Remastered: A Life Changing Phone Call

A remastering of one of the first captions I ever made.

TEXT

"Anthony, how could you do this to me!? How DARE you steal my research!" Hank shouted into his phone as he stormed through the ransacked laboratoy. He and his (now former) partner Anthony had been on the verge of a breakthrough; the ability to modify reality with little more than a combination of well placed signal tones that distorted space time! Anthony had done most of the work, but with all the resources that Hank had supplied his colleague with, it was just as much his as it was his friend's. They had such plans for it! They were going to end world hunger! Cure cancers! All the heroic things that science strived for!

But then Anthony had gotten selfish (in Hank’s opinion); refusing to sell out to the government, to corporations, to, well, ANYONE that was willing to pay absolute top dollar for such a technology! The moral man had been standing in the way of progress AND wealth, and Hank had put up with his friend’s moral high ground for long enough. After all, HE had been the one to supply the funding, the lab equipment, the personnel, all the things that Anthony had needed to make his dream a reality! Two nights ago, once Anthony had left, Hank had locked his EX-partner out of the lab. But that hadn’t stopped Anthony, apparently. Anthony had driven a car through the wall of the lab! And the mad man had gone about hacking his way into what computers he could and with that not being enough, Anthony had even set the building on fire! While the everyone else stood around like morons, Hank had taken action. The angry scientist had jumped in his own car and sped through town, heading for Anthony's house and calling his former partner on his cellphone.

"YOUR WORK!? Excuse me, but I'M the one who discovered the frequency resonance! And there you are, trying to claim it all to yourself as usual" Anthony snarled from the other end of the phone, "You're nothing but a snake in the grass!"

"We were FRIENDS, Tony! That's why you came to me! You needed MY connections! My funding! And because of that friendship I believed your insane theories! That's why-" Hank started, but was interrupted by a loud, hateful chuckle.

"Friends? Well, how about we be something more..." Anthony said, his voice full of malice. Hank pulled up to the front of Anthony's two-story house and leaped out of his car, phone still wedged in his ear as he heard a series of rapid beeping taking Anthony's place. His blood ran cold as the beeping intesified, making room for chirps and trills and low tones that tingled his brain into paralyzing his body.

The changes were swift, but merciless. The first thing Hank felt was his skin trembling as it began folding over itself, losing his masculine hair and muscles as his body began to shrink. A pinching motion between his legs, a sucking feeling in his gut followed by painful swelling on his torso while his bones cracked and popped into new shapes. Hank felt his frozen mouth shift and change as his lips felt more plump, and his hair was now weighing more heavily on his previously balding head. His clothing began to change as the pulsing in his ears grew faster and louder, his skin tones changing with them as his messy lap coat and slacks became something far, far more feminine. Hank had just enough strength to let out a high pitched ‘NO!’ as the buzzing filled his brain...

“Ugh, what was that?” Helen said, pinching the top of her petite nose with two equally petite fingers.

“What was what, honey?” Anthony, her husband said, his voice soothing, but cautious. Had it worked? Had the prototype he’d spent so many years working on been successful in changing his ex-partner into nothing more than a loving housewife that wouldn’t get in his way from making the world a better place?

“Oh, nothing. I guess I just got out of the car too fast! Did you say you had the weekend off from the lab? I was thinking maybe we could…Have some fun? It’s been such a long time since we…studied chemistry” Helen purred, shaking away the last of the headache as she turned back to her cute little car and began to unload the groceries from the back.

“Consider me all yours, partner!” Anthony laughed, though for the life of her, couldn’t figure out why it sounded so mean. Helen bid her husband a quick farewell and began carrying the bags of groceries into their house, feeling lucky to have married such a genius like Anthony and being his…’lab’ partner.