Jason was deeply uneasy, and he wasn't sure whether it was from being on the lookout for some hypothetical suspicious individual that he didn't know how they were supposed to recognize, or just from being out in public like this. Walking around the neighborhood kept bringing up experiences and sensations that were still unfamiliar in this body: viewing the world from a height that he hadn't stood at since junior high, the swaying of his wider hips, the bobbing and jiggling of his modest breasts and the way his bra straps tugged against his shoulders, the awareness of lacking something that used to dangle between his thighs as they brushed against each other...and on top of that there was either an acute awareness or a paranoid perception of people staring at him wherever they went. Lucy's body wouldn't have won any bikini contests or anything, but she was by no means an unattractive girl; now that he had that in common with her, it seemed like the entire world (or at least the male half of it, plus a few girls here and there) was furtively turning its gaze upon him as they passed. Was this really what it was like for girls? Or was he just imagining things?
Of course, if he was feeling paranoid, it probably also had to do with the idea that someone might be watching them from the shadows - in the bushes on the streetcorner? That aging panel van across the way? Maybe they were stationed in one of the houses, peering down from the attic with high-powered binoculars to see what fate had in store for their guinea pig...
...or maybe not. As they made their way around the neighborhood, there was a conspicuous lack of anything suspicious, even to Jason's heightened awareness. No strange passers-by hurriedly pulling up their trenchcoat collars and pulling down their fedora brims; no men in dark suits and sunglasses barking cryptically into walkie-talkies; no homeless guy on the streetcorner staring wild-eyed and muttering vague, dark prophecies. Even the motorcycle cop who passed them on the way to wherever paid them no particular mind.
In a way, it was kind of maddening; what Jason was experiencing was so beyond the realm of the ordinary that part of him felt like something must be going on, like the universe owed him an explanation in the form of some twisted, Byzantine conspiracy that would put this craziness into a meaningful context. Obviously, the reality-altering laser katana had come from somewhere, and whoever had left it with him must have a specific agenda in doing so; if they could only find out what that was, surely it would help them figure out how to reverse this, right?
A cat lazily sauntered across their path in an infuriatingly normal fashion, displaying exactly the usual feline calculated-indifference-to-human-affairs, and utterly refusing to arch its back or hiss ominously at the headless girl or the boy-turned-tomboy carrying the reality-warping mystery artifact.
Jason groaned, once again taking note of his new, more feminine voice. Hearing it coupled with his own normal speech patterns and mannerisms was surreal; it was like listening to a girl doing a remarkably accurate imitation of him. "This is ridiculous," he sighed. "We're never going to get anywhere like this..."
Lucy carefully balanced her head in one hand and put the other comfortingly on his shoulder as they made their way down the street towards the little corner gas station. "Yeah, this is kind of a bust," she said. "But it was worth a shot. I mean, whoever gave you that thing must be paying attention to what you're doing with it. Maybe they're just waiting for the right moment to reveal themselves."
He shook his head in exasperation, feeling his hair brush past his ears. It wasn't actually any longer than it had been, but he'd been getting pretty shaggy lately, and Lucy had suggested/insisted on combing it out and arranging it so that he looked more passably girly, ostensibly on the theory that he'd be less uncomfortable going out in public like this if there were less indication that he was anything other than a normal girl. Really, he suspected, she just wanted an excuse to do his hair; fortunately, she hadn't tried to get him to put on makeup. "I wish I had your confidence," he said. "We don't know anything about this other than what was on the sheet, we have no idea who's behind this whole thing, and all we can do is hope that they choose to pop out and go 'hey, ready to change back yet?'"
They were passing the station now; Lucy was about to say something when suddenly the door slid open and someone skipped out of it and ran smack into Jason, who let out a startled yelp. Lucy jumped in surprise at the commotion, and lost hold of her head, which went sailing toward the pavement; her body blindly dove to catch it. Jason watched in what felt like slow motion as his cousin successfully caught herself and clutched her head tightly to her chest, managing to twist around and land shoulder-first. It looked painful, but probably less so than dropping three or four feet face-first onto asphalt.
As the moment of peril passed and his perception of time returned to normal, he realized that his unseen assailant was suddenly taking him by the hand. Jason glanced over to where the other person was standing to find a tall, fit young man, about his age, who seemed very concerned for having just nearly knocked him on his ass.
"Oh, man, sorry!" the other guy said. "Seriously, I didn't realize you were there...!" He reached for Jason's shoulder as if to steady him, apparently unaware that Jason had already regained his balance without much trouble aside from briefly being thrown off by his lower center of gravity and the new weight on his chest.
"It's fine," Jason said, a little snappishly. "I'm fine." He tried to disentangle himself from the boy's grasp; hadn't Mr. Oblivious here ever heard of personal space?
The stranger seemed a little taken aback at his standoffishness. He regarded Jason for a moment, then brightened. "Oh, ah, er...Jasmine, right? I think we have biology together! I'm Cole."
He edged up into the boundary zone again; Jason felt a little unnerved by this, but not half as much as he did by being called "Jasmine." It suddenly dawned on him that, sure enough, the rest of the world apart from himself and Lucy thought he'd always been like this - that he really was nothing more than a somewhat tomboyish girl.
Lucy had, by this point, collected herself and gotten to her feet. She stared at the interloper. "'Jasmine?'" she repeated in surprise.
Cole nodded. "Yeah, Jasmine...McCormick, right? We go to the same school."
Lucy nodded with one hand while the other rubbed her shoulder. "I'm Lucy," she said dryly.
Cole didn't seem to hear her. Instead, he turned his attention back to Jason. "Ah, hey, listen, Jasmine," he said, edging closer and striking an agressively casual pose, "d'you like soccer?"
Jason stared at him, trying to work out the meaning behind this non-sequitur. "No," he said flatly. Why was this guy so up in his business? He didn't really have any interest in making chit-chat if the guy was just going to run into him, offer a token apology, and then stand around acting all weird. "C'mon, Lucy," he said, "let's go home."
Cole looked inexplicably surprised and disappointed at this. "Ah, hey, wait...!" he called as the two of them turned and left, but Jason deliberately ignored him, stalking off with visible irritation.
They walked on in silence until they rounded the corner and Cole was out of sight; then, all of a sudden, Lucy broke down laughing. "Oh man!" she giggled. "You are a stone-cold crusher of dreams, cousin! Just shut him down in a New York minute..."
Jason frowned. "Huh? What are you talking about?"
Lucy laughed harder, then collected herself. She lifted her head up high, turning it to one side and gazing downwards. "'Do you like soccer?'" she mimicked in a dopey voice, a confused expression on her face. Then she brought herself over to the other side and faced the other way, glaring upwards with exaggerated annoyance. "'No,'" she snapped, with equally comic mock-irritation in her voice.
He eyed her in confusion. "What? I don't like soccer. Or, I mean, I don't have any interest in it. Plus, what did that even have to do with anything?"
She broke down in a giggling fit again, holding her head in the crook of one arm so she could use both hands to rub the tears from her eyes. "Ohmigod, you seriously don't realize he was trying to ask you out, do you, Jasmine?"
The bottom suddenly fell out of Jason's stomach, and he stared at his cousin in astonishment. That guy was...? But...but he was...! Was he gay? No, wait, wait, he'd called him...he thought he was a...he was a...!
The entire universe came crashing down around him. "I think I'm going to be sick," he said weakly.
Lucy managed to stop herself from laughing and put a comforting arm around his shoulder. "Yeah, I guess this is a first for you, isn't it?" she said. "If it helps, it can be just as weird and uncomfortable for those of us who are used to it. And look on the bright side," she said teasingly, "at least you get to be harassed by pretty good-looking dudes."
Jason scowled. "He was a jerk," he said.
She looked surprised. "Oh?"
He nodded. "He made all that fuss over me, but he didn't even care about you. And you got it way worse than me."
Lucy smiled. "Heh, I guess you're right. Shame so many of the good-looking ones are jerks, eh?" She blithely ignored Jason's deliberate non-response to this and pulled him into a half-hug, moving her head out to one side to keep it from getting pinned between them. Jason tried not to notice the sensation of her breasts pressing against his; that left him mostly focused on the strangeness of being up-close face-to-face with someone whose face was missing.
"Good thing poor little headless me has such a sweet cousin looking out for her, y'know?" she said, from somewhere down below. "C'mon, cuz, let's go home."
By the time they finally made it back, the family car was sitting in the driveway. Jason had managed to spend most of the walk back very pointedly not pondering his predicament, and Lucy had been unusually tactful in just letting him be, but seeing it parked there brought home the reality of the situation: he and his cousin were, apparently, the only people in the world who knew that he wasn't really a tomboy named "Jasmine." That most certainly included his mother, who wasn't even aware that she had used to have her head directly attached to her body. Which meant that...well, that he was going to walk into someone else's house and someone else's life. That was a disturbing...an upsetting thought.
But it wasn't like there was a whole lot they could do about it. He didn't have another house he could go home to, or another bed to sleep in, or another mother to do...a lot of things...for him. Even if it was upsetting, this was the only home he had, and he wasn't about to go homeless until this situation was resolved. Which meant there was nothing for it but to go inside and face the altered reality...
He and Lucy entered to find his mom happily working in the kitchen. She was busily dicing up vegetables while her head rested on the counter, alternating between observing herself and reading ahead in the recipe she was working from. Jason noticed with some curiousity that she was able to slightly shift her head this way and that without the use of her hands; how was she doing that? Maybe some kind of strategic twitching of the jaw muscles?
She smiled wryly when they came in. "Welcome back, girls," she said. "You arrived just in time to not have to help unload the groceries..."
Girls. There it was. Even at home, even to his own mother, he wasn't Jason anymore - he was "Jasmine," whoever she was. He bit his lip; he knew this was coming, but it still caught him off-guard. But there was his mother, warm and welcoming as ever to the daughter she didn't know was supposed to be a son...
Mrs. McCormick's expression changed to a look of concern. "Jasmine? Honey, are you okay? You look upset..."
He sighed. "It's...nothing." The little flicker of building resentment at the situation melted away; her voice, her tone, her expression...everything was just the way she always responded to him. Only the name had changed. She was still his mom, and he was still her child, even as messed-up as things were right now...
Lucy stepped forward and put a hand on his shoulder. "It's okay, Auntie," she said, reaching forward with her other arm to gently deposit her head onto the counter next to her aunt's. "We just ran into some creep who was really rude to us, and J-uh, Jasmine got kinda shook up over it." She began to gently massage his shoulders; Jason was a little weirded out by the sudden touchy-feely stuff - was this a girl thing? - but it was surprisingly soothing.
"Aw, I'm sorry to hear that, sweetie," his mother said. "Sometimes that can just ruin your whole day, can't it? Think goulash would help to salvage it?"
In spite of himself (and in spite of the slightly unsettling experience of talking to two disembodied heads just a couple feet away from him,) Jason brightened, and Lucy grinned at him from the counter, even as she continued to rub his shoulders. "Well," she said, "it certainly couldn't hurt...!"
Dinner was somehow both perfectly logical and utterly surreal. Lucy, not having the mindset of someone who had spent her entire life this way, was a bit uncertain at first, and hung back a little while she waited to see what her aunt did. Jason's mother gently cradled her head in one arm in order to see what she was doing as she ladled the stew into her bowl and set it up in place, then set herself down on the placemat in front of her and began to eat, carefully lifting spoonfuls out of the bowl and dipping them down into her mouth; with her head resting freely on the table, she ended up tilting back slightly every time she opened her mouth, which seemed to help with keeping everything relatively mess-free.
She was also able to retrieve and butter a slice of bread without even looking at the loaf, only glancing over briefly to where the butter tray was. Drinking seemed to be the most complicated thing; she had to set the spoon down and use one hand to tilt her head back while the other held the glass to her lips. Jason noticed that the glasses at the table were short, broad-based tumblers, as opposed to the taller glasses that he was used to seeing; obviously this was because they were better suited to this particular method. He was kind of amazed to watch the practice and precision with which she did all this; it really was like she'd been this way her entire life...
Lucy, by contrast, was considerably clumsier at it, continually looking to her aunt for clues and already having had to stop and clean up a dropped spoonful. It was a bit surprising to see, considering how naturally she'd taken to the basics of moving around and handling her head like this, but maybe that was the price for retaining her awareness of the changes; she might have gained some instinctual knowledge with her altered body, but the more involved technique that came with a whole (imaginary...?) lifetime wasn't there.
As they ate, Jason felt himself calming down a little; sometimes there was nothing quite like "comfort food" for this... Of course, this was still not a good situation, and it was still weird and disturbing to find himself thrust into the life of some alternate-girl-self with only one other person even aware of it, and they had a monumental task ahead of them just trying to find out who even made the blade, but...at least for the moment, it felt like he could stop freaking out and just relax. After all, there was nothing specific to the basic act of eating good food that called attention to the fact that he had his cousin's body from the neck down, right?
Some minutes later, he frowned and stared down into the bowl at the portion that still remained. Wait, Jason thought. I haven't even finished my second bowl...how can I be full already? He sighed...even with eating things could be different. At least his tastes didn't seem to have changed...
After dinner they helped Mrs. McCormick clean up, which was another surreal sight. Rather than carrying her head with her in order to see what she was doing, she simply set herself on the end of the counter looking into the dining room so that she could use both hands to carry the dishes from the table into the kitchen, where she set them on the counter and loaded them into the dishwasher apparently by feel. It was fascinating for Jason to watch; his mother was clearly more cautious and deliberate in doing things while she was outside her own field of vision, but apparently memory and proprioception served her well enough that she could "fly blind" without too much trouble.
Lucy, unsurprisingly, was clearly envious of her aunt's ability, but knew she wasn't up to the task herself, and settled for carrying her head in one arm and as many of the dishes as she could safely manage in the other hand. Jason shrugged and took the rest; there weren't that many. As soon as they'd finished getting everything squared away, Lucy tugged on his arm and motioned towards the stairs. "Thanks for dinner, Auntie," she said, "it was great. But I need to borrow Jas...mine here for a bit..."
Jason's mother smiled slyly. "Oh? What are you getting up to now?"
She laughed. "Nothing, nothing! I just, er, want some help trying some things with my hair. You know how it is..."
Her aunt chuckled. "Of course...I'll leave you girls to it, then. Let me know if you want me to bring you up anything later."
Lucy grinned. "We will, thanks."
With that, she led Jason upstairs to his room, ushered him inside, and shut the door after them.
"OHMIGOD THAT WAS UNREAL," she said breathlessly, as soon as they were closed off from the rest of the house. "And here I thought it was weird that she thought she and I were normal!"
Jason grimaced. "She...she thought I was a totally different person...it was so bizarre, because she's still acting like my mom, and she's still treating me as her child, but..." His voice, already softer and more feminine than he was used to, began to crack as the emotional strain of the experience came back to him.
Lucy frowned thoughtfully, her body scratching her head. "Yaknow, maybe not a totally different person, though...look, your room is still pretty much the same, right?" She moseyed over to the dresser and pulled the top drawer open. "I mean, heck, even your underwear's the same. You got a copy of mine with the copy of my body, but I guess beyond that you're a braless wonder, cuz. Lucky for you I'm not all that stacked..."
He cringed momentarily, not really wanting to ponder his new breasts in any detail, but she raised an interesting point. "And...if reality changing didn't change anything that wasn't strictly necessary, then she must think even that's normal..."
Lucy dipped her head in a nod. "Or in other words, 'Jasmine' is literally just a girl version of you with a different name. I guess it's kinda lucky you've never really been all chiseled and macho or anything, or you'd be past the point of 'tomboy' and into straight-up butch."
Another cringe. He didn't really want to think about that at all, let alone in those terms; he wasn't a tomboy, he was a boy! That was the whole problem right now - couldn't she be a little more sensitive to what he was going through!?
"Tell you what, though," Lucy mused, "it's probably still kinda odd that you'd be wearing guys' clothes; the fit's gonna be all weird. Though at least you don't have to always worry about whether tight girl-jeans make your butt look big." She sighed. "Believe me, you can never decide whether to trust other people's judgement, and you can never really tell for yourself when you have to crane your neck back and look in the..." Her eyes went wide. "Hey, wait! I don't have to do that anymore, do I?" She set her head down on the nightstand and began striking a variety of poses. "Hah! Check this out, I can actually see how I look from behind! Look, look, I'm actually not half bad!"
Jason rolled his eyes, but chuckled in spite of himself. His cousin continued to surprise him with her ability and readiness to adapt to the weirdest damn situations in a whole variety of ways. It seemed impossible to stay in a bad mood with her around...but that didn't mean he could stop thinking about his predicament. Just blindly stumbling around waiting for something to crop up had gotten them nowhere - but what were they supposed to do? The blade didn't have any identifying information on it...
He pulled it out and took another look over it. Nope, nothing. Not even the simplest identifying mark or inscription, not even on the control knob...nothing. In exasperation, he flopped back onto the bed...
...or tried to. Used to his own stature, he hadn't really counted on the fact that he was using a copy of his cousin's shorter body. He fell short of hitting the bed proper, landing with the small of his back on the edge of the side rail; he gave a startled, pained yelp in his girly new voice and dropped the rest of the way to the floor, landing hard on his ass. Which would have been merely painful and embarassing, if he hadn't also been flailing his arms trying to regain his balance. In the confusion of the moment, the blade slipped from his hand and sailed across the room, arcing gracefully through the air and hitting the doorpost with a solid and fateful whack.
Even if the device hadn't been probably a prototype, this would not have been good for it. Time seemed to - no, considering the nature of the thing, it may actually have slowed down as it impacted the wooden frame. Jason had just enough time to see a hairline fracture zip down the length of the handle like a thunderbolt before there was a loud FZZZT and the room suddenly erupted in a flash of blinding light.
The acrid smell of burnt-out electrical components permeated the air. Jason had apparently fallen on his face, since his chin was resting on the worn shag carpet of his bedroom. He blinked his eyes a couple times as his vision returned to normal; the flash had temporarily blinded him.
Oh, right, the flash. What was that? Was...was that just what happened when you cracked a laser open? He really had no idea. He could see the pieces of the device scattered on the floor around the doorway; there was a little wispy haze of what electronics engineers term "the magic smoke" drifting out from the center of the pile.
"What the hell was that?" Lucy sputtered, somewhere behind him. He heard her move to pick up her head and turn to survey the room. "Jason, did you...Jason? Ohmigod...!"
He didn't know what to make of this - her words seemed like something that should convey concern, but her tone of voice sounded more like neutral-to-positive surprise or amazement. Had something happened to him? He felt fine, he thought...? Well, there was no good reason to stay lying prone on the floor, anyway...
He made to get up, and this was when he realized that he wasn't lying on the floor. In fact, he was sitting against the bed, exactly where he'd fallen. But if that were true, how was it that he felt carpet on his jaw and was seeing the world from floor-level? He stood up, feeling confused and unsettled; he could feel the weight of his body lifting itself up and coming to a standing position, even feeling the swaying of his breasts as he moved, but his head remained exactly where it was.
Jason was really weirded out now. The understanding that when you move your torso, your head goes with it is such a basic part of human proprioception that he'd never even had a reason to stop and think about it before. Curious, he reached his hands up in front of his face - and they clearly did not enter his field of vision. With a sinking feeling in his stomach, he tentatively reached one hand to touch where his cheek should be. Instead of touching flesh, it touched nothing at all, then swiped through...something...that felt vaguely like reaching into the exhaust port of a humidifier: some gently-swirling mass of particulate mist or something...? But rather than being cool and damp, it tingled with a strange energy... With a startled yelp, he yanked his hand back. What was going on!? His body wasn't where it should be, and neither was his head...!
Suddenly, someone grabbed him by the head from behind and lifted him up - or rather, lifted his head up; his body stayed in place, as if it were unattached. He had a terrible moment of realization as the unseen person turned him around; it was no surprise to find that the person in question was his headless cousin. What was somewhat surprising was that, while she'd previously had nothing at all where her neck used to be, there was now some kind of greenish-blue ethereal flame hovering there. It curled and danced and flickered exactly like fire, but it was made up of countless little flecks of light, and crackled with a strange energy...
Pieces were fitting together in his mind to form a picture that he really wasn't thrilled about. Lucy took him over to where her head was sitting and brought him level with herself; he couldn't help but notice that, while her hands were grasping his head under the jaw, they weren't touching his neck. "Listen, Jason," she said, "whatever just happened - whatever...that...was, it, uh...well, you can see it changed me a little. Dunno how or why. But, um, well...no easy way to say this, but...it changed you, too." She turned him the other way, and he gasped.
There was another headless body standing there, with another eerie flame dancing where its neck should be. As a wave of anxiety swept over him, the other body's flame became more agitated, reaching higher and flickering brighter. The other body just so happened to be built exactly like Lucy's and was coincidentally wearing an exact copy of her outfit. Jason tried to raise his right hand; the other body raised its right hand. Then his left - likewise. He closed his eyes and tried with all his might to feel where his body was - and somehow his sense of proprioception told him that it was directly ahead and about five feet away.
Jason said nothing for a long moment, staggered by the dawning realization. He was like her now - he was nothing but a disembodied head, being held in his cousin's hands while a body that was alien to him even before it had been severed from him by that damnable blade stood there mutely awaiting his commands. Things had progressed so rapidly from "kind of fun, in a bizarre way" to "absolutely screwed" that it made him reel to think about it. Not only was he stuck with the wrong body, stuck in a reality where everyone except his cousin thought he was supposed to be a girl, but now he was stuck as...as this freak on top of that...and there were the fragments of the blade across the room, making it clear just how stuck he was. It'd been bad enough to find out that the undo function was bugged, but now even that option was obliterated...! If...if he really had to spend the rest of his life like this...
In spite of himself, he burst into tears, letting out a wail in his new girly voice before his body over across the room was wracked with great heaving sobs. Lucy stared at him in surprise, then hugged him - head-him? - tightly to her chest. "It's a lot to take in, isn't it?" she said; he gradually calmed down as she gently stroked his hair. "I guess even more for you, cuz. I mean, I think it's pretty cool, but I can see where it'd be awfully weird, too. You feel so small and helpless 'cause you're just this little thing that can't do anything by itself, or look out for itself - but that's okay, Jason! 'Cause there's a whole other part of you that's responsible for that, yaknow? Here..."
She took him over to the other side of the room and held him out. Another pair of hands took him from her - his hands took him from her. He could feel himself doing it even as he also felt it being done to him; he could feel his body clutch his head to his chest, he could feel it still trembling from his outburst, he could feel it carefully sit down with him in its lap and continue gently stroking his hair the way Lucy had done - and he could feel all of this from both ends. He suddenly understood what she'd meant earlier, when she was trying to describe this state of being. His body was in some sense semi-autonomous - he hadn't had to will it to do any of this, it just did. His body knew his head for the other part of itself, and vice-versa - and it cared for him. It did what he told it, but it also did what he didn't even know he needed it to do; he could feel both parts of him gradually calming down from his body's ministrations.
"Y'see?" Lucy said. "It's not like you're just some helpless lump now, or anything - there's this whole other part of you looking out for you, and it needs you just as much as you need it. I never would've even understood this if we hadn't done what we did with the blade - heck, if you hadn't stumbled onto that in-between setting."
Jason thought this over; as he did, his body turned him around to face himself and hugged him tightly to his chest, which ended up with him getting a faceful of his own bosom. Still, while this was weird and awkward on a variety of levels, it was somehow comforting.
While he was sitting there hugging himself, he heard the door open and someone enter; he turned his head around to find his mother standing in the doorway, a look of concern on her face (which she was cradling under one arm.) Not too surprisingly, by this point, she also had somehow gained an ethereal-flame-thing burning between her shoulders. "What's all the commotion?" she asked. "Are you girls alright?" Her forehead wrinkled as she sniffed the air. "Is that smoke? Did something happen?"
"Oh, uh," Lucy put in hurriedly, as Mrs. McCormick began to look around for a fire, "that was a...little electronic gizmo I...got in the mail. I was, ah, showing Jasmine and it, uh, suddenly kacked itself...she got startled by it. She, uh, she was...still kinda rattled from that thing with the one jerk earlier, and I guess it kinda set her off...?"
Jason's mother turned to him with a look of sympathy. "Aw, honey," she said, "I'm so sorry." She came over to where he was sitting and knelt down, putting her free arm around him in a half-hug and performing an odd gesture where she brought her head over to his to nuzzle foreheads, which he guessed was maybe supposed to be some sign of affection...? It was comforting, but this kept getting weirder and weirder... "Are you gonna be okay?" she asked.
He paused for a moment, thought, then nodded - only realizing once he was already through that he'd used his hands to make the gesture with his head without even stopping to think about it, just like Lucy had done earlier. "Uh, yeah, I think so," he said. "It just...kinda all hit me at once..." Which was certainly the truth, even if it wasn't really the creep from earlier that'd set him off.
His mother smiled sympathetically. "Mm-hmm; stress can be like that. You're a strong girl, hun, but if you ever need to let it out, your cousin and I are here for you, alright?"
Jason balked internally at being called a "strong girl," but the familiar warmth of his mother's smile was too much for him to actually really be upset. He cautiously rose to his feet, teetering a little as he tried to keep his balance with his center of gravity now even more off-kilter than he'd been dealing with just having a girl's body. Fortunately, he managed to keep his head about him.
With the situation seemingly resolved, Mrs. McCormick chuckled softly. "You know, it's funny seeing you and Lucy dressed the same - you're so much alike, if it weren't for your body language I wouldn't know who was holding whose head...!" She turned her attention to the scattering of shrapnel left over from the blade's destruction. "I guess we'd better get this cleaned up," she said. "Whatever it was, it looks like it's kaput now. I hope it wasn't too valuable..."
Jason felt his stomach churn, but his mother had directed the question at Lucy, who canted her head to one side and shrugged. "Well, I'm not personally too put out about it," she said. "But, um, I do wanna try to return it, so I'd like to save the pieces..."
He breathed a sigh of relief as his mother went to go get a broom and dustpan. Lucy, meanwhile, had set her head down on the nightstand while she fished something out of her purse. He heard her squeal in surprise. "Look!" she hissed, motioning him over. "Lookit this, Jason!"
He carefully made his way over to where she was; while there were definitely some instinctual adaptations that came with this bizarre new body, it was still unfamiliar and a bit confusing trying to navigate with one's head not in any particular fixed location relative to one's body. Lucy turned her hands outward to reveal her wallet, which had a family photo in the top fold. "Look!" she repeated. "Even my mom...!"
Jason stared at the little photo. It was old enough that it'd been taken with a film camera, and the edges of the picture were starting to get a little blurred and discolored, but it clearly showed three familiar figures: a young Lucy in front center, and her father and mother on either side behind her. In fact, he was pretty sure he'd seen this exact photo in a family album somewhere - but now, not only Lucy but his aunt Shannon had their heads separated and glowing blue-green flames licking up from where their necks had used to be. (He noticed with some curiosity that the flames seemed to cause a bit of a lens-flare/washout on the film stock, as if they were hard to photograph properly.)
He said nothing for a moment as he took it in. "If...I mean, we never even touched her with the blade. If it changed her as well, then it didn't just do the bare minimum like before..."
Lucy nodded, picking up her head and stepping carefully over to where the pile of bits was concentrated. "For sure - what it did to you is proof enough that it went kinda haywire when it broke. But this is, like, on a whole other level." She began to sift through the chunks of broken plastic and circuitry, and suddenly gasped. "Hey, lookit this!"
Jason scrambled over, wondering what new insane discovery he was about to have to process, but Lucy was just holding a chunk of broken circuit board. It was clearly a prototype, hand-soldered even, but scrawled in the corner, in thick Sharpie letters, was the text:
PROPERTY OF SIÓGA CORPORATION
