by Maxwell Avoi
She snuck into Aiko’s lab and through the door when she was sure that no one was looking. Once the door was closed and latched she looked around. No one was immediately obvious, so she whispered, “Aiko?”
She said his name again, louder, and was answered by a soft moan from the corner of the lab. She made her way there, barely keeping from tripping over some of Aiko’s equipment. In the corner, she found three men lying in a pile on a set of blankets with a truly spectacular Japanese woman wound through their sleeping limbs.
Ryan frowned; if it hadn’t been for the knowledge that Trevor had also become a woman she never would have made the leap. “Aiko?” she said, shaking the Japanese woman’s leg. She did her best to keep from staring at the naked men but it was starting to be a problem.
The woman stirred and moaned a little. “Mm?” she said. She blinked up at Ryan without recognition.
“It’s me, Aiko. Ryan.” Ryan stood and folded her arms beneath her round breasts, frowning at Aiko.
Aiko’s eyes widened and Ryan forced herself to remember that she was here for a cure for her current situation, not to admire spectacular eyes or bodies. “Oh wow,” Aiko whispered.
She got up in careful stages. One of the men muttered something and snuggled up next to one of the others when she left. Both of the girls stared at the sight for a moment before shaking themselves free. Aiko led Ryan back to the staging area. Ryan stared at Aiko’s beautiful naked ass the whole way.
It wasn’t long before Aiko had figured out what had happened and had explained it to Ryan. “So we’re just stuck like this for the next day or so?” said the redhead.
Aiko nodded. By that time she’d found one of her partner’s shirts and was wearing it to at least make a nod toward modesty. She was about to go on, to explain herself, when the door swung open and a short, incredibly well-rounded black woman ran in with a wild look in her eye. The door thumped closed behind her as she stood there, her chest heaving attractively, until she had caught her breath long enough to say, “What. The fuck .”
Ryan grinned. “Trevor?”
The black girl nodded, trying to frown at them through her panting. She wore the same kind of mismatched, makeshift clothing that Ryan did, including a shirt that was about to burst at the seams thanks to the pressure of her enormous tits. “Woke up like this. What’d you do ?” she said to Aiko.
There was another round of explanations. It turned out that Trevor’s partners from the night before had been intrigued by her new situation rather than repulsed as Ryan’s date had been. Trevor had spent an enjoyable morning with them while wondering what had happened, and when the sisters had gone she had made her way to the lab the same route as Ryan.
Ryan reached out and took Trevor’s hand, enjoying the feel of her flesh. “Well, we’re stuck like this for the rest of the day, so I think that it’s time that we enjoy some of Aiko’s party favors.” She led Trevor to the corner where some of Aiko’s boys were starting to come around. By the looks of things, they appreciated both Ryan and Trevor quite a lot.
Trevor made a small mewling noise and drifted toward the pile, Ryan hot on her heels. Aiko joined them a moment later after turning on the camera. After all, it was important to keep a record.
Sparkle and Shine
Halfway through my college career I learned the benefits of extreme showering. At the time I was working my way to an English degree, reading and writing hard in the few moments I could catch between sleep, class, and work. You know that old saying, that you can have any two of sleep, fun, or studying during college? It was turning out to be depressingly true for me; the fun part was the one I lacked though I was often too busy to bemoan its loss.
I worked at a pizza place, Ricardo’s, making deliveries of second-rate pizza to people who were too damn lazy to come and get it themselves. Living on tips and a built-in delivery fee wasn’t the best way to go but at least it kept a roof over my head and some food in my belly. The owner, Ricardo, understood my plight and would assure me that it was all just temporary. “Someday!” he said. “Someday you’ll be a teacher or a bestseller or something, and you’ll look back and laugh!”
He wasn’t a bad boss, so I didn’t scream at him, but I had to admit that it could have been worse. Not a lot worse, but still.
Being poor I often shopped around for the best prices I could find. One of my favorite stores was Imported! , a peppy-sounding place that should probably have been called Infested! instead. It was dingy and everything in it looked to be about six weeks past the sell-by date, including the employees. Still, it was a great place to browse on a budget when you wanted to find strange things that you might be able to afford. There were brands there that I not only hadn’t heard of before but that would never be heard from again. That night, the night of my introduction to extreme showering, I found a whole crate of shampoo for a price that came to about fifty cents a bottle. The brand was some ungodly conglomeration of letters that my phone assured me translated to “Shine” in English. It was one I’d never seen before but I figured that it couldn’t hurt to have enough shampoo to last me for the next ten years. I had the cash for it, for once; the tips had actually been good that night. I loaded it into the cart.
There was a crate of bar soap next to it with the same lettering. My phone told me that it was “Sparkle” brand soap. Well, at least they were consistent. I figured that each bar ran five cents, so I loaded that crate into my cart on top of the shampoo.
The person at the checkout register could not possibly have cared less what I was buying; I got the strong impression that she wouldn’t have blinked if I’d led a horse and three zombies out of the depths of the store. I smiled and greeted her and she gave me a look that was identical to one that I’d seen staring at me from lily pads in my youth. It was our ritual; as a regular, I got that special treatment that made buying there such a pleasure.
I got the soap and shampoo into my little hatchback, though I had to move some things around. At least my car had a pleasant scent that evening, the clean smells of discount cleaning products inundating every nook. I couldn’t place the smell but it was pleasant enough.
I lugged the boxes up three flights of stairs over the course of about fifteen minutes when I got home, cursing my buying impulse, my roommates, the creator of stairs, and the world with impartial fervor. Once I got to my floor I sat down on the boxes and huffed a bit. The door wasn’t far, I told myself. I could do this without dying.
“Hey, there he is!” said Lenny, one of my roommates, when I finally got inside. He and Brody, my other roommate, were sitting on our shitty couch and playing something that involved a lot of gunfire on Lenny’s XBOX. They paused it and looked over the back of the couch as I heaved the boxes toward the bathroom.
“Whatcha got?” said Brody.
“Went to Imported again,” I said, Lenny made a sound of disgust, his head falling back behind the level of the couch, but Brody kept watching. “Found some discounted shampoo and some soap.”
“Well, here’s hoping that it doesn’t burn your skin off,” said Brody. “Or turn it some weird color. You remember the last time you got some detergent from there.” He too disappeared back below the level of the couch and the gunfire recommenced.
“Totally different brand, and that eventually dissolved anyway,” I called back.
I disregarded the mumbled response and went back to what I was doing. It wasn’t long before I had my cabinet stuffed with Shine and Sparkle. I wasn’t preparing for the apocalypse; it just looked that way.
Since I had the soap there and I was already sweaty, I told the cretins on the couch that I was going to take a shower. They made more non-committal noises and I went to get my robe.
I cracked open the soap since my normal shampoo still had about an inch left in it; you learn to be thrifty when your income depends on the kindness of strangers. I got in and went to work, relishing the hot water. The soap was actually quite nice, foaming easily and carrying with it that strange but enjoyable scent.
It wasn’t until the shower was nearly over that I realized that it had removed all of my body hair.
I stared in shock and then horror as the water level started to rise. I turned off the shower and started digging clumped hair out of the drain until the levels fell, and then I inspected myself. The soap had taken off every single hair on my body as far as I could tell, leaving only the hair on my head. Even my eyebrows were gone.
“Holy screaming fuck,” I whispered, the horror of it settling over me. Lenny and Brody were never going to let me hear the end of this. At least my lashes were still attached; if anything, they looked longer and fuller without the competition from my absent eyebrows.
On the plus side, fake-Sparkle certainly seemed to work. I felt squeaky clean in a way that I hadn’t experienced before; I figured it was because now the air could get to my skin without having to fight through the body hair. Even my cock and balls were bald, which actually made them look bigger. Maybe this wasn’t all bad.
Once I got over the initial shock I realized that it really wasn’t all bad. My skin felt better than it had in a long time, not just clean but also softer and moisturized. It felt as if I had used really good lotion from my forehead to the soles of my feet, my whole body glowing slightly from the sense of well-being that started right at the surface of the skin.
I wrapped the robe around myself and walked back to my room without saying anything to the people on the couch. Once there, I put on some boxers and went to bed.
I was awoken by furious pounding on my door. The noise came with incoherent screams that sounded like a cat caught in a threshing machine. All I could make out was, “The FUCK ! The FUCK !” in between the screaming.
I picked up the baseball bat that sat next to the door and opened it nervously. On the other side was a naked, wet woman who looked caught somewhere between rage and raw panic. She was short and slim, though she had curves in all the right places. Just as I opened my door, I saw Brody come stumbling into the hall from his room.
The woman looked back and forth between us, her chest heaving as she tried to figure out what to say. “Whoa,” said Brody as he opened his eyes.
“What the FUCK ?” she cried, apparently feeling that she hadn’t made her position clear. I tried to keep my eyes to myself out of deference to her obvious agitation but it was difficult. She was a well-built woman about my age, dripping wet and naked. As far as I could tell she didn’t have a hair on her body from the nose down. I forced my eyes back up to hers and said, “Whoa, wait, hold on.”
“This is your fault, you bastard!” she screamed at me. Whoever she was, her grasp of screaming was flawless. “You and your fucking cheap-ass soap!”
I blinked at that non-sequitur. “Say what?”
“It’s me , you fuckstick! Lenny!”
“You are very not Lenny,” said Brody. He eyed her without reservation, his gaze traveling the length of her body.
“Fuck you. I am Lenny. But dumbass here bought some stupid expired soap or something and when I used it I turned into this!” She gestured at herself. It was the kind of gesture that a naked woman shouldn’t use unless she was trying to get a certain reaction, and I started to show it around that point.
She looked at my crotch and gave me a look of such disgust that my hard-on wilted before it got going. “Fucking wonderful. Figure out how to fix this, asshole.” She turned and stormed back down the hall. Brody, who hadn’t been intimidated in the slightest by her body or her glares, got a wonderful view of her tits bouncing with each step as she approached and then passed him.
Brody and I stared after her up until the point when she slammed the door to Lenny’s room. Then Brody turned to me and said, “What the hell just happened?”
I shook my head, tired all over again. “I think Lenny’s new girlfriend just tried to punk us.”
“He hasn’t said anything about a new girlfriend.”
“Can you blame him? Girl’s a freak, obviously.”
“Hot freak, though.” He shrugged and went back to his room.
I closed the door to mine and sat down on the edge of my bed. I hadn’t tried the shampoo during my shower of the night before; the sight of all my hair falling out had stopped me before I’d gotten to that point. What if the shampoo really had changed Lenny into that girl?
I shook my head. The soap making my hair fall out was one thing but that was a totally different level of change. It was three or four different levels, actually, but either way her claim was a lot more than just a little bit of depilatory action like the soap had been.
Lenny was trying to punk us. It was the only explanation that made any sense. I shook my head again and went back to bed.
In the morning Lenny’s door remained closed. I was just as happy with that; I was a little pissed that his new girlfriend had woken me up so it was probably just as well that they remained sequestered. I didn’t allow Lenny or the girlfriend any more space in my head as the usual whirl of school and work took over. I didn’t think about anything at all until I got home that night.
Lenny sat on the easy chair next to the couch, frowning at the television where Brody played something hyper-violent. The sight of Lenny reminded me of my irritation and I said, “Oh hey, look who it is. Hey Len, some psycho chick said she was you this morning. At like three in the morning, by the way, and thanks for letting her wake me up.”
He didn’t even look at me. He just raised one middle finger in my way and then went back to glaring at the TV. Brody said, “He’s giving us the silent treatment. Pissed ‘cause we didn’t let ourselves get punked, I guess.”
I shrugged and headed off to the shower. Lenny would get over it; he often sulked when his attempts at practical jokes didn’t work.
I was still hairless. All day I’d been conscious of the way that the fabric of my clothing brushed against my skin. It was a constant source of distraction, one that had made my classes into a blur of noise and sound rather than coherent thoughts. I would have sworn that the soap had somehow made my skin more sensitive as well as hairless; perhaps it had simply melted the top layers off the same way that it had removed the dead cells that made up my hair. That was a disquieting thought; it meant that repeated use might be dangerous.
I decided after some thought to go on using it; the main reason was that I didn’t have anything else. We didn’t use each other’s cleaning supplies because of the gross-out factor, so if the soap started to melt my skin I was going to have to get some new somewhere instead. I would just have to be careful and aware.
I went ahead and started right in on the soap when I got into the shower. It wasn’t painful or irritating in any way, I was glad to find. It didn’t even make my skin red until I rubbed too hard with the washcloth. If the soap had melting powers it was being damn subtle about it.
I shrugged and opened up the shampoo. It had a strange scent that reminded me a little of the soap, but the overall smell was different. I couldn’t quite place it; sort of like flowers smelled from a distance through a haze of smog. It was odd but not unpleasant.
I shrugged and started in, scrubbing with my fingers. I frowned as the weight on my head started to increase; it felt as though the shampoo was foaming up more than I expected it to. Soon there were great gobs of foam flowing down my body and into the drain, making my skin tingle in its wake.
It wasn’t just the foam, either; my hair itself seemed to be fuller and deeper. It felt like there was just more of it, buried beneath the foam and the water. I finally rinsed it out when it got to feeling too weird. When it was rinsed I found that I could pull strands of it around in front of my face, something that I hadn’t been able to do before thanks to the length. That tiny detail was by far the least significant, but it was the one that my mind latched onto.
The fact that I appeared to have become a woman was such a huge thing that I had to hang onto thoughts about my hair length just to keep my mind from exploding. I eased into the idea, moving my eyes downward an inch at a time as if low
ering myself into a hot bath.
That smooth, soft skin was even smoother and softer now, and my body hair remained absent. I kept moving my gaze downward until it finally settled on my chest. I wasn’t well-endowed, but there was no question as to what I now carried on my chest. They were round and firm, experiencing gravity for the first time with a sort of cheerful bobbing whenever I moved. I held them in both hands, slippery with soap and warm beneath my fingers, and I kept myself from screaming by sheer force of will.
Lenny hadn’t been messing with us, I realized. He had actually turned female while he’d been in the shower! I had to find out if he knew how to change back. I got out of the shower and dried off enough that I wouldn’t drip everywhere, aware of the silliness of my actions even though I was powerless to stop them; the motions of drying off were normal and I wanted every thread of normalcy I could muster. I wrapped the robe around myself and headed for Lenny’s room, determined to get to him (or her) and wrest answers from him (or her).
Lenny’s door stood open, the room deserted. I turned back toward my own room in a state of near-panic, only to freeze when I realized that the living room was occupied. Lenny and Brody sat on the couch, their differences apparently forgotten in the spirit of blowing shit up onscreen.
They were staring at me, open-mouthed, Brody with total confusion and Lenny with dawning glee. He stood up and pointed at me. “HAH! Fucker, happened to you too, didn’t it!”
“How’d you change back, Lenny?” I asked, suddenly aware that my voice had changed just like the rest of me. I didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to think about the way the air circulated so freely between my legs or anything else that had to do with this insane situation.
He sat down again, his arms crossed and a satisfied look on his face. “I’m not telling.”
“Wait,” said Brody, wearing the look of someone who was either heavily stoned or partly concussed. “Wait, you guys are doing this shit again ?”
“What shit?” I said. Then I realized that Brody thought we were playing a joke on him. “Oh shut up , Brody. It’s not a joke. Lenny, damn it! Tell me how you changed back!”
