"If I'm not Athena, then who am I?" the fake Athena asked, humoring him.
"I don't know. You don't look familiar to me. You ..." Jon got cut off by the sound of his cell phone. He took it out of his pocket and looked at the ID. It said ????.
He put it up to his ear.
"It's 5:15, Jon," the raspy voice said. "You don't have time for chit chat."
Jon waved the fake Athena over to him. At first, she was hesitant (it was obvious that she didn't think Jon was playing with a full deck), but then she decided to risk it. She was into the occult, and while she hadn't heard of anything like this happening, she knew that a powerful user of magic could pull it off. It just frightened her, thinking that someone like that could exist, here and now in her very own town.
"Trying to get other people to believe you? Tsk tsk." Jon held the phone up so both he and the fake Athena could hear the caller. "It won't work." There was a pause, then "Now get back to the game." Then the line went dead.
"Who was that?" the fake Athena asked.
"That is who made all of this possible. I don't know who he is, but he's a twisted sadistic son of a bitch, I can tell you that much."
"He's the one that switched people's identities?"
"Yeah. And the only way to get them back to normal is to take them back to their houses ... their real houses, before they got switched. And I only have until midnight to get it done."
"What happens after that?"
"Everyone returns to their original lives, but keeps their personality and lifestyle from this reality."
"And what's so wrong about that?" she asked.
"Huh?"
"This reality is all I know. I don't know who I am in your reality, but I prefer to stay the way I am, whether I live with a different family or not."
"But this reality isn't real. It just exists for the game."
The fake Athena thought about what Jon had to say, then decided to ...
