"Karyn!" Jon yelped, as he felt himself fishing around in the bowl before grabbing one of the paper scraps. "This isn't fair, you can't just do this to me!" He withdrew it and, against his will, laid it out on the floor.
Height less thant 5'2"
Karyn tried unsuccessfully to suppress a smirk. "Well, you were the one talking smack about girls," she said. "Geez, the way you talk you'd think it was some kind of torture."
"I said I wouldn't want to be one!" Jon protested. "I didn't say it was bad! And what gives you the right to throw me into someone else's life?" He pulled another scrap from the bowl.
Weight less than 110 lbs.
Karyn snickered a bit. "Right, right," she said. "You'd only hate to be turned into a girl or be in any way involved with a girl who had used to be a guy. It'd only be torturous because you're not used to it and not because you have any preexisting biases about what life as a girl is like. Sure. Besides, it's only for a week, jeez. And if it makes you feel any better, I'll be right there with you, having my own out-of-body experience."
Jon reached for the final scrap of paper, wishing he could stop himself, but powerless to do so. "This is going too far, and you know it!" he snapped. He laid it out.
Tomboy.
Karyn blinked. "What? That wasn't...was that the 'something else?' Aw man, I was hoping you'd have to be really-"
There was a sudden lurch. Jon blinked...
...and opened his eyes to a typical high-school classroom. Huh? Wasn't class over? It was already four-thirty...oh, unless they were in a different time zone. Karyn had specified that they'd be in the US, but not where.
"Now, next up is the Wars of the Roses." Jon looked up to the front to see a middle-aged man behind the desk. "I know at least one of you here is going to be running through Final Fantasy Tactics as we talk about this..." The man eyed a boy off in the corner of the classroom, and most of the students chuckled. The boy grinned sheepishly and shrugged. "...but the rest of you will have to be paying at least a little more attention, so listen up."
Jon chuckled at that as well; it was the sensations produced by the gentle physical force of it that drew his attention back to his situation. It felt different; the gentle heave of his chest rippled outward in places he'd never felt before. While he was distracted, he hadn't forgotten the events that had led up to his sudden arrival here, and he glanced down, trying not to be conspicuous about it. Sure enough, he was greeted with a body that was not his own, the body of a teenaged girl, dressed in a plain red T-shirt and what he thought at first to be a skirt, revealed as black denim shorts as he nervously uncrossed his legs. Her legs. He was...just like Karyn had wished, she was a girl. Some random girl, somewhere in the country...who? Whose life had she just been dropped into?
Nervously, she raised her hand. The teacher noticed, and paused mid-lecture. "Yes, Maddie?"
"Maddie?" Short for...Madison, she guessed. Huh. "M-may I be excused?" she said, trying not to sound as nervous as she felt. Her voice was so different... The teacher nodded. "Sure. Don't take too long."
Jon got to her feet, feeling a little wobbly - while her general muscular strength felt roughly the same (was that proportional to her size, or absolute? She didn't know,) the proportions of her legs were off, and it was only by dropping out of conscious observation and letting muscle memory take over that she was able to get out of the classroom without tripping over herself.
Getting to the bathroom was not so easy. She tried to keep her concentration off the motions and on the task of figuring out where the heck the bathrooms were, but the unfamiliar sensations of walking with differently-proportioned legs and differently-proportioned hips, and the conspicuous-in-its-absence feeling of having nothing between her legs (which he'd never even noticed that he noticed as a boy) kept drawing her attention back to the technical details, and anyway trying not to focus on them was like trying not to think of pink elephants. She managed to get there without falling over, but she was certain that she looked ridiculous trying to keep her feet.
Jon was inexpressably grateful that the girls' bathroom was empty; she hesitated a moment before stepping inside, then went over to the sinks and looked in the mirror. The girl that stared back at her was short, not taller than five feet even, lightly built, and otherwise actually pretty ordinary. Her clothes were plain and simple, but they weren't boys' clothes, exactly - the shirt was a girls' cut, and while the shorts were loose and definitely not designed to flatter her butt, they fit her hips and waist just fine, and did kind of emphasize her legs. Her black hair was fairly short, no longer than the base of her jaw, but it wasn't a butch cut or anything. Her face didn't seem to have any makeup on it. She didn't look so much like a girl who didn't want to be a girl as a girl who just didn't feel any need to emphasize her femininity.
Slowly, nervously, she reached her hand down and cupped a hand over the mound between her legs, feeling her palm rest flat against the surface through her shorts and underwear. She felt a little uncomfortable doing so, but there was a burning need to know, and, weirdly enough, a little comfort to be found in having it as a fact and not a mere inference. She looked back to the mirror, gazing at her chest. She breathed slowly in and out, trying to calm herself, and watching it rise and fall with her breath. She glanced around, making sure she was alone; might as well get this over with...
Uneasily, she grabbed her shirt, untucked it from her shorts, and lifted it off. Setting it on the counter, she gazed back into the mirror. "Maddie's" body was fairly slim, but gently muscular, more of a subtle toning of her modest curves than obvious muscles built by working out; if she was a tomboy, she was more of a general running-and-climbing sort than an exercise or sports freak. Her breasts were on the small side, but she was hardly flat-chested, and they were pretty perky. Her brassiere was a plain white number, as nondescript as the rest of her outfit. Jon gently cupped and hefted them, but left off any further investigation - she didn't have any idea how this body would react, and she hadn't even wanted to be in it, much less play with it while in it. This was so weird...
"Dammit, Karyn!" she snapped, slamming her fist on the counter, feeling the shock reverberate through her chest, then stopped. "Is that...wow. Testing, testing..." Her voice was...different. Different than her own voice, obviously, but also different than she expected. For someone on the small side, she wasn't as high-pitched as she'd have thought; an alto rather than a soprano, and with...actually, kind of a little bit of gravel, but somehow not unpleasantly so. She laughed, an un-musical but pleasant laugh; how differently this had turned out! Here Karyn had thought she'd become some poofy, frilly, petite little delicate flower of hyper-femininity, or some zaftig nascent fertility goddess...hah! She was just some girl, and not even a girly one at that! Man, this would almost be worth it just to see the look on her face...
She stopped short on that train of thought, frowning. That reminded her: where was Karyn? Who was Karyn? What had Karyn specified she'd become? Someone close to her, but that could mean anything! One of Maddie's classmates? A teacher? A member of her family? They were miles from home, with no idea how to find each other other than Karyn knowing that Jon would be a short, slim tomboy.
Then again, did she even want to find Karyn? She still had the stone, after all; suppose that she tried to use it to make Jon more stereotypically feminine? No, maybe she should just let her wonder, and try to stick out the week on her own. Karyn hardly knew any more about this life than Jon did, aside from basic female-survival stuff, and what the hell, she could turn to the Internet for that, if she had to. Sure, Karyn had the stone, but Jon wasn't really any more lost than, say, Maddie would be, if she were in his...shoes...
She blanched. What about their bodies!? Karyn had said that they'd be transported into these other people's bodies, but she hadn't said anything about what would happen to the people they displaced! Were they stuck in the background, watching strangers take over their lives for a week? Or were they perhaps in Jon and Karyn's bodies, back home in their lives with even less idea of what was going on? What would these strangers do to their lives? Even if Jon and Karyn's bodies just told their families that they had used to be a girl and boy on the other side of the country...gah! She had to find Karyn, they had to fix it!
Trying not to panic, Jon grabbed her shirt and put it back on. As she tucked it back into her shorts, she felt something thump against her thigh, and reached into one pocket. It was a wallet; evidently, purses were another girl thing Maddie didn't bother with. She could feel a cell phone in the other pocket. She opened the wallet and grinned; Maddie had a driver's license! An Oregon driver's license, huh. And...evidently, it was short for Madeleine, not Madison. Who names their kid "Madeleine," these days? Jon thought. But she didn't have time to waste on that thought; she had to find Karyn, fast.
