A shy, nerdy college student gets invited to a legendary fraternity party. The longer he stays inside the packed house, the more he changes. His body rapidly grows larger and more muscular, transforming into a massive superheavyweight bodybuilder with broad shoulders, huge arms, and an imposing presence. His clothes shift into stereotypical jock fashion—tank tops, athletic shorts, a backwards cap, and flashy accessories. His hair, attitude, and mannerisms change as well, becoming increasingly cocky, outgoing, and frat-oriented. As the night goes on, his academic interests and complex thoughts fade away, replaced by a simpler, more carefree mindset. By sunrise, he's become the fraternity's biggest and most popular jock, and nobody remembers he was ever anyone else.
[This Quick and Dirty story was written by a human (me) based on a prompt that was previously sent to generative AI. I wrote it in one uninterrupted stream-of-consciousness flow with a hard time limit of 20 minutes. It is not perfect. No edits have been made, except to correct typos.]
Melvin tugged at his collar. Damn, it was muggy in the frat house. He suddenly understood why the Delta Chi boys wore tank tops all the time. He wondered how much longer he had to stay in order to fulfill his promise to his roommate that he’d “have fun.”
As if. “Fun” wasn’t a kegger with a bunch of bros he barely knew. “Fun” was a Star Trek marathon. “Fun” was making a spreadsheet of the different morphs that each Animorphs character had, and assessing which character had the most morphs of certain genuses.
Speak of the devil, his roommate, Cole, appeared from the crowd of sweaty bodies like Moses parting the Red Solo Cup sea. He had two beers in his hand and offered one to Melvin, who took it gingerly after Cole popped the cap open with his bicep.
Melvin planned to just politely hold it until Cole went away. He didn’t drink. Cole nudged him and whispered, at the top of his lungs. “Don’t worry, it’s non-alcoholic! Just drink it, bro! Loosen up!”
With that, he patted Melvin on the shoulder and vanished as quickly as he had appeared. Melvin took a sip. Alcoholic or not, he usually wasn’t into hoppy flavors, but this one went down smoothly. He shrugged and took another sip.
He instantly felt dizzy, but not from the drink. The floor had suddenly zoomed away from him, like he’d been picked up by a crane or something. But no, his feet were still touching the ground. He was just… taller. He did some quick calculations based on triangulating the height of the nearest doorway with the empty beer bottle that was standing upright on the carpet and assessed that he must be well over six feet.
Was he dreaming? That was the only way to explain the sudden change in altitude. And the only way to explain what happened next, which was that he inflated like somebody had plugged his brother’s old bicycle pump into his ass. His shoulders spread apart like magnets on opposing poles. His chest rose to fill the gap, giving him mountainous pecs that burst open the top few buttons of his shirt. He could barely see over them, but as he craned his neck, he noticed the fabric of his button-down, which was straining at the top, ripple as his slight gut receded, no longer pressing against his shirt as it was converted into a set of abs. His legs ballooned. His quadriceps first. And then one gastrocnemius after the other.
His arms kept inflating even after the rest of the movement had settled, making him full-on Johnny Bravo top-heavy. He dizzily tipped left and right. He hoped the dream would end soon. He worried that maybe the beer had contained alcohol and he had passed out. He fretted that this dream dizziness would ultimately result in him choking on his own vomit.
He tugged at his shirt collar again, but it slipped away from his grasp like a bar of soap in the shower. He grabbed at it, but it wasn’t there anymore. From what he could see around his pecs, the button-down had morphed into a bright pink stringer tank, over a pair of neon yellow shorts. And he was… barefoot? Disgusting! A musky, funky smell tickled his nostrils. Even though his increased height should make the possibility unlikely, considering how well-groomed he was, he worried that the stench was coming from his feet.
A sudden weight fell upon his head. A cap. Of course. But why was it all wonky? It was facing forward. That didn’t feel right. He twisted it around backward, and all his nerves were instantly quelled.
Whatever was going on, he finally looked like all the other guys at a party he was attending. This was his first time, and he was gonna enjoy it.
He decided to join the beer pong game, but first he adjusted the brown hair that stuck out of his cap, pushing it upward into a gravity-defying quiff and enjoying how it shimmered as it faded to a bright blond.
He crowded around the beer pong table, bragging that “I’m a one man team! Brain and Brawn all in one!”
He scored shot after shot on the other team, alternately flexing his newfound muscles and bragging about his academic accomplishments. He was about to pull out his phone and show the video of him answering the final question at the academic decathlon, but he got distracted by a video of him doing deadlifts in the gym. He chubbed up in his pants. God, he looked so hot.
While he was distracted, the other team had dumped all their ping pong balls into his cups. He drank cup after cup, not noticing that as the beer filled up his stomach, it also drained his brain. By the end of his final chug, he couldn’t even remember how to pronounce “decathlon,” let alone remember what his correct answer was. But as he shrugged off his tank to wipe beer foam from his lips, the stares from guys and girls alike were more than worth the things he had forgotten. Whatever they were.