Ascension of Men

"What, you really don't wanna enjoy some of this meat?", Adrian flexed seductively in front of his reluctant friend-but-not-friend, flashing Jonas's trademark goofy expression.

Martin was reminded of those cliche situations in Hollywood movies. A character met an imposter, someone who looked like Person A but claimed to be Person B, and in order to prove their true identity had to disclose to his interlocutor some private, often embarrassing secrets that only him and the latter should know. The difference was that in Martin's case, it was not a life-or-death situation. His life would probably not be in danger regardless of whether he chose to believe in the story just uttered. For now, at least.

But despite the barrage of secrets, indeed private and embarrassing, constantly pouring out of Adrian's mouth, the inhibition in Martin's rational mind never ceased. The change of heart was caused by something else.

He thought of that meme, "inside you there are two wolves".

One was more paranoid than the other. Both were horny. And humans are, after all, animals.

◼◼◼◼◼

Post-nut clarity hit harder than he thought, even a day later. Now sitting in Jonas's– well, it's Adrian now. In body and mind. According to the culprit himself, memory and personality were also absorbed. That explained the obnoxious behaviours when Jonas the persona was gone for the whole week. Now sitting in Adrian's Bugatti Chiron, with the spellbook firmly between his palms and on their way to take over another body, questions after questions kept cropping up in his head.

Magic being real aside, how could a spellbook, one so powerful that it could allow a loser like Jonas to completely assimilate Adrian, came into his hand in the first place? Whether he really got it from a thrift store like he said, or from Temu or AliExpress or some witchy hut in the Irish woods or a castle taken straight out of Resident Evil Village, it was obvious he was not meant to be its owner.

Perhaps that was truly what Martin struggled with. That Jonas was some kind of chosen one, not as soothsaid by a spontaneous coke-driven prophecy, but simply by being more predisposed. Gifted to learn this gobbledygook, something that to Martin may as well be gibberish.

His ego was in shambles. He had always counted himself as the smarter of the two, and now the prospect that not only did Jonas possessed superpower, but also managed to get a hotter body, a solid personality, a more financially cushioned identity, just didn't sit right with him.

It should have been me.

He flipped through the book. The cursive Latin was incomprehensible to him. OCR and AI didn't help either, given that when instructed yesterday to explicitly flag out anything it couldn’t recognise instead of hallucinating words, a third of the pages just turned into one long row of "[unreadable]". Thankfully for every ten or thirteen pages, he could always find a handwritten note inserted, where there was more legible writing in a modern tongue.

He was surprised by how hard it was to even do something useful with the bound stack of piss-coloured paper. He spent three hours the day before trying to turn his hair blond. Granted, it's now naturally lighter, but he'd rather get a tube from Rossmann, splatter it all over his messy hair and scroll through brainrot videos for 45 minutes instead of working his tongue and mandible to exhaustion trying to pronounce rows after rows of impossible syllables.

Adrian had offered to help him speed up his progress. And he had declined. He really wanted to do everything all by himself, the current body heist included. Instead, the whole operation was concocted from A to Z by his friend. His frustration was through the roof, and one steamy instance of having Adrian creamed into his mouth had not erased his suspicion, only transmuted it into scorn.

"Right. Walk me through the plan once again."

"Jesus, man, relax. It's simple as fuck, you don't have to ask about it every hour," he took a break, anticipating Martin's retort. Spotting none, he continued.

"I'm close with Leon, and if that thick head of yours still has trouble remembering the most basic of facts, it's hot and hung Leon Weber. And by close, I mean suuuper close. We'll reach his house in 20 minutes. Once there, I'll distract him while you do whatever you can to make sure you've got the whole incantation inside your noggin. Then you'll sneak into his room, use the spell and be Leon for the rest of your life. Or until you're bored with his body, I guess. If you don't want him then we can still snatch the sweet trust fund money."

It sounded too good to be true. Martin had seen Leon Weber in class before. Once. The guy rarely if ever attended class. Rich college kids and their grade-warping parents. Every other instance he saw him or the outline of his big dick had been through the thick scratched screen of his Xiaomi.

He imagined himself in Leon's pricey shoes, checking out his handsome face in the mirror, sniffing out his pits, whipping out his huge dong, having a good session before shooting a thick load over his meaty pecs. He would ride a flashy car across the city, drink fancy wine and bang twinks and hunks and bears and cubs and otters and DILFs and whatnot.

Fuck, he's hard already.

Sometimes his dick really got the better of him.

◼◼◼◼◼

"Just wait here and keep reading. I'll text you when everything's ready."

And with that, Martin was left alone. He was so anxious about the carrying out of the plan, add to that his fantasising about its outcome, that he did not even register them already being inside Leon Weber's residence. Or perhaps temporary residence? He had no idea how many properties were under Leon's name.

Must be at least 500 m2. As he darted his eyes to the left, he could already sight an infinity pool outlooking the valley, rows of inclined chairs spanning its edges. Through the sliding glass doors, he counted five bedrooms, an open plan kitchen and living area, all clad in large marble flooring slabs. And another half a dozen rooms whose verbose and long-winded names only real estate agents could come up with.

He tried just focusing on the book at first, but something kept tugging at his mind.

Doubts.

He could work for another thirty years and still never be able to afford a place like this. He wondered what other people would think of his old identity or what had become of him, when everything was already in place. He thought about Jonas. Adrian. Jonas and Adrian. And the book. That everything was so sudden, and he needed more time.

He looked at the book.

He could just run away with it. And plan things out later.

He swallowed.

The train of thoughts was cut off abruptly when his phone chimed.

"Yo come in from the backyard ill wait for you there."

That primed his spirit.

◼◼◼◼◼

He finally found his way to the backyard after some time of being navigationally challenged. As had been planned, Adrian was waiting for him, with nothing but a white towel wrapped around his waist, effortlessly showing off his toned body while casually sipping coffee that he had probably managed to brew himself while Martin was busy catastrophising and preparing for the crucial part.

"Heyyyy, everything's good! Why the long face, man? (Martin promptly adjusted his mug). Anyways, I chatted with him for a while, taunted him with how he could not beat an Elden Ring boss on first try. He's busy farming runes right now, won't even notice you even if you stand behind him. Just come into his room, I'll show you the place."

The two of them passed the kitchen, and Martin stopped in his track. He heard clanging steel and heavy grunting coming from what seemed to be the room straight ahead to his right.

"That's the gym, right? Is he working out already?"

"Nah, it's someone else. Another friend. When you're loaded and well-known all kinds of peeps come to your house. Maybe we'll have some fun with him once you're already 'inside' Leon", he winked at Martin, and made a gesture that instantly boosted up the already high level of adrenaline in the latter's bloodstream.

Martin asked no more questions, and walked up the stairs. As he stole one last glance at the visible part of that room's floor, he swore he saw someone who looked almost identical to Adrian.

◼◼◼◼◼

The door opened, letting out a cold, air-conditioned breeze, as Martin and Adrian found themselves inside the room of their target. True to Adrian's words, Leon's gaze was fixed to the TV's screen. The ear-deafening sound effects of sword cutting through mobs rendered him oblivious to the presence of the intruders, leaving his muscular back completely exposed.

"He's yours", Adrian jutted his head up at his accomplice. The words were all drowned out by sounds coming from the game.

Martin wasted no time. His mouth contorted to pronounce all of the strange syllables. Clear and sharp. He felt his body become lighter, lighter, until he was detached from it altogether. Mustering all of his willpower, he hurled himself towards Leon.

He collided.

With a thud?

It was not human flesh that he felt, but a cold, hard, invisible flat surface. He tried to steer himself back, only to be hit by the same material.

No …

He was still looking like himself, albeit blurrier and with a blue, ghostly tint to the outline of his limbs, and a reflection of the environment where the inside should be.

"Adrian. Jonas. Help!", he used the last of his energy to scream at Adrian, in despair hoping the latter's newfound magical power would allow him to hear Martin in his current form, something his target wouldn't be able to.

Nothing responded back at him.

Leon put down his controller, threw a smirk in Martin's direction.

And launched himself into a long, loud, maniacal cackle of laughter.

"Fuck, couldn't have been easier. You morons are rightfully made to be thralls."

He finished his sentence, and Adrian's voice joined in the cacophony of mockery. As the two of them continued to laugh, Martin, helpless and trapped, slowly realised what he had gotten himself into.

Adrian hollered at the door. "Hey 'Adrian', come in".

The door opened, revealing a perfect copy of Adrian in grey gym shorts and a towel in his hand.

It was the man Martin saw earlier while halfway up the stairs.

He was breathing heavily, with sweat completely coating all of his body. As Adrian-in-towel rested his hand on the newcomer's shoulder, Martin discerned the difference between them: sweaty Adrian-in-shorts had a dopey, dumb grin on his face that had stayed the same from the very moment he entered the room; meanwhile Adrian-in-towel's range of emotions switched from cruel mockery just one moment ago, to cheerful and happy-go-lucky just as he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with his doppelganger, back to the neutral expression that had accompanied Martin the whole hour they were scheming on the road.

Adrian patted his twin on the back, "How's life, 'Adrian'?". Martin heard the peculiar Southern tinge of his friend in the question.

"Awesome, man!". The same voice talked back, devoid of any trace of Jonas at all.

Leon looked at Martin with disdain. "What, dimwit? Can't recognise your good old friend?".

The prolonged lack of a corporeal body had caused more strain on Martin's senses. He spoke weakly.

"Jonas, you–you sided with him …"

That provoked another stream of laughter from both of his captors.

"Alright, villain monologue time," said Adrian-in-towel once he had recovered from laughing.

"Last week, an idiot named Jonas, aimed with a cheap copy of the most common spellbook and three hours of sorry-ass fooling around, thought he could take over me. He used the same spell that you just did just seconds ago. Poor Jonas knew nothing about psionics, nothing about soul binding, and he thought he could just suppress my mind with that lame amount of knowledge. I showed him his place, and sealed him back in his body. Of course, not without some restrictions."

"I was thinking, this incompetent fuck must have been hired by my rivals to steal my body, so I crawled through all of his memory. Turned out he was just some horny loser. "

"See, I'm a nice guy. If he was here for blood, I might as well have turned him into my second cock or absorb his pathetic body mass until there's nothing left, but since he just wanted to be me that badly, I granted him his wish."

Adrian walked behind his twin.

"I made him a thrall. A walking meatsack that always listens to my commands."

"Isn't that right, buddy?", he asked the other Adrian with a sing-song voice. His arms slowly reached up the latter's pecs from behind.

"Yes, Master!", his twin replied enthusiastically.

"The cosmetics", Adrian paused, moving his left hand up to caress his himbo-copy's face, "is courtesy of my pal Leon."

"Thralls are hella useful", he pressed his body against the still-grinning husk of Martin's former friend. The soul in captive heard a wet sound as the layer of sweat dripping off Adrian-in-shorts's back clung to the other Adrian's torso. The latter slowly dug his hands into his thrall's torso. The thrall whimpered, and moaned loudly. From afar, Martin could see a tent pitching up in his gym shorts. The bulging muscles of his body had lost its previous glow, and with every passing moment, Martin could swear they were getting smaller. The hands digging into the thrall's pecs swelled, ballooning up with the stolen muscles. The similarity between the two had stopped being uncanny, as one now looked like he hadn't been to gym in months, while the other probably spent several hours a day pumping iron.

"I can eat whatever I want, and goof off whenever I'm not feeling like it. And 'Adrian' here would still diligently stick to his training regime. Cause he loves being a dumb rich jock bro."

"Right, Adrian?", he kissed his twin.

"Mmmh, yeah", 'Adrian' kissed back with puppy eyes.

"Enough of your softcore porn", interrupted Leon, whose face had 'bored' in bold and all-cap written all over it. "We need to get to work."

"I'll cut the story short for you, dimwit", continued Leon, turning his attention to Martin. "I'm tired of Adrian always bragging about his thrall, and since he owed me for the transmutation work needed to get that thrall looking irritatingly like a copy of him, I get to have a thrall of my own too. We struck the deal. Adrian slurped up the rest of that loser's memory and personality to play the bait. And here you are."

With that, all of Martin's hope was gone. He looked desperately at what remained of his friend. A copy of Adrian, now with his big hard cock already out of his shorts, sloppily kissing a more muscular version of him, who had also dropped his towel off.

"Wait here, I have work to do", said the original Adrian as he interrupted the love-making session with his twin.

"Yes, Master," the other Adrian replied with unwavering eagerness.

Naked Adrian held up the crystal container holding Martin's soul.

"Any specific details you want to add to his personality?", Adrian said to Leon.

"No. Keep the thrall simple."

"Okie dokie."

The trap opened up, and Martin felt like he was thrown into a washing machine spinning at its fastest setting. He had lost control of most of his senses, so now everything was like a daze. Then just as suddenly, he touched flesh again. Adrian's hand. His mind was tossed and turned, all its layers, its conception of past, present and future, its ability to distinguish between what's in and out, what's subject and object, what's ego and non-ego, got rolled and tumbled into a hot, wrinkly mess, a primordial soup of forms and formlesses all boiling and spilling its content over the rim of his consciousness, until something not unlike an industrial machine the size of the sun violently stomped on it and flattened it into a readable, navigable sheet.

And then the thing, with its spindly, thin, perfectly straight extremities, started to crawl, slowly and steadily on that very sheet. Each of its movements poked a hole in Martin's memory, causing jumbled scenes to reappear in his mind.

Jesus, man, relax. Adrian's voice echoed through the empty Bugatti. But no one was there.

Liar. The thought formed in Martin's head. It did not translate into a voice.

Watching you getting jealous and all worked up was really fun, Martin. The disembodied voice spoke again, this time resembling Jonas. But I don't think Leon would like seeing you like that.

The scene faded away, along with the voice.

"Farewell, Martin".

◼◼◼◼◼

The unconscious body of Martin came back to life, just in time for Leon, who appeared to be losing his patience. The naked Adrian propped Martin up, letting the latter meet Leon's gaze with his dull, empty eyes.

"Now's your turn", said Adrian as he shoved Martin towards the other man. Leon caught him with one arm, and shoved him further into his pit.

"Sniff."

Martin complied. He hungrily lapped his tongue at his captor's crevices while Leon's hand guided his head from the back.

"That will also be your scent from now on."

"Now open up that mouth", he lightly pushed Martin away from his pit.

Martin followed his command. Leon cleared his throat, and hocked out a huge ball of gob straight into the soon-to-be thrall's mouth. The latter swallowed it eagerly.

"Tell me, who are you?", asked Leon with satisfaction glinting in his eyes and a grin plastered on his face.

"I am your thrall, Master," it took the thrall quite a while to response. His voice had dropped an octave lower, and his facial features were realigning. His sandy blond hair, the result of last night's practice, had turned completely dark. Coarse hair started to sprout from a chin that was perfectly smooth just moments ago, covering the entirety of his jaw to form a thick bushy beard.

"What's your name?"

The thrall looked blankly. No answer. His face resembled Leon more and more.

"Your name is Leon Weber."

"My name is Leon Weber," his voice was almost indistinguishable from Leon. Only the articulation sounded a little off.

"Good boy."

The expression seen on the face of the skinnier, off-looking copy of Leon changed from blank to content.

"Now show me a good time". He slowly revealed his hefty, hardened member, and the thrall dove in.   

Leon was gentle, as it took 'Leon' some time to get used to the size. The former grinned, satisfied at the result of his handiwork. The two spectators standing nearby were also enjoying the view as they started stroking each other.

The change was becoming more noticeable when 'Leon' got to the base. His shoulders were broader, thighs bulging out, neck thicker, veins showing up all along his arms and legs.

By the time the room was all but a vortex of carnal desire, only two archetypes remained, each with one original and one copy.

Leon was having a good time, and as reward, he gifted the thrall his seed.

The last unchanged part of 'Leon', his package, received his master's essence. The rod thickened and lengthened. The weight between his legs filled up and drooped down. The transformation was complete.

Adrian, having just finished his session with his own thrall, plopped in the couch alongside Leon. 'Adrian' followed him to his feet.

"Now we're equal", Adrian said smugly to Leon.

◼◼◼◼◼

'Leon' and 'Adrian' settled into their newly assigned roles with unimaginable speed. To the public, whose opinion of them had never been favourable to begin with, nothing had really changed. Their simple routine of being a nuisance was known by everybody.

Being hot. Being dumb. Being rich. Working out. Speeding around. Getting sloshed. Fucking men. In that exact order. Rinse and repeat.

Behind the curtains, 'Leon' and 'Adrian' gleefully put their bodies to use for their masters. It was a small price to pray for all the privileges they had earned.

They had found what they sought.

Credits:

[character - base model]

Adrian - affine warp of Philippe Bélanger and Waldo Rubio Martín

Leon - Marcos @polofromthe305

Even integration is supposed to be performed here, though I have no idea how. The pod is small but comfy. Vintage in a way, not plagued by the proliferation of new-gen screens and integrated appliances. Functionally it's not that dissimilar from a tiny hotel room thanks to it being sufficiently furbished for the occupant to entertain himself. There are water and soft drinks in the corner, a nice couch, a bookshelf and a screen, and what looked like an empty section with markings on it.

I'm fidgeting again.

I usually eat when I'm anxious. But the unfamiliarity of the environment I'm in, and the uncertainty of whether I would become a citizen, or eventually rot somewhere not far from here, moneyless, alone and unknown by most, eases somewhat the hunger trying to make itself known through infrequent bouts of gurgling in my stomach.

The video on the screen is cut short, replaced by the visage of a handsome young man. I gather that he's the clerk assigned to deal with my case. The device's surface bulges out following the contours of his face, and a few seconds later a physical copy of his torso is already in the room with me.

He speaks to me warmly, with bright smiles interspersed between soft-spoken words. I was asked if I wanted the translation to be audial or textual. I picked the latter. I want the Homeland to haunt my thinking process as least as possible. My brain, however, skips most of the small-talks while the transcript of the whole conversation is being provided. I fumble some answers here and there. It's obvious that I'm unprepared.  

I'm aware that bureaucracy is universal to all societies. And when dealing with government officials, them being nice to you is just par for the course. It warms my heart nonetheless, talking to this man. He could, right in this moment, demand some huge sum from me to serve as his pocket money, or force me to kneel on my knees and beg for citizenship, or call out security personnel and have me thrown into a dark cell somewhere. But he doesn't, and probably won't. He does not go out of his way to be cruel, and that is enough of a reason for me to feel glad.

"We confirm that you are eligible for immediate citizenship. The integration process will begin shortly."

I want to cry.

I am crying.

To say that I am overfilled with joy is an understatement. I know this is not the end of all of my problems. But so long as they are being dealt with, there is still a reason to keep on living.

“Please remove all articles of clothing and accessories on your body. When you are finished, step on the pedestal in the right corner of the room”, continues the clerk after having provided some reassuring words. At his mention, warm, faintly yellow lights turn on around the section that moments ago I thought was empty. The area surrounded by markings props up, revealing an octagonal pedestal.

It takes some time to remove all of my clothes, given my weight. When I think that I'm done, I turn towards the section.

“You forgot your glasses.”

I look at the translated text, and apologised profusely for the gaffe.

I step on the pedestal, in my birthday suit, vision blurred and face still wet from tears.

This section of the room is not tiled, or perhaps it originally was, but later got overlaid with a metallic layer. It's cold, and fortunately my feet aren't wet from sweat right now, cause otherwise I may as well have slipped right up when I stepped on it. The elevated platform covers an area big enough for me to stretch one of my arms out, but not both of them. It's only when I'm on it that I notice another detail on the ceiling – a depression of exactly the same shape and area as the pedestal. I turn back to the clerk for further instructions.

"Just a piece of advice. The following steps won't have translation available. Don't worry about them. Language won't be a problem for you soon," warns the clerk. He pauses for a while to check for something, then promptly continues.

"Now I'll redirect your pod to the integration centre. There will be a short moment where you're gonna feel disoriented. This is normal, just stay calm. We will meet again on the other side. All clear?"

I nod enthusiastically. It's been a while since I last felt that feeling. Even when nothing has been done yet, I can already sense energy spreading through my body. Any upcoming minor discomfort won't inconvenience me, that's for sure. 

I hear a whirring sound from above. A thick, cylindrical glass wall is slowly descending from the ceiling. As it connects to the perimeter of the pedestal I'm standing on, a deep, reverberating clicking sound echoes throughout the small space that I'm now finding myself in. A robotic arm from the wall brings out a thick, multi-layered metallic panel with several holes of different sizes and slides it through the glass close to the ceiling. One of the inner layers – wider, with bulky rim – pops out, and the arm seals it shut. The whole panel has been clamped to the glass cylinder. My whole body is now encased inside a giant, transparent tube. A glass chamber.

The ceiling opens up, revealing total darkness on the other side.

I suddenly stumble forward, palms reflexively pushing against the glass surface to steady myself. My balance is lost for a few seconds. The whole structure is moving up not unlike a lift, propelling me into the pitch-black void above and beyond. The cozy room that I've just started to feel comfortable in is slowly moving away from my vision.

Now it's gone.

It's so dark here, that there's practically no difference whether my eyes are closed or open. The nausea hasn't faded away, a sign that I'm still en-route to another section of the building inside this mildly claustrophobic device.

The lift stops. Inertia pulls my torso forward. I feel dizzy for a moment.

Sharp, geometrical blue lights banish the oppressive darkness away. It's still dark inside, but at least now I can see my body and make out the edges of my surrounding. Which is not that useful – without my glasses I can't register much of the machinery around me. The only thing that stands out most is a giant screen in front of me. The vintage kind – flat and lacks the capabilities to project or remodel.

The clerk appears again. He says something. His voice seems oddly clear. Maybe there's a speaker embedded somewhere inside this glass tube. I think I heard 'okay' at the end of the last sentence. I'm pretty sure he knows that his words all go in one ear and out the other. After two more sentences, he disappears, just as quickly as he arrived.

The screen now shows a 3D model of my body with a lot of text on each side. Can't read any of that. Shitty eyesight and being illiterate in this language. The dead silence in the sterile and glass-wrapped bubble of air is broken by a soft hum. I hear a loud burst of pressurised gas above. The sealed hole of the top panel has opened up, and through it bright cerulean smoke starts to flow in. The waves reach my face. Odourless, but heavy enough to feel its pressure. I touch it, and shiver. Cold. Or wet. Maybe cold and wet at the same time. The sensation, however, doesn't seem as vivid if I just let the gas follow its natural path. And I did.

After some time, all the air around me has taken on the same hue. If I was lamenting the darkness earlier, now it is too bright inside. Every part of my body, every roll of fat, and even minute veins and blood vessels on the surface of my skin are now exposed. Yet the gas keeps pouring in, and I'm starting to feel pressure from every direction. Perhaps my body has acclimatised to the texture of this thing. Even with all of these molecules grazing against my body, the initial mix of cold and wetness has essentially disappeared. In its place, a thickening effect can be felt. At some point, the substance surrounding me has turned from gas to liquid. Or at least it seems like so. If it truly is liquid, how am I not drowning yet?

The pressing force is turning uncomfortable at this point. The thing is, the annoyance does not come from the point where my skin meets the semi-liquid. It's whatever it's doing to me inside. My body feels groggy. My brain feels turbo-boosted as if by concentrated caffeine, and not in the best way. It complains about being unable to act and move. Caught in this conundrum, I feel a compulsion to shift my body.

I regret it immediately.

My feet are now floating above the glass floor. Yet my face has not met the glass pane yet. My arms are flailing helplessly in this bizarre coating that sometimes acts like a liquid, other times like gas.  The turbulence caused by my movement has given birth to a counter force that is pulling at me from every direction.

It’s very much like being sub in water. I'm being suspended mid-air, arms flailing, feet swinging like a dying frog. The only difference is that the pressure is very light, and my panicking has nothing to do with me actually being in danger. I'm still breathing with my lungs. I'm not drowning. I feel air coming into my body, albeit slower.

The process continued. The anxiety passed. I'm calmer now, heart beating slower, lungs breathing longer. Grogginess seizes my body. I have stopped my useless and counterproductive struggling, partly because I was out of breath, partly because the gas-fluid itself prevented me from further doing so. It has thickened considerately, to the point of being opaque. The only part of my body that I can move with ease is my head; a sensation  I've never once felt in myself. Now that the initial unfamiliarity has been gone, it feels quite comfortable.

I hear a soft, metallic clanking, then nigh-inaudible humming, like some mechanism just got deployed and is now sliding down from above, its sound distorted by the liquid. Through a hole of the top panel, a colourful ball dribbled into the chamber. A different kind of liquid? It hits the top of my head. Doesn’t splash as strongly as water would, but instead makes a gentle impact and uniformly spreads in all direction. The new substance clings tightly to my skin, and moves in a way uncharacteristic of a liquid. There are no droplets – the whole pool of it moves like a thin, sticky film rolling downward. It's path of motion is not straight-forward, either. Where there are creases or like when it reaches my jaw, where the body part protrudes more than what's underneath it, it deliberately pulls itself inward to cover that unexplored area of my body.

Feels like a second layer of skin. Smooth and void of blemishes. And hairless too. Wherever new-liquid touches, it removes whole patches of hair in that region. Hair on my head, facial, body, pubic. My brows are gone, and the thing drips into my eyes. I so desperately want to scratch them, but of course I cannot. Not that it's unpleasant, there's no distinguishing traits for me to tell the liquid inside my eyes apart from water, I just don't want anything rubbing my eyeballs, that's all. Thankfully the itch stops. I open my eyes and briskly blink.

Good Lord.

I could see every single detail of the hairless, smooth, fat bastard on the screen. His gigantic belly and the mound of meat underneath where his tiny cock is hidden. Blemish-free, saggy skin pulling down from his shoulders or thighs; a double-chin between a pair of blinking blue eyes and another pair of fat, milkless jugs jiggling in tandem with the floating of his body. I see numbers jumping up and down on both sides of the screen, and mathematical symbols sliding leftward and rightward. I don't understand any of them, but I could see them, in all of their crispest, sharpest, incomprehensible glory. Texts. Curves, bowls, hooks, beaks, tails, spurs, ascenders, descenders.

And I see another man on the screen, one who would appear briefly for a few seconds as the system updates. A handsome Halithian native, with dark eyes, thick eyebrows and plump lips, and a dreamy, fit body. The opposite of me. He too, blinks as I blink.

He glitches out again. And the two biggest numbers above the progress bar jump up. It seems a new stage is in store.

A set of tubes descend from above. Six of them in total.  Two grab my arms, another two down my legs, and the last two are hooked to my torso. I briefly feel lightheaded as suction force begins to intensify where the tubes meet my skin. Everything is happening so quickly. Or is my processing capacity slowing down? I don't think I lost consciousness at any point during the whole procedure, but when my brain finally starts to function normally again, I already notice some big changes to my body.

I've lost weight. It's the feeling that comes first. My head, still unnumbed and being able to move freely, senses the weightless excess skin pulling downward where my beard used to be. There's a lack of pressure on my back and chest, and a spontaneous exhilaration as my breath no longer feels shallow as it had been throughout my entire life. Then the images hit, and I see the result for myself, as I focus my gaze to the screen.

The man on the screen looks comical. He's wearing loose, baggy clothes three times his size, with the peculiarity being that the clothes are made of pure, smooth skin. His face is slim, his nipples are nearly touching his belly-button, and the outline of his cock is naturally obscured by four layers of what is basically gravity-affected human rawhide.

I don't have much time to embrace those new sensations or laugh light-heartedly at my new look, however, as news of the next stage has already arrived in the form of engine's whirring, echoing from above. A swarm of teeny tiny drones gust in, each no bigger than a fly, leaving bubbles trailing behind their path. They circle around me, and start to pull. I'm not sure how exactly they work, but the excess skin is starting to ... disappear? I guess the wastage must be stored inside each drone somehow, but as far as my eyes could see, the drones essentially just touch me, and my skin starts to tighten. They continue to do this for a while, until I start to resemble the default human in those 3D modelling programs, a slim man whose body hair density is on the same level as a Ken doll's.

I don't know what to feel; I've never been this light. The handsome man, me at the end of this procedure, appears on the screen again as more statistics are updated. There is a jarring sense when you look at someone and know you're destined to be him, yet feel so removed from him that you feel disbelief in thinking you could even become such a person. A third of the procedure is done now, and don't get me wrong. I feel fantastic. But at the same time, I cannot push aside the vast difference between us. I still view myself as a pathetic man. Now better-looking, but still pathetic. Every time the viewport switches back to showing my current self, I am reminded of that fact. The man's eyes exude confidence, mine don't. His look carries the accumulated knowledge and lived experience of a man born and bred in this beautiful coastal city, one I've only spent less than two days in. And my brain refuses to accept the reality that soon, it would be modified to not only match the former description, it would never remember being me again. Me – obese, nearsighted, undocumented immigrant.  Me – weakling, pathetic.

There are no more images or numbers on the screen. Only one giant message that I can't read. Two robotic arms have entered the chamber, and are now steadying my neck, trying to hold it in place. I hear that whirring noise again, very softly behind me, but definitely louder compared to the drones. My nape stings, and my vision blurs.

The words ... they are beginning to make sense. Rec. Ons. Tru– no.

Reconstruction.

RECONSTRUCTION NOMINAL.

Fuck, head <NOM> my hurts. I can now those letters <ACC> read, but, something wrong with the word order <INSTR> is, I think? Goodness gracious, what are these endings? The device <NOM> behind me vocabulary <ACC> into my head is injecting. But only, exclusively, vocabulary. Or maybe my impression that just is. The English nouns in my brain are being replaced en-mass, and my grey matter is being intimidated by these weird, extensive sets of nonsensical rules. Thankfully, the grammar still remains digestible. I don't know, what does English grammar look like anyway? The only thing I am certain is that, somehow, the messages have reverted back to a more readable form.

The screen starts updating again, and for the first time, I can at least make up a significant percentage of what is being written. Executive function. Process cognitive. Something something spherical-half.

I close my eyes. There's just too much text.

On one hand, it is absolutely a euphoric feeling to have a foreign language, or even just half of that language, slowly being poured and packed into your brain in such an expeditious manner that you can already immediately understand things in it.

On the other hand, to say that it's unpleasant would be a wild understatement. I am very much overwhelmed, and I cannot explain why. A feel like a dictionary the size of a few thousand pages has been jammed ice-cold into my head, and my illiteracy has been elevated to a level that's still not quite literate. It's the same feeling when I was listening to a lecture on Quantum Physics: every individual word made sense, but the percentage of things I understood never made it to two digits. Except that now the topic is just basic biology.  

A tiny message appeared on the screen. "Nominal reconstruction completed". The progress bar boosted up a few inches, and all the previous statistics were minimised to the corner, as two new windows popped up.  

TOPOLOGICAL REMAPPING, one of them displayed.

The top of the glass container opened up, this time much quicker compared to the previous phases. I can rotate my head now, whether due to the diminishing effect of the liquid-gas or the presence of the new object, I cannot tell. I look up to see a flat, holey object.

A mask. Not just the front, but more like the whole skin of a human head. There are creases where openings should be: eyes, mouth and nose. The biggest hole corresponds to the neck. I cannot see what the outside looks like, whether there is hair or if the outer surface is less veiny and filled with blood vessels. It floats slowly in the thickened air, until the horde of drones soar up and spread it out, bringing it closer to my face. It covers the top of my head, then my forehead, then my eyes, nose, mouth, neck. A perfect graft assisted by the robotic army. The atomic stinger behind me vibrates, and I feel light-headed once again.

Light returns to my eyes.

For a very brief moment, I am stricken with an uncanny feeling. Triggered by the marvellous ability of the homo sapiens to recognise faces. And just as marvellous, the ability to distinguish one’s own from others’.

Only one window remains, in the middle of which a handsome face is displayed.

My face?

My face.

Me from a minute ago would say that this is what would become my face. He saw this face as inherently different, foreign and intrusive, despite wanting it. Me from just a moment ago would say that this is the face of my twin. A non-existent twin, a doppelganger. One who carries a face that intellectually is yours, but instinctively is not. But that moment has passed, and soon memory of its existence will also be erased by the sterile metallic object behind me.

I blink. The man on the screen mirrors my motion.

I open my mouth. My facial nerves seemed excited to exercise. Like an athlete hospitalised eager to make use of his limbs again. I sense familiarity. I also sense the lost of something that I cannot name. And for some reason, I cannot even bring myself to want to take it back.

"Remapping completed."

But my identity is still incomplete. I bear the face of Argio. My name is Argio. The name bubbles up and dissipates inside my mind, leaving behind a sense of disorientation not dissimilar to that feeling when I saw my face on the screen. I know my native language is Halithian, but I cannot cast away the imprint in my memory, that I grew up in an English-speaking country. I know I was never obese, and I also remember a time when blob-like people waddled around me, at home, at school, in the street, everywhere. I know I was immigrant, and I paid everything to come here.

Was I?

My head hurts. I try to recall a moment from my childhood. Any moment. I fail. Images and sounds enter my mind, but I recognise neither the voices nor the people in them. I am made aware of a lack, that the events in my past that still linger in my psyche no longer make logical sense. Even if they objectively make sense, I am no longer in such a state that can comprehend them. That lack, of an established, consistent and continuous self, only serves to intensify my angst. I want it gone.

STRUCTURAL INTEGRATION.

Resolving temporal conflicts

Resolving spatial conflicts.

Resolving …

Resolving …

There were at least a dozen lines of similar 'resolving' messages. The numbers were jumping up and down like crazy. This is it. The last phase. I know it not just from the indicator on the screen, but also just through the sheer imposing presence of the machinery that's gathering in glass chamber.

The chamber is getting hotter, and I feel like the dense layer of gas-liquid surrounding me thinning and loosening. Another army of nano drones rush in. Two disc-shaped objects latch onto the arm behind me as it retracts and recalibrates, ready for one final round of mind-warping chemical-altering brain-reconfiguration.

And then another arm from the front. The body has the same clinical, sterile metallic appearance as the rest of the equipment I've been exposed to. But the head looks oddly organic. If not to say, human-like. Reminds me of …

—it quickly attaches itself to my circumcised cock, forming a seamless patch of skin whose only sign indicating where mine ends and the thing's begins is the colour – mine is paler. With light pressure, it starts pumping. A thick, viscous liquid slowly travels through my urethra, and then deeper into my balls, where it is met with resistance.

I feel a dull itch behind my neck, a sign that the ween needle-bearer has fucked with my nervous system once again. At the same time, a new, slick force has arrived near my rear entrance, prompting a loud moan from me. As the two of them work effortlessly in tandem, I quickly succumb to the probing, and deliver my load. Yet the machines only took that as the sign to continue. With each cycle, I feel the weight hanging between my legs become heavier. My whole package has grown to unimaginable size, and what started as just a miniscule bronze-tinted tip has spread to the base of my cock, such that even through the hazy cyan air I could see the rich, brown undertone of my genitals.

A pair of drones levitate towards me, strapping between them a squishy, glossy round-orb. The screen flashes with "Ingest", and I follow its instruction. The thing seems to have been compressed, and once it lands in my mouth, it quickly expands in volume, coating the inside of my mouth with a rich, creamy, sweet liquid. It's also very sticky, and even after swallowing several times, I have a feeling that some of it still remains stuck to my throat.

Needle and prober work me up against, and reflexively I react with a soft whimper. The voice that comes out sounds almost unreal. A deep, rumbling baritone that echoes throughout the chamber. And then the machine scoops out that brief moment of awareness from me, leaving behind at first the impression in my brain that I've always sounded like this, until the impression gets shrunken, and totally disappeared. Of course, I sound like this, is it even a surprise?  

But the changes to deeper than that. The effects of neurochemicals working overtime to retroactively create- no, help me rediscover my past, are felt every microsecond. I now hear my own voice in my head, and it leaves the same masculine residual as it did an hour ago, days, months, years ago. The way I talk, the words I overuse, the intonation I'm inclined to fall back on, my laughs, my speeches, my talks with friends. My nouns, my verbs, my way of being me. They are here, in my mind, taking roots, reappearing, fixed, immovable. They're spreading out, as tiny crumbs of miniscule linguistic unit weave and twine, springing up unique baggage of emotions that accompanied me during all those pockets of reality.

What I spoke and how I felt when I stood on a stage in an oversized blazer, recipient of the Junior Operation Planner award, while my parents sat in the audience. I remember making the starting lineup of our varsity sports team after being cut the previous year, the things that came out of my mouth and landed in my coach's ears when I saw my name on the roster. I remember my pride and joy, when I was accepted for the position at the State Logistics Department.

The stale inorganic smell of the chamber has gone away, only my scent remains, earthy, strong, undeniably manly. A batch of drones lash out, making imperceivable incision on my body. Massive amounts of energy enter my body from every direction. I want to explode. Ruthlessly efficient is the procedure. The dull pressure in his hips and spine quickly turns into a sharp ache in my knees, my ankles, my jaw. My limbs stretched incrementally, joints expanding, bones lengthening along to almost twice their previous length. I feel my torso elongating, vertebra by vertebra. My collarbones widened subtly, femurs stretching, tibias extending, hands growing broader, fingers lengthening, joints realigning with a series of small pops and throbs. The pain, muted and cushioned by the tank’s anaesthetic properties, was enlivening. I am reliving, in real time, my years of gruelling training condensed into just a few seconds.

My chest balloons up with cords of muscles. A golden hue spreads, downward from my neck, and upward from my cock, dominates the remaining pallid spots of my body, until inconsistencies finally disappear from my skin. My calves thicken with strength, my thighs double in size. The glass chamber is becoming too small to my outlandish gain in stature and musculature.

Every bout of growth is followed by oddly specific actions from the drones done on odd parts of my body. A handful of memories from my formative years jab at me. They simulate the moles and birthmarks. Another batch.  The healed scars buried deep beneath skin tissues, from a fall while on the track. The next bunch. The wounds long forgotten, injuries from major to minor. Tiniest details are being made to reconcile with the narrative streaming in my mind.

As the last act of memory reconciliation takes place, the arms behind me start to retreat. My gigantic balls churn, and I cum one last time, delivering my thick load into the piece still docked to my cock. It detaches, revealing my hefty foreskin and the full size of my huge member.

[ALL CONFLICTS RESOLVED]

[INTEGRATION COMPLETED]

My muscles are sore, my heart still syncopating maddeningly. Sweat pours out of my body, coating the chamber with my scent, and cum keeps dripping from the tip of my manhood, long after the stimulation was gone. I feel like I just had the best workout session of my life, and the best sex too. Euphoria seized my mind for so long that throughout that whole time, I never once paid attention to the glass chamber that has just started to move upwards.

As darkness gives way to bright green neon lights, the slowly manifesting surrounding fires up neurons in my brain.

This is my hometown.

This is where I grew up.

This is where I work.

This is where I will raise my children.

The door opens up to a narrow, but brightly lit corridor ahead. With confidence in my gait and determination in my eyes, I strut. Reception is waiting for me to pick up the reissued foreman uniform. I must get to the terminal and start my next shift.

Sensors beneath the floor dry up any liquid that drops down from my body. A familiar male voice echoed throughout the hallway:

“Welcome home, citizen."

That meant pumping iron, bragging about your own sexual conquest, or assigning points of arbitrary scales to bodies of random chicks. If one could feint that level of macho-bravado long enough, perform those rituals of perceived masculinity well enough, the difficulty level of pretending to be sloshed just seemed ten times lower.

He had long hoped to break out of this state, and today might be the day.

There were several reasons why he needed to act drunk. All of them intimately linked together. His friends liked to get pissed, so much to the point that he already estimated one of them would redeliver a half-digested mixed-sauce kebab to the toilet bowl in the next hour, and the other would follow through before dawn, assuming their bodies would not undergo any significant changes. He himself enjoyed a small amount of booze in his solitary time, but never to the point of losing balance or vomiting.

Reason number one: his pals became more susceptible to ridiculous suggestions. A nice example was for the big fellow to lift the smaller guy off the floor.

Reason number two: they were less likely to think that him filming them in the act had any ulterior motive than just boys being boys.

He gripped his phone tightly. Too tightly. After all, he still had to down a few cans just to maintain the façade of camaraderie. But more than that, he feared. He might fuck up, or The App might suddenly just stop working.

Reason number three: The App.

A nameless app suddenly appeared on his phone after he gave his bus ticket to a creepy beggar. He had thought it was just coincidence. He tried to delete it, to no avail. He gave into temptation, and tested one of its functions. Its power terrified him.

His head was still littered with questions. He still didn't know the fullest extent of The App's capabilities, or how it did all those things. Magic? Alien technology? The matrix glitching? Maybe the past two weeks were all but a dream; he would wake up, annoyed by his alarm, to find out that there was no app and he was late for his shift at the coffee shop. The rational man inside him wanted that version of reality; it sounded more real and certain than whatever he was experiencing. But he was now driven only by the morbid complement of rationality: he was curious. Curious enough to be captivated by the power he could exert over other men. Power The App promised. Enough to set up this elaborate plan, to lure these two known gay-bashers to his place, and throw a nice, relatively lavish house party, purportedly with no strings attached.

"Done yet?" Aleh asked. There was a tint of impatience in his voice.

"A few more seconds. You can actually hold him higher, right?" Danik replied. No more questioning from Aleh followed, for he was busy hoisting his friend up to shoulder level.

Seventeen seconds. Danik had learnt from his first three experiments that The App needed exactly seventeen seconds of the subject in frame to do its magic. The party, the food, the drinks, all were set up just to keep those two in front of him occupied for that amount of time, and so that he could see the result afterward.

He tried to be more meticulous with the profiles this time. His first adventure with The App ended up with the forty-something homeless man of the block being turned into a bubble butt ginger twink who only spoke Hungarian. He had used The App the second time to turn a basic bitch into a jolly balding beer-bellied dad, but was too scared to tinker with the awareness section, so her– well, the basic-bitch-turned-beefy-dad's boyfriend was devastated and crying non-stop. His third use immediately followed the second, as he gave the boyfriend a makeover as well. The experience left a bad taste in his mouth, but thankfully instead of an annoying couple at his gym now he got two chill gay bears to talk to.

"And … that's a wrap!" he said, excitement unauthentic.

He noticed beads of sweat already forming on Nazar's forehead.

"Ugh … I'm wasted already," Aleh weakly remarked after a loud burp.

"All good? Toilet's that way."

"No … just, really tired." As you should.  

"I'll help you two to my bedroom". So I can watch you lot transform. The sentence never left his lips, but it lingered in his mind for a while.

Signs of their changes were already there even before they arrived inside the bedroom. Hair started to sprout on Aleh's smooth chest, at first soft and patchy, but quickly grew thicker and spread across his torso, then down towards his crotch, now maintaining the same coarseness and lushness as his own man bush. Nazar's noodle arms gained a tiny bit of bulk, then a little, then a lot, then quiet a lot. Elsewhere on his body the muscles were also reaching gym-rat level, swelling and becoming more prevalent each step he took to the bedframe.

Danik closed the door behind him, and the room was filled with an undeniable masculine aroma. A smell that could, just like he had specified, 'bring any man into submission'. He was ready to leap into to the writhing mass of moans and muscles, to smell, touch, explore, worship their bodies. But he had to wait until The App finished. He had never trusted in magic, and now with a thing of such potency in his possession, he would not risk any part of him for shits and giggles. Paranoia had been his defining trait for decades since grade school, and he would not distrust his instincts that easily, even just to indulge in a few seconds of unimaginable bliss.

The pair in bed seemed more dazed and disoriented than ever. Nazar was licking his lips profusely. Dehydrated. Vodka's doing, and The App's as well. He soon a source to quench his thirst, in the form of Aleh's armpits. He dove in like a starving hog, and hungrily devour the latter's sweaty, musky underarm. The slurping and slopping sound as his tongue and mouth made contact with skin and bushy pit hair echoed through out.

Aleh moaned with a mix of approval and satisfaction, his deeper an octave deeper. He feverishly gripped Nazar's head, and wrapped his free arm around the latter's neck, surrounding and supplying him with even more of his funkiness.

Nazar continued to be deeply engrossed with licking, and had slid further down to Aleh's chest, where his tongue kept on encircling and suckling Aleh's nipples. In the same manner, he continued downward, until his eyes were level with Aleh's crotch. At this point, Aleh turned, and guided his partner's head towards his ass. It didn't take long for Nazar to understand him, and he right away commenced his spit-filled assault on the Aleh's firm, pillowy muscle cheeks.

Danik had gathered that both of them were hard, though he couldn't confirm that in the case of Aleh as his cock was hidden between his rock-hard abs and the damp, precum-stained bedsheet. But Danik could tell The App was working wonder on Nazar. The leaner of the bunch had his giant feet on the floor now, and his package was on full display, dangling beneath his tree-trunk thighs. His hard cock kept growing to monstrous size, and his balls swelled fuller and drooping lower. The two men, completely transformed, had become utterly unaware of their surrounding, only captured by the euphoria of the moment.

They fucked, loudly, passionately, boisterously; the room was now a harmony of two unintelligible baritones, the wet squelching of flesh and the creaking of the wooden bedframe. One of them screamed, and silence returned back to the room, disrupted only by inaudible, abated breath.

Aleh suddenly turned his head to face Danik.

Hear that? A family just checked in next door. The wall is thick enough to prevent me from eavesdropping on every conversation they have. I'm not too keen on occupying myself with others' private matters, though chances are I myself will be hearing and talking about those exact matters in a few seconds. The wall is also thin enough to let me discern the cadences of their speeches. There's the deep baritone of an adult man, the caramel sugar-coating way a woman roughly his age issued out commands masqueraded as suggestions at her two kids, who responded back with boredom-laced one-word answers. Chances are mine will be hollering amidst those voices in a few seconds.

That's the people I'm talking about.

I don't know them. Nevet met them, don't know who they are or what they look like. My educated guess is that they booked that flat through Airbnb or booking.com or some other obscure site, assuming the flat's owner has decided to up his marketing game recently. A typical family on vacation. Unique, yet at the same time not too different from countless others that have rented that flat for a few days a year ago or two.  

Please don't think of me as the sketchy kind. I don't harbour any nefarious intentions towards my neighbours. Truth is, I made a peculiar promise with the previous owner of that flat. An old lady, mum of the current owner. We used to hang out, despite her eccentric nature and me being the age of her grandson. She told me one day that she would soon move out, and asked me to look after that flat for her.

I didn't understand what she meant then, but I agreed to it. A strange request; she didn’t give me any key, and when she was no longer there, her son quickly changed the lock and turned the whole place into a rental.

Took me quite a while, but I eventually got the gist of it.

It's 7 PM. The obnoxious sun is still gleaming outside, and the group of four just came back from their first sight-seeing trip of the day. Our bathrooms are adjacent to each other. When one side turns on a faucet or showerhead, the rumbling sound of water being pumped through the shared network of pipes can be heard echoing through the wall.

I just heard that rumbling sound. It's about time.

The floor is dry, half covered by a thick carpet, on which my feet are resting. It helps mitigate any possible damage to my body and minimise the chance of me getting a concussion when I fall. I only learnt that after finding myself with a sore head and aching back after my first two tries.

I'm going to fall soon.

My bathroom has no tub. If you walk in and do an anti-clockwise turn, first you'd see the sink, then the toilet, the window, and finally the shower cabin. There's a gap between the window and the cabin large enough for an adult human to stand in. The wall covering this gap has a sigil on it. It's glowing.

I touch the luminescent ring, and feel something inside me suddenly being pulled out of my body. Darkness seizes my vision as my senses all shut off, the links between my limbs and my mind all severed. For one very brief moment, I was weightless. I was one with my consciousness, freed from the chains binding it to the material world. I was pure volition. I travelled, but was neither flying, walking, nor swimming.

I see light. Bright, intense, blinding. I am at that ephemeral border between dream and not-dream, where I am aware that I'm regaining my senses, yet still cannot sense. And I sink. The light fades away, until absent. Yet in this new lightlessness, reality appears defined again. Rigid and solid.     

My mind is struck with a familiar feeling, the feeling of unfamiliarity. That experience when the user struggles with an old interface suddenly brought into new hardware. I know from the size and weight of my heaving chest that this is not the body I inhabited mere seconds ago. That sensation intensifies as the warm, soothing water caresses my skin, as it softly applies its pressure to my meatier, calloused fingers slowly wading through the surface. I notice the different contours of cheek bone and forehead and everything else. A balding scalp, a fuller beard, and wrinkles around my eyes.

Taking over brings invigorating effects. I'm stating that as a fact, though for a long time it was never obvious to me. I'm neither hip nor spiritual, so forgive me if I don't know all the nooks and crannies of what I do. When I first experimented with this power, I hypothesised that it's just due to having a younger soul populating a more matured body. But that can't be true; in my usual body, I am pretty much a sexless being. I eventually realised that the process itself is inherently vivifying. My body will always immediately crave the intimate touch of my partner. It happens regardless of my host's sexual orientation. The only limit is that I cannot possess women, transwomen included.

Sometimes the body receives me too well. Like this one. My cock is hardening, and I can feel energy gathering around my crotch; a tool begging to be used. As usual, I fail to resist the temptation. I moan in my new deeper voice, huge hands stroking my growing member. The personality of my host is taking its grip in my mind.

If my goal is to maintain a semblance of my original identity, I've failed thoroughly. I carry a piece of every man whose body I've ever inhabited. That means if I'm meshing too well with a host, some of his physical traits, memories, skills and temperament will stay with me forever, forming an amalgamation with the other men already taking residence inside me. If I cum right now, and I'm pretty sure I will, my balls will expand a little, having absorbed and repurposed my lifeforce into an earthlier form, and I will slide deeper into my role as Matt, chief engineer, father of two, currently on vacation. And after this long session of mine, I will find myself in my original body, with hairline having crept up a few centimetres, belly jutting out a little more and thicker patches of hair running along my torso.

I feel pressure building up. I feel myself slipping out, and another self slipping in.

It's only the beginning. My body is still yearning for more, and I'll need my wife to sate my hunger, when the kids are all asleep. We'll make breakfast together when we wake up, I'll change my clothes and then Matt will stop being me for a while as the whole family steps out of the block into their car for another trip. The cycle continues, until they check out and the next group checks in.

I like this responsibility of mine. It yanks me out of my monotonous routine, away from the clanking of my keyboard, dirty from sweat and dust, away from colourful rows of syntax-highlighted text glinting out of bulky monitors, away from a grey-filled space void of human interaction.

It brings my mind into a zen-like state. I'm aware this is an odd thing to say given the very sexually-charged actions that I almost always perform when inside another man's body. But my sexuality throughout the takeover is always derivative. It feels good being inside another man's body, cumming as him, taking on his personality and having sex with his partner, whether that be his wife or husband, but all of those are secondary to my true goal.

With me, my host becomes healthier and more virile, his partner is euphoric, and his kids are content. My presence induces tranquillity. I don't harm anybody. I'm not corrupting my host's mind or body, but reacting to his most natural desire.

I make sure that the flat is always in good condition, that its inhabitants are always happy.

That is my responsibility,

as the keeper of Flat 11.

There's a whole load of other stringent requirements, like no alcohol, no drugs, no excessive caffeine, and students must eat a full meal before exam time. The reason, as they often love to say, is that they care about you and your safety. Bullshit. The main problem is that moving your soul around is energy-consuming, and they just don't want to spend extra effort then being caught in a lawsuit trying to resuscitate your meatsack when you expel your soul with too much force after drinking too much coffee or hitting a bong so potent that you fly high through the campus and collide with some hapless student. And since I did violate that exact rule, I was disqualified from doing any possession during exam season (not due to weed, I was just hungover).

I arranged a second attempt with our lecturer and examiner, Prof. Morozova. Gosh, I hate that hag, but more about her later. I have to finish my bitching about the logistics first.

It's times like these that I wish I was born in Southern Europe or South America. Aye, the men are fine, and the beaches are fantastic. But the best thing? Siesta. Ethical regulations dictate that you can only possess someone when they are sleeping, and try as best as you could not to disrupt their normal routine. Including their sleep. But since dudes infuse more energy into their hosts than dudettes, the chance of me or any other guy possessing someone without waking them up is near zero. Unlike my buds who went on exchange to Spain and passed their exam by jumping into hot Valencian men right on Wednesday afternoon, I am stuck with this shitty schedule dictated by the typical temperate continental European climate, where possession finals can only take place on the weekend (people wake up later in the morning) in registered areas (you can't just pick any residential building, the place must be approved by the university).

On my second try, I chose this cute banker and informed Morozova a week before. Tried to be a goody-two-shoes this time, and stayed clean the whole Friday night. Ate scrambled eggs with croutons and half an hour later, I was in front of his apartment with my examiner by my side. I did the usual stuffs just fine: detachment, propulsion, projection, yadda yadda. Then I found myself in his lanky body. Once again, someone was wasted, this time not me. Our sweet banker over here just got promoted the day before, so he decided to have a blast with his pals that night. Returned home still in his working attire, breath stale, clothes damp. And. Fucking. Horny. Yeah, you guessed it. He creamed his pants while I was in his body. I was in heaven, but then the old hag wrote "Disturbance of host's mental space" into the remark section, and my whole week was ruined. I did file an appeal, but Morozova's vindictiveness meant no one from administrative would dare overturn my examiner's decision. Third attempt awaits.

Here I am, once again with my professor slash lecturer slash examiner, a flawless case study for those interested in the phenomenon of nominative determinism. Her ice-cold forty-something face is frozen with exactly one expression: a frow that leaves wrinkles so deep in her glabella, her thin pointy nose and pouting lips almost look like the extension of one long whacky line. Her demeanours are frosty, and her grading habit sends chills down the spine of any student unfortunate enough to have her as their examiner. But I'm used to her presence now (the perk of taking an exam thrice), so I just need to focus on my target.

I did more research this time, and registered Nick over here as my target for the final. Decent, buff, good-looking, established routine, very-unlikely-to-be-high-or-drunk-right-now. The man is dozing off peacefully on his balcony, his hairy chest and beefy thighs out for us two ghostly figures to peruse. Well, probably just me – I'm not even sure if my examiner is into men. I concentrate on my energy flow. Still my core. Steady. I feels the heartbeat of my target, in tandem with his breathing. The physical level is synced, and with no discrepancies in bodily sensations at the deepest level, I just scored the highest point for projection. As I close the distance between us, random thoughts from Nick's subconsciousness start to pour into my mind. If I keep my calm and continue to navigate his mind labyrinth well enough, there won't be any problem.

The noisy storm of thoughts ceases, and then silence.

I open my eyes. Groggily adjust my ball cap. What time is it? I habitually pick up my phone. 9:18. I'll get myself some coffee then go to the gym. The thoughts come naturally to me, as if they were mine. That's because I am Nick now, and I do take on his personality, at least until this session of ours ends. The distinction is very blurry, and only advanced practitioners can tell us apart.

I am not exactly in 'steering mode'. If you bring a psychologist and have her map out all my behaviours throughout the day while I'm in Nick body, you will find out that I behaved exactly like how people and even Nick himself expect him to behave. This is what 'non-intrusion' looks like in practice. It's like being a privileged passenger. You feel everything the driver is feeling, and sometimes you two switch roles, you take the wheel and he can't do anything about it except to watch. But that is predatory behaviour. That's a criminal offense right there.

There does exist a grey area, called 'nudging'. I can make Nick suddenly feel the need to admire his body and flex, or go further and inject some lewd imagery into his mind so that he wants to whip out his meaty cock and jerk off to some steamy (gay) porn. As long as I can prove that all actions Nick 'does' while I'm inside him is characteristic and expected of him, and that he is not and will never be aware of my presence, I can get away with anything.

But not now. Morozova is watching, and my exam is not doing yet. I still need to do Nick's routine perfectly for at least 30 minutes to get my grade.

I strut into the kitchen, my morning wood straining against the shorts. A spring breeze sweeps through the opened door, caressing my hefty pecs. I press the power button of my Rancilio Silvia and let it pre-heat. Put some bread into and toaster, and start scrolling. Gym memes, group chat, messages from clients. Not really productive, but who cares, it's Saturday. I tip an 18 g dose in my grinder. Transfer the grounds into the portafiller and do some tamping with my brawny arms. There's ham in the fridge. Pull two shots.  

The rich, aggressive scent of morning espresso punches up my nose. There's also another scent. My scent. Nick's own. I'm subtly savouring it right now as I'm chewing through my breakfast. Only five minutes left before the end of the test. A cold gust of wind gusts through my shirtless torso. That means she's gone. There's a telepathic message for me. Shucks. I want to read it, but that means I have to divert my mental resources and stop enjoying Nick's body.

ᴘʀᴇᴘᴀʀᴀᴛɪᴏɴ: 𝟤.𝟢 ᴅᴇᴛᴀᴄʜᴍᴇɴᴛ: 𝟣.𝟢 ᴘʀᴏᴘᴜʟꜱɪᴏɴ: 𝟣.𝟢 ᴘʀᴏᴊᴇᴄᴛɪᴏɴ: 𝟥.𝟢 ᴄᴏɴɢʀᴜᴇɴᴄᴇ: 𝟤.𝟢 PASS. ᴘ/ꜱ: ɪ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ᴡᴏʀᴋ ᴛᴏ ᴅᴏ ʀɪɢʜᴛ ɴᴏᴡ. ᴡᴇ'ʟʟ ꜰɪʟᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀ ʜᴏꜱᴛ'ꜱ ᴀꜱꜱᴜʀᴀɴᴄᴇ ᴘʀᴏᴛᴏᴄᴏʟꜱ ᴀᴛ 𝟣𝟤. ᴡʜᴇɴ ɪ ᴄᴏᴍᴇ ʙᴀᴄᴋ.

JACKPOT! I passed, and I have two more hours to spend in this awesome body!

Shit, shit. Nick felt my presence. I may have been too excited there.

Hooray. Yippee. Yes. Yas Gaga. (I'm trying to curb my celebrating noises here.)

Perhaps I've been too harsh on old Morozova. She just gave me one more hour to spend in Nick's body. One more hour where I'll be pumping iron, sweating out and basking in my own godly musk. One more hour to be a hung hairy stud. This is the best day ever.

Suck to be you, but I'm not gonna narrate everything I do while I'm inhabiting this godly body. Getting this degree is already hard enough, let me have some fun, please. Also, I don't want Faculty up my ass (but only metaphorically, I don't really mind some of them being literally up my ass).

Peace.

He quickly went back to the melting shop. The sun was at its peak two hours ago. Bright sky outside, and slivers of light shone through vast empty spaces where speckles of dust danced in the stale air before settling on grime and scattered remnants of demolished walls. Thankfully, facilities within the plant often were not separated by either doors or gates, thus if the sun could sweep its far-reaching beams across the floor of one place, there's a high chance adjacent parts in the building were also just as well-lit.

 "We're at the base of the furnace. The moulds are over there. I guess this was where they produced ingots."

His voice echoed throughout the abandoned shop, footsteps amplified by the surface made uneven from the years-deep layer of dust and debris. Wind howled and whipped against the thick, old wall. Cranes, remnants of them to be more apt, suspended three floors above rumbled and sluggishly collided against each other. If there was any eeriness from the lack of human presence, the noises got rid of that feeling pretty quickly.

"So how long have you been a YouTuber?" he remembered the question from his cousin while they were seated at the Easter table. He didn't answer, though to his relatives he may as well have. His response had the form, but not the essence of one. Of course, there was the social aspect of his justification for doing so, which was that he found the asker irritating and the only instance he should engage with him was when they were about to say goodbye. That's like, ten-percent of the 'why'. In truth, he himself didn't know.

Teens, just like his annoying cousin, associated his job with AdSense, flashy videos, jump-cut editing and folks who put their algorithm-farming faces on every thumbnail. The epitome of being effortlessly popular while making bank. The new driving force of neologism. The usurper of the old order of silo-trapped blue and white. That last descriptor had also been found lingering on the mouths of his older kin one way or another, usually with anything but reverence. To them, the mysterious way thanks to which he found a stable income was the malaise of modern society, that which had enabled do-no-gooders to chew and gnaw on public amenities at the expense of the honest folks. It's hard to talk to people about something when their perception of it had become so warped and entrenched. Part of the reason why he hardly ever told them about the actual details of his job.

His first urbex video was uploaded to the platform when he was still underage, hidden behind the nickname splunkouskee. Back when ads were non-existent and between bouts of quirky prank videos one could stumble upon a gruesome scene of human-beheading. He disliked saying corny sentences about change. It made him sound like an old codger, even if he was nowhere near hitting thirty.

But a lot did change. The prospect of doing YouTube as a career did not register in anyone's mind then, and he had wondered what he would do after finishing his studies. Now it's his full-time job. Only his thousand-or-so subscribers from the early years remembered the shaky hand-held camera, the forcefully deepened voice and the artifact-laden underexposure that accompanied the bulk of recordings on his channel. The voice eventually got more natural. He bought a GoPro. And the number of followers reached six digits.

There were also things that didn't change. Nobody knew of his real name, or his face. Yet. And he intended to keep it that way. Not that there was anything bad about showing his mug to random strangers on the net. He'd never thought of himself as ugly. While the low-maintenance self-trimmed messy brown hair and lean body that was more the result of a healthy diet than a rigid workout routine would never land him a role in any fancy movie, he was well aware that, objectively speaking, he would fit the polarising label of above average. Just not above-above-average.

splunkouskee had stayed anonymous for all these years, largely because it brought him comfort. A part of him also perceived it as a trait that distinguished true urban explorers from the clout-chasers. There's something deeply unauthentic about famous people being sighted in abandoned places. He had taken it to heart, that the focus should always be on the scenery and the atmosphere.

The perforated stairs clanged underneath his feet, the yellow paint had all rusted out. Even when equipped with the knowledge that abandoned plants were a Southern staple, it's still jarring for him to think that five thousand people used to work here, everyday painstakingly operating this mish-mash of Soviet-licensed equipment and imported French machinery. The fate of this plant did not differ much from others of its kind. Lower sales, less revenue, more protests from workers, but business continued in the tumultuous and chaotic period immediately following the fall of communism. This particular factory managed to get by until 2004. Unlike some that eventually got absorbed by ArcelorMittal, the ladles blaringly poured their last batches of molten iron while bankruptcy and mass layoff loomed in the air. Most of the former workers had very likely all migrated abroad – if not to the British Isles, then to Germany, while those who remained continued to do odd jobs in the vicinity.

He heard rustling above. His brows furrowed, and he stopped.

Urban explorers like him rarely revisited a spot. That left only three kinds of people to frequent an abandoned factory: annoying teenagers, homeless people with some kind of mental illness, or criminals in hiding. Possibly a combination of all three. He could handle the first two groups, not too sure about the last. He thought about the likelihood of him encountering one of its representatives. Those that he'd heard about kept themselves close to the big cities. Two guys from his school paid for their big-titted gals using the proceeds from stolen cars in Düsseldorf. Homicides were rare and would make national news if one was to be found. It's hard to even imagine what kind of criminals he could encounter here.

He walked forward. The brutalist sight of the melting shop faded away from his view as he ascended a floor higher.

"Thought I heard something. Seems like no one's here. Anyways, we're in some kind of office space."

All the windows were open, albeit with some missing panels. The layer of dust was thinner, and junks and broken furniture didn't clutter the floor, instead gathered in two big piles near a corner, giving the space a less claustrophobic feel, and the impression that the desertion of this floor was more recent and thorough than the last.

That, or someone just moved in.

At the end of the hallway, a lightless corridor led to the other wing.

"If memory serves me right, three years ago, an old couple said they saw blue light coming out from this section of the building. All the creepypastas about aliens abducting homeless people and drug addicts stem from this sin–"

He bumped into something red while emerging out of the corridor. He stepped back.

Someone. Someone's back. Lower back. Rear. Rump.

The brutish figure before him exceeded dimensions. A gothic 'M' etched on his right brow, a cross below his left eye, and 'FAITH' in faded ink spanned the front of his neck.

Wide. splunkouskee had so dearly wished for that wideness to more of a blubbery kind. Which still wouldn't increase his chance of winning the colossus in front of him by any significant percent if any altercation were to take place, but at least successful escape would still remain a probable scenario. Alas, all his eyes could see were thick, corded muscles, stacked layer upon layer, with only a subtle sheet of fat separating them from the bright red tracksuit the bald giant was wearing. He'd gather that half of the doors in the building weren't built for this mountain of meat and muscles to walk through. His neck strained just to keep his head up high enough and look the man in the eyes.

"Enjoying the view?" the latter asked playfully. splunkouskee did not find the reverberating bass of the man funny or calm-inducing.

He was stunned by unhuman stature of what seemed to be the only other human in the building. Logic had evacuated from his mind, and it took him a good few seconds before he could snap himself back to reason. He gulped. His eyes darted to the lower body.

Rectangular bulge in left pocket. Phone or wallet.

Thin oblong object in right pocket. Key. Car key or some other kind of key.

That jacket had an internal pocket. An unusual place to store dangerous toys. And the jacket's front was zipped.

Only three kinds of people were likely to frequent an abandoned factory: teenagers, homeless, or criminals. In front of him was obviously not a teenager, unless genetical anomaly and tons of drugs can make a nineteen-year-old look like that. The type of people who wore that attire and built and maintained that physique had little in common with homeless men. The nearest petrol station was six kilometres away, docs who could issue roids triple that number, and no services would deliver whey or creatine to a place where 'No entry without permission' in bold littered its perimeter. Which left him with the worst answer. He threw a glance behind his shoulder, expecting more manpower to come and flood the room.

"Relax, s' only you and me 'ere. The boys are busy running their errands," said the man in red, as if reading his potential interlocutor's mind.

"Hey man. Just taking in your size," splunkouskee forced a smile, trying his best to suppress any hint of anxiousness in his voice. "You, uh, from around here?" 

"Kinda. This meathead is from around here," replied the other man, pumping his chest proudly.

Great, the YouTuber silently sighed. Referring to himself in third person. If not already a total nutjob in his natural state, then probably on something. Maybe both.

"Sorry for bargin' in, man. Didn't know this place is still looked after. I'm just a YouTuber. Ain't no cops around. If you don't want any filming, I'll fuck off."

"Y'know what …"

Ƨ̴̡̨͇͍͕̗͂͂̐ ̷̥͔͒͆̋̕T̸̢͗ ̶̗͓͔̭̤̹͈̓́̏͂́̓A̶͕͑́̍̉͂͊̈ ̵̗̲͋̋́͒̕⅄̸̘͈̤͗̑͘ ̶̦̹̾̄͗̉ ̸̭̞̝̉H̷̝̺͈̪̫̱̰̀͐͂̽̌ ̶̱̪͚̮͎̉Ǝ̸̱͍̓̈́̎̆͝ͅ ̶̙̽̄̒͂Ŗ̸͔̗̼͍͍̇ ̶̡̰̗̫̞̦̦́̓̐̈́̊̒Ǝ̴̢͊͘

The red tower stepped toward him. He zoned in. Eyes locked, limbs ready. The air shimmered, as though whispering to him, but he only listened to the accelerating pulse of his heart. His focus was solely on the threat at large, and he paid his surrounding no mind. Why would you not concentrate on something that could block two third of your vision? Especially when that thing was moving.

S̴̨̛̗̝̱̽͛̀͛́̏͡ ̡̡̧̞̟̰̙̮̞̝̔̏̀Ț̢̛͕͖͑̾̈́͛̏͛̚͟ ̴̡̯̩̰͕̻̝̈́̽̾͡͠Á̢̙̮́̓͑͜͡͏̤̓̌ ̴̴̤̯̠̘͛́͆̔͆͘͠Y̜̮͙̯̤̜̟̏̀́̾̈́͟ ̴̗̞̻͛́̽̓͒͆̔͜͠ ̯̟́͏͇͇̙̗̔́͑̾͛Ḧ̴̴̴̢̛̞͕̦̐̀͑̋ ̡̢̯͇̹̪͛͒̀͆͑͡͡E̶̯̟͑̽͑̈́͐̈́̾̓͝ ̨̜͒́͗͠͏̻̯̩̔͑̀R̛̛̗̞̟̘͕̾́̑͗͂͠ ̞͕̗̹̘̜͑͜͏̴̯̩͠E̴͓̤̙̟̽̈̏̓͛̀̃͡ ̞̻̩͙̩̿̈́́̈́̌̚̕͘.̛̛̩̪̝͕͕̹̘̞̓̿͠ ̡̛̻͔̘̱̔͗́͒͛͑͜.͏̴̛̯͕̟̌̑͑̓̀̿͡ ̟̿̓̑̈͏̛̞̝̯͛͞͞.̴̶̤̯̙͍̹̞́̔̏̋̾

He felt unease. He could just easily turn around and run down the dingy stairs, and let this experience fade into forgetfulness, like that time he backed off from the heroin addict in the abandoned hotel. Yet he didn't. Had he become braver? That he thought he could do anything else other than running away from an undefeatable foe. Maybe more stupid. Because he still wasn't running. He wanted to believe that the uneasiness inside him stemmed from the behemoth slowly advancing in his direction.

The other man grinned. The typical brainless grin that he had seen among the football hooligans in his hometown. He felt silly for thinking that it was the source of his dread. True, in his head there was fear of an altercation with something that resembled a prehistoric gorilla. An instinctual fear that resonated with all animals. But beyond that? The same dread was preventing him from bolting away. Yet try as he might, he could not pinpoint its true nature. His thoughts were jumbled. His brain hurt.

C̡̈́̓͞͏̛̾͑ ͛͏͍͓̜̽͑̾A͕̼̯͒̀͑͆͡ ̤͛̈́̀̾̐͜͠L̞̱̼̈̿͑́͜ ̴̛͙̞͐͑̓͠M͍̜̤̩̐͒͑̓ ͓̃̽̽̾̽̓͠ ̡̝͍͂́̐̔̑D̶̞̘̗̹́̈́͠ ̴͕̝̜̗̈͗̌Ơ͛̓̓͗͘̚͡ ̡͖͕̼́͐͆͜Ẃ̨̡͙̯̂͛͠ ̼̱͑̌̚͏̩̯Ǹ̴̩͍̩́͌͒

Yes. He must stay ᴄᴀʟᴍ. No time to panic when the brute was inching closer now. He looked at him in the eyes. Gaze locked.

"All these years and this idiot's brain still cannot muster any thoughts other than football and vodka. His goons are just as stupid …"

He felt pity. No thoughts behind those stupid eyes. He knew the simpleton was bullshitting, but to see him turn out to be a terrible liar, the threat now felt even more comical.

They were never alone to begin with. He could see the others now. Strange, the moment he glimpsed their faces or the movements of their mouths, the images vaporised from his mind. But he just saw them. And heard them.

They whispered to him.

C̡̈́̓͞͏̛̾͑ ͛͏͍͓̜̽͑̾A͕̼̯͒̀͑͆͡ ̤͛̈́̀̾̐͜͠L̞̱̼̈̿͑́͜ ̴̛͙̞͐͑̓͠M͍̜̤̩̐͒͑̓ ͓̃̽̽̾̽̓͠ ̡̝͍͂́̐̔̑D̶̞̘̗̹́̈́͠ ̴͕̝̜̗̈͗̌Ơ͛̓̓͗͘̚͡ ̡͖͕̼́͐͆͜Ẃ̨̡͙̯̂͛͠ ̼̱͑̌̚͏̩̯Ǹ̴̩͍̩́͌͒

What was it that they said? There were no words, only random noises. Perhaps a foreign tongue. He did not try to even understand them. Unlike TV static, which left its impression and echo in the consciousness, whatever this was, it left no traces. A randomness that poured out into nothingness. Yet they kept talking to him, and he couldn't stop himself from tuning in. They spoke. He heard them clearer now. He felt ᴄᴀʟᴍ.

ᴄᴀʟᴍᴇʀ now. As if a machine of incomprehensible efficiency and discreetness just vacuumed away his most distressing thoughts.

The tiny cones in his eyes still registered a red-cladded specimen in front of him, but the labelling process that should come afterward, where the adrenaline would kick in and the initial nondescript characterisation of a red object would be erased and replaced with the mark of peril, had all gone dysfunctional.

There was a big man in front of him. That's it.   

Somewhere around the man, he saw, semi-saw, not-saw, some other people. They seemed like a likeable bunch. Much more so than the red-cladded specimen in front of him. He could stay, and talk his way out. Out of what? Nothing. Just talk. Just ꜱᴛᴀʏ.

The giant was inches away from him now. A shadow loomed over him. Meaty palms were placed on his shoulders.

"That's true. I like you a lot. A younger and healthier body, a more refined mind. Prime potential."

F̸̪̆ ̸̟͆E̵͓̓ ̷̮̂Ḙ̶̌ ̷̞̂L̷̩͑

He ꜰᴇʟᴛ the faint smell of alcohol mixed with body odour, sweat and sex wafting up his nose. The rough, calloused hands pressed him in, and the smell intensified. The fabric was thin enough for him to ꜰᴇᴇʟ the contour of muscle paunch into which his face was planted, and ꜰᴇᴇʟ the rhythm of the other man's heaving chest. A force was pushing him slightly below where his GoPro was strapped. A pitching tent inside the other man's pants. He ꜰᴇʟᴛ it. Touched it. Caressed it. His GoPro was still recording.

ꜰᴇᴇʟ.

His ꜰᴇᴇʟɪɴɢ hands slid down further. Thighs. Gargantuan thighs, hard and tout. Thighs that could effortlessly smash his head within seconds. He wasn't even sure if his arms could even completely wrap around one.

He ꜰᴇʟᴛ small. And he ꜰᴇʟᴛ conflicted about his feeling. A man is more than just his size and physical prowess. Why then was he feeling inferior. Weaᴋ. ᴛɪɴʏ. ᴘᴜɴʏ. ᴘᴀᴛʜᴇᴛɪᴄ. ɪɴꜱɪɢɴɪꜰɪᴄᴀɴᴛ. ɪɴꜰᴇʀɪᴏʀ.

"You can be bigger than this."

WANT.

The man's fingers interlocked with his, their hands moved together along the firm surface of his quads.

Yes. The word never left his mouth. If uttering anything was even in his capabilities now, he seemed too busy to do so. Drool dripped from the corner of his lips. He ᴡᴀɴᴛᴇᴅ to be bigger. The affirmation echoed louder in his head.

"Sound better than this."

CRAVE.

His hand was laid upon the oversized Adam's apple.

Yes. His dilated pupils continued to stare straight ahead. He seemed intensely concentrated, though it's not entirely clear what the object of his fixation was.

"You can dominate all the weaklings."

Yes. His hands were now by his sides. Heart beating abnormally slow. Breath not even noticeable.

"All of this can be yours."

ᴀʟʟ ᴏꜰ ᴛʜɪꜱ ᴡɪʟʟ ʙᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀꜱ.

All of this will be mine.

The brute's jaw slacked and opened up, revealing an ethereal, luminous teal slowly emerging from the inside of his mouth. The first patch of light fluidly exited his orifice and descended toward smaller man. Soon the air between them was occupied by an oblong, cylindrical stem still pulling itself out from within the bigger man's body. The body was translucent, almost hollow, or perhaps deliberately maintaining the facade that it was hollow, thanks to the mind-warping way light bent around its axis.

From the main stem, hundreds of luminescent hair-thin filaments waved in the air while the eerie light flickered irregularly. A distinct pulse. Where it left the giant man, it seemed to draw something from deep within him, both literally and figuratively. Blinding white lights in discontinuous stretches flew out of his orifices before joining the core in its journey toward the less well-built man. As more and more light evacuated from its human source, the red-clothed man's expression also became less intense. When the last of the thing had floated out of its vessel, the veins on his temples deflated, and his facial nerves repositioned themselves to form a more neutral position, if not to say blank. The two men now shared an identical dazed look on their faces.

The whole organism coiled, narrowed and condensed as it closed the distance between itself and its target. The glow intensified at the point of contact, illuminating the contours of his face, his lips, his cheekbones, the tension in his neck. The entry was much quicker than the exit. The filaments retracted into the main stem, and in one swooping motion, the whole stream of teal was already inside, leaving no traces of its presence just mere moments ago.

splunkouskee gasped for air as light returned to his eyes. The thug's knees buckled, sending two hundred kilograms of meat and muscles down onto the man half his size. With bated breath and shaking arms, he withstood the fallen colossus's weight, but not for long. He grunted, then slowly backed off, and the other man landed on his own belly.  

"Fuck, you're heavy," an uncharacteristically grin plastered across his face as he looked at the unconscious brute.

Heart rate still elevated from the last exertion, he threw his jacket and baseball cap on the floor. GoPro dismounted, he extended both of his arms and hold them right in front of his face. Rotated them. Left hand. Right. Flexed his fingers. Thumb. Index. Pinky. Two fingers. Four fingers. He ran his hand over his chest and stomach. Then he did all kinds of mock-motions, holding, grasping, forming a fist. There was exuberance in his breath, and a child-like excitement on his face.

The originally right-handed YouTuber now seemed oddly fond of his sinister limb. Seconds later he was already in his birthday suit, and in an exceptionally good mood. The novelty of exploring the sensation and sensitivity coming from all parts of his body still hadn't faded, as he quickly did all sorts of acts, from elementary to questionable, first with his legs, and later, briefer, with his manhood.

His attention finally turned to the other human in the room. He lowered himself next to the legs, and pulled the red top up and the bottoms, along with the softer piece of white cotton under it, down. The man's weight ensured that very little of his clothes actually moved away from their original position, but enough was done to expose the deep crevice of his powerful lower back and the top-most part of his hairy, mighty glutes. The naked young man stood up, and firmly planted his left foot onto the giant's body exactly where the skin was exposed. A depression formed around the crevice, then like quicksand, the flesh around it flooded the invading toes, burying them underneath. More and more went in, subsumed by foreign muscles, until the heel completely vanished inside. The result resembled an up-right, perfectly bio-engineered extension of the spine rather than a leg magically attached to a back.

The veins on his left leg swelled up immensely, pulsing with unnatural vigour as they pumped some unknown substance across his body. The change quickly spread, and soon all of his skin surface was covered by bulky veins. He moaned softly as his cock came to life, excited by the rush of body-enhancing fluids.

Soft cracking sound echoed inside his frame as his spine lengthened, his bones elongated and repositioned to accommodate his new, still increasing, height. His calves thickened and hardened, in their new improved form would put any Olympic sprinter to shame. As his body worked overtime to extract, transfer and appropriate the other man's power, his glutes jutted out rounder and firmer, his quads exploded to the size of tree trunks. The formerly lean and compact figure began to expand both horizontally and vertically. His core fortified tremendously, abs simultaneously forming and dissolving as mass and raw power kept accumulating around his stomach. His pecs ballooned into mountainous, deadly slabs of muscle, while his delts inflated and his arms and forearms grew in all dimensions.

At his feet, the opposite change was taking place, albeit less noticeable. The red tracksuit now seemed comically oversized on the bald man's frame, who continued to shrink as all of his former glory travelled to the region where the other man's leg had been connected to his back to be repurposed as the latter's height and body mass. The two men now seemed on par with each other in all physical aspects. Even in his diminished form, the thug still possessed a body that all strongmen or bodybuilders would dream of.

The younger man's left foot reemerged from the shallow flesh pit it had sunken in.  Armed with new might, he flipped his muscle donor's body and promptly removed the huge pair of shoes and dirty socks from their owner's feet. He hoisted the big man up with ease and propped him against a thin, sturdy board nearby singled out from the pile of junks. Trackie top unzipped, white t-shirt on the floor, trousers loosened, briefs down. Now, both of them were bare.

The man stirred. His face scrunched, then he opened his eyes. He looked around dazedly, then his gaze landed upon the naked, transformed YouTuber. His expression turned quizzical.

"Who the fuck are you?" he asked, more surprised than annoyed. It was clear from his state of mind that a response was not expected.

A hand dug into his chest with lightning speed. Contact was made, and the flesh sunk in. He gasped.

"Stay there. The transfer is still not done" a commanding voice bellowed at him from above.

The arm sunk deeper. Its veins inflated, more rapidly and violently than in the first transfer. A second arm disappeared inside the bald man's belly. The latter's desperation and helplessness soon became apparent. A new wave of change was coming, this time more profound, more sweeping, and more devastating. With each breath and each heartbeat of the bald man, he felt clearly the contraction of his crown jewels. They shrunk and shrunk, until the two of them were hardly the size of grapes. Opposite him, two mighty orbs swelled and drooped, amassing everlasting virility for their bearer. The killer thighs around them never stopped expanding and hardening, greedy and thirsty for more mass.

The hand that was stealing muscles from the chest rose higher, reaching the man's neck in a half-submerged state. The outline of thick, meaty fingers became more prominent as they wrapped around his throat. He yelped with a cracked voice.

"Easy now," the voice that came out was an octave lower. A deep, resounding baritone that resonated from a voice box still ragingly enlarging. Thick, corded muscles topped delts that had grown to an unthinkable proportion.

"I'll give your body a makeover once we're finish," two octaves lower now, eerily resembling the thug's voice before the change, except with a clearer cadence.  

A force pulled at the contact point and spread throughout his chest as the now bigger YouTuber raised him to his feet with terrifying raw strength. The height balance had been broken, as one man's head was now level with the other's collarbones. Yet decrease of his height showed no signs of stopping, only made more striking when seen in tandem with the corresponding increase of the other's stature. Nipple-level now. The height transferred had slowed down somewhat. Finally, below nipples.

Once again, there was a David and a Goliath in the room. But the new Goliath was even bigger, calmer and evidently more virile. And the new David was pathetically smaller, obviously more afraid and glaringly impotent. The last remnant of resistance in his dull eyes had gone away, replaced by submission. His body submitted to the giant hands inside it, taking away the final crumb of dignity that his biceps still clung to. His mind submitted to the rugged, dominating, unimaginably deep voice issuing commands to him.

"Feels good to serve a proper man, isn't it?"  

He whimpered, too weak to talk. His cock had been reduced to a nub whose bulk was made entire of the mushroom head. He could feel blood rushing to it. It's getting hard. But the dangling foreskin that may help his cock keep the illusion of a respectable volume when soft only added more to the humiliation in its current state. A bystander could never tell if he was getting an erection.

One assimilating hand had pulled out, leaving the other still hovering near his nether region. The shadow of a monstrously sized phallus spanned the length of his abdomen. He felt the size and texture of the freed hand that was now running down his body. All the roughness, meatiness and calluses had been copied perfectly. Meanwhile, his body familiarised itself with two smooth and delicate hands attached to twig-like, scrawny arms that had never seen any fight nor lifted any iron.   

"I need a good hole for my new cock. And you will do nicely."

No more hand connected to his body. The inhumanly big figure sat on a nearby sturdy steel beam suspended by several others, and placed the petite bald man on his lap. The latter's whole back touched the former's abs, skin-to-skin. He looked down to see a throbbing monster almost the length of his femur.

"I'll do some modding, then you can take that all in." Hot breath from above coated his head. He smelled a masculine scent derivative of his own before the transfer. Stronger, earthier, more intense, more intoxicating. Wet fingers reached into his hairy hole and spread it out. The patches of hair that still remaining on his body retracted, and his bushy beard was reduced to a patchy moustache, the last physical marker of his old identity completely gone. He felt something dripping out of his ass before landing on the bigger man's crotch as the forearms of the latter turned hairier with each massaging act. His ass quivered, and more fluid dripped out of his hole.

"Ready?"

The girthy rod entered his hole. Pleasure overwhelmed him, and something else as well. Energy. Wrinkles and eyebags disappeared. Short, sandy blond strands of hair sprouted out of his smooth, oily bald scalp. As the cock went all in, the feebleness that resulted from the transfer had been eradicated.

In between thrusting and bucking, where grunts from above and moans from below harmonised into one final transfer, jumbled images and sounds jolted at his own consciousness, then evaporated. He was losing his grip with his own past. Memories buried deep in his psyche were dug out and taken away. They slipped away from his mind, just like the fluid deep inside his rear, dripping out, coating the massive rod penetrating it, claimed by its conqueror.

A squelching sound. He saw, three years ago, a faintly glowing blue squid-worm. It was gone. The thing. Inside him. Then the memory, also gone, outside of him. He moaned with his new, youthful voice. Memory of meeting his new cohort, the boys. Gone. The thrusting into his hole hastened and intensified. His mid-thirties in prison slipped away. His time with the old gang faded away. Almost there. He felt pressure built up below. The long agonising period of doing odd jobs, trucking, warehousing drifted out of his mind. He's about to cum. The steel plant's bankruptcy no longer figured in his psyche. His balls churned, preparing to expel the years of unemployment out of his head.

He screamed, as loads after loads of cum were blasted into his ass, as his own seed ended up on the floor. The transfer was complete. The only link between the young man of unimpressionable height with short sandy-blond hair, blemish-free and scarless body lying wasted in this abandoned steel plant and the brass, gigantic ex-convict who stood in the same room minutes earlier was their inked skin.

The quivering in his hole had ceased, though not for long. His modified rear entrance, like others in the gang, would need a constant supply of body-enhancing cum from their boss. He glimpsed superiority inside his King's mesmerising eyes as he kissed the other man.

The eyes of a calm young man.

The eyes of a hardened criminal mastermind.

The eyes of a conqueror.

Someone, or something, beyond and above human.   

The almost inaudible sound of a car engine travelled through the air. The transformed YouTuber stood up, heart still racing and skin dampened with sweat. He reached into the pile of clothes, and picked up the off-white t-shirt that the other man was wearing earlier. The faint smell of alcohol and the scent of its previous owner still lingered. He put it on. It strained against the size and mass of its new owner, readily absorbed droplets of his perspiration. Soon, it would come to emit an even more potent odour.

splunkouskee donned the whole outfit. His gargantuan cock, wet and still hard, left its own imprint on the two layers of fabric, hungry for more men to fuck. But before the main event, some formalities still needed to be maintained.

He threw his old clothes on the smaller man's body, except for the ball cap, which he kept for himself.

"Dress up. The boys are back."

Nate doesn't seem to register his question. His vague expression turns graver, and color is visibly seen draining from his face.

"Uh … Tim?"

Tim is still oblivious to his companion's troubled state. If anything, he's obviously high after taking a whiff of funkiness from his possessed body's armpits.

"Mhmmm … what?"

"Th-this … " Nate swallows and stutters, "this is not our target."

The revelation snaps Tim out of his trance, though it seems too much for him to handle. He looks at Nate in disbelief, and stays speechless for a good ten seconds.

"What do you mean? Didn't the Ectoscope point at this guy?"

"It pointed at his car. The ghost was in the passenger's body. I just rechecked the client's description."

Tim shoves his face into his palm and lets out a long sigh while his colleague looks at him guiltily.

They had received an order that morning to capture a malignant ghost that was last sighted roaming the area. The summary said that the current body inhabited by the ghost was that of their client's brother, and they wanted it back before 6 PM. The funny thing is, the client was unable to find a picture of her brother, and the latter without a body couldn't provide the duo with any useful information. The last photo she had on her phone was from 6 years ago, and according to the her, "he has changed a lot since then". So the two had to rely on her description of the guy, which was succinctly summed up as "young, tall, short hair, pretty buff".    

The pair took up action nonetheless, as dictated by their corporate overlord, and followed their Ectoscope to this deserted parking lot. It didn't take long to locate their target. Well, presumed target. Afterall, who other than this shirtless young man could best fit the description provided? He looked just like the dude in the low-res blurry photo from 6 years ago whose face was half-obscured by his sister's hand. Nate waited for the guy to return to his car and snatched his soul off, so that Tim could jump into the body immediately afterward.

And now they just found out that it was all for nothing.

It's already 1.43 PM. The ghost must have already knew that the Nabsters are hot on its tail, and is doing everything it could to hide its track. It would take at least another 4 hours to relocate it, and another 6 hours to reach Siarsville, where the pair is sure the ghost is heading. And most importantly, there's no guarantee that the thing would submit easily— the element of surprise has been depleted.

Nate is planning to blame it on the client, which still wouldn't make their misstep any less tolerable, since they did receive a more recent photo of the guy 10 minutes before Tim hopped into his current body. If a contractual dispute is to take place, the resolution would definitely favour their client.

"Tim, I'm so sorry. It's all—"

"Shut up, Nate. I'm thinking."   

Nate has never seen his pal this serious. But even more bizarre to him is Tim's playfulness. It just switched off half a minute ago, and now his eyes – well, his host's eyes, needless to say Nate is still not used to his current form – light up, indicating that once again a switch has taken place. A sign that he is up to no good.

"You still have that Alt-Form Mix in your trunk, eh?"

Nate furrows his brows at the question.

"Yeah, what for?"

Suddenly it dawns on him what Tim is planning to do.

"But it's only for emergencies!"

"Not getting our asses fired nor sued is an emergency, you dumbass."

Nate is desperate to stop his colleague from realising his ulterior motive, but he is one step too late. The latter is already torso-deep inside their car's trunk, looking for something. Moments later, he emerges with a small vial in his hand.  

"You got us into this mess— oh please, what's with that look. All right, it's my fault too. The important thing is, there's a way out."

"I'm really scared of whatever you're intending to do next, but I'll listen."

"This guy's car," Tim points at himself with his thumb, then at the dusty Mercedes-Benz parked across them, "has the target's hair. At least a few strands, I guess. We'll dump them into the mix. Then I'll drink the thing while in this body. Voilà. The dude will have his meat-sack back before 6 PM. Oh shut up, Nate, I still think you're the one who got us into this clusterfuck, and so. You. Will. Take. Two. Days. Off. And ride with me the whole weekend to catch the ghost. For real this time. Did I make myself clear?"

The addressee of Tim's question only nods along. He knows well the personality of his companion. Once the latter has settled on something, any form of protest will only serve to embolden his decision.  

Nate hands Tim two strands of hair he found near the gap between the headrest and the seat back. They have learned to be more cautious this time, and Tim specifically takes out the Ectoscope to test the hair. Usually when a body has been possessed by a ghost for a while, it leaves residuals behind that resonate with detectors.

Positive.

Tim wastes no time in dropping the hair into the vial. His companion observes from the side, anxious, yet curious at the same time. When the faint blue liquid is almost ready, Tim pinches his head. Nate gives him a puzzled look as he opens his palm to receive several strands of hair.

"So we can restore this body later, duh."  

"Sorry hot bod, you will be missed", Tim says, smooching his biceps with regret.

He downs the solution in one gulp.

"Tastes better than I expected."

A pressure hits him in the spine. A sudden straightening, where vertebrae stiffen like soldiers at attention. They lengthen and realign, in tandem. The sensation soon spreads downward, reaching his femurs, then the lower leg bones, and finally his feet. Tim yelps and hurriedly unties his sneakers. As the pair of Adidas tumble freely on the ground, Nate hears a loud tearing noise. Tim's socks have failed to contain the size of his feet, which are simultaneously lengthening and widening, mirroring the transformation that's effecting his height. calves harden and rise

Only now does Nate begin to understand what their client really meant when she said "tall".  

Tim's traps begin to rise. Thickening from the already sturdy muscles of his current body, they bloom like armour along his shoulders, forming a slope of mass that even the most dedicated gym bros would be jealous of. His neck balloons up next, raising his jawline. It is a ridiculous thing to say, but Nate is pretty certain that his head now is two times smaller than Tim's studly neck. The delts round out, swelling beneath the skin. Each of Tim's breath feeds them, and each of his movements reinforces them.

The afternoon sun is still high, relentlessly blasting its heat onto the concrete below. Tim's body is all wet from perspiration. His pectorals swell outward, the sternum pushing forward, ribs flexing to accommodate the new mass. The well-trained biceps of his arms continue to bulge with vigorous fury, each one an accumulator of raw power. Veins unhide themselves from beneath the skin of his thickening limbs and angrily pop up along the surface. Triceps not wanting to fall behind, prop his forearms up to with more mass, more meat, more muscles. The wave of transformation twitches Tim's fingers, prompting him to curl them up. With each motion of his palm, rows of calluses swell up and become ever more defined, marking his hands as the ultimate devices for gripping and controlling.

"Fuck, I don't think I'll be missing my last form anytime soon," Tim says between bouts of heavy breathing, gulping and swallowing. His voice is already targeted by the Mix, now possessing a rugged, gravel quality to it.

Naturally, Nate focuses on his pal's core, where he thinks the change would take place next. Unlike Tim, Nate has seen the photo the client sent – the more recent one – and so he has a clearer idea of what Tim will look like after this whole ordeal ends. But right now, nothing novel can be discerned. If the transformation is happening somewhere down under, then the shorts are getting in Nate's way. The only indication of change is how the baggy material seems to have tightened and Tim's constant shifting of his shorts and underwear. And the thing inside it. Tim lets out a husky moan as he adjusts his package. His voice is definitely deeper now.

Nate steps to the side to get a clear view of his rear. Two giant globes of muscles jut out from his behind. Nate is struck with the impression that their potential energy alone is enough to eat the shorts that are trying in vain to restrict them. His calves pulse as if catching up, inflating and sharpening each time Tim moans.

Nate is still waiting for the final touch.

Tim's skin glistens with a low sheen of energy. The rosy skin that his host spotted is gone, replaced by a rich, olive complexion that's bringing out more and more patches of thick, course hair all across his body, most notably his chin, which is now spotting a lush, majestic beard. Tim is too busy toying with his giant cock to notice the changing features of his face. His lips have taken on a plumper shape, and the previously brown hair has turned two shades darker.

His breathing gets more and more elevated. More mass has started to gather around his core, though not exactly in the form of muscles. Not that it diminishes his figure in any way. His silhouette now has widened significantly, and he looks more imposing and intimidating than ever.

Tim looks around to check for any unwanted, curious bystander.

Empty.

He's comfortable enough in Nate's presence, it seems, and he finally releases the trapped monster cock from his shorts. He roars, and shoots streams after streams of thick, creamy cum.

It takes a while for Tim to finish, which was an agonising sight for his colleague to see. Nate really wanted to put the meaty rod into his mouth.

Whether Tim recognises that desire in Nate or not, the latter isn't sure. The transformed stud has put his member back to its proper place. He turns to Nate, and smiles brightly with his new – well, newer – face.

"All right then. We're going back to the Dep."

Arthur was a second-year student majoring in Astral Phasing at the Imperial Academy of Astral and Psionic Studies. During his first year, he passed the examination on unidirectionally absorptive junction at the same institution. His estimated ɮ-level was 97.3. Physically, he was less robust than Samir, although medical evaluation revealed no underlying deficits. Prior to the incident, Arthur had committed two recorded misdemeanours involving the redirection of the ɮ-field of male non-emitters and the performance of an ɂ-warp. In one instance, this resulted in temporary romantic and sexual attraction; in the other, it produced a permanent alteration of personality. Arthur had no documented condition that would destabilise his ɮ-field during junction procedures. Based on his prior conduct, investigators concluded that his motive for targeting Samir was a desire to obtain a more physically developed body and to appropriate personality traits he perceived as desirable.

Arthur first encountered Samir in a deserted restroom at a small local grocery store. The latter was intoxicated and visibly agitated, likely due to a prior altercation. The investigation determined that Samir had not been directly provoked by Arthur. However, as a result of the Huapayan collapse, forensic analysis of psionic residue within the inner layer of Samir’s core was not possible. After observing Samir and noting his physical characteristics, Arthur entered a nearby stall while Samir proceeded to use the urinal.

Arthur successfully inserted his psionic core into Samir’s. However, his ɮ-concentration diminished significantly upon entry due to the host’s agitated state and the absence of direct visual fixation. Consequently, the differential between Samir’s and Arthur’s ɮ-concentrations fell below the threshold required for both separation and extension. The two opposing psionic cores reached equilibrium through the most rapid and energetically efficient mechanism available: Huapayan collapse.

A new psionic core was formed from the remnants of the original two. Although it exhibited a slightly increased ɂ-count, its internal distribution was diffuse and chaotic, with a Charnichenka Index of -6.5. The outer layer of the newly formed core was inherited from Samir, resulting in the preservation of overt expressions such as habitual behaviour, body language, and self-identification by name. The inner layer, corresponding to latent expressions such as desire structures, dream-field configuration, and predisposition toward non-emitting entities was replaced by that of Arthur.

As a result of the collapse, Samir was unaware of his new status as a ɮ-emitter and had no conscious understanding of the events that had transpired. On the same night, he visited several establishments where he performed ɂ-warps on five male strangers and redirected the ɮ-fields of six others. All eleven individuals subsequently accompanied him to his residence and engaged in sexual activity.

The Psionic Investigation Office was notified of the incident, and Samir was detained the following day for interrogation. In accordance with the International Accord on Psionic Succession and Core Integrity, a psionic core formed as a result of Huapayan collapse is not considered a direct ontological continuation of any of its constituent cores. On this basis, Samir was not charged with criminal offences and was released the same day.

Arthur’s coreless body was discovered shortly thereafter at the site of the incident. It was transferred to the Bodyseeker Foundation, where it was subsequently inhabited by a newly designated ɮ-emitter one week later. The eleven affected individuals underwent the standard restoration protocol; however, residual traces of ɂ-warp persisted in several cases.

As Samir no longer retained access to the theoretical and practical knowledge required to regulate his psionic abilities, he was permitted to re-enrol at the Imperial Academy and recommence his education. He studied for two years before withdrawing from the programme. Of the previously non-emitting men affected during the incident, five continued to maintain romantic relationships with him and remain financially responsible for his living expenses. Samir formally retained his occupation as an electrician; however, he provides services solely to these five partners.

The following paragraph outlines the most salient post-collapse changes observed in Samir. Some of these manifestations pertain to the outer layer of the psionic core, while others correspond to the inner layer.

Prior to collapse, Samir was right-handed; he is now left-handed. Following the incident, he demonstrated a markedly increased use of dialectal vocabulary. Before the collapse, he had been involved exclusively in relationships with women; since the event, he has engaged sexually only with men. His eye colour changed from brown to grey, and his olfactory profile now differs measurably from its pre-collapse baseline.

Questions:

Determine the equilibrium level at which the collapse occurred.

Establish the upper and lower bounds of ɮ-concentration loss following entry. Had the junction been successful, would its resulting ɮ-value have fallen within the same range?

Identify all psionic traits of both junctioner and host that may contribute to an increase in the Charnichenka Index. Determine the minimal set of confluent traits required for the index to be non-negative.

Which of the observed changes are corollaries of inner-layer takeover, and which constitute direct manifestations?

Thick body hair, a mix of dark and grey, wet and taped to his skin due to the warm water, ran from the top of his chest, crossing his soft belly down to his nether region. The warm water’s surface parted way for his well-built thighs to emerge, upon one of which his flaccid member rested peacefully. The magnate did not spot no fancy six-pack or bulging muscles, something his male peers seemed to have become more obsessed with the more they aged. This was not an indicator that the man was unfit. For all the caviar, lobster, wagyu beef and gold-wrapped foodstuff stuffed into his body to eventually form his distinctive paunch, he was never one who ignored the advices and recommendations of his personal physician. Thanks to that way of living, he could be proud to say that he never needed any surgery or medical intervention in his life.

But that would soon change in a moment.

His way of living had earned him something, not a surgery, though of a similar nature.

Only more sinister.

Next to him across the small room stood two men, their expressions grave and serious. A thin man in white was focusing intently on a set of syringes and vials on the bathroom’s counter. The man emanated stoicism, with round glasses framing his hawkish but classical features. Wrinkles littered his face and eyebags were visible underneath his eyes.

“How much time until the next stage?”, said the third man standing not far away from him. Compared to the other two, he seemed hardly younger, though of the three of them he was the liveliest. He looked sharper and more athletic, both in attire and in visage. There was something about his posture that suggested a man of the people. A public figure.

“Until I see no risk of rapid brain aging”, said the hawkish man after a long pause. He perused one small vial with viscous purple liquid inside. “Do I sense impatience, Michael?”

The questioned man smiled diplomatically, as though half-confirming what his interlocutor implied. “Dr. Finkelman, I’m just asking if there’s still time left for me to prepare for my role”, he replied, using a strange intonation for the last word.   

The doctor continued to dedicate his concentration to the array of chemicals and instruments in front of him.

“Six minutes”, he said without looking at the other.

————————

The plan had been three years in the making. Michael Prokop was announced CEO of EXOLYSYS Inc. two years before that. Long enough for someone as sharp as the old money mogul to work out the dynamics of the company. Afterall, one cannot climb to this position without knowing how to play with others’ emotions and stroke their fragile egos.

The eagle-faced Finkelman had been with Erdos since the company’s founding. He was a brilliant man, albeit reclusive. Michael had always sensed that deep beneath all the layers of calmness, patience and aloof rationality lurked a terrifying mad scientist, but for all purposes, the man never truly showed that side of him. It was thanks to his exceptional mind that the company’s most successful line of products, the anti-aging Regenerative Cellular Repair Serums REGENEX™ came into being.

Erdos was, on the other hand, responsible for the funding of every venture they had taken. Marketing had always been Erdos’s strength, and as their company grew, he also took on dealing with politicians and lawmakers to ensure that Finkelman could run all the sketchy experiments he needed. Since his partner disliked publicity and talking to people whom he considered intellectually inferior, Erdos became the hub of all spokes in relationship building, provided that the former would receive all the necessary capital to conduct any experiment he had taken interest in. This professional and somewhat transactional relationship had been functioning for a decade now. It was never healthy, but throughout the ups and downs of the company, it was stable.

Recently, however, it had taken a sour turn.

As the circle of yes-men surrounding Erdos kept growing, expanding and homogenising, the man had become more and more unhinged. His mind had been seized by the delusion that he alone was responsible for the bio-tech empire that had found their products in every corner of the world.

A change in vocabulary first took place in his mind, where ‘working’ with Finkelman had been slowly replaced by ‘keeping’ Finkelman, until the change itself was put into words for all the board members to hear. Then ‘keeping’ Finkelman started by be treated like an entry on a financial report, with revenue and expenses assigned to it. Needless to say, Finkelman was not oblivious to the situation he found himself in.  

“A dangerous simpleton”.

He opened up to Michael once with that sentence, when the latter was deemed trustworthy enough. Michael shared the same view.

There would come a point where co-founder Finkelman would be deemed redundant by the other corporate overlord. He couldn’t care less for the company, but without the funding and access to his lab, there would be no more experiments. And that, for the doctor, would truly be devastating.

Michael was only peripherally interested in the company’s long-term profitability. Of course, letting Finkelman stay would be the best option of all, but that alone was not his only motive. Especially when he found out the true capability of the doctor’s work.

Thus hatched a conspiracy to take care of their chairman for good.

————————

Finkelman deposited the pill into Erdos’s oral cavity. Michael helped stabilise the sedated man’s jaw as his co-conspirator slowly and steadily poured water from a glass into his mouth. He showed no sign of choking, and the two men promptly let go of his head.

After five minutes, they witnessed the first symptom. Erdos’s breathing intensified.  His chest heaved up and down as fat melted away from his belly. The clean water turned a murky colour, and an unpleasant smell, likely of body odour, emanated from it.

Fat melted away from Erdos‘s body. Gone with it was also the trail of hair leading to his pubic region. The coarse curly hairs at first softened, then retracted into his body. In roughly a minute, his torso had turned completely smooth. This was partially the result of the drug-induced depilation, but not only. Where there were creases and wrinkles running across his chest earlier, now only supple, firm skin remained.

The skin of a much younger person.

His lower body was up next. As the transformation reached his nether region, it seemed a new development was in store. His cock stiffened up, rising above the water surface. Eyes still closed, his bated breath turned into soft groaning, and ultimately morphed into moaning. The voice that escaped his mouth was still his, but lacked the raspy and hoarse tone of a chronic smoker.

Meanwhile, the density of his pubes was reduced by half, and a few moments later, the hair on his legs had all vanished. His skin tightened up and achieved the rejuvenated look of his chest and stomach, as evidence by his balls now looking much more tightened up, showing no sign of the sagginess observed earlier. New hair sprouted on his temple, replacing the soft fuzz earlier and driving the bald spot downwards, away from his crown. In tandem, colour returned to the hair on his head and elsewhere on his face. The greying influence of his salt and pepper look had been removed completely, so that now the man spotted what looked like a dark buzzcut and a full, lush beard – all dark hairs.

“Doctor, I must say, this is incredible. But where is the second DNA mixture?”, said Michael, his face a mix of awe and puzzlement.

Finkelman furrowed his brows, as though he himself was also struggling to find an answer.

The unconscious man in front of them looked like a younger Erdos. Shaved and waxed, fitter and definitely more attractive, but no doubt Erdos. That was not what they were aiming for. The young college student the doctor specifically picked out from the sham study was the perfect fit for the second half of the DNA cocktail. By this point, his traits must have already manifested and took over Erdos’s genotype. Had Finkelman miscalculated?  

Thankfully he didn’t have to think for long. Both men noticed turbulence kicking up the water. Rejected and discharged proteins started to coalesce atop the surface, forming clusters of foam that floated away from Erdos’s body.  

“It’s working! Hold his head, and don’t let water enter his mouth”, said Finkelman almost too expressively, then disappeared into the next room. Michael followed his instruction.

Erdos’s vocalisation turned louder and more rapid. There was a crack in his voice, and a new cadence slowly became more prominent, warmer and clearer, until all that Michael could hear was a whole different voice, not connected to Erdos in any way.

New blond hair started to grow over the old dark buzz-cut of the man’s body. Elsewhere on his body, on his arms and legs, a new layer of soft light hair began to spread out as well. Michael saw, with his own bewildered eyes, the bones of the man whose head he was holding subtly restructured and rearranged. Each change only made a minimal difference to the young man’s face, but with all of them added up, the resemblance to Erdos had reached a new low.

But the most impressive change was probably down below. The young man’s heart was working overtime to pump new blood to his engorged cock. With each breath, the thing jolted up and down with new vigour, and each time it lengthened a tiny bit. Michael directed his glance at the muddled water, and through it, he could see the two round objects between the man’s legs expanding as well. It seemed his loud, desperate moaning was an unconditioned response to the growing pressure felt in his lower body.

As Michael continued to hold the blond man’s head, he felt the latter spasm, accompanied by a dozen-second-long moan. Some droplets hit the water, while others landed on his glistening chest.

One thing Michael knew for sure. Adam Erdos would be a better looking and more endowed man than his ‘father’.

It was a devilish plan that killed two birds with one stone.

They had contemplated the easiest option – to give Erdos one dose of some mind-altering drug concocted by Finkelman. It would break down any semblance of his willpower or mental resistance, and combined with two sessions of repersonation masqueraded as psychotherapeutic care, the man would be reduced to a mindless stooge, forever ready to do their bidding.

But that path would result in many complications in the future. The fool would be subservient to Michael or Finkelman all the time, unable to make decisions for himself, which would be uncharacteristic of him in the eyes of other dim-witted members of the board, who’d always viewed him as an egomaniac. Both of them wanted discreetness, and having a puppet tailing them in every public occasion would be too suspicion-inducing.

They needed a proxy.

The solution to every single hole in their plan.

Peter Erdos, business tycoon, founder and chairman of the board of EXOLYSYS Inc. would die.

And the public would learn that he had a son, one Adam, a smart, handsome and overall decent fellow, whose head injury had made him slightly forgetful of his past.

One Adam, who, after all the necessary testing had been done, would with no doubt be confirmed to be the biological son of the late magnate, and soon would inherit all of his father’s assets.

All the documents would be dealt with by Michael. For the grand finale, the conspirators only needed two more actors.

Oleg, Michael’s right-hand man, would on that same day be with them in the house, wearing a bald cap and fat suit. An ambulance would be called – not for the father, but for the son. Medical personnel would be introduced to the character of “Adam”, whose dad’s abusive and hurtful words would reveal to be a closeted homosexual, lying unconscious, accompanied by two other men from his dad’s company. One of these men, purportedly his lover, would climb into the ambulance and stay with the young son until he woke up on hospital’s bed. The other would stay behind, and, some hours later that same day, be spotted mortified with a physician at the sight of the dead body of Peter Erdos, whom cardiac arrest had been taken away from this world. A body specially bought on the black market two years prior, meticulously preserved only to be deployed on that fateful day, masqueraded using the residues from Erdos’s transformation.

A bloodless assassination. No nosy cops involved.

And then funeral.

The board may find Michael Prokop’s relationship with the tycoon’s amnesiac son distasteful, but that’s all they could say about it. Even the board’s collective reasoning was no match for the combined power of Finkelman’s ingenuity and Prokop’s insidiousness.

The public would always side with Adam; there’s no doubt in that. It was the generic but tragic story of a son, unloved and uncherished by his dad, the damnable, villainous figure of the story. Rich, selfish, money-hoarding, for young women thirsting, now with the insidiously fabricated moniker of domestic abuser.

But as the humble and traumatised man that Adam was, he would talk little about his strained relationship with his father or his ambition to ascend to the empty throne, and preferred to just spend time in solitude and enjoy artsy things.

And throughout all of that time, Michael would always be by his side.

The first man he saw when he woke up in the hospital.

The man who drove him in his Volvo S90 every week to visit Dr. Finkelman.

The man who remembered details of his character more than he did himself.

The man who helped with all the networking required so he could publish his first novel.

The man who diligently supervised him on how to deal with the vast amount of inheritance that he received from his dad.

The man who dealt with all the unwanted publicity that he himself was too overwhelmed to handle.

Adam trusted him with his life.

But he was wrong, and that was the moment the alarm buzzed off in his head and the threat radar went from “random encounter” to “scripted event”. Because by the time he did that inevitable cleaning, more of his clothing had disappeared. The range of afflicted items and the spectrum of their wear and tear had also expanded, going from recently bought trousers to old merch bought from a rock concert to worn off-white undies. All gone.

Channelling fury into his knuckles, he knocked loudly on his flatmate’s door. He had discussed this with Cam before, and there didn’t seem to be any reason for nor any indicator of him performing this peculiar heist. The bloke was a decent one, and although he sometimes behaved like a dim-witted dork, there was nothing in question about his moral compass.

A profanity-laden scream, clearly not directed at him, pierced Mark’s ears. His flatmate was busy playing CS:GO again. As he thought more clearly about the whole fiasco, he felt like whatever he was doing was unnecessary: Cam was not the culprit, and he should direct his energy towards building a plan to prevent further disappearance, and think about the bizarre crime itself later.

As Mark returned back to his room, he heard a strange rustling sound.

His ears soon caught up with his eyes, and he discovered what was the source of it.

The doors of his wardrobe were wide open, and between them, a disembodied arm was poking around. It grabbed a pair of Mark’s socks.

“You fucking cunt”, Mark charged towards the animate object, not really caring about how the situation itself defied physics and biology.

Using all of his strength, he took hold of the thing and try to pry its fingers off. The arm was big, meaty and hairy, with a small scar running diagonally on the back of its hand. Its patches of dense hair almost covered up the bulging veins running across its skin surface. Compared to it Mark’s looked like a twig. And indeed, it was twig versus iron pillar when it came to the power discrepancy between Mark and whatever the thing was. Even with the element of surprise, it took him almost a minute to get its hand off his clothes.

The light in one spherical part of the room suddenly refracted strangely and started to ripple as if underwater. The arm promptly disappeared into that rift, leaving the room as quickly and discreetly as it had entered it. A moment later, the rift itself began to diminish, until everything returned to normal. Mark let out a heavy sigh, still trying to take in the situation. His adrenaline was still pumping, and he felt both of his arms sore and still shaking as a result of the altercation.

He flinched.

Another arm was behind him, slightly different from the first one, slowly sizing him up. This one had lighter hair on its surface, but still just as stout and imposing as the first. Mark shoved the arm away, and the arm jumped around to dodge his move. It made a quick stride across his chest, then bum, then legs, back to belly, groin, then nape.  No matter how hard Mark tried to catch it, its lightning speed outmanoeuvred him.

Mark was losing his patience, and with it his sanity and stamina as well. Sensing that bare hands alone wouldn’t do with this thing, he was desperately in need of a weapon. Any would suffice. He dashed towards the monopod on the table. His makeshift baton was almost within fingers’ reach, when it was snatched away from him.

The first arm had returned.

While Mark was busy fighting the light-haired arm, a new rift had opened in his room. The dark-haired arm casually threw away his monopod, then immediately joined up in reinforcement with its conspecifics. Within seconds, the two arms overpowered him, and in the end Mark’s hands were rendered immobile in their tight grip.

A third arm appeared from the rift.

Then a fourth.

And a fifth.

Then another and another. At this point it was impossible to even distinguish which hand was which. The first few of them tackled Mark’s remaining free limbs until he was pinned to the couch, then the rest started to swarm in.

They made quick work of his clothing. They explored every nook and cranny of his body. One hand was up his ass. Another fiddling with his cock. Another cupped his balls. One played with his nipples. One’s fingers were interlocked with his toes. Every exposed surface of his body was covered with a hand. Rough, strong, callused hand. A sweaty palm was preventing him from letting a muffled moan. An olive-skinned arm was running its fingers around the tip of his mushroom head, sending waves of pleasure across his body.

The sea of hands suddenly disentangled and reduced their intensity. Mark was still restrained and in a semi-floating state, with his feet also being carried by several arms. As the arms hovering near his torso lowered themselves for whatever’s coming next, his field of vision was unclouded.   

The first arm, the one with the scar, was floating above all other arms, stretching out its fingers.

It dove straight into Mark’s chest, sinking deep into his flesh. Mark gasped. When the entirety of the arm had completely disappeared inside his body, one by one the army of arms retreated into the rift.

Mark felt as though he was having a fever. It was hot, excruciatingly hot, and sweat in massive quantity poured out of his pores. He laid his arm over the area where the thing had entered, checking for any bump or sign of a foreign organism.

He couldn’t help but let bewilderment took hold of his eyes.

His heaving chest was getting firmer and protruding outward, prompted by an increase in muscles and fat. Hair started to sprout, first forming small patches on his sternum, then spread in every direction: sideways, downwards, upwards, until all that could be seen on his chest was hair and a pair of sweaty pink nipples.

Thick coarse, dark hair soon grew out of his neck, chin and jaw, blessing him with an intimidating beard. He had a feeling that something was stuck in his neck, but when he swallowed, nothing was there. Except when afterwards he let out a soft groan, he discovered what it was: his voice had dropped an octave lower.

At first, his stomach hardened up, revealing washboard abs running along it. But as the hair spread downwards, a new layer of meat and fat surfaced up, burying the six-pack underneath it, with only soft, fuzzy hairs and treasure trail as the only indicator of where the short-lived abs had been earlier.

The transformation was reaching its final stage, spreading out to his extremities. As his arms resembled more and more what had fused with his body, there was a parallel change in his nether region as well. He felt the weight between his legs increasing tremendously, almost doubling its previous size as his balls expanded to the size of tennis balls. Instantaneously in response as though to support that new weight, his legs lengthened up, adding at least half a foot to his height, his thighs swelled up like tree-trunks, his calves greatly widened and feet reached new dimensions that few shoes in the world would fit, all this accompanied by more and more hair covering his lower body.

Rivulets of sweat dripped down his bulky arms, coyly navigating through the jungle of newly formed hair. Mirroring the change to his torso, his biceps bulged out, veins popping along the contour of his upper limbs, only for the rigid curves to be replaced with softer and softer lines as meat and fat deposited more and more above the foundational muscle core.

Overstimulated by all the upgrades his body was receiving and by the ecstasy brought to him by his overgrown cock, he came.

————————————————

Cam thought he heard someone knocking earlier.

It was getting dark, so his flatmate must have been home already.

He went out to check, but no one was there. The door to Mark’s room, however, was standing ajar.

“Mark?”, he called out.

No answer. And neither was there any sound coming out of the room.

Curiosity got the better of him, and he gave the door a gentle push.

The room was dominated by fresh man-smells, mainly sweat and cum. Laundry littered all over the floor.

Lying peacefully on the couch, eyes closed, was a man Cam didn’t recognise.

A hairy giant.  

A statistical breakdown of the area’s recent notable events would indicate that there’s nothing objectively dangerous about this place, and the worst thing that could happen would be an occasional encounter with a benign yob. Still, to Liam, there existed a risk– one of hygienic nature. A man strutting in a spotless navy-blue suit and highly-polished pair of black Oxfords, were mishap to befall him, would expose himself to certain odours that any business-minded people awaiting him at his destination will scoff at upon sensing even the slightest hint of their presence. In the best-case scenario, Liam just needed to stay away from any suspicious puddle or unidentified mass. But what if that misfortune manifested in the form of a stinky local delinquent?

Thankfully for Liam, it was a gloomy day, and, tried as he might, he could not spot any human figure within his line of sight.

As his footsteps echoed through the walkway, he had the feeling that he was being watched.

“Oi, lad”, an energetic voice boomed somewhere to his left.  

A sigh escaped his mouth. That’s his signal to keep going. That intonation, in this kind of place, built up in his mind a certain image, and struck his psyche with a certain feeling.

Not the best kind.

Liam liked to rely on stereotypes and put people into boxes, and this had often earned him uninvited snide remarks about his moral standing amongst friends. Habitually he would just reassure himself, just like in this very moment, that there was nothing questionable about his character if the people to whom he mentally assigned unpleasant descriptions all turned out to be unpleasant. And he was sure for whomever that just uttered those two syllables, that would be true as well.

He kept on walking. Or to be precise, he kept on maintaining the façade that he was walking. To any bystander, the speed at which he was lifting up and stomping down his glossy shoes resembled more that of an exhausted jogger about to finish his run. His number one rule in dealing with these types of interaction was to reduce the number of encounters to zero. And that meant getting away from this place as soon as possible.  

And then, he stopped.

Strange … where did that come from? He thought.

When he entered the tunnel, there was nobody there. Up until the point when he heard that voice, his feet were the only source of all possible sounds. Of course, there was the occasional rustling of a kebab wrapper that someone had probably left behind after devouring the content inside an hour ago. But still, that didn’t explain Liam’s befuddlement.

He looked back.

No one was behind him, and no one was in front of him, either. Discreet was not what Liam would usually describe this type of people.

“Oi”. That annoying voice again, this time right to his left – almost like its source was standing next to him. As morbid curiosity claimed victory over his avoidance tendency, he turned his head, ready to be greeted by whatever surprise that awaited him.   

… A painting?

Caught in the centre of Liam’s vision, on the graffiti-filled wall that had seen better days, was a man. A painting of one. He’s probably the same age as Liam, albeit taller and not as formally dressed. His body was covered in grey. Grey hoodie, grey sweatpants, grey Nike Air Max. The lighting and the rust on the wall had also made the off-white colour of the Stella Artois can held in his hand turn a darker grey, leaving the tiny, barely-visible red part of the emblem the only object of this painting that was not something in between black and white.

Wow, he really does look like what I’ve expected him to be. Bemused Liam.

He must admit, whoever had made this piece deserved all of his admiration. The painting looked almost like a real person. The grey colour buried amongst thousands of other vibrant, eye-catching blobs and lines nearby hid it away from his perception – the reason why he didn’t notice it right away. Every detail was immaculate, from the texture of his clothes, the contour of his bulging muscles, the toothy grin to the veins on his hands and even faint shadow showcasing what’s he got to show down under.

He stepped closer to the wall and, instinctively, looked around the painting for any camera, any teeny tiny devices that someone probably had planted to spook him and film his reaction. Maybe a whole content-creating team had tinkered with this part of the subway in hope of capturing a viral moment where a clueless corporate bloke screamed upon sighting a hyper-realistic painting of a beefy yob. It was the most plausible explanation Liam could think of.  

He looked up, down, left, right, front, back.

Nothing was found, neither had nobody jumped out to say that he had been pranked.

Weird.

Now that he'd spent some more effort to put his brain to use, the situation appeared even more unusual. He’d never considered himself a connoisseur in street arts, but enough exposure to it had acquainted him with its most typical expressions – ugly tags, political messages sometimes sprinkled with a touch of racism and football references from the obscure to the obvious. The conspiracy theorist part of him would say that this was definitely an ad, either for the shoes or the beer, but that begged the question, why the bloke in the middle? He didn't look like any famous person that Liam knew, and Liam knew quite a few. This was not some high-traffic touristy city, surely even pranksters would find no pleasure giving this third-rate hellhole their attention.   

He reached out his hand to feel the painting, right where the lad’s chest was. Not exactly flat, warm to the touch, and slightly smelly. The smell of cheap beer and body odour. Liam felt vindicated. Someone really was here just a moment ago.

The moment Liam’s fingers stopped at the tracksuit’s sleeve, an invisible force pulled him in, sealing his arm shut. The stench of stale sweat and alcohol wafted up his nose, and he heard an impish laugh bellowing out of the surface inches away from him – the painting came to life, and on the other side of the wall, Liam could feel his hand being held tightly in the beefy lad’s grip.

“Oi, calm it, yeah? It’s not gonna hurt.”

Liam’s head was racing. The situation left him no clue on how to react. If he had had a first thought, it would have been to blurt out “what the fuck”, and then scream for help as loud as possible. But there was no thought in his head, and his body acted like on autopilot. Reflexively, he tried to break free, but his effort was in vain. The mismatch between his strength and his captor’s aside, whatever substance surrounding his arm seemed to be semi-liquid– a very dense one that voided any chance of him manoeuvring around to put his body in a better counterattack position. He raised one leg in attempt to kick the other man in the balls, or just simply to get himself off and out of this sticky situation. But his opponent was quicker, grasping Liam’s foot in a split second, and pulled it into the wall with lightning speed.

“Sound move, posh lad. Why didn’t ya answer when I called?”, said the voice from inside the wall. The concrete and paint next to Liam turned semi-translucent, then a round lump started to bulge out from it. The surface broke up, and the other male’s head emerged out of it to let out a loud, cheeky laugh. The substance coating his head receded back into the wall shortly after.

With both hand and leg trapped, the well-built man quickly pulled Liam in, and, with remarkable strength, pulled the latter hard to his right side, thereby turning Liam around to face the opposite wall. Liam’s lower body had been almost subsumed into the painting, with only the tips of his shoes still jugging out. His upper half was suspended in an odd angle, where his hands were still stuck behind but chest, and stomach were free to lean forward, leaving his head slightly farther away from the wall than his torso.  

“Let me out. Please. I haven’t done anything to you”, Liam begged frantically.

“ᴇᴀꜱʏ, ʟᴀᴅ.”

Liam’s body shuddered. The word reached his ears with such deafening intensity that limbs went into panic mode, the kind that shut them all down instead of jolting them all up with electrical craze to go all-in for a fight-or-flight response. Not the kind of loud sound that blasted by some giant speaker to make you deaf, but echoing, reverberating, first to his ears, then to his psyche. He felt as though the weight of all the concrete around and above him had condensed together to lend power to that thundering command. It clapped his eardrums and struck down his psychological resistance into pieces. His mind went blank, and his movements enfeebled.

The lad’s head sticked out some more, so that it was on the same level as Liam’s. For the first time, the latter had a close look at the young man. Patchy moustache, face flushed, thick neck, prominent Adam’s apple. Emanating from him was an aura of caricatural masculinity – strapping, simple-minded, but in an endearing way. There was not even a crumb of malice coming from him, likely the consequence of being airheaded.

“Don’t get shy now, pretty lad. You’ll like it in a sec!”, the lad said while looked at him with beaming eyes. The other man’s hot breath laced with of alcohol glided on his face and assaulted his nostril. Liam couldn’t help but to breathe it in. The sloshedness was contagious, and seconds later, Liam’s mind was already in a new state. Liam looked into his glinting eyes, and the infectious fervour flowed back into him, soon also reflected in his eyes.

ʀᴇʟᴀxᴇᴅ.

“Y’alright there, posh lad?”, boasted the lad enthusiastically, wrapping his big sweaty arm around Liam. His tipsy breath continued to invade Liam’s nose, but it was enhanced by another smell – the stench of the lad rank, sweaty armpit. Bare and pure, undeodorized, accumulated from years of toiling labour, gruelling work-out and dirt-cheap fast food, suffocating Liam with testosterone. As Liam drew in his concentrated signature scent, his mind had lost its last battle against the foreign dominant personality that was breaching into his head. His brain had turned into mush, and his innermost self was now nothing but a malleable mass, ready to be reshaped into something better.

He let out a dopey grin not so different from the hunky lad.

“Sound”.  

His words were already slurring.

“Fucking sound”, he repeated.

“Aye, that’s more like it.”

The lad pulled Liam forward into a kiss. The bigger man made quick work of Liam’s tops, and in a matter of seconds his torso was already bare for the wind to caress. Once again, the strange material swelled and budged, and Liam could feel dampness and heat inches away right behind him. Soon, the gap was closed as wall of sweat and muscles slowly pressed against him, and Liam could feel the former’s growing member sliding along his ass crack. Massive, oozing.

Hand in hand, Liam’s arm was dragged out of the wall to the front, laying gently on his navel. The lad pressed hard against it, and his flesh sank into Liam’s own. His tiny office-worker hand was being consumed by the heftier, stronger one. For a short while, Liam felt like that hand was his. He felt his own digits getting bigger, rougher, tougher, burlier. He felt the itchiness on the back of his hand as a lotus tattoo slowly appeared on it. But that sensation soon stopped, and he was disappointed. He wanted more. He pressed hand arm back against the lad’s, and was rewarded with that hit of ecstasy again. His forearm thickened up with muscle, and hair started to sprout on across its length. His bicep soon followed through, ballooning to a size that far surpassed that of his puny neck. And the high, just as it came, shortly disappeared. His hand and arm were moving on its own. They had become the lad’s hand and arm, which had just begun to fondle his belly. It felt good, but not as good as before. He would give anything to reach that state again.

The lad’s other arm shot out of the wall, in its grip the beer can from earlier. He quickly transferred it to his left hand. The cold spread from the lad bulky arm up to Liam’s shoulder.

“Down it”, the lad said, patting Liam’s belly. He then promptly raised the beer can to Liam’s mouth.

Yes. He needed to gulp down his dissatisfaction. It didn’t register to him that he was being commanded. How could that be a command, if he himself had already think of it just a moment ago? It was as if he had just reunited with his best friend whom he hadn’t met for years, and they were on the same wavelength again. His friend understood exactly what he really needed.

In synergy with the lad’s hand movement, Liam guzzled half the content of the can. The cold froze his brain, and he hung his mouth agape, only for the lad to lean up and charge in with his tongue. Their hairy merged hand explored his body. Calluses reigned over his chest, stomach, and meaty palm caressed his growing bulge. The other hand unfastened his belt, then unbuttoned his trouser, and slid his pants down. As his clothing came into contact with the substance inside the wall, Liam felt every tiny inch of them being pulled away from his skin, as though the wall had disintegrated them, until nothing could be felt around his legs and ankles anymore.

The lad pulled Liam’s other hand out of the wall along with his, and began to feel up Liam’s package.

“Heh… decent cock, that”, said the lad playfully.

As the lad’s fingers interlocked with Liam’s, the latter once again descended into mania. Giving up– no, sharing his hand and arm with the lad, feeling them explode with muscle and imbued with his intoxicating scent, until the numbness settled, as the lad took control of his remaining arm. Now two mighty hands connected to his shoulders were touching every part of his body, and he was in heaven.

The lad held up the beer can again, and downed the rest of its content. A clanking sound reverberated through the tunnel as he hurled the empty can away. They kissed. Some amount of beer still left in the lad’s mouth sloshed into Liam’s. It’s lukewarm now, and mixed with his spit. Liam swallowed all of it, moaning softly as more of the lad’s essence penetrated his throat. The lad’s cock had reached full mast, and was dripping profusely on Liam’s rear, enough to form a puddle on the ground had they not been half-contained inside a wall.

One of the lad’s hands had moved behind Liam, smearing and spreading the natural lube into his hole, working it up for a grand entrance. With his other hand, he put two fingers inside Liam’s mouth. The latter eagerly suckled on them, and the lad promptly placed his digits, wetted with saliva, inside Liam’s cavity. It was a bizarre feeling. He was aware that he exerted no control over the hands that were tinkering with his pucker and spreading his cheeks, except that were connected to his shoulders, and from that angle it did look like he was playing and fingering his own bum. Every time their merged limbs touched his body, there was a brief moment where he could also sense them, as if they were still his own, and it made his brain go crazy, but soon the sensation would stop. And his mind would be screaming for more.

“Yeah, our arse’s gonna look mint”, exclaimed the lad. Liam could only reply with a loud, needy moan.

And the lad went all in.

Pleasure coursed through Liam’s veins. His body was opening up, literally and metaphorically. The lad was pouring into him, and he was becoming the lad. He was drunk. Drunk from pleasure, from cans of cheap beer, from undiluted masculinity, from the courage he had just gained to give up, and from the bliss of giving up itself – his life, his worries, his thoughts, his very own identity. Everything that was his, would soon belong the lad’s. They would share everything in this word together.

The two men moaned loudly in tandem, voices practically indistinguishable from each other. There was no delay between vocalisations, as if all regulated by one source. Each man spotted a dumb, blissful grin on their face. Their combined hands stroked the man in the front’s cock, cupping and fondling his balls.

As the lad pushed in more and more, that feeling came to Liam again. More intense. More spread out. More rapid. His chest had turned into two hairy mounds of muscles, and once more an itch spread across one pec as a tattoo of a scorpion emerged on its surface.

the lad hastened his pace, ramming up Liam’s rear with increasing speed and strength. He dug his giant, stinky feet into Liam’s petite soles, and the latter felt his own body stretching out and up to accommodate its new mass and height.

The lad’s voice was no longer behind him, but all around him and inside. It had become his own voice, booming out of his expanded voice box, bumping up and down his giant Adam’s apple every time they moaned.

Only Liam’s head and pelvis remained unfused. And he was so desperate for it. He could feel, against all physical possibilities, the lad’s cock reaching closer and closer to his cock, and the lad’s face somewhere next to his face. Not behind, not in front, just … there. Ready to share and be shared.

Then the lad became him. He screamed. And came.

His limbs were set free. His balls were churning hard. They drooped and swelled, unfazed by the amount of sperm exiting his body, as though ready to resupply him with billions more. They kept tugging at his crotch while euphoria was seizing his body.

Ropes of cum shot out of his cock that was growing with no sign of stopping. He continued to stroke it. His glorious, colossal cock, hefty and heavy in his meaty hands coated the ground with his essence.

——————————————————

“Liam” stood in front of an oddly-shaped patch of wall, sweaty and breathing heavily.

Beneath him, a thick puddle of cum glistened in the light.

His hand dipped into the wall, and pulled out a pair of grey trackies, dirty from grime and stained, possibly from a combination of potent bodily fluids. “Heh… gonna need a proper clean after this”. He quickly donned the pair, struggling somewhat to properly place his dripping monster cock and jumbo balls inside them, as, the lack of undies aside, the article of clothing obviously wasn’t made to accommodate his size.

Next came a pair of supposedly white socks. Their soles were nigh blackened, and a funky stench emitted from the cloth. His trainers, in contrast, looked relatively new.

Liam was about to reach for something else, when a loud, long and obnoxious burp escaped his mouth.

“Fuck me, why’s it boiling in here?”

He darted his eyes around, then grinned mischievously.

Trackies pulled down, his cock, hard and wet with both pre and cum, let out a stream of yellow liquid onto the strange wall.

“Fuckin’ right”, he said with an exaggerated moaning.

It took a long while for his bladder to finish the alcohol-induced number one. By then his cock had gone semi-soft. He gave it a nice shake, and pulled it back inside. The oversized member left behind a tiny wet spot on the already dirty article of clothing.

He departed, leaving behind the thoroughly desecrated tunnel with its graffiti wall.

Some days later, the city maintenance workers came over to clean up the place. The sun had evaporated the most noticeable parts of the battlefield, only a distinctive smell remained. A worker bent over to pick up an empty beer can.

On the wall in front of him, a peculiar image stood out. The area untouched by paint and dirt seemed to take the shape of a man ...

Is he aware of my presence? Is this thing in front of me even aware? Do I ask him nicely? Or just takeover by force? I don’t know how anything works. I’ve been dead only for what I guess is a few hours, and this is my first successful entry. I’ve tried my luck with roughly a dozen of bodies similar in built to mine – young, tall, ripping with muscles and teeming with life – but it seems like their minds were too alert for me to do anything productive. Hopefully I’ll get my chance with this one. There are easier subjects, but I don’t want to become old, disabled or have a vagina.

My disembodied voice reaches out. There’s no way to know if sound even travels in this pocket world when the rules of physics have been banished to a faraway land. Chaos continues to roll about and proclaim its superiority, and I take that as a clue that I need to do something more decisive. More drastic.

I lunge at him.

Suddenly he looks normal.

Reality stirs.

And I am greeted again by endless darkness.

Fuck.

I’m losing my patience.

——————

News of my eventual demise was brought to me by her. I can no longer recall her name in this state, but we used to be close. It started with me not being able to focus during practice. The slightest movement caused my body to ache, to scream at me, to want me to stop. At first it was only my back, but after a week the pain had spread to all of my extremities. For an up-and-coming athlete, it was devastating. After visiting all the best specialists in town, the condition wrecking havoc on my body remained a mystery.

She was the first person to not dismiss my deteriorating physical and mental health as mere paranoia or delusion. The conversation was awkward. Had it not been for her being well-known as the serious type, I’d have thought that something had gone terribly wrong with her head. But I followed through all her directions. And for a while, everything returned to normal. I was happy. And grateful, too. I couldn’t understand why she still had that grave expression on her face the next time we met. A hint of sorrow in her gaze caught my eyes.

“Tomorrow, you will die.”

——————

When my heart stopped beating, I couldn’t even tell whether I was dead or not. The shadow of the living world didn’t rush towards me, but slowly embraced my feeble, unprepared mind, welcoming it to its new reality.  With no legs, I still stood. With no eyes, I looked around. I could not sense, but I could still feel. My senses might have been gone, but memories of them were still so fresh, it almost felt like they were functioning just like they used to.

Somehow, I was more sensitive to the presence of other humans. I was being bombarded with the deafening sounds and the weird smells of their organs functioning. Closest to my flatlined body was the doctor. I heard every single beat of his heart. I vaguely saw the remains of a salmon fillet with torn pieces of salad around it being dissolved in his stomach. I sensed the signals of his jiggling brain spreading to other extremities of his body.

But soon the imprint of that last moment of my life flew away out of my consciousness.   Save for the humans and possibly some animals, I could no longer sense any thing else. Was I standing on a floor? Below a ceiling? Were there walls around me? All of those things had faded into oblivion, leaving behind only the animals, including the ones at the top of the food chain: every one of them a blob of ethereal light enveloping a walking sack of veiny, scrunchy flesh, into and out of which viscous bodily fluids casually flowed. It was a fascinating sight to behold, more gruesome and vivid than any anatomy book could ever depict. The people around me were scattered, standing or resting on invisible platforms and manipulating imperceivable things with their hands. I couldn’t even tell if they were wearing clothes or not. And there was nothing sexy about it. Unlike the ghosts of pop-culture, who in leisureliness sneakily bask in the natural beauty of mankind, the pretty bags of skin that normally prevent humans from seeing the gory intricacies beneath them were transparent to whatever remained of my sight. And it won’t stay with me for long.

——————

It was revenge. Someone had had too much of my fist in his noggin, so his cohort wanted me to die. I felt no regret. At all. If I hit someone, that means they deserved it. And I’d have pulverised that cunt to pieces had she told me who it was. But she refused. And for a brief moment I really wanted to make her open up, but then she looked me straight in the eyes, and the frenzy went away. I couldn’t.

Not by force.

“Not by force”, she said. I would die at midnight by a heart attack, and nothing could prevent it from happening. But she would help extend my time in the intermediate state, until I could find someone to seek shelter at – a willing host.

“ᴅᴏ ɴᴏᴛ take over their body.”

——————

Waves of emotions splash at me like madness, and I start to drown. My second successful tethering has landed me in a more stable world, where objects are clearly delineated and intuition can be used to move myself around. Still, it doesn’t make things easier. The shells of excitement burst into pieces, and beneath their surfaces derangement crudely pours out in snips and snaps. Mania from all directions pierced through me, trying to slice up and away what little sanity still left in my being.

It is clear that I don’t have much time. I have a feeling that in this realm I am still human, or at least human-shaped, but there is no real way to check. Any movement that I make would be swept away by the pressure of this host’s mind. Looking up is like looking down, and inside is no longer different from outside. When I was with the first host, the sounds were incomprehensible, but I could clearly hear them, and I knew then that there were different sounds. But now my senses have lost their abilities to distinguish one sound from another. Are there sounds around me? Is there any sound at all? Is this bumping just the echo of his heart beating? Or is it me being shattered by this imaginary body of water? Or is it the world around me collapsing?

Focus, I must focus.

I wasn’t afraid when she said I was gonna die. There was no crumb of fear when I spent my last breath. But now I’m starting to feel it. The dread of being reduced to nothingness. The angst when one day you look into the mirror and see something so different, so decreased, so diminished, so shrunken, you would be in disbelief and denial that the pathetic thing is actually you. The ultimate despair that once you truly accept that you are now that thing, you will stay so in a moment that spans eternity, until that very awareness will eventually cease to be. And I’m afraid that I’m nearing that state.  

ᴘʟᴇᴀꜱᴇ

Let me stay here.

But he didn’t hear me. Typical. I swim, and swim, and swim towards the host. Yet despite all my effort, he is still nowhere near my reach.

ᴡʜʏ?

I’ve been begging and begging, yet my pleading continues to fall on deaf ears.

You low-lifes think I would just stay a helpless little princess?  

ᴡʜʏ ᴅᴏɴ’ᴛ ʏᴏᴜ ᴊᴜꜱᴛ ɢɪᴠᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀ ʙᴏᴅʏ ᴛᴏ ᴍᴇ?

Light flickers and the water strangles. But who is doing the strangling?

ᴡʜʏ ᴄᴀɴ’ᴛ ɪ ᴊᴜꜱᴛ ᴛᴀᴋᴇ ʏᴏᴜ ᴏᴠᴇʀ?

He is afraid. I can sense it. A runt just like those cockroaches who squirmed when I showed them true power. I am eyeless and earless, limbless and headless. But the ego is still alive, and it craves for more. Even if his sea is crushing me, my volition will prove stronger.

ɢɪᴠᴇ ᴍᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀ ʙᴏᴅʏ

Like a bullet, I pierce through the current towards him. No, I ᴀᴍ the current. I no longer have a body. But I will not falter, for I am everywhere. I smash through layers and layers of his protection. I desire. And when I take over, it will be mine, all mine. I will pound the abstract into concrete. I will press nouns into verbs. I will bring your consciousness to ruin, like trampling over an insect.

Crumble. Shamble.

He screams.

GIVE ME

Just one more second. I could feel it. The body.

Arms. Legs. Head. Ass. Penis.

Pus. Blood. Shit. Piss.

Everything.

Life.

Space flattens. His heart is beating like a machine gun.

ɴᴏ

Colours drain into nothingness. Time converges to a point, then splatters into the dimensionless.

NO

He wakes up. But I did not.

——————

I did not feel anything after she told me every minute detail about my destined death.

And I felt the same way the first few minutes after I died.  

And I feel the same way.

Now.

——————

It is calm here.

All of my senses have been lost, my anger subsided. I want to know what this realm is like, but can I? It feels like a cozy meadow. Maybe I am the meadow. The flowers are my eyes, the trees my limbs, the earth my body.

He is lying somewhere above me. On me, even.

Time passes normally in this world.

I no longer mind its passing.

.

.

.

I have a body.

I have what looks like a body.

I have a feeling that I have what looks like a body.

I’m still here. But now I feel human, and can enjoy the scenery around me. A scatter of wild poppies flames red among the tall, silver-tipped grasses, their petals trembling at the slightest brush of wind. Here and there, clumps of pale daisies lean toward a lone birch tree, its white bark flaking like old parchment. The meadow slope gently, and beyond its edge, a tangle of hawthorn and young oak stand as if holding back the forest’s deeper shadows. Overhead, the sky is a thin, washed blue, with high clouds stretched so fine they seemed brushed on by hand; the air smell faintly of rain that had passed in the night.

And he’s next to me. He’s no match in neither size nor stature compared to the other hosts. But none of that matters to me now.

He grins. And I sink into him.

——————

Specks of dust slowly dance in the lakes of sunlight that streams through the blinds. Warmth tickles me. The smell of early morning mixes with my scent marches straight into my nose. The sheet is damp, drenched with sweat and a bit of my cum. This has been happening for two weeks now. At some point I’ll have to remind myself that everything wrapping around me should be dumped into the washing machine, but for now the stench hasn’t gotten that bad. Well, the fluids have become very … potent indeed. But I’ve gotten used to them.    

I rise up from bed and groggily saunter up to the mirror. A lot has happened to my body lately, almost like I’m undergoing a second puberty. Most noticeable of all the changes is that I look more in shape, despite zero minutes spent in the gym. My fingers slowly trace the soft pelt of hair that runs from my chest down towards my nether region. I shaved two days ago, and now my jaw is already teetering with a new layer of fuzz. My legs and ass too, are not spared from the invasion of aggressive hair follicles.

I’ve grown several inches taller in just two days. The weight between my legs also seems heavier. Much heavier. For a second I did think that the magical operating of probability has blessed me with testicular cancer. But a few minutes of very thorough checking later and I still haven’t found any anomalies in my golden balls. In fact, the touching and squeezing have only served to excite them further, as evidenced by the clear dripping falling out from the head above.   

I touch my Adam’s apple. Bigger. My deeper voice rumbles as I let out random sounds just to see the thing pops up and down. I should be alarmed. There’s no such thing as second puberty, and growing rapidly at this pace definitely means that some disorder is manifesting in my body. Yet I feel oddly at ease. This is how things are supposed to be. Me from several months ago just seems like another person, someone to whom I feel a sense of disattachment. It’s not that he’s a stranger. No - he’s closer to me than anyone else could ever be. But he’s just … not the same person as me. Me in the dream is true me.

Lately my dreams have been very energetic. In them I was mostly playing rugby, though sometimes I’d also be spending time in the gym. So strange and funny. I don’t even know the rules of the game, but I guess I scored a lot, because I remember celebrating and running around the pitch shirtless, and others were swarming around me, cheering and showering me with all kinds of compliments. I was taller and bigger than all of them, and sweaty all over. I felt protective over all of them so much that every time I gave each of them a well-deserved bear hug, I felt energy coursing through my body (which possibly explained the cum spot on my sheet). The whole chain of events almost resembles a distant memory, though a faraway corner of my mind tells my that it’s still just dreams, and that the other rugby player was never that close to his team.

Now that we’re mentioning rugby, a year has passed since the rising star of the town’s team was announced dead. Judging from the comments left on his social media and what I’ve heard from friends alike, he was not the most likeable person, to put it mildly. The most damning account of him told tales of a violent meathead, a brutish maniac whose talent on the pitch had earned him an always-guaranteed spot in some of the most prestigious championships. Locker room humiliation and bullying was only the tamest of his deeds. More than one person got a nose broken because of him, and second-hand stories only pile up and up to paint the portrait of the deceased young man as ultimately a cancer to society. Yet I found myself unable to feel any positive emotion watching the masses express their satisfaction. I recall the other rugby player from my dreams, and lately my own memory, whose childhood carved him into the bitter and ruthless person that he’d eventually show the world to be. A death so sudden, so many ambitions unrealised. My mind is suddenly hit by the thought that maybe, just maybe, if he had lived a little bit longer, he would eventually become a decent person.  

I soon put the thought aside. There are more important things to do than fantasising about the fictional life of a dead stranger. First, I’ll drop into the bathroom to do my basic routine. After that, I’ll have to do something to quench my desire.

There were several compartments, all packed to varying degrees, and the weight of it in his hand felt oddly personal. Just a glance alone could tell Mark that there were at least two dozen cards tucked in the lost wallet, and it was precisely these cards that gave the thing its beefy appearance. He felt the surface of the billfold with his hands, and it seemed that aside from a tiny number of notes, the whole of it was also filled with cards. He yanked out a card, the one next to his thumb, just to search for any kind of information that could help him return the wallet back to its owner.

He almost jumped. The intense stare of the man on the card nearly made Mark believe that the former was looking directly at him, and not at some lifeless camera in a studio. Sharp jawline, straight, thick eyebrows and a prominent Adam’s apple, the man exuded masculinity in an unsettling way. Aside from the en face photo that took up one third of the plastic thingy’s space, there was hardly anything else that could qualify this as an ID card, even though from afar it may very well look like one. Where normally personal info would be found, rectilinear strokes stacked up and intertwined with each other to form a maze-like pattern covering the remaining parts of the card. Mark would have mistaken it for a really pretty QR code if not for the strategically placed curves, each pair spaced out an even distance from the others. Every two curves twisted and touched, taking on the outline and form of an eye. It was the inside of each shape that differed one pair of curves from another. Some of them had only tiny dots, whereas others contained several concentric rings, each inner ring progressively shrunk the distance between itself and its outer encompasser, until all that was left was a perfect circled filled with pure darkness.        

The more he stared at the card, the more his brain hurt. He wondered if this was one of those optical illusions where people see movement where there is none. He was looking at something akin to Snake the game overlaid over Frogger, but instead of one pixelated snake there were ten of them chasing over the same number of balls across a hyper-realistic, yet oddly symmetric river, across which almond-shaped objects drifted while constantly blinking. Most bizarre of all—they popped. Every now and then, a chunk of the symbols appeared to have teleported into the air in a way so subtle that without the change in depth of field, Mark would have never noticed it at all.

The relentless, overbearing surge of information—incomprehensible, interdimensional, intense and alien—was taking a toll on the functioning of his senses. The assault on his eyes left them strained, and he could feel his focus slipping, pupils darting without direction, vision starting to blur. It was actually in this state of half-seeing that the chaotic symbols started to make sense. From total disorder, the strokes merged into a more readable form, almost resembling Latin characters to his primed brain. Light waves continued to beam endlessly at his eyeballs, but fatigue was no longer felt, only a soothing sensation. He saw words, at first hundreds of them, then hundreds of thousands of them. He couldn’t recall what words they were, for they went by too quickly. He just knew that they calmed his mind, as if he’s in the warm embrace of a benevolent, supernatural force.  

Each time the two-dimensional strokes extended themselves into a higher dimension, the man’s face shimmered. Mark could still felt the fierceness of his gaze, but whatever that seemed threatening to him before, it now called out to him much more invitingly. The printed face began to shift. Depth appeared where there was none; the surface bulged subtly, then more visibly, until the image seemed to push out toward him. His hand, moving with robotic stiffness, began to rise. Fingers trembling slightly, he reached toward the protruding face on the card.

He touched it.

Instantly, the sensory assault stopped. No more noises in his head. No more shifting symbols. Reality reasserted itself, as the less pleasant sounds of car’s honking and dog’s barking hit his ears. The surface under his fingertips was smooth and flat. A piece of plastic. No protruding face. No funny movement.

He blinked, still halfway in the strange trance-like state, and slowly came back to himself. His heart was beating normally, if not a bit slower than usual—not from fear, exactly, but from the residual intensity of whatever had just happened. He browsed through the remaining content of the wallet. Every single card was similar to the one he picked out. The same photo. The same nonsensical patterns. The same tranquillity echoed in his mind. He pulled out his phone. Ten minutes had passed since he’d first noticed the wallet lying in the road. He was definitely late now—missed the bus, no question. And definitely wouldn’t make it in time for his Cognitive Psychology class.

‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒

“Right, show me that stuff you found.”

They were between lectures, not in the lecture hall but tucked away in one of the smaller classrooms—a relic from the Cold War era, with creaky chairs and a whiteboard that still displayed the same formulas from two weeks ago, though the smell of markers seemed to be older. As usual, a loose circle of lads had formed, drawn together by habit and the kind of idle energy that fills breaks between classes. They talked about things—manly things, geeky things, manly geeky things, and no-things, as in, neither manly nor geeky.

Mark had arrived late. He quickly scuttled up to his seat, reserved by his trusted companion Peter, after dedicating less than 3 seconds to mumble out an apology when the professor threw him a hostile glance. Upon being prompted by Peter to explain his unusual tardiness, he whispered something about an unorthodox object he just discovered.

Now, under the curious eyes of the lads, he hoisted off his backpack and started rummaging. His fingers brushed against notebooks, cables, and finally landed on the thing. He pulled it out and dropped it onto the nearest desk.

“Just a wallet? Your wallet?” Peter leaned in with a skeptical smirk, eyebrows raised.

“No,” Mark said, his tone a little sharper than he intended. “I found this... thing on my way to the bus stop.”

“Eh, what’s special about it?” Greg asked, more intrigued than doubtful, though his voice still had the usual careless edge.

“See it for yourself,” Mark replied, growing impatient. He caught himself for a second, and wondered why he was being more on edge today. Normally he was the playful kind of bloke, and wouldn’t mind teasing his mates for some harmless fun.

Peter, however, didn’t need more encouragement. In a matter of seconds, he’d flipped it open and started pulling everything out—cards, a few bills, and more cards. And even more cards.

“Wow,” Greg blurted out, his voice jumping half an octave, with a once in a lifetime enthusiasm that Mark had only witnessed when the former unboxed his new PS5, and that was two and a half year ago. “This is so lit.”

That reaction alone was enough to pique the curiosity of other males in the room. Heads turned. Conversations paused mid-sentence. All eyes were laid on the heap of rectangular things spread out in disarray all over the table.

ID cards. Or at least, that’s what they looked like at first glance. More than two dozen of them. In German, French, Czech and whatever the hell the remaining languages were. A bunch of them had only Cyrillic on the surface, while a few more had Cyrillic mixed with Latin. Others were written in scripts so exotic to the young men that their combined knowledge of geography would still not suffice to list off the countries where they are used.

And the languages and countries of origin alone were just the top of the iceberg. Greg, who took German for two semesters, picked one up and turned it over in his hands. “This one’s a residence card,” he muttered, narrowing his eyes. “Looks legit”. Peter had grabbed one with “Permis de Conduire” printed in italic across the top, and a much bigger text on the top-left corner that read “Québec”. “Driver’s license,” he guessed aloud. “Not for a bus, though. Definitely not for a bus.”

Other cards followed—military credentials, university IDs, health insurance documents, employee badges, event staff badges. The types varied wildly, just like the places they came from. There were cards from nearly every part of the globe. Asia, Africa, the Americas ...  every continent had its piece in this strange collection. Except, maybe, Antarctica.

Yet through all the variation, one constant remained: the name Darius, and the face. That face. The name changed slightly from card to card—Dariuš, Dario, Darijus—adapted to local spelling systems and grammatical rules. But the man’s face stayed the same. Every time. Dark eyes, heavy brow, a square jaw that could have been carved from stone. Striking, unmistakably masculine, and… off. Uncanny, somehow. Not quite artificial, but just detached enough from natural human warmth to leave an impression.

“Fuck me, he’s built like a tank,” Greg muttered, holding one of the IDs at arm’s length.

“You think these are all fake?” Peter asked, his tone shifting from amusement to suspicion. “They look real. Like, properly real.”

The excitement of the group wasn’t shared by Mark. He was standing just a little away from the table now, arms crossed, eyes fixed on the pile like it might change again if he blinked. Something about it didn’t sit right with him. At all.

He was absolutely sure that the wallet hadn’t left his backpack. Not even for a moment. He hadn’t touched it since that weird moment on the street. Who switched the old cards with these? Did they transformed by themselves? How did they become so... detailed? When he first opened the wallet, all of the cards were covered in nonsensical symbols—random, unreadable. And they definitely did something to his brain. But now? Aside from looking like very professionally faked proofs of identity, there weren’t any other concerns. They looked ... normal. Strange enough to garner a reaction, but not as outlandish as what Mark had encountered. The boys, if anything, seemed even more rambunctious. They were too caught up in the novelty, in the sheer weirdness of it all. Peter had already pulled out his phone. “This is too cool to not be on my reels,” he said, grinning brightly as he adjusted the angle to fit the entire spread into frame. He tapped his phone several times, then picked up a card for a more detailed photo.

‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒

Peter’s eyes were still locked onto the screen, unblinking. A full minute must have passed, maybe more. His phone was held in front of him at an awkward angle, but his hands didn’t tremble. He wasn’t frozen in fear—just ... still.

The other lads were still caught up in their own excitement, passing cards back and forth like collectors at a flea market. But Mark had gone quiet. He was watching Peter now.

“Pete?” he said.

No response.

Mark tried again, firmer this time. “Pete?”

Still nothing. Not even a twitch.

Mark stepped in closer, and that’s when he saw it. The source of Peter’s sudden, total stillness. His phone’s camera was still active, and through it, the driver’s license remained centred in frame—balanced between Peter’s thumb and forefinger, perfectly still. Yet on the phone’s screen, there was no fancy driver’s license to be found. The vortex of alien symbols had returned. They swirled out from the card like an intricate animation from a high-budget video game. They tapped on the screen, and some of them even bled out. And then the face of the man—Darius—was moving. Not just closer. It was emerging, as though the screen itself were turning into a portal to another dimension. The man’s head grew in size, inching forward pixel by pixel, somehow without distorting, without breaking the illusion. It was no animation. It was him.

Mark felt peace. This time, the symbols were no longer foreign to him. His eyes absorbed them, and his brain interpreted them with impossible clarity—thousands of words, meanings, suggestions, ᴄᴏᴍᴍᴀɴᴅꜱ, flashing past in rapid succession, too fast for any human to consciously parse, yet he understood. Something in his brain had clicked. A circuit closed. A key turned.

Calmness. He felt ᴀꜱꜱᴜʀᴇᴅ. Like everything was happening just as it should.

He took another step toward Peter. Their shoulders touched. Neither said a word.

Mark raised a hand and gently placed it on Peter’s shoulder. With his other hand, he reached toward the phone screen, toward the ever-growing image of Darius. At that moment, just before his fingers brushed the glass, his eyes registered the final flashing message.

VESSEL SELECTED

Mark’s hand passed straight through the phone’s screen, like dipping into a pool of cool, crude oil. Through the viscosity of the liquid, he finally found texture. Soft, warm, organic, and fleshy. His fingers sank into it, feeling a slick and pulsing sensation, like touching the inside of a mouth.

Without hesitation, he pulled back. The phone rippled once, like disturbed water. Then Darius’s head emerged. It rose slowly, pushing out from the screen, defying physics without even acknowledging the laws it was breaking. The face was exactly as it had been on the cards—broad jaw, dark eyes, regal in a way that made it more uncanny than impressive. The head was tethered—held together by a continuous stream of liquid flesh, like umbilical sinew spilling out behind it. A pulsing, flowing cord of organic matter, connecting Darius to the world was still trapped inside the screen. It poured out endlessly from the card, threading through the air in a gruesome ribbon, viscous and constantly reforming.

Mark smiled at the surreal sight. He turned his head towards Peter, whose gaze was still blankly resting on the screen, oblivious to the event taking place in front of him. Slowly, deliberately, in a mechanical manner that seemed almost reverent, Mark raised the flesh-dripping head towards Peter’s face. The latter managed to let out only a muffled moan—more confused than pained—as the biomass met his skin. It wasn’t clear if he was resisting or calling out. But it didn’t matter.

The others didn’t notice. Not really. The mania had ceased, but their collective consciousness remained transfixed by the cards scattered across the table, gazing into them with glazed eyes. Not blinking, not speaking. Whatever spell that had taken over them, its effects were now more visible than ever. The appearance of a flesh cyclone from beyond Peter’s phone screen, and its now completely covering his head seemed not to have disturbed the young men in the room at the slightest. Slowly, with the calm of inevitability, it aligned itself, feature by feature, onto its new host.

The stream from the phone didn’t slow. It only grew thicker, more purposeful. It wrapped around Peter’s head, then his shoulders, crawling down his neck with eerie precision. Peter’s skinny body was revealed for one brief second, as the sentient flesh first wormed both over and underneath his clothes, then in one swift but violent movement, completely devoured them down to the last atom before slathering itself neatly onto his body. The mass accumulated overwhelmingly at Peter’s feet – if who or whatever that was standing next to Mark could still be said to be Peter. The flesh had solidified after binding itself to Peter’s body, but the forces at the bottom continued to push upward, lengthening first the legs, then the figure’s whole torso. A tower of meat and muscle were coming into view. The head was now completely Darius’s. It twitched, and then continued to moan with Peter voice as if there was something stuck in his vocal cord. One who looked at the face would have the impression that all its facial nerves were paralysed, for the facial expressions were completely detached and at odds with the vocalisation taking place.  

The mass, just mere seconds ago immobile, started to stir. The stream of liquid flesh had been severed from its source beyond the phone’s screen. All that remained on the giant that Mark was looking at had been turned into solid flesh – hard, firm, natural, organic. Big, prominent veins surfaced along his arms and legs. His toes coiled, and his fingers curled into fists, letting Peter’s heart pump fresh batches of blood to the new extremities of its enhanced, occupied body. A body taken over by ᴅᴀʀɪᴜꜱ. The moaning had stopped, replaced by the dead silence that stemmed from the grimness and intensity of a man’s presence. He looked down at his body, at the hair slowly growing out across his legs, over his arms and along his chest. At potent beads of sweat pouring out of his imposing body. At his intimidating, rising member filled up with blood. And at Mark.

Darius’s stare had triggered something inside Mark. The latter turned his attention towards the remaining men inside the room, whose minds had been scattered by the cards around them. Mark smiled, having only one thought in his mind.

Matt glanced at the rearview mirror. “You have beautiful eyes”, his wife used to say. The same pair of eyes, void of liveliness, stared blankly at the highway behind drooping eyelids. It was clear that his eyebags would only get more bloated after this restless night. So much for the forty-first year spent on the planet. More suited to describe the number of wrinkles on his face than the number of birthday cakes he'd had.

“ᴛɪᴍᴇ ʜᴀꜱ ʙᴇᴇɴ ᴄʀᴜᴇʟ ᴛᴏ ʏᴏᴜ, ᴍᴀᴛᴛ”, the stranger lamented.

Matt would love to agree, but the more he thought about it, the less convinced he was. So frivolous is the thing that is called language, it assigns to dead things quirky traits of the living. For time is a law of nature. It doesn’t judge. It has neither a face, nor a persona. It was the cruelty of mankind that had wreaked havoc on his face and body. It was also the cruelty of the concept named “Matt” to have accepted the former cruelty without ever once questioning it. The body was rebelling, yet the ego didn’t want to listen. Cold coffee sloshed around gently in the half-drunk cup, and explosive ‘90s rock blasted up the stale, conditioned air of the car. His favourite brand. His favourite band. There was no enjoyment, only the echo of a voice telling him to not fall asleep.

“ʏᴏᴜ ᴄʟɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ᴛʜᴇ ɪʟʟᴜꜱᴏʀʏ, ᴡʜᴇɴ ᴛʜᴇ ᴍɪɴᴅ ʜᴀꜱ ᴀʟʀᴇᴀᴅʏ ꜱᴇᴇɴ ᴛʀᴜᴛʜ”.

The man was boring more and more doubts into Matt’s brain with his statements. Matt glanced at the rearview mirror. “You have beautiful eyes”, his wife used to say. How he yearned to hear that same sentence again. Yet for all that he could imagine, the weary face of the woman he loved would scrunch up upon seeing him the next morning. It was already past mid-night; he had missed their anniversary. Business suit still on, with all the business cards from the conference, coated with the faint smell of fast food. The fresh, vibrant bouquet of flowers and neatly wrapped gifts sat silently on the rear seat, judging him for being the liar that he was. He had promised to come. He was coming. He didn’t forget. But why did the prospect of fulfilling this promise bring no more joy than letting it rot in oblivion? Why all this effort, when he already knew what lied ahead? The ugly faces, the apologising, the berating.

ɪᴛ ɪꜱ ɴᴏᴛ ɢʀᴇᴇᴅ, ᴍᴀᴛᴛ, ᴛᴏ ᴅᴇꜱɪʀᴇ ꜱᴏᴍᴇᴛʜɪɴɢ ʙᴇᴛᴛᴇʀ.

But what do I do? Matt thought. The publicity would be disastrous. The year-long legal process. Custody. Child support‒

ʙᴜᴛ ʏᴏᴜ ᴅᴏɴ’ᴛ ᴄᴀʀᴇ ᴀʙᴏᴜᴛ ᴛʜᴏꜱᴇ ᴛʜɪɴɢꜱ. ɴᴇᴠᴇʀ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ꜰɪʀꜱᴛ ᴘʟᴀᴄᴇ.

The empty, desolate road could not see through the windows that Matt was shaking. Not by the chilling cold breathed in and out by the cranked-up A/C. Not by any kind of medical emergency that might befall upon the healthy, though exhausted middle-aged entrepreneur.

ʏᴏᴜ ʟᴀᴄᴋ ᴄᴏɴᴠɪᴄᴛɪᴏɴ, ᴍᴀᴛᴛ.

Matt felt tears welling up behind his eyes. He glanced at the rearview mirror. Glassy, wet blue eyes. He desired. Yearned. Thirsted. For the thing that he hadn’t felt in years. In decades.

The low hum of the engine became almost hypnotic. The headlights carved through tunnels, piercing the void of asphalt and darkness. The gloomy street lights left behind streaks of ethereal yellow, merging with the blurry, waving road signs. Forms got squashed into blobs, and shapes got crushed into lines. And the lines went on,

and on,

and on,

endlessly.

Until they collapsed.

Into one point.

---

The warmth of a Saturday’s morning greeted Matt as rays of sunlight shone through the car’s window. He softly groaned, his head spinning. His voice no longer carried with it the raspiness of a heavy smoker. The smell of cologne and leather mixed with someone else’s scent filled up the car. It smelled heavenly. The road continued to slide backwards, but Matt was no longer in the driver’s seat.

He felt lighter. In mind and in body. No more responsibilities. No more irritating voice telling him to stay awake. Gone was the certain dreariness of a bleak future. The soft fuzz of hair on his right arm glinted gold as they passed through a forest clearing. Youth had graced Matt’s body once more, manifesting itself in the form of raging hormones. He felt a heavier weight between his legs, not counting the natural reaction of his body that had already tented up his shorts. Energy was coursing through his body.

He looked to his left. Driving the car was a handsome young man with a deep, warm voice. He smiled at Matt, and said something. Something about his beautiful eyes. But Matt was too groggy and not in the right state of mind to make out what the man said. But it was not important. He felt like he could just ask the man later about it. He felt a link towards the man that he couldn’t explain. The only way he could verbalise it was that he could trust him.

But above all, he felt happy.

It was never his intention to get huge. He just wanted some meat on his bones. He wanted his clothes to finally start fitting him right. Because they never sat comfortably on his shoulders. And even the smallest sizes sometimes felt too large on his narrow frame.

This was Tanner’s first morning run. What he really needed to do was some strength training so that he could build some muscle mass. The problem was that he’d been having some trouble with motivation, of late. He’d read online that a morning run was a good way to get in the mindset and the further along he got, the more he was inclined to believe it.

He was lucky that he lived near a nice park. It felt great to be out in nature—to be breathing relatively clean air. He doubted that running around a city block would have felt as exhilarating or stimulating.

Tanner did think that he might have taken a bit of a wrong turn, though. He’d deliberately chosen a trail that people didn’t often take—he’d felt a bit self-conscious about being on his first morning run—but it felt like he’d strayed somewhere he shouldn’t have been.

A faint sense of dread settled into the pit of Tanner’s stomach. A small voice in the back of his head was telling him to turn around now before it was too late, but he’d already come so far. And besides, he wasn’t sure he’d even be able to find the way back.

Tanner swallowed his trepidation and continued down the trail. He was certain he would eventually make it back to the main trail if he just followed the path, but that certainty was dwindling with every moment that passed.

The trail looked increasingly dilapidated the further along he went. Vegetation was starting to poke through the packed dirt. The foliage overhead was getting to be so dense that the sunlight had visibly dimmed.

The worst part was the silence. The ambient noise that Tanner had taken for granted had faded to nothing. Now, the forest around him was just eerily quiet.

Tanner stopped for a moment to catch his breath. This whole place was giving him the heebie-jeebies. He felt like he’d wandered into some sort of in-between, into a realm where he didn’t belong.

He felt a pang of terror when the temperature in his immediate vicinity dropped. His breath misted in front of his face as if it were a crisp winter day, even though it was the middle of July.

Tanner’s eyes went wide. He could see curlicues of frost spiraling down the bark of the tree across the path from him. He wasn’t alone. He didn’t know how he knew that or why he was so certain, but he felt a presence.

“Help… Me…”

The ghostly voice sent a chill down Tanner’s spine. He should have run but he was rooted to the spot. His feet refused to move.

A thin fog filled the air and suddenly there was a figure hovering right in front of Tanner’s eyes. Its face was a bit hazy on account of it being made of mist. Somehow, Tanner could tell it was a young man around his age.

He was frozen as the visage reached out to him. “Help… Me…” the ghostly figure repeated, its fingers outstretched as it slowly drifted toward Tanner.

Tanner couldn’t move. He was petrified. He was terrified. He scrunched his eyes shut and held his breath. He didn’t know what else to do.

He felt something ice-cold touch his chest through the fabric of his shirt. It sank through his skin and seeped through his breastbone. It settled in the center of his chest and then spread throughout his body like a rush of ice water flowing through his veins.

Tanner gasped, his eyes flying open just in time to see the apparition’s ghostly form being sucked into his body. He sucked down a breath and tendrils of ghostly mist surged up his nose and down his throat, filling his lungs.

As soon as the ghost was gone, the temperature went back to normal. The forest suddenly didn’t seem so dark. The ambient noise returned.

Tanner wondered if maybe he’d just imagined the whole thing but then memories that weren’t his own started to bubble up inside him. He tried to push them out of his head but they were insistent. The same memories came up but they were a confusing jumble. The order was messed up. It was as if someone were struggling to tell him a story. Against his better judgment, Tanner took a breath and opened his mind to the memories.

‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒

His hand trembled as he read the letter aloud. “Dear Jerome…” it began. “Congratulations! I am thrilled to offer you admission—”

All he’d wanted to do was go on a run. He didn’t need this. He sorely wished this bitch would just take her drama elsewhere.

“The good news is, it’s not terrible.” That was a relief. He just wished he didn’t know there was a ‘but’ coming. “The bad news is, you’ll be out of commission for a couple of weeks.”

What the fuck? Why did his hand just pass through that bush? Why did his hand pass through his body?

Just a little further. Come on. Come on! Don’t choke now! His heart was racing. His blood was pumping. His legs were flying as they carried him across the pitch, and then— “TOUCHDOWN!”

He grimaced. That shrill screeching was grating on his nerves. That poor guy was just taking a walk, minding his own business. That woman needed to get a grip.

It didn’t matter whether he ran, flew, or crawled. He was trapped. Chained to his body. He could get up to the trail but that was it. He couldn’t leave, even if he wanted to.

He spotted a side trail. It wasn’t his usual route, but anywhere else was better than the main trail. That bitch was still screaming that poor man’s ear off.

He was grinning from ear to ear. This was it. The defining moment. He could scarcely hear himself think—the crowd was going wild.

“It looks like you’ll be all good by the end of next week.” That was a relief. But it did mean he was still going to miss the championships.

He tilted his head. He couldn’t understand. Why was he looking at himself? More importantly, how was he looking at himself?

He thrust the game ball into the air. “FUCK, YEAH!" he bellowed at the top of his lungs. His teammates all rushed him, a dozen sweaty men all jumping up and down. The energy was infectious. He couldn’t stop grinning.

He shivered. Maybe he should have stayed on the main trail. This area was giving him the creeps. He felt like the trees were closing in on him. But fuck was it a relief to be away from that Karen and her entitled screeching.

The crowd jumped to their feet in the bleachers. He didn’t join them. Just last week, he’d felt triumphant. Unconquerable. Now, he was sitting in the bleachers with his arm in a sling.

Why… was he down here? The trail was up there. And why was his body all twisted like that? That didn’t look natural…

He was on top of the world. His teammates carried him past the home crowd on their shoulders. He pumped his fist in the air and everyone cheered. Coach was grinning from ear to ear.

“It looks like you’re all good to get back to your usual routines. In a hurry to get better, were you?” He gave the doctor a polite chuckle. He was just glad to get the sling off.

Why was he in the bushes? Did he take a tumble? The last thing he remembered was running along the trail and then… nothing…

He was walking back to the locker room when a shock of ice-cold sports drink jolted him out of his reverie. He spun around, eyes wide. Two of his teammates grinned at him, holding the empty cooler between them. “Oh, you two are fucking dead now," he said with a laugh as he took off in hot pursuit.

No. No, no, no. That wasn’t right. He couldn’t be dead. He was fine. This was all just a bad nightmare. His doctor had said he was fine.

“We’re sending you in for a closer look. It’s probably nothing, but we want to make sure. No, you’re free to get back to your usual routine. Just maybe try and avoid contact sports until we can get things looked at.”

He hated feeling this way. It was stupid. He was being selfish. He should be happy that his team was winning. But part of him didn’t want them to make it any further, now that he had to sit out.

How many days had it been? He wasn’t sure anymore. Had anyone noticed he was gone? Was anyone looking for him? Wait… Was this the same day? Or was it a new one…?

No. This wasn’t right. This was impossible. He was too young to die. He had so much to live for. So many things he still wanted to do!

He was positively sticky by the time he got back to the locker room. “MVP! MVP! MVP!” they all cheered as soon as he entered. Hell yeah. Tonight, at least, he was the man.

They did it. His team won. He didn’t feel like a winner, though. There were only the state championships left. They were all celebrating down there like he didn’t exist. No one even looked over his way.

It felt weird, being inside a bird. He couldn’t shake the wrongness of it. But it confirmed something for him, at least. He needed a new body. That was the only way he was going to be able to leave.

Campus. It was all so intimidating, but exciting, too. He was standing in front of the student residence, everything he owned packed in his bags. This was where his future would start and he couldn’t wait to face it.

He couldn’t take this anymore. He was cold. He was scared. He was exhausted and alone. All he wanted to do was go home.

There was no sleep. No rest. No escape. Home felt like a distant afterthought. More than anything, he wanted to be free of this torment, and there was only going to be one solution: a body.

It had only been two days. Maybe it was three. He didn’t know why it was so hard to tell the time when he saw the sun rise and set every day but he was slipping. He was losing his mind. Losing himself.

Desperation grew with every passing hour. He was hollowing out, turning into a husk of what he used to be. He needed a body. More than anything. And he was just about ready to go to any length to get one.

‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒

Tanner snapped out of his reverie with a cold sweat running down the curve of his spine. “I-I can’t just let you take over my body! Is that what you want? My body?” he called out, not even entirely sure that Jerome would be able to hear him. “What would happen to me?”

Not that Tanner had expected one, but a response wasn’t forthcoming. Instead, the shock of cold that had gone through his body was replaced with a strange warmth that started to spread from the middle of his chest.

It was a deep heat that suffused every bone and muscle that it washed over. Mere moments later, Tanner was sweating more profusely than when he’d been running at his top speed. The heady warmth overtook his whole body, spreading to the very tips of his fingers, making every breath hot.

Tension coiled like a wound spring in the pit of Tanner’s stomach. Something was happening to his body but he couldn’t quite put a finger on what it was. A strange sort of pressure was building up inside him, the sensation intense to the point of being uncomfortable.

Tanner felt like he was burning up from the inside. The heat rising from his body filled his head and made it impossible to think.

He fell to the ground on his hands and knees as his legs gave out from under him. He was starting to sweat like a pig, soaking through not just his shirt but his shorts, too. Dark splotches appeared in the soil as sweat dripped off his brow onto the ground.

Tanner felt a pang of panic as he watched his hands shift right in front of his eyes. His pale complexion darkened as his hands grew larger, his fingers growing longer and thicker while veins popped along the backs of his knuckles.

The transformation crept up his arm, darker skin washing over paler. The dread that he felt redoubled as he watched his bony forearms suddenly grow thick with muscle, a juicy vein climbing up along the back.

Tanner followed the transformation up his arms. His eyes grew wide as his biceps swelled. For the first time in his life, his upper arms filled his sleeves. In fact, as his triceps bulged with new mass, his arms didn’t just fill his sleeves, they stretched them.

A low groan escaped Tanner. His shoulders had always been narrow. He’d always had trouble with shirts that were too big just sliding off. Suddenly, he felt his shoulders moving. At first, it felt like someone was forcefully pinning them back, but then he felt them growing wider, and broader, finally filling out the shoulders of his shirt like they were meant to.

Tanner’s delts grew in, swelling with muscle to the point that they stretched his shirt across his shoulders. Between his new shoulders and new arms, he was almost afraid that his shirt would just explode off of his body, the stitching pushed beyond its limits.

Heat filled Tanner’s lungs as his traps started to grow in, too. He felt the collar of his shirt stretching as the sides of his neck bulked up. The shirt that had been loose on him when he started his run was suddenly skin-tight, at least around his upper body.

The transformation wasn’t done yet, though. The heat in Tanner’s lungs spread to his chest. New bulk packed onto where there was once only a flat, bony expanse. The front of his shirt swelled as all of a sudden, the sweat-soaked fabric was stretched taut over a pair of firm, muscular slabs welded on top of his breastbone.

The wet fabric clung to Tanner’s body like a second skin. It dipped into the cleft between his pecs, highlighting not just his cleavage but the striations of the corded muscle.

Despite his better judgment, Tanner couldn’t help but lean back. He sat on his feet and reached up to touch his chest. He’d only ever dreamed of having a rack so impressive so he was struggling to comprehend that this was real.

But the more that Tanner touched his new pecs, the more that he palmed, squeezed, and kneaded them with his own two hands, the more that he realized this was really happening. His body was changing. He was gaining the bulk that he’d always wanted.

Tanner’s cock twitched in his shorts. He could feel his stomach tightening up. He slid a hand up under the bottom hem of his shirt and barely managed to suppress the moan that came to his lips when he felt the start of abs etching themselves into his middle.

He hitched his shirt up to expose his belly. He brushed his fingers back and forth over the cobbled abs that had grown in. His cock twitched and leaked against his leg as his fingers dipped in and out of the ridges and crevices of his rock-hard washboard.

It was strange seeing his pastiness give way to a healthy dark complexion but as the transformation swept down past his waist, etching a pair of delicious Adonis lines that dipped past the waistband of his shorts, he could hardly complain.

Tanner watched his obliques grow in like ripples along his flanks. He felt his lats swell, rooting at his spine and then spreading out like a pair of wings that shoved his arms out and away from his body.

He groaned as his legs expanded, the skin on his thighs growing taut over sculpted quads. His hamstrings thickened and his glutes swelled. Suddenly, his running shorts seemed more like compression shorts, all but bursting at the seams to contain his new bulk.

Tanner staggered to his feet as his calves bulged with solid muscle. His shoes felt like vices clamped around his toes as he grew a handful of sizes bigger than he was meant to be.

His legs ached as the bones stretched and realigned. His vision swam as his perspective shifted. Suddenly, he was looking at the world from a whole new vantage point. It was just a few inches higher than he was used to but it still felt like he was suddenly standing at the top of a very tall tower.

Up until then, Tanner actually started to enjoy what was happening to him. Seeing the world from an entirely new perspective was like a shock of cold water to his system.

On one level, yes, he was getting the body that he’d always wanted, but it wasn’t exactly his body, now was it? It was Jerome’s body. He was the pasty, lanky white kid who would start tumbling down the street in a windstorm. He wasn’t meant to be this huge black stud, no matter how much he wished that he could be this big.

“No,” Tanner said, shaking his head as he clutched his temples. “I can’t do this. This isn’t right!”

He felt a strange warmth in his chest. He felt like Jerome was trying to calm him down. But how could he be calm? His body was being taken over. His life was being taken over. “This isn’t me. This isn’t me!”

The warmth that Tanner felt in his chest turned icy cold. His body jerked, his limbs bending in unnatural ways as the ghostly form of Jerome slowly started to separate from him.

Tanner didn’t fight it, even though Jerome was visibly trying to claw his way back. He resisted the urge to hold on to the body that he’d been given, feeling the muscles shrink back into his body as if they had never been there in the first place.

“Nooo!” came Jerome’s ghostly wail as he was expelled from Tanner’s body. The bonds between them snapped. The backlash was enough to send him flying backward through the air, his misty body slamming into a tree before scattering back into nothingness.

The moment he could move, Tanner ran like he’d never run before. His legs were flying as he thundered down the trail, his heart pounding in his ears as he tried to ignore the darkening forest around him.

He had to get away. That was the only thought in his mind. He had to run as far as he could, away from Jerome, away from the temptation.

Before he knew it, the forest was opening up again. The sunlight was streaming through the foliage. He hadn’t noticed how cold it had gotten in that darker part of the park until he felt the warmth of the day on his skin. Tanner was struggling to catch his breath when he ran into someone else coming down the trail, going the opposite way. It was a man walking his dog. They shared perfunctory greetings and suddenly, all felt right with the world.

‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒

Tanner was safely home but his mind was still spinning from the encounter he’d just had in the woods. The adrenaline was still pumping in his veins.

He didn’t think he’d ever run so fast from anything in his life. The experience had been harrowing. Part of him couldn’t help but wonder if he’d just hallucinated all of it—if he’d accidentally breathed in some hallucinogenic spores or pollen and dreamed it all up.

That didn’t seem to be the case, though. Tanner’s clothes were looser than they were when he started his run, almost as if they’d been stretched out. More importantly, the stretching was uniform across his clothes. There was no rational explanation for that. If he’d just caught himself on a branch or something, then his clothes would have been more stretched in some places than others but that wasn’t the case here.

Tanner stumbled into the bathroom and whipped his sweat-soaked shirt off his body. His skin had returned to its usual pasty white, though the run had given him a bit of a healthier glow and a sheen of sweat-damp that accentuated what little definition he did have.

He stood in front of the mirror and looked at his reflection. Compared to the body that Jerome’s possession had given him, what with all its muscles in all the right places, his lanky frame seemed almost…pathetic.

Tanner dreaded to think what might have happened if he’d allowed Jerome to fully take over his body but at the same time, he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d maybe been a bit too hasty. He remembered the thrill of muscle growth, how the heat had filled his being so completely.

He licked his lips. He hadn’t sensed any real hostility from Jerome. And the encounter had gotten him the body he always wanted.

Looking at his own body in the mirror, Tanner felt a pang of regret. The opportunity had been there for the taking and he’d run away from it. Would it have really been so bad to let the ghost be a passenger in his body?

The more that he thought about it, the more Tanner was convinced that it wouldn’t have been bad at all. He flexed his arms but there was nothing there to flex. There was barely a bulge as his biceps contracted, compared to the guns that the possession had given him earlier.

Tanner recognized that it was probably a bad idea to go back but he wanted to be bigger so badly. He had just started out on his fitness journey. He had a long way to go, and he had no guarantee of results. On the other hand, he’d already had a taste of what Jerome could do for him.

That settled it. He couldn’t stomach the thought that he could put in all the hard work and make no progress. He had to go back. How bad could it be, anyway?

‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒

The only thing Tanner did before heading back into the park was to change out of his old clothes. He was still wearing workout clothes, but ones that fit him better. He didn’t know why, it just felt right.

Somehow, he found that isolated trail much easier than before. It was almost as if the woods were waiting for him to come back. He had to admit, it was a bit eerie seeing the daylight dim, the shadows encroaching from the edges.

Tanner tried to ignore the instincts that were compelling him to run away before it was too late. He didn’t want to run away. He was determined, as bad of an idea as he knew this was going to be.

He did end up freezing up when he felt the temperature drop. He found himself unable to breathe or speak when the fog rolled in—when Jerome manifested in front of him again.

The specter regarded him for a moment. “Why…Come back…?”

Tanner gulped down his trepidation. “I… I had to,” he said. “I… I couldn’t stop thinking about what happened.”

“You…help me… I…help you…” said the ghost, its voice like the barest whisper of wind through the foliage.

“Q-quid pro quo, yeah,” said Tanner. His mouth felt dry and so did his throat. He was nervous as all hell but then again, he supposed that was only normal when negotiating with a ghost. “I—I can help you get out of here…But I want to be a stud like you.”

A brittle sound reminiscent of laughter seemed to echo through the misty visage of the ghost in front of Tanner. “That…can be…arranged…” said Jerome. “If you…don’t mind…becoming a hot…black…stud…”

Tanner’s cock twitched in his shorts. He didn’t know why the idea of that seemed so titillating. “I-I don’t mind at all,” he said. “I just want to be bigger.”

“It’s…a deal…then…” rasped Jerome’s ghost.

Tanner licked his lips and nodded. “Deal.” He’d barely finished saying the word when Jerome’s spectral form rushed into his body.

He sucked down a sharp breath, his chest spasming as he gasped for air. He felt like he’d been plunged headfirst into an icy river. The sensation was short-lived, at least, quickly replaced by that bone-deep heat that he’d felt the first time Jerome inhabited his body.

A low groan escaped Tanner as all the muscles he’d gained earlier returned to him. His shirt stretched, riding up on his navel as the perfect, studly physique grew on him.

The sound of seams popping filled the air as Tanner’s body swelled with even more muscle than the first time. A veritable shelf of meat stretched the front of his shirt to its breaking point while his upper arms thoroughly shredded the sleeves.

Sweat dripping down Tanner’s torso plastered the bottom part of his shirt on top of his abs. Jerome gave him a six-pack before, but this time he had an eight-pack. Not to mention the delicious Adonis belt and rippling obliques.

Tanner’s thighs bulged, his titanic quads and thick hamstrings tearing his running shorts up along the sides. Muscular glutes exploded out the back, those meaty cheeks tightening up as his calves swelled and his feet busted clean through his running shoes.

A low, bass growl rumbled through Tanner’s chest as he luxuriated in the feeling of his new muscles. He flexed his body and relished in the unholy noise of his clothes all but exploding off of his new form.

Tanner looked down at himself, admiring the rich dark complexion that had replaced his old pasty self. He felt his legs grow, just like his arms. He grew taller by at least half a foot—if not more—but this time he didn’t feel as disorientated by the new perspective.

He folded his arms over his chest—as much as he could, anyway, since the bulk of his new body made that a bit difficult to accomplish. He caressed his chin, surprised to find that even the shape of his jaw had changed.

If only he had a mirror, Tanner would have noticed that his features had changed. He was still recognizable, but he looked handsome. Studly. There was no denying just how masculine the set of his jaw made him look.

The messy unkempt hair that Tanner had had all his life had also gone. He discovered that when he realized that his scalp felt colder than before. He had a buzz—if he had to guess—but it didn’t feel uncomfortable. If anything, it felt weirdly sexy.

There was only one part left—the best part, saved for last. Tanner had never been the most well-endowed so what was between his legs was more modest compared to the rest of his new physique, but not for long.

His balls were the first to change. He used to be high and tight but his balls began to dangle as his sack grew heftier. Fuller.

Tanner suppressed a moan as he felt his nutsack swing for the first time between his legs. It got him half-hard, but his cock didn’t stop swelling. It snaked down his leg, the head brushing along the inside of his thigh as it grew longer and thicker, nearly reaching his knee.

It swelled as he stared at it, slowly rising to full mast as he realized just how sensuous his new body was. The cool air made his skin tingle and he couldn’t help but reach up and play with one of his nipples while his dominant hand wrapped around the girth of his new fat cock.

A low groan came to Tanner’s lips. His cock was huge and his nipples felt like they were wired straight to his dick. He stroked himself, growing hornier and more desperate as he moved his hand down from his nipple to explore all the contours of his new body.

Waves of horniness powerful enough to be overwhelming washed over Tanner as he pumped his big new dick. He had a veritable baseball bat between his legs. It looked huge enough flaccid, but it was downright intimidating erect. He couldn’t stop touching it.

Pleasure pounded through Tanner’s body as his fingers explored the ridges and valleys of his sculpted musculature. He could have stood next to a statue of a Greek god and fit right in.

Tanner moaned, his voice dropping an octave as the transformation finally ran its course. He didn’t hold back, either, letting the whole woods hear just how good he was feeling as he slid his hand up and down along the length of his shaft.

He hadn’t thought about how pent-up and horny Jerome might have been, being trapped in these woods for so long. Not that he was complaining. It felt fantastic. Every touch on his skin was electric, and every time he grazed one of the numerous erogenous zones on his new body, it was like an explosion of bliss in his head.

Tanner’s breathing grew ragged and shallow as he quickly approached the edge. He knew he could go all day playing with his big new cock but he really, really needed to bust a nut right now.

He wasn’t sure if that was Jerome’s desire or his, and he didn’t know if it even mattered. He could feel the load churning in his balls as his toes curled in the loamy forest soil.

Tanner grunted and groaned, pumping his dick while he thrust his hips into the loose ring of his fingers. He fucked his hand and moaned, holding nothing back as he enjoyed his new body, his new cock.

Pleasure pulsed and throbbed through his fat hog as pre-cum leaked freely from his tip. Every muscle in his body tensed. He teetered on the edge. “I’m gonna…” he moaned, trailing off as the pleasure reached a fever pitch.

A ghostly roar crept into Tanner’s voice as he swept past the point of no return. The very forest around him seemed to shake as he came hard. Ropes of thick white jism sailed through the air, reaching high enough to drape over the branches overhead as his body locked up from the sheer, rapturous bliss.

Shot after shot after shot blasted out of Tanner’s cock, his nuts bouncing as they emptied out a fat, pent-up load that must have been years in the making.

As he came down from his orgasm, Tanner felt a change in the very depths of his being. His soul and Jerome’s were merging, intertwining. They were still separate people, but they were going to be together forever now, passengers and pilots in a godly body, free to pursue whatever pleasure they desired.

Tanner licked his lips. He was so glad he’d chosen to come back. Deep down, he could tell that Jerome was glad, too.

It was just going to be awkward walking back home naked. Not that he was ashamed or anything. A body like the one Jerome had given him deserved to be shown off.

Tanner’s cock twitched. Actually, the thought of walking home naked was starting to become more and more appealing. He could already imagine the looks he would get, especially considering what he was packing between his legs now.

He heard a low, ghostly chuckle in his ear. “If the first thing…I did after being trapped here for so long…was to get laid… I don’t think…that I could complain…”

Tanner cracked a grin. “Then that’s what we’re gonna do, buddy,” he said. His new body seemed to have come with a new sense of confidence—but maybe that was just Jerome rubbing off on him. Either way, Tanner was eager to take his new body for a spin.

‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒

Tanner ended up calling in an anonymous tip. The police found the body a few days later. The coroner determined that the cause of death was a ruptured aneurysm not long after that.

Jerome got the burial he deserved. It wasn’t much consolation for his family, but it was closure, at least.

Even though he’d only been gone for a month, Jerome decided not to go back with Tanner. There wasn’t much point, and he didn’t want to reopen his family’s wounds.

Jerome had gotten a new lease on life and he figured it was going to be for the best to just keep on looking forward. He could never get his old life back, so there was no point dwelling on it.

Tanner was on board with that. Having already taken his new body on, for lack of a better term, a “joyride,” he was eager to explore all the new pleasures that were in store for the both of them.

It was going to be weird, sharing his body with another person, but he was sure it was going to be alright. He and Jerome shared a type, it turned out, and nothing could bring two guys together quite like a tight hole.

Tanner’s phone—though he supposed it was their phone, now—dinged with a notification. He picked it up and read through the message, grinning to himself as he pulled down his shorts and snapped a dick pic.

It looked like they were going to get laid tonight. Of course, that meant they’d have to figure out who was going to be in the pilot seat. That wasn’t usually a problem but Tanner had a wicked little idea that he was sure Jerome would enjoy: they could swap every couple of thrusts.

Two days ago, some fruity producer from Nagoya had ordered 16 pairs of sports shoes as part of the preparation for his upcoming unreality show where humans and homunculi compete in some obscure obstacle course. But not just any normal sports shoes, the ones we have in store have been worn by famous human athletes from all over the opaque world. ᴏʀɪɢɪɴᴀʟꜱ. The wear and tear and stains are still here. Some of them still retain the smell of dirt and grime, one pair even carries with them the peculiar mixed scent of spilled beer and piss. Although the lads from sales did inform our client that some cleats would suit his’s contestants better, he still ended up ordering normal trainers. 13 of them – a mix of Pamu, Ekin, Azix and Ripoc – are already packaged and ready to be thoroughported to the Japanese hub. The problem? Those scatterbrained SOBs from procurement had fucked up the records of the Valdidaß batch when it was shipped to the thoroughport last month. To make matter worse, the higher-ups decided to use aether clamps instead of mana seals to preserve the scents of all products categorised as “non-fungibly imbued”. This means that any forensic technique applied on a pair of stinkers to find out who its original owner is would risk tampering with the emission mechanism, or worse, the scent.

And thus, the only shapeshifter from the Audit department – that’s me! – is up to save the day. My task: to straighten up the records. Test the trainers, find out the identities of their original owners, single out the 3 pairs to be shipped to Nagoya and send the data along with proof of work to middle management through our internal channel. My boss has so gracefully teleported the whole mislabeled batch to my house, which means my overtime already started 17 minutes ago. So here I am, with 10 identical – and by identical, I mean worn, dirty and smelly – pairs of Valdidaß Top 10 ÆU size 45 lying neatly in my teeny-weeny pocket-dimensional bedroom.  

I pick up a pair at random and take a whiff. These seem new compared to the others, and relatively less as rank. Still in my casual clothes – protocols require us to undress before shifting, but I’m too lazy for that – I delve in deeper. The damp smell of grass, dirt and sweat invades my nose at once. And my body, with its innate magical power, reacts almost immediately.

My lanky frame starts to bulge out with lean, toned muscle, filling up my black t-shirt nicely. My facial bones twitch and shift to match the face of the athlete. The skin on my face tightens and the hair on my head starts to grow inward and compresses itself, revealing a crew cut that nicely accentuates my now smooth, youthful face. My cock thickens and pushes out a little bit, the veins on it becoming less prominent. Further down begins the thickening of my thighs, accompanying which is the elongating of my legs. My quads bulge immensely, each head gaining more definition as they grow. I feel itchy for a moment. Seems like a few fresh scars have manifested on the skin of my upper legs. My buttocks expand outward, becoming two large, firm globes of muscle. The increased mass causes my jeans to strain somewhat against the new contours of my lower half. Finally, my calves buff up and my feet get slightly larger until they reach the ideal size to fit into these bad boys.

Nice bod. And a pretty interesting one too. The lad has a birthmark at the base of his dick and left thumb stubbier than right. I glance at the mirror to see a young human athlete with warm blue eyes looking back at me. Judging from the build, might probably be a footballer. But not someone famous enough for me to recognise. Besides, I’m pretty sure we only procured from footballers imbued cleats, not trainers. I have to check the database … Yup, that’s him. He has a beard now, and has grown his hair out somewhat. But a search for some photos taken around the time this pair was first registered did result in current ‘me’. So, this must be Erik Bepunkt, an up-and-coming gymnast from Köln. I quickly pull up the company’s ERP app, note the data, then send to Slakk a selfie of young Erik in black t-shirt, tight white jeans and tattered trainers.

Onto my next pair. I quickly grab the one next to me and sniff. Fuck, this is ɪɴᴛᴇɴꜱᴇ. Now, I may be a bum, but my experience as a shapeshifting auditor is unmatched amongst my peers. That whiff I just took – that’s real business. I have to take off all my clothing, or else things will definitely get torn off. T-shirt – off, Erik’s smelly trainers – off, jeans – off, undies – bird set free.

Still staying as the young gymnast, I energetically absorb the characteristic foulness into my lungs. Right away, my spine shoots up, earning me an extra foot. Muscles continue to accumulate on my already athletic frame that I copied from Erik. They swell and firm up across my chest, shoulders and arms, giving me a lean but powerful physique. My waist and legs remain roughly the same as before. My arms, however, have noticeably extended outward, greatly increasing my arm span. Perhaps the owner of these reekers was a rower. Or a swimmer. But the next stage of my transformation would cast doubts on that theory. A thick layer of coarse hair sprouts across my newly broadened back and pumped-up chest down to my washboard abs. Cthulhu’s tits this guy is ʜᴀɪʀʏ. My cock twitches a little as it adjusts to its new proportion. Smaller than Erik’s, but still not too shabby. My Ericesque baby face matures, my hair recedes and my jawline becomes more defined as stubble shadows my cheeks and chin.

The shifting is complete. Now that I have a closer look, the build is definitely that of a swimmer. But this amount of body hair combined with the receding hairline tells me that he’s no longer competing. I just need one quick check in the mirror, and … Holy shit, it’s Antoine Plucinski. He’s the coach of the French Olympic swimming team! And his protégé just won a gold medal too! Finally, some progress. Unlike some other cretins who share with the humans the incomprehensible mania towards football, my heart has always belonged to the water. To swimming, diving and sea monsters alike. Well, it’s not everyday you get to shift into an OG MVP. But that’s just one part of my excitement. This pair of trainers is marked to be sent to Nagoya, and that means I’m allowed by management to do some “enhancement” work.

My company is world-renowned for producing the freshest scents. Tch, all marketing gimmicks. If you think the lingering smell of those funky Satyrspel coats on the market was sealed exactly when those hairy bastards were too busy fucking each other, then the company duped you good. Truth is, most of the time the freshness is artificially enhanced. Aye, I know it’s not authentic. But you are delusional to think that the cosmic gem-hoarders care about your demand for authenticity. How is it actually done? Well, industrially, the fleshweavers would grow a bunch of samples in their conjuratory, stimulate the samples to the extreme, then bind them with the items. But for a one-off job like this, a shapeshifter like me with some knowledge of imbuement will suffice.

I delicately remove the aether clamp with my ectoplier. Minutes later and I have already put on a full set of sportswear, with my feet neatly snuggling beneath the dank trainers. No socks, of course. Gotta optimise the process as much as possible. I head downstairs to the summoning room. The golem accepts my prompt, and just like that, the empty street of Chiangmai opens up before my eyes, with its blazing sun hovering above my head.

Then I start running.  

ʜᴜꜰꜰ. It’s nice to stay in one form like this. No flashy magic, just nature (well, conjured nature) and a human body. How wonderful, the feeling of sweat naturally dripping down my body without any fleshweaving stimulants.

ʜᴜꜰꜰ. But I dread the moment I have to say goodbye to Antoine here. I hate changing forms constantly. It’s exhausting and makes me feel dizzy.

ʜᴜꜰꜰ. To think that there’s 8 more pairs of trainers left to be processed – 8 more records to be fixed – I can’t help but let the hatred for my job boil up inside me.

After this gig I’ll ask for a raise.