The Switch
I woke up in a forest in nothing but a medical gown, surrounded by soldiers trapped in orange slime.
Sprawled out on the forest floor, I picked myself up and stumbled out of the clearing. The orange slime twitched and moved as I walked past, occasionally gathering in larger chunks or shrinking away to let me through. Everything felt strange and I was extremely lightheaded. My feet were bruised, bloody, and starting to swell. I wandered for what could have been hours or minutes when I came upon someone’s backyard.
I climbed the small metal fence and landed uneasily onto the well-manicured lawn. At the base of the house was a garden hose and desperately dehydrated, I wandered over and began drinking from it. After I had satisfied my thirst, I took to cleaning off as much dirt, blood, and orange goo as possible. By the time I finished, I was soaking wet and freezing, my medical gown pressed against my emaciated body.
That's when I noticed the comforting aroma of barbecued ribs coming from inside the house. It sat right on the kitchen counter, unguarded, and drizzled with sweet honey. Still, in a daze, I made my way up to the back porch and tested the door. I found it to be unlocked and I quietly slipped inside.
The smell of the ribs was even more intoxicating inside the house than out and I pounced on them like a wild animal. I never even took the time to chew, each rib smoothly slid down the back of my throat and immediately started to dissolve. When I finished, I slumped to the floor, taking everything in.
I suddenly realized that what I had just done should have been biologically impossible and yet, the bone, meat, and sauce, was absorbed into my body within minutes, providing me with a shockwave of energy.
Testing my limits and vaguely remembering using my arm as a sword against the soldiers, I willed my fingers to fuse into something sharp. In seconds, the fingers of my right hand became one and sharpened into a blade the color of rust.
Terrified, I quickly asked my hand to go back to normal and it obliged, the sword separating into fingers and returning to my natural skin color.
Below me, there was the squeak of feet on hardwood and the sound of footsteps heading upwards to a nearby door in the kitchen. I dove behind the counter, my heart rate pulsing.
The door opened and a man shuffled out.
He wore nothing but a tight-fitting lavender polo and a silky drawstring thong, looking very clean despite just cooking with barbeque sauce. He blearily looked to the counter and his eyes opened wide.
“What the fuck?” he stammered.
He ran over to the pan and examined it. Cold sweat dripped down my back and I did my best not to breathe.
“Nate? Baby, did you come home and finish all these without me?” the man asked, nervously, searching the room.
His bare feet edged inches away from where I hid and before I could think I grabbed his foot on impulse. From the palm of my hand, tendrils made of ooze penetrated the man through his foot and inserted itself directly into his bloodstream.
He gasped, but before he could scream or move, a paralyzing agent was introduced to his body, pacifying him. Moving with the paralyzing agent were the tendrils themselves, growing and expanding as they rode the current of his circulatory system before reaching his brain. From there it quickly gained control of his entire body, inserting itself into the many grooves of his brain, until his every heartbeat, breath, and thought was firmly under my control.
I pulled my hand away and the tendrils connecting us severed. The man wobbled on his feet, eyes rolling to the back of his head, before finally falling hard on his back, with a silly grin plastered on his face.
I stood up. The man remained silent, his breathing slow and relaxed. Despite removing my hand from his form I could still feel deep inside him, the ooze communicating back to me every function that was being conducted in his body.
Taking a deep breath, I kneeled back down, and using the influence of the ooze in his body, I looked over some of his surface memories.
The man was Max Larsen. 29. Ex- fashion model, now a computer programmer. Married to Nate. Living on the outskirts of Benton in upstate New York. The date was March 7th, Nate and Max's 3rd wedding anniversary.
I looked up and sure enough a bright and sparkly banner with the words “Happy Anniversary to Us” spanned the kitchen.
I sighed. Nate would be home in an hour and there was no telling when the reinforcements for the military unit I devastated would arrive.
Acting partially on instinct, partially on intuition, I placed my hand on Max’s foot again. Establishing a better connection with the ooze in his body, I willed my body to take on Max’s form.
The first thing to change was my arms. They inflated with muscle, tissue pulled, and past their normal limits to match decades of exercise. The next thing to change was my skin tone, shifting from a fluorescent white that hadn't seen the sun in years, to a healthy tan that had just left the beach. Accompanied by the skin color change was a light dusting of blonde hair that started from my arms and began growing over my once hairless body. Then my chest enlarged with muscle, my pecs growing to the size of milk jugs, straining the fabric of the ripped medical gown. My neck and shoulders quickly followed, adding more weight to a body that was now more than a little too top-heavy.
I fell over, panting from the strain, my hand still firmly on Max's foot. I relied on my newfound upper body strength to keep me upright, but soon my lower half began filling out to pick up the slack. From my waist down muscle and a thin layer of fat were added to my body as I felt my dick grow several inches, my balls dropping against my skinny legs. From there my legs ballooned to accommodate the rest of my body and a perky bubble butt replaced my bony ass. Soon I was able to support myself by just kneeling again and picked myself up.
Then I felt my face begin to change, bones cracking and breaking to fit a new shape, making me wheeze with pain. Once that was finished, hair sprouted on my face and the top of my head, growing thicker and heavier as the seconds trickled past.
When all the pain in my body receded, I grabbed Max’s phone off the counter and checked for my reflection in his camera. I was his spitting image, albeit covered in barbeque sauce and a ratty medical gown that was now two sizes too small.
Then I went to work on Max. I needed a decoy to throw my assailants off my trail in case there were more of them, so I began shifting his body to take on my old form.
I knelt back down to the floor as Max’s good looks and health quickly receded from him like a desert storm over a savannah. Never losing the smile on his face, his body deflated, years of exercise and healthy eating replaced with the look of someone fed on nothing but an IV tube. His skin color shifted to a pallid white as his healthy golden locks of hair thinned and shrank before disappearing completely. His face hollowed and his boyish good looks and charm faded.
When I finished, I stared down at the man before me and was horrified. It looked like staring down at a corpse.
I took a deep breath. I tore off my medical gown, slightly ripping it, and got to cleaning myself off in the kitchen sink, too terrified to waste time going upstairs and cleaning myself in Max's bathroom.
Once I was clean enough, I moved Max behind the counter and stripped him of his polo and thong, taking time to undo the many strings of his underwear and weirded out by the sensation of gripping what had once been my balls, now on another body.
I put the clothes down in a pile and did my best to slide Max into the medical gown, careful not to rip it any further, to prevent him from being completely nude in the woods. Once that was finished I noticed the two thick gold rings on his now too skinny fingers. I easily slid them off and applied them to my hand, careful not to put the wrong ring on the wrong finger.
Then I put on his polo shirt, soft against my hairy chest, and then stuffed my new dick and balls into the silk thong. Despite the weight of my heavy balls, the thong was a smooth fit and accentuated them perfectly.
Firmly taking Max’s place in appearance I noticed the blinds on his kitchen door and shut them, casting the kitchen in darkness, before I got to work taking his memories. I spent the next 45 minutes soaking up as much information as I could, anything that would convince people, but especially Nate, that I was Max and always had been.
When I was satisfied, I wiped my old body's mind clean and replaced them with only my memories of waking up and wandering in the woods. I made sure to withhold any memories of finding and going inside Max's home, leaving him a nearly blank slate.
Then, still unsure, but willing to test the extent of my power I willed the ex-Max to enter a dream-like state where he would not remember anything for the next hour and commanded him to find a new shelter, far from here.
His eyes snapped opened and a part of me was afraid I fucked up and would be conscious, but he calmly ignored me, pulling himself off the kitchen floor and stumbling to the door. He pushed his way outside and quickly disappeared into the woods, letting me breathe a sigh of relief.
Satisfied, I took Max’s phone and sitting in his living room scanned the news for any word of what happened in the forest.
I did that for a few minutes and found nothing when a car parked in the driveway. It was only then that I remembered that Max had promised to make barbecued ribs for Nate and that I had devoured it only an hour before. I cursed myself and ran to the front door. When Nate let himself inside, I embraced him in a bearhug, kissing the back of his neck.
“And hello to you too,” Nate said with a laugh.
Feeling him take a step towards the living room and beyond that the kitchen, I spun him around and met my soft lips against his.
His shoulders relaxed, but he still kept moving to the kitchen, so I went further, slipping my tongue inside his mouth, accidentally cutting it against his teeth. From Max, I knew that he had been looking forward to those ribs for a while. I had to distract him with something else to keep him from asking questions.
As I kissed him, I placed my hand on his lower back the way he liked and succeeded in leading him out of the doorway and up to several of the stairs.
Nate dropped his briefcase on the stairs, letting it tumble to the bottom when he pulled away for a moment.
“Wait, don’t you have a meal waiting for me?” Nate asked, confused, looking behind him. I grabbed him by the chin and gave him a big smile.
“Come upstairs and I’ll make a meal out of your ass,” I said, playfully, remembering how much Nate loved getting his ass eaten.
“You’re the best boyfriend ever,” Nate said, kissing me sweetly on the cheek before we went up the stairs together, the sound of military helicopters gathering in the distance.