Chapter 1: Midnight Metamorphosis
The apartment smelled of stale coffee and forgotten laundry. A single bulb flickered in the kitchen, doing little to dispel the gloom that clung to the towers of pizza boxes and the academic journals avalanching off the coffee table. Mark Thompson was burrowed into his usual spot on the sagging couch, the glow of his laptop illuminating his glasses and the faint acne scars on his cheeks. He was debugging a stretch of code, the meticulous work a comfort against the vague, looming anxiety of his own body—too narrow, too soft, all angles and nervous energy.
The door crashed open.
Mark jumped, his knee jamming into the wobbly desk. An empty energy drink can teetered and fell, adding to the sticky film on the floor.
“Dude.”
The word was the same. The voice was deeper, richer, a vibration that seemed to come from the walls. Mark looked up, and his brain short-circuited.
It was Kyle. But it wasn’t.
His roommate stood in the doorway, a silhouette cut from a different universe. The thin, band-tee-wearing film student was gone. In his place was a monument. Broad shoulders filled the frame, straining the seams of a plain white tank top. Sweat glistened on forearms corded with new veins, on the shocking, defined slabs of his chest. His jeans hung low on hips that now tapered sharply above thunderous thighs. His face was sharper, his jaw a brutal line, his eyes brighter under a mess of now-golden-tipped hair. He was breathing heavily, like he’d just run a sprint.
“What…” Mark’s voice was a dry croak. “What the actual hell, Kyle?”
Kyle grinned, a flash of white in the dim room. He stepped inside, his movement somehow more deliberate, more present. The floorboards creaked in protest under his weight. A new weight. He tossed his gym bag—an ordinary, frayed thing that now looked absurd—onto a chair.
“Went for a run,” Kyle said, his chest still heaving. He flexed an arm absently, watching the muscle bunch and ripple with an expression of pure, unadulterated wonder. “Felt… different.”
“Different? You look like you’ve been photoshopped!” Mark stood up, pushing his glasses back up his nose. He felt insubstantial, a ghost in his own living room. “Did you get, like, synthol or something? That stuff kills people, man.”
Kyle laughed, a booming sound that felt too big for the cluttered space. “No injections. No steroids.” His eyes darted past Mark, toward their shared, perpetually messy desk. His gaze landed on the one oddly clean object there: a mirror, its frame a weird, glossy black material that seemed to drink the light. Its surface didn’t look like glass. It shimmered, a still pool of oil.
“It was the mirror,” Kyle said, his tone dropping to a conspiratorial rumble.
“The thrift store thing? The one that freaks the cat out?”
“Yeah. I was just… looking at myself yesterday. Feeling like a sack of wet noodles, you know?” Kyle’s new, confident demeanor flickered for a second, revealing the insecure guy Mark knew. “And I just thought, really hard, about what I wanted to see. I wanted to be… formidable. Not just fit. Like, undeniable.”
He walked over to the desk, his new body moving with a predator’s grace. He didn’t touch the mirror. He pointed to a strange, snub-nosed device beside it, partially hidden under a cable. Mark had assumed it was a garage door opener or a weird component for one of Kyle’s film projects. It was matte black, with smooth, organic curves and faint, pulsating red lines beneath its surface.
“That was beside it when I woke up from… the zone-out. I must have picked it up without thinking.”
“You found a creepy mirror and a space gun, and your first thought was to point it at yourself?” Mark’s voice climbed an octave. “It could have vaporized you!”
“But it didn’t.” Kyle picked up the device. It looked small in his massive hand. The red pulses quickened, reacting to his touch. “It listened. It made this sound… a low hum. Felt warm. And then there was this light, kind of a golden wash. It didn’t hurt. It felt like… becoming.”
He turned the device over in his hand, then, with a sudden, impulsive flick of his wrist, tossed it to Mark.
Mark fumbled it, the warm, alien metal sliding against his sweaty palms before he clutched it to his chest. The pulses were slower now, a dormant heartbeat. “What are you doing?!”
“Try it.” Kyle’s eyes were blazing. “Come on, man. You’re always going on about how you wish you could fill out a t-shirt. About how people look right through you. So change it.”
“This is insane. We don’t know what this is! It could be permanent! It could have… side effects!”
“Look at me!” Kyle spread his arms, a god of the living room. “The only side effect is feeling like you can actually take up space in the world. It’s not a monster-making gun. It’s a… suggestion implement. You think, it delivers.”
Mark looked down at the device. It was warm, almost comforting. He felt the low thrum of its power sync with his own rapid pulse. The bitterness of his own insecurity rose in his throat—the ignored greetings, the dates that never materialized, the way his own reflection was a constant, gentle disappointment. He looked at Kyle, at the effortless power he now wore. A desperate, hungry curiosity uncoiled in his gut.
“What did you think about?” Mark whispered.
“Strength. Raw, physical power. The kind of body that commands a room without saying a word.” Kyle leaned forward. “So what do you want, Mark? Really want? Not what you think you should want. The secret thing.”
The apartment was silent except for the flickering bulb’s electric buzz. The clutter seemed to recede. All Mark could see was the mirror, its surface now swirling with faint, copper-colored light.
He didn’t want to be Kyle. That wasn’t it. The image that flashed in his mind wasn’t of muscles or command. It was of curve and sway, of a devastating smile, of a power that was entirely different. It was the kind of beauty that stopped traffic, that made people stutter. A power born not from threat, but from sheer, breathtaking attraction. An escape from his own invisible skin.
It was a stupid, fantasy thought. The kind he’d never admit to anyone.
His thumb found a depression on the device. It warmed under his touch.
“It’s probably out of batteries,” he mumbled, a last ditch effort at sanity.
“Just think it. Really focus,” Kyle urged, his voice tight with excitement.
Mark closed his eyes. He didn’t think of health, or confidence, or any sanctioned self-improvement. He thought of the secret thing. The impossible silhouette. He focused on the feeling of being seen, of being wanted, with a hair-trigger intensity he’d only witnessed from the sidelines. He imagined the weight of long hair, the arc of a spine, the sharp, perfect clarity of features that were nothing like his own.
The device erupted in his hands.
It didn’t hum—it sang, a high, crystalline frequency that rattled his teeth. A beam of vibrant, rose-gold light shot from the snub nose, not at the mirror, but directly at the center of his chest.
He gasped. It didn’t burn. It infused.
A wave of liquid heat flooded through him, followed by a terrifying, exhilarating sense of reorganization. He heard a series of soft, internal pops—his shoulders, his hips. A feeling of tensile strength swept down his back and coiled in his abdomen. His skin prickled, every hair follicle buzzing.
The heat became a thrumming, insistent pressure, building deep in his bones. Mark gasped, a sound that hitched in his throat as his ribcage seemed to flex outward. A sharp, electric crackle shot down his spine.
“Oh, right,” Kyle said, his voice cutting through the rose-gold haze. “Forgot to tell you. It’s gonna hurt like a bitch.”
A groan tore itself from Mark’s lips, low and guttural, as the muscles across his back began to sear and swell, fabric stretching with a sound like tearing paper. He could feel individual cords of muscle knitting themselves into new, dense formations. His abdomen clenched in a vicious cramp, and a series of audible, wet pops echoed in the quiet room—snap, snap, snap—as definition carved itself, impossibly, into his stomach. He looked down, breath ragged, at the sudden topography of a six-pack gleaming with sweat under the flickering light.
He was still reeling from the shock of it, the alien feel of his own solid mass, when Kyle moved.
“Whoa, dude. No,” Kyle breathed, his eyes wide not with concern, but with a dawning, greedy inspiration. He snatched the device from Mark’s trembling hand. The rose-gold beam vanished, leaving Mark swaying, overwhelmed in his new, powerful body.
Kyle stared at the pulsing tool, then at his own reflection in the weird mirror. A wild, impulsive grin split his face. “You know what? Screw it. I’ve been the alpha for a whole hour.” His fingers danced over the smooth surface, finding hidden buttons, twisting an unseen dial. “Tonight, I’m gonna be a bitch. A fucking sexy one.”
Before Mark could croak out a protest, Kyle aimed the device square at his own chest and pressed what looked like a trigger.
The sound it made was different—a higher, piercing whine. The light that enveloped Kyle was a searing, electric blue.
Kyle’s back arched. A scream ripped from his throat, but it broke, shattering mid-air into something high and breathy. Mark watched, utterly frozen, as Kyle’s formidable frame began to collapse in on itself. The shoulders, so broad a moment ago, sloped and narrowed. His height diminished, bones seeming to melt and re-set with a series of sickening, rapid crunches.
The screams turned into strained, panting moans. The tank top sagged, then was filled again, violently, from underneath as two distinct, heavy swellings pushed against the cotton. They grew, round and perky, straining the fabric to its limits. Kyle—or what was becoming not-Kyle—clutched at the new weight on his chest, fingers sinking into soft flesh, a final, shuddering gasp escaping lips that had grown fuller, tinged now with a natural-looking pink.
The blue light cut out.
The silence was absolute, broken only by the erratic buzz of the dying bulb and two sets of frantic, confused breathing.
Where Kyle had stood, there now stood a stranger. A woman with Kyle’s stormy eyes, but now framed by long, dark lashes. Her face was a heart-shaped echo of his, softer, with high cheekbones and the same mouth, now trembling in shock. The white tank top was stretched taut over a painfully narrow waist and the dramatic, outsized curve of hips that hadn’t been there ninety seconds ago. She stared down at herself, at the perfect, manicured hands that had replaced Kyle’s calloused ones, and then at Mark, who was still a sculpted statue of a man, his own transformation now horribly mundane by comparison.
She opened her mouth. Kyle’s voice, but higher, smoother, laced with panic, came out.
“Dude.”
Mark finally found his own voice, rough and unfamiliar in his new baritone chest. “Kyle?”
She looked at her hands again, then back at him, her expression shifting from terror to a kind of hysterical awe. “I think… I think I’m a fucking babe.”