Perfect

“Well, well, well, look who had a change of heart!” Derek smiled as he looked over to the couch.

“That’s because you swapped me into your wife’s body against my will and threatened to never swap me back unless I agreed to attend this function with you, you ass.” A very upset Malcolm replied.

“Is that any way to speak to your loving husband? I mean, you are aware of the power I have over you right now, yes? Now, are you ready to go or not?”

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes...sir?” Malcolm hesitated not really sure what Derek was actually expecting.

“That works, I suppose. Though maybe next time try ‘my love.’ Remember that if you want your body back, you need to play your part well. And we can only hope my wife has a better attitude after a few hours of being in your body as well.”

As Malcolm left with Derek to attend the event, he realized that was certainly an X factor. Even if he played the part of the perfect wife tonight, Jessica was still extremely mad at Derek, even more so after the swap. If she fumed at him once they got home, Derek may just leave them stuck like this simply to try to teach her a lesson. Malcolm could only hope that he could convince Derek to swap them back, then he and Jessica could run away and escape from Derek’s abusive behavior and odd experiments forever. It was hard to think that Derek used to be his friend...

Bewildered

“Why do I have -- ? What’s wrong with my voice? Oh, my, God! I’m a woman! Why am I a woman?” Troy said feeling rather bewildered.

“You too!” Squealed a scared Kyle, “I thought it was just me! There was this flash of light, and then, BAM! I’m a woman!”

“So you’re a guy too?”

“Yeah! Why is this happening?”

“I have no idea. Maybe it’s a bad dream. Maybe it’s a mass delusion. Whatever it is, I want it to be over NOW!”

Geek

Bruce had always hated how his sister had picked on him for most of his life. But finally after twenty years, he was ready to get his revenge. With an invention he had made, he was able to steal his sister’s body. He had intended to ruin her reputation as the popular girl on campus by trying to act as nerdy as possible. He even decided to wear a shirt advertising GEEK in big letters. After a short stroll on campus, he returned to her dorm room to reflect on how his plan had failed miserably.

It seems no one cared what his sister acted like or said, all the guys were still just attracted to her body. He had some of the biggest jocks on campus talking nerdy to him about comics or algebra. He couldn’t seem to fend them off with even the most obscure Doctor Who reference or Star Trek quote. If he was going to find a way to ruin her, he’d have to step up his game...

Gone

Over the course of the past week, Doug had been having a pretty good time using the Medallion of Zulu to transform himself into all sorts of people. However, he hadn’t considered that he may have been overusing it. In fact, he didn’t notice the angel in the center of the medallion slowly fading. And after transforming himself into a woman for the first time, he finally noticed something was up. He held up the medallion and not only had the angel faded away, the entire center was completely gone. He only hoped he could use it one more time to return himself to his own body. However, he had worn it out for good, and it simply wasn’t going to work anymore.

Perfect

“Ugh...that stupid medallion,” Sam sighed to himself, “My sister found the damned thing and thought it as perfect for the ‘something old’ requirement for her wedding. Then we accidentally touched the thing at the same time, and we swapped bodies. She threatened me and told me I had to go through with her wedding, and make it look perfect. There was no way I could wear those heels so I hope she doesn’t notice these sneakers under her long dress. I can only hope that medallion works again later today; I certainly don’t want to be stuck in her body forever!”

Just One Thing...

Ryan had run to the store for just one thing. He was sure he would simply be in and out in no time. He never could’ve expected the Great Shift to strike as he was in the check out line. Suddenly, he found himself in a dressing room instead. He could see a reflection countless times in the mirrors on either side reflecting back on each other. Part of him still couldn’t believe it, even as he lifted up his foot and seeing the woman in the mirror wearing the tall green boots do the same. So he picked up the phone nearby to him and had the camera show his face. Sure enough, it was a woman’s face. This was all so much to take in. He just sort of sighed. He wasn’t ready for anything like this today...

Contractor (Part 2)

Click here for Part 1.

While using the medallion while he worked always put a smile on Frank’s face, there was certainly more than a few close calls. Most occurred when he thought the home’s owners were on vacation when they actually weren’t. Other times, nosey neighbors or relatively had come around to check in. He hadn’t been caught yet, and the one time he was, he luckily was able to play it off. A woman’s husband had come home early, and he just claimed to be “looking the work over.” He was fortunate enough to sneak away before the wife returned.

Contractor

Frank worked as a contractor, and there was one aspect of his job he loved more than any other. Typically, when he worked in a home the people inside were away on vacation. He’d show up early in the morning with the Medallion of Zulu, find a piece of clothing in the drawers and touch it to his chest. He’d find himself transforming into one of the members of the household. More typically than not, he’d choose to be a woman, painting or repairing as he got to experience the feel of a different body. Then after a long twelve hour day, he’d use the medallion to transform back into normal. This latest job was no exception, and he smiled as he looked at he caught a glance of himself in the mirror just across the room as he stood on his ladder.

Keep Playing

“I’ve got to admit that when you told me you enchanted a bottle for this game, I never expected anything like this.” Greg told Susan and Amanda.

“Yeah, every time it lands on someone, we swap a body part,” Susan said rather nonchalantly.

“At the end, do we just sort of swap back?”

“Nope.” Amanda retorted.

“Does that mean I’m going to be stuck like this? With pieces of your bodies from the neck down? I mean, this is fun, but I don’t want to be stuck like this!”

“Well, then I guess we just need to keep playing...”

Easy

Derek didn’t expect walking in heels to be this easy. In fact, he never expected anything about swapping bodies with Abbie to be easy, but he wasn’t having any trouble. Maybe it was all part of the magic or maybe it was just the muscle memory of her body. Regardless, he was pretty sure that he was going to be able to handle being her without much problems...

Irresistible (Part 2)

Click here for Part 1.

It had been several hours and Jason was finally finishing up. Now he just needed Kiki in his body to wake up and activate the thing just as she did so. However, it seemed that she wasn’t waking up. He tried to kill some time by looking through some old papers and old inventions. But as the minutes ticked away, he got worried. What if she didn’t wake up? What if he had done something horribly wrong? And worst still, what if he was stuck in her body?

Irresistible

Jason’s invention was supposed to make him irresistible to women -- or, more specifically, irresistible to one specific woman, his neighbor Kiki. His calculations must’ve been off or something, as he ended up swapping bodies with her instead. He quickly subdued her, and he started to adjust his device to swap them back. He was convinced that if he worked fast enough, he could return them both to their own bodies before she woke up and convince her everything she remembered was a dream. But as he worked, it was hard not to be distracted by Kiki’s body. He hoped he could work fast enough.

Try that One

“Try that one on the left,” Andrew said pointing to the screen.

“You know I DID program this thing,” Miranda sighed, “And I just because I’m a pretty woman doesn’t mean I don’t understand computers. Or rather WAS a pretty woman before I created this code that swapped our bodies.”

“I’m not doubting your brains or your beauty, and I want to get back to being myself just as much as you do. The last thing I want is to go out on the street and get ogled by a bunch of men.”

Maybe Not an Accident

“Dude, why does Matt’s mom come to every practice and sit in the bleachers?” Alex asked another student on the football team before waving out to her, “Hey, Mrs. Lee.”

Matt uncomfortably waved back before returning his arms to a crossed position and setting them down on his knees. It was still unbelievably weird to him how he had swapped bodies with his friend’s mom. He was pretty sure that she was going to ruin his life, so he tried his best to keep an eye on her when he could -- that included watching her at football practice. What may have been even weirder was that she seemed to be doing well; not just in terms of playing football, but also just being a social eighteen year old man. He was wondering if maybe it was all planned. Maybe she had actually wanted his life; maybe the swap wasn’t an accident...

Quitting

Al got home and slammed his bag down on the kitchen table, “That’s it; I’m quitting this job. They’ve spent the last two weeks running all sorts of experiments on me, but this one takes the cake! They were testing out some sort of body swap device and stuck me inside the body of a woman! And worse still was that it was on the end of the day on Friday, so I’m stuck like this all weekend. Once I get swapped back Monday morning, I’m out!”

“No you’re not!” His wife shouted from the other room, “You were out of work for a year before you got this job. I don’t care what they do to you, you are NOT going to quit. Let them run all sorts of experiments on you, and turn you into whatever. We need the money, and you know it.”

Al forced a smile. Knowing better than to cross his wife, he shouted back, “I wasn’t serious. I’m just saying I’m frustrated. I think maybe I should at least ask for a raise after having to go through all this!”

Sitting

Freezing

Grant certainly certainly had a lot of questions. Why was he a woman? Why was he wearing a bikini? How did he end up wearing this sort of thing outside in the freezing cold? Those questions could be answered later. For now, he just needed to find some place warm before he froze to death out here!

Protect (Part 2)

Click here for Part 1.

As Brett stretched, he couldn’t help but notice that being a woman felt...different. He wouldn’t call it good or bad, just different, as if everything wasn’t quite right. He began to look around as well, noticing other people seemingly freaking out about their bodies. It wasn’t too hard for him to piece together that he wasn’t the only one who had swapped into someone else’s body. The extent of this situation was really beginning to sink in for him. This wasn’t a dream; this wasn’t an isolated incident. It seemed a vast number of people had suddenly just switched bodies with each other.

Protect

Brett saw the bright light in the distance and used his hand to shield his eyes for a sense of protection. There was, however, nothing that could protect him from the effects of that light. After it passed, Brett was sure it had fried his corneas or something; his skin just looked so much darker. Then he noticed the sleeve of his shirt had a leopard print pattern on it, and he knew that there wasn’t something wrong with his eyes -- there was something wrong with his body! As he began to look at it, he quickly learned that the problem was that this body wasn’t his! He had somehow swapped bodies with a woman! He didn’t put two and two together that the light was responsible for the swap. That it was something called The Great Shift, which not only affected him but every other person on the planet as well.

Photo

Jeff was taking pictures with his new camera when he discovered that it had the oddest feature. It seemed every time he took a photo of a person, he’d transform into a copy of that person. There didn’t seem to be any way to avoid it, and he spent most of the day as all sorts of different people. Yet after taking a picture of a small Asian woman, he paused.

He looked at the photo in the camera’s viewfinder; he examined his new body. He thought about breaking the camera in half. He decided that he wanted this body -- to keep this body. But it might be best to keep the camera in a safe place, just in case he might ever decide to use it again in the future.

Bad News

“Please, Mr. Banks, could you run us through what you know and what you remember?”

“I don’t know what you expect to get from me,” Harold Banks replied, “It’s my first day on the job. They barely got my computer password set up and running before it was time for lunch. Then when I was walking back, I get knocked unconscious and I wake up and I’m this chick. Then you guys brought me in here and started asking all these questions.”

The two men questioning whispered amongst themselves before one replied to Harold.

“HR does request you avoid the term ‘chick,’ Mr. Banks,” one of the men said, “However, we might owe you a little explanation without accepting responsibility or guilt, of course. You seem to have gotten caught up in work that we may or may not be researching, and you ended up swapping bodies with one of our other employees.”

“Great,” Harold sighed, “Look I’m not going to sue. Let’s just fix this, okay?”

The men’s eyes lit up when Harold said he wasn’t going to sue, but somehow he had the feeling bad news was going to follow...

Software

Arnold was truly amazed at the software in front of him. It didn’t make sense, but as he modified values on the screen, his body adjusted in real time. Sliding the age bar down, he shifted a decade younger into his twenties. Switching a box and he changed himself from male to female. He continued to make all sorts of adjustments until he transformed himself into his idea of an ideal woman. He chuckled briefly before looking for a reset to get back to normal -- except there didn’t seem to be one. He tried just moving everything back to normal, but he couldn’t seem to find some of the values -- most importantly: gender. Things got worse when his computer froze...

You Need to Let It Go

“Do you really expect me to take a bath wearing a swimsuit?” Jason asked.

“Yes!” Chloe replied sternly, “I’ve blindfolded you every time you needed to change clothes or go to the bathroom, did you really expect this would be any different?”

“I think you just need to start accepting the fact that the Great Shift is permanent and that these are our new bodies now. You need to let go.”

“No! That’s stil MY body. This thing will reverse itself or maybe it’s just sort of terrible dream.”

“It’s been three days and bilions of people have swapped bodies. They aren’t going to solve this thing overnight, and it’s likely they’ll never solve it at all!”

“Until they solve it, you are going to do exactly what I say!”

Jason just rolled his eyes.

Control

As she got out of her car, Pamela suddenly froze. She was worried, and it only got more worrisome when her body started moving again -- only she wasn’t controlling any of the movements. She wanted to scream, “What’s happening!?” But she was unable to move her lips to speak.

“I’ll tell you,” She heard her own voice say responding to her thoughts, “I’m taking control of your body.”

“You can’t!” She thought as loudly as he could.

“I’ve already done it. For the moment, you are a voice in my head, but soon enough even I won’t be able to hear you. You’ll just be along for the ride, and believe me, it’l be a ride. I’ve always been curious what it would be like to be a woman.”

Resolved

Umbrella

Having the umbrella your holding get struck by lightning is the sort of thing you would expect to kill you. Devin sure expected that it would kill him. He certainly didn’t expect the lightning bolt to branch out and strike two people at the exact same time resulting in a body swap. Yet here he was on the street staring at himself. He shifted uncomfortably in the tall, high heeled boots now on his feet. He didn’t know what to say; he wasn’t even sure he wanted to hear what he sounded like. Considering he had swapped with a woman, he imagined it to be much higher pitched than what he was used to. The woman seemed to be looking back at him, equally unsure of what to do next...

Public Defender

Tyler sat in his jail cell smiling. He was pretty sure he had just committed the perfect crime. Sure, he was arrested for it, but that was actually part of the plan. He had already requested a lawyer, and now all he needed to do was wait. His heart sank a little bit when his public defender arrived. He couldn’t believe it -- a woman! He knew he didn’t have much choice. She was going to be the only one he’d get close enough to for long enough to enact the next part of his plan.

It was on their third meeting when he felt the time was right. He looked at the red dress she wore, feeling a little uncomfortable at just how short it was. The public defender could tell Tyler was looking at her and began to make her exit. That’s when Tyler made his move to cast a spell to swap bodies with her.

He just kept up her momentum to exit. He walked out of the cell and then out of the jail a free man -- er, woman -- while leaving the public defender inside his body to rot in prison. He looked up her ID in her purse and went back to her house. He smiled as he sat on the stairs. Tomorrow, he’d pick up where a lot of the loot was stored then he’d jet off someplace where the cops could never catch him. Sure, the body swap spell only worked once, so he was stuck in this body, but he started to think that might not be so bad...

Hopes

Maggie had hoped that bringing her husband James on a vacation to Exchange Island would have been a humbling experience. That spending a few weeks in someone else’s shoes might help him become more empathetic, especially when he ended up in a woman’s body. Instead, he just jumped into a swimsuit and started to do some poses in the mirror. Part of him was excited about being twenty years younger again. He didn’t quite care if he was male or female or whatever. Then again, the more he thought about it, the more he realized being a woman was even better. It was something few guys ever got to experience, and if he could get away from his wife for a few hours, he could certainly have some real fun all to himself. He couldn’t imagine this was why she brought him here, but he didn’t really care either..

Hoops

“What do you miss most about your old body?” Ron asked Jerome.

“It’s weird being almost two feet shorter! That’s for sure!” Jerome replied, “And being a chick is a total trip as well!”

“I’m glad we didn’t lose our basketball scholarships!”

“Yeah, they passed that law after the Great Shift protecting that sort of thing. It might be playing that I miss most though.”

“Well, we can still play!”

“Yeah, but you know what I mean...like for the college team. They just recruited new players that would crush us now.”

“You may have lost a team, but you gained a good girlfriend,” Ron said as he laid his head on Jerome’s shoulder, “And I got a good one, too.”

“I love you too,” Jerome said giving Ron a kiss, “And I probably never would’ve realized that if not for the Shift, so I guess in a way it was all worth it.”

“Totally worth it. Now let’s play some hoops.”

Not Home (Part 3)

Click here for Part 1.
Click here for Part 2.

Neil left Olivia’s, but once he went outside, he realized he was very far from his own home and wife. He didn’t recognize the city he was, but he was sure this wasn’t any place he had ever been before. The traffic seemed snarled with many abandoned cars, and he was sure public transportation wouldn’t be working if he could even find where it was in this city. He thought about heading back to Olivia’s -- even that was a strange unfamiliar place for him, but what other choice did he have?

Not Home (Part 2)

Click here for Part 1.

“First off,” Neil asked as he got to his feet and took off the jacket he wore, “Who’s Olivia?”

“Olivia is my sister,” The woman explained, “And right now you have her body.”

“Well, I can certainly tell that this body isn’t mine! But how...I mean, come on, body swapping? That sort of stuff is all just Freaky Friday made up stuff!”

“Tell that to the news reporters and 90% of the world! Apparently, there was some sort of event. I was lucky to not be swapped. I nearly panicked when everyone around me just sort of passed out. Olivia...you were out longer than most.”

“If everything you’re saying is true, then my wife is probably worried sick about me! I’ve got to call her! I’ve got to get home!”

“Cell phones are dead right now, but the news reporters say they should come back online in a few hours. You’re welcome to leave, but please take Olivia’s phone. We’d like to be able to keep track of her body.”