Mystery Lake

[4] Pressure

“Bitch…”

It was not a word that Joel wielded easily or flippantly. He appreciated female dogs as some of the most loyal and cunning animals. Alyssa was welcome to vent and get mad. But to force him into this was not cool. Casually, Joel removed the last of her clothes and stood there stark naked.

She was skinny, with her ribs obvious below those modest breasts. On second thought, maybe she was being unkind to them. They seemed like they had the potential to fill perhaps a D-cup and definitely a C-cup. Their prominent hang displayed the same confidence she felt from her regular chest. Below, she had sprawling hips despite her skinny body, tiny butt, and no hair down there. For emphasis, she went from jiggling her new tits to sliding slender hands across the shape between her legs. Alyssa appeared dissatisfied that she wasn’t wrecked.

“You going after my man, Dunc, next?” Joel accused. Alyssa raised her dark eyebrows and nervously shot her gaze around. Duncan, who still gave the events a wide berth, looked up in surprise that he had even been invoked. He appeared as though he really wanted to look at what Joel was showing off but resisted.

Jess came over to Joel's side and offered to help her. Joel had no qualms about spending the rest of the day buck naked but welcomed her help as she led him over to the other side of the car. Alyssa drifted over and scowled, as if to suggest her clothes were totally off-limits for loaners this time.

Joel didn’t even wanna wear them anyway. Jess rummaged through her bag and came up with a pair of jeans so tight that Joel felt like they would’ve popped his balls like an overripe pimple and cracked his rod just trying to get them on. Since she didn’t have either of those now, it just felt like the fabric was giving her a pelvic exam. Not a notion she wanted to dwell on. She had no clue how Jess squeezed into them without breaking some bones. That earned some kudos.

The top, fortunately, was actually a pretty decent fit, with a ring of her skinny stomach revealed and her boobs looking pretty decent. After slipping on a pair of flip-flops that only stayed on because she tightly gripped with her toes, Joel strolled close to Barry but was still an arm's length away. Duncan and Alyssa moved over to the pier and were quietly chatting. It didn’t look like Alyssa was going to shove him in, but Joel honestly had no idea what she might do. She looked at Barry and dipped her eyes.

“I am truly so sorry, man. I fucked up and messed with bad spirit forces. Sorry you had to pay the price.” She didn’t advertise her words with a booming invocation. This was just for Barry.

Barry tilted her face a few different ways and searched her with those gorgeous green eyes. After a minute, she nodded and answered, “Thanks for taking care not to split my head open.“

Joel was glad she noticed. Carefully, she laid a hand on Barry’s shoulder. And that was that. Just because they looked like girls didn’t mean they had to act like vendetta-spewing, devious double-crossers with fake apologies and phony smiles. Jess eventually found and passed them a sizable hand mirror. They shared it to inspect themselves since taking a look at their reflections in the lake would be too risky.

Barry’s biggest surprise was seeing exactly how enormous her bust appeared, no matter how she shifted her clothes. An ever-present, hot blush colored her features. Otherwise, she marveled at her shifted face and whispered, “I look like a model…”

Joel reiterated her mention of ‘goddess’ and Barry gave a plaintive squeak evocative of, but of a different character than when he startled geek boy Barry. The poor guy twisted between awe and mortification at the social implications. He could barely get a grasp on when he seemed to look decent as an early-age-balding blonde man. Looking like a freaking sex bomb had to be spinning her with a tornado of bewildering emotions.

It wasn’t as much of a shock for Joel to see herself. She knew she looked awesome as a man. What pestered her were the faint variations. She expected a pendulous, unearthly mountain of flesh jiggling from her chest. She assumed that instead of honed muscles, she would have the voluptuous curves of one of those classic clay figures from antiquity in celebrated museums from history class. Instead, it all felt muted and insubstantial.

She wondered if the difference came from immersion in the lake versus being splashed in the face. If Alyssa had robbed her of the full possibilities of her shape, then that was another indignity. It was weird to feel the desire for more, but Joel figured if she was going to be stuck this way, then she at least wanted the same head-turning power as a woman she held as a man.

She pondered what Duncan told them. He had said that a dip in this lake was some sort of permanent ritual. But that didn’t necessarily mean that you only got one try. What if she wanted to re-roll her result, as Barry sometimes referred to with his table games? Duncan had said that there was a lot of history, folklore, and confusion when it came to the exact details of this place. Maybe he was just sugarcoating it for Barry, but that didn’t necessarily mean he was off the mark.

At the same time, Joel had no idea what would happen. Maybe a second dip turns you into some kind of animal spirit, and she’d wind up as a horny doe. A lot of myths and legends went for that kind of thing. Among her ideas for what to do, she could easily envision dropping her head, barreling towards Alyssa, and tackling her off the pier into the water.

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It was a pleasant thought, but she wasn’t going to do it. That was the kind of solution Alyssa would take. Get someone else into trouble. And then Alyssa would be the martyr, and Joel would be a total pariah.

She had to think. If all those wild feminists around college were to be believed, then Joel should’ve had some sort of mental boost from all this. The power of double X chromosomes and estrogen flooding her body should’ve naturally boosted her intelligence.

She didn’t mind that. She just barely got through classes, and they were still all prerequisites. Jess wanted him to get a focus somewhere in the sciences, but that was too heavy for him. She was going into psychology with a minor in linguistics. She always talked to him about all sorts of books she was reading on the side, and they sounded good. But he couldn’t get more than a few pages before switching over to something funny on YouTube. Jess tried to explain that his difficulty focusing actually suggested high intelligence that they didn’t really have a “metric” for, but he suspected she was just being nice.

He was a meathead, but it would’ve been kind of cool to know shit as well. Be able to talk to Jess about her books on the same level and not feel like a child talking to an adult.

She didn’t immediately feel any smarter just from having a cleft between her legs, skinny limbs, and alright boobs. The water probably just translated what you already had, she figured. If so, then did that make her now a lesbian, or did it shift over from the same deal and mean she was as hungry for a thick stick as her manly self loved the cat?

Only Duncan was left with one between his legs. Thinking about the guy didn’t trigger any sudden epiphanies or feelings. But then it wasn’t like the ladies were all rushing to get a piece of Dunc on any normal day. No disrespect, just the facts.

However, Joel detected a presence in the air when the wind shifted over the water, blowing from the pier towards them. From this distance, there wasn’t enough to tell.

Leaving Barry to sit there and ponder her own new realities, Joel got up and approached Alyssa and Duncan standing over the water. Alyssa brought her arms up as though she were about to pull out some karate moves. Joel snorted, held her hands up, and then put them behind herself. Alyssa didn’t back down, but she lowered her hands in return.

“Just curious”, Joel explained, then added. “I’m not gonna touch you; I'm just investigating.”

Duncan seemed to have no idea what was going on. He stepped back, checked where he was in relation to the water, and positioned himself at the center of the platform. Gingerly, Joel bent her head forward and took a strong whiff. There was definitely something there. Pressing her nose near his shirt allowed her to really catch the aroma.

Alyssa made an indignant, muttering sound but didn’t say anything else. The scent didn’t seem all that different from regular guy sweat and the lingering remains of a masculine aroma. She wondered if her original clothes had any remnants of this. Get turned on by the man she used to be—next-level narcissism.

And there was something alluring in Duncan’s aroma. It was muted by the wind and perhaps by the kind of guy he was, but she could definitely detect something there. It was pleasant, did something to her, and made her do something she never would’ve imagined before this moment.

Joel bent up and kissed Duncan firmly on the lips. She held that position without wrapping her arms around his neck or pushing more of her flesh against his. He seemed too shocked to kiss back, but his lips twisted and yielded beneath hers. And Alyssa was pissed off. She began kicking at her legs and looked like she wanted to use her blue nails on Joel’s face.

Rushing up from the shore as Alyssa screamed at her, Joel noticed Jess joining them. The tussle, with Duncan looking for the nearest pylon to grab onto, twisted and turned as Jess tried to pull Alyssa off of Joel. With an angry, twisting elbow, Alyssa smacked Jess in the mouth. She staggered back and ran out of board underneath her.

Pulling away from Alyssa, Joel yelled for Jess and jumped into the water after her. Somehow, neither of them hit the bottom. Joel knew that Jess was a poor swimmer, so she watched her head as she plunged beneath the water and struggled to support her upper body above the surface. Kicking and yelling, Joel carried her until there was enough beneath her feet to make it back to shore. Jess had already changed though.

Her clothes looked like she was going to burst out of them. Jess‘s neck was practically thicker than both her original arms had been. This new version of her sure looked like he lifted. Her long hair retreated into her head as a rough, dense, water-matted pile. The new man’s face was broad but clean-shaven. Lifting his too-tight shirt up, Joel could see that he had broad pecs that stretched out so much that they almost seemed like hardened ghosts of her breasts. His legs were thick and about to split her pants.

Arriving on the shore, Joel had a moment to assess that no changes had occurred to her. This was apparently what she got. She sighed and shrugged that off to make sure that Jess was alright. None of the new man’s clothes were going to last very long, so she carried him over to the car, where hopefully something in the sparse things he had packed as a man would be enough to keep her decent.