not at all grandiose or nefarious, at least. Her brown hair framed her head and barely reached for her shoulders. The top she wore was loose but still showed a chest that nearly challenged mine as she flailed for the towel rack to lift herself up. Connor crossed over and snatched the flashlight from underneath the sink. The girl gave a quick gasp and then quietly sighed before sliding down on the tile. Her hands rested in her lap, atop her gray shorts.
“Please be very careful with that…” The girl squeaked and held her hands in front of her face. Connor turned the flashlight around a few different ways, showed it to me, and then asked this Beverly, “What is it?“
She slowly reached into her shorts pocket and extracted a tightly folded paper pamphlet which reminded me of the kind they packed in with watches. Beverly held it out to Connor, but I was the one who snagged it, using the broom in case she tried to grab at me. I then passed it over to him. The suspicious girl lay there and glared at us.
Connor carefully read and announced from the pamphlet, “This flashlight is the property of the Quantum Helix Corporation. Not intended for sale. Experimental model. This device alters the sex and related characteristics of anyone… And anything covered by its light. The settings allow for blue and pink variations. Blue pass through spectrum makes the target more masculine or male and pink emphasizes and creates feminine or female traits. The intensity of the filtered beam determines the strength of the effect. Advanced settings. Flashlight duplication. By default, only the user/wielder of the device will notice anything has changed. Hmmm. Ahhh…Cloak user… so that’s how you did it.”
The girl on the floor looked positively dejected. “I can’t believe someone found out the same day. I really do find both of you adorable. And I spent a good amount of time on that poem. Still a little off at the end.”
I had no idea what to say. So much hit me. Connor was holding some sort of sci-fi experimental device from a corporation I had never heard of. It could make light that transformed people. And clearly the pink, girly version had not only been used on us but across the entire campus.
An absolute flood of questions and unknowns wanted to spill out of my head and rush through my mouth. What rose to the top of the heap though was a very simple one: “Why?”
This girl winced with her back against the hard wall and gave a sigh as she relayed, “It’s fun. I have seen so much, and no one‘s seen me until now. Beatrice was cute and is getting even cuter. Your guitar buddy in the pool game even added an unexpected wrinkle to things. I truly considered keeping it confined to just the four of you. Do a slow burn and watch the results. But it’s so addictive to see everything change. All those different reactions, all those wild possibilities. And it all started with me.”
——
It was his day off from classes at Cressman University, so he wound up strolling through the mall over by the freeway. He enjoyed taking the bus from the north campus transit center to get here. Very cheap for a round-trip. The new fancy, outdoor section with its California cliché offerings didn’t appeal to him. The old-school mall section was where it was at. And that part was better than the one in his hometown which lost all the department stores on the west side. These shops were flourishing. He had idle fantasies about abandoned stores, magnets for spooks, and other supernatural things. It might be nice to have an experience beyond explanation.
But he was just going for a walk with no other serious expectations. The air conditioner was still pumping although fall was in full swing with the new semester.
The food court was surprisingly appealing but quite busy at this hour. He took the curve around the far side of this end of the mall. The comic book store showed promise, but he had his eyes set on the gaming shop just around the loop. Surprisingly quiet. No one really took this route anymore because there were easier ways, but it was a nice walk. Nothing interesting to run into over here… Or so he thought.
Tucked away behind a larger store with a slim profile and black drapes spread across the windows which made it look shuttered was one of those tiny shops like the ones full of Asian trinkets on the better end of the mall. A simple paper sign, affixed behind the glass with meager pieces of tape advertised a “Magic Store”. He chuckled but slowed and approached it out of idle curiosity. Worth checking out, at least.
The interior was narrow and strikingly claustrophobic. Shelves just below his eye line were crudely packed to spilling with random products, from laundry soap to stress balls. Some were coated in a noticeable layer of dust, as though they hadn’t been touched in ages. That doesn’t make any sense to him. The weak yellow lights above flickered. Crude, hand-painted signs point to broad categories like “essentials“ and “entertainment” but didn’t provide any further clarity. Scanning the store, his eyes landed on a particularly curious object.
It’s a small flashlight, smaller than most of the ones his family kept at home. It looked more like the kind of thing you would put on the end of his keychain. The shell of the light was candy-striped by a tangle of pink and blue. The portion at the top was a vivid shade of purple. A small instruction pamphlet dangled, connected by a tiny bit of plastic.
As he read with incredulity, not recognizing the corporation named, the booklet explained that it gave off a blue or pink light depending on the settings. Frankly and without a preamble, the instructions explained the impossible abilities of this little object. The power of blue and pink light to transform and alter. So many details. So many fantastic possibilities. He had to try it!
His expectation was that this ridiculous object could be easily debunked with some minor nugget of truth. There was probably a funny filter on the end. A projection of a pink lipstick illusion and perhaps phantom breasts versus a muscleman six-pack in shades of blue. That made the most sense to him, a joke for a child. He switched the setting to pink and carefully aimed the light toward his chest.
Instantly, a warm fullness spread across his chest as he could vividly feel his nipples pushing against his shirt. Before long, his colorful, loose shirt has shifted into a contour-hugging, girl’s top. Beneath, he can feel something like an undershirt developing over his shoulders and around his back. It’s a bra. And it soon filled with rapidly developing flesh.
Nervously quivering but softly excited, he clicked the light off. The changes to his clothing and chest remain. Thinking about the instructions, he twisted the knob to the blue option and clicked it back on. Fanning the light over his breasts melts them back into his flesh. The bra dwindled into the ether, and the shirt dangled across his boyish body. Clicking the light off again, he felt about the same as when he started.
He had to get this. This was a magic freaking flashlight! The possibilities are practically endless. At the deepest section of the store, flanked by black curtains, he saw marvelous little trinkets spread everywhere but only had eyes for this flashlight. No one was at the counter, but there was an automated setup to insert a card or tap a phone to pay.
Cautiously, he scanned the item and saw a stunning price of five dollars pop up on the screen. Only five dollars? That’s all?!?
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
Swiftly, he tapped his phone against the machine and used his thumbprint to authorize it. An instant later, the sale goes through. A black plastic bag was released from a lower section, and the machine printed out a receipt. That’s all there was to it. Unimaginable power for just five bucks…
——
Beverly spread out her hands and finished her story.
“Brought it back, experimented, liked what I got, and decided to share it with the world. I’m really trying not to let all the power get to my head. The whole scroll deal was kind of theater, even though I’m not a drama student. Acolytes. Myths. And it’s got to be permanent.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “It’s not. You used it to turn back. You’re the one who forced everyone into this situation. People deserve the opportunity to choose. Some of us may be happy and fine with it, but there are broken people out there. And they need to be fixed.”
Beverly gave a little nod of her head. “I know. The light of truth will shine upon them, and I will fix them. I have big plans.”
Connor shook his head. “No. You’re not getting this back. I’m sorry, but this needs to go to administration. This needs to be fixed properly.”
She was silent for several seconds before a slow grin emerged on her face. Uh oh…
“Those weren’t the complete instructions. I am still the designated user, not you. And that affords me some advanced abilities…” She suddenly gave a sharp whistle, and the light ripped out of Connor’s grip and sailed into hers. I braced myself. She looked at me.
“I can understand your distress. Please don’t hit me again though. I might take it personally. You two really are quite cute together. I couldn’t resist watching. But I’ll grant you some privacy. Keep the switch. And keep it just between the two of you. I have to go now… Lots of classmates and countless possibilities.“
Before either of us could move away or dash closer, she clicked the light. It remained off. Beverly frowned and tapped it a few times. A strange golden shimmer, like dusty waves in the air, with rings of blue twinkling filtered from a seam. She backed away in fear. Looking over to the left, to the counter, I noticed that a wavering ring of that light was drifting out of our switch as well. As quickly as they emerged, the strange lights dissipated like smoke clearing. No weird aroma remained. It vaguely made me think of dry ice tinted by food coloring, if that was even possible.
A tense but quiet moment passed between the three of us before Beverly raised the light again, and… a gap suddenly formed in my memory. We were standing there, and yet the girl we had seen was gone. The girl. The one who left the messages. What did she look like? Glasses. Yeah, glasses. That was the only clear physical attribute I could hold onto as I thought about her. The rest was gone. Even the glasses thing felt annoyingly vague. What kind of glasses? What color was the frame? How big were they?
Other notions filled my thoughts. She had told us about a flashlight. There was a flashlight. At least that stayed with me. It came from the mall over by the freeway, from a magic shop. And… It made everyone into girls? For some reason, that was what stuck out and that felt right, but I couldn’t reconcile it with the incongruity of the switch which allowed us to change back into guys.
Connor struggled just as much, resolving that this interloper to our bathroom definitely wore shorts even though nothing else quite resolved physically. At least she had left Connor as a man, with the switch in the same position. Something strange happened with the switch. I could readily remember that. Dry ice? It didn’t feel cold though. My brain was exhausted just bundling together those frail fragments. We swung around the broom a few more times, but this mystery individual had either gotten wise to that method or left. I looked at Connor.
He lingered on me. The third time we’d been so rudely interrupted. No more. I crouched before him and attended to his pants. My lips felt dry, and my throat felt tense. No way on earth did I have a chance of figuring out a sexy way of handling this. Riona made it look so easy. How? She just hoovered me off.
First step first, I firmly slipped a hand around it. Plenty of self-grasping under my belt, but the otherness felt disconcerting. The most peculiar point of context for me involved thinking about what to compare this to. Up north, when we were kids, the schools would quite often have a farm field trip. The big moment of every trip was when they allowed you to milk the cows. Call me weird, but that part in particular is where my brain went. The grasping and massaging of cow teats compared to running my hands down my best friend’s shaft. Fundamentally, as far from one another as you could possibly get, and yet my thought process went there.
The differences swiftly compounded as he stiffened between my fingers. I was turning him on. At least, I hoped so. So many things rushed and lingered through my thoughts with confusion and uncertainty. The craziness of the last few minutes wasn’t going away, but it felt like the best thing I could do with the time we had was share it with one another.
I quickened my tempo. Connor was unmistakably enjoying this. But was I maximizing the act? Such a typically me thought to have. Beyond questioning my sexual identity, knowing that some mysterious faceless person was watching and tilting our fates, and the larger uncertainty of things and ideas I could barely scratch at, I had to analyze the quality of my hand jobbery. I made sure it was focused and insistent as I shed clothing.
Despite my misgivings about releasing my body from this bra and whatever chaos might follow, along with figuring out how to put everything back in place, I undid the snap and let the girls move freely. It was wild. Seeing their shape and shades beneath cloth was one thing, but the immense, puffy nipples that were a part of my body atop soft, faintly yielding flesh made me reel like I was being spun in the depths of a washing machine cycle. To balance, I clung to Connor and replaced my fingers with a cozy valley of titflesh. Plenty to spare for the task.
It was trippy and actually not as weird to handle him like this. Like getting part of myself playfully stuck in another even though it wasn’t mine. I could go further still. Truly connect. But we needed to use the things that we specifically borrowed. Right?
Connor asked me to marry him or her or however it turned out. We just shared with each other. We didn’t go on crazy benders or wander in a crowd. Just two dorky lifelong friends. I slid his crazy, warm self away from my chest and positioned myself practically on top of him. The threshold. The final frontier. Somehow, I resisted giggling from the notion.
He looked concerned and glanced over at the colorful assortment of things we probably should’ve used. But he asked me to marry him.
My efforts at getting inescapably close weren’t stopped by flesh, emotion, surprise visitors, or sudden changes. I yielded and welcomed him. Fire, slick but consuming, like human napalm, screamed through me. Retreat should’ve been my choice, but I still advanced. No feeling in the world or life compared. Not to be achingly romantic. My mind considered too much, and my emotions were twisted. It felt amazing, and yet so uncomfortable and strange. Woozy sick, delirious, delighted heavenly transcendence. Expression failed me. It was like leaping into a Technicolor final boss while still training for the inherent mechanics. I loved it but was terrified.
“Yes,” I panted without context. Connor was already watching me attentively and doing his best to moderate this crazy combination of selves. I made it clear that I wasn’t just offering up simple pillow talk.
“Let’s…get married. I want it. I want you. F-for the rest of my life.”