Undergrad Alchemy (Part 2)

Wallace glanced at the runes he’d just cast amidst a small amount of the mixture he’d created to make Tony a twenty year old. “Hm,” he said, flipping through a small hand-written journal he’d inherited upon his uncle’s death.

“Looks like… the runes say… inconclusive.” If Wallace was interpreting his uncle’s scribblings correctly, of the seven runes cast, four of them had fallen in a favorable configuration, while the other three seemed… unclear.

After double-checking the results, Wallace headed to the staircase leading out of his attic. As he descended, he yanked the pullchain attached to the lightbulb above his head. He winced as it snapped. The light flickered and went out with an electric crackle. “Damn,” he said. “That’s gonna really suck when it’s nighttime.”

Peter sat on the edge of the couch in the living room, leaning forward with one tongue craned out the left side of his mouth. He tightly clutched a faded N64 control, contorting his body as, on screen, the Princess’ kart skidded around Rainbow Road.

“Bro, would you believe I scored this for fifty fucking dollars?” Peter shouted.

“Great score,” Wallace said, just as the front door opened. A sweat-spattered George walked in, his posture slumped with post-gym fatigue. Behind him walked a cure brown-haired guy in ludicrously over-sized gym-clothes.

“Who’s your–” Wallace began, pausing when he realized it was twenty year old Tony–or “Anthony” as he’d begun insisting. “Oh. How was the gym, guys?”

“Good,” George said with a flat affect as he headed to the kitchen.

“Dude, it was fucking WILD,” Anthony said, yanking up his sagging sweatpants. “I was like… so weak! I couldn’t believe how light I was lifting today. And the guys there were MASSIVE! I’ve never seen guys that big around here before!”

Peter was still contorting along with his efforts in his video game. A blender sound started in the kitchen, where George was no doubt mixing up his post-workout nutrition. Wallace smiled politely at Anthony, who continued to prattle on about the gym.

“It’s like… I never really thought college guys were my thing, y’know? When I was IN college, I still liked older dudes, and then when I was like, 40, you know… I was into other guys my age…”

Wallace looked around, unclear who exactly Anthony was speaking to as he paced around their front entryway. Since he was the only person paying attention, he felt bound to be his audience.

“...but it’s like, now? I’d date, like, almost every guy I saw in there. Like football players… I’ve NEVER liked football players. But George was saying some of the guys I was checking out were, like, on the football team, and I was like, ‘For real?’ I mean, those guys were fucking HOT!”

Wallace nodded, smiling. When he heard a break in the conversation, he held up the broken pullchain from his light. “Before I forget,” he said, “this broke upstairs. I think I’m gonna need it fixed.”

Anthony blinked, the giddy smile on his face fading as he tried to focus on what Wallace was handing him. “Light? From… upstairs?” he said, confused, as if Wallace had handed him a rat’s tail or a chewed-on popsicle stick.

“Yeah, no rush, but… if I could get it fixed by tonight it would be great,” Wallace said.

Anthony blinked, his eyes unfocused, the corner of his mouth twitching in and out of a smile.

“Light from where?” he asked again.

Wallace escorted the fresh-faced 20-year-old up the stairs to his room. Anthony took in the space as if he were seeing it for the first time.

“So, wait, you can do like… potions and stuff?” Anthony said, seeing the dusty journal with arcane writing in gold ink. He picked up a small pouch from Wallace’s desk and untied it, gazing inside. He made a face as he smelled its foul contents.

“Yeah… don’t touch that,” Wallace said, snatching it away from Anthony. Nowhere in this giddy twink was the burly man he’d lived next door to for years. Had Anthony really been this way when he was young, or had something gone wrong with the potion?

“Can you make other potions?” Anthony asked.

Wallace sighed. “Sure can. Can you fix a light, though?”

Anthony shook his head. “Later with that.”

“But you’re my landlord.”

“Not now I’m not!”

Wallace tilted his head to the side, not sure how to proceed. “Technically, you are,” he reminded the man whose bulky sweatpants hung low on his narrow hips, revealing the top of his pubes.”I mean, you’re not ACTUALLY twenty years old, you just look that way.”

“And I FEEL twenty, too!” he said, flexing his arms. Wallace had to suppress a laugh at the lean but noodles limbs, which one day before had been massive hairy “cannons.”

“Sure,” Wallace said. “But… y’know, two weeks is a long time to go shirking your responsibilities.”

“It’s a vacation,” Anthony said. “And besides, YOU’RE the one who did this!”

Wallace nodded, turning away. It didn’t look like his light was getting fixed anytime soon.

“Make me a potion and I’ll fix your light,” Anthony said, biting his lip. He raised an eyebrow and crossed his arms, causing his sweatpants to slide down. Only his semi-erect cock was there to keep them from hitting the floor.

“What kind of potion?” Wallace said. “You know, I technically already made you one, and it wasn’t easy…”

“I have these tenants I hate,” Anthony said. “Bunch of cocky roidhead assholes over at my Roselawn property. Fratty little bitches whose parents are always threatening to sue me even though they’re DESTROYING the property.”

“And you want me to…”

“Anything. Turn them into cockroaches.”

Wallace smirked. “You want your property infested with cockroaches instead?”

“Or mice.” Anthony clapped his hands together as inspiration struck. “Oh! Make all of them female mice except one, and have that one get them all pregnant!”

Wallace rolled his eyes. “Uh, Tony–”

“Anthony,” he corrected.

“Yeah, anyway, I’m not a god, or a wizard. I’m pretty much a novice, and even then, there’s the problem of materials. Most of these things require some pretty gnarly ingredients that aren’t easy to get…”

“Well, what CAN we do?” Anthony said.

Wallace paused, glancing around the various bottles on his shelves, and an idea struck him.

***

Brock Neidermeyer stepped out of his shower, toweling off his lean, muscular physique before wrapping the towel around his waist. He ran a hand through his curly blonde hair, then confidently strutted out of his bathroom, down the hallway of the house he rented with his three buddies. The air smelled flowery, an unfamiliar scent, but he disregarded it. “Hey, Grant,” he said, banging on his roommate’s bedroom door with his powerful fist, “shower’s all yours, bro!”

He heard his roommate grunt back at him before he headed into his room. He caught another whiff of the perfumey scent, wondering for a moment if someone had a girl over. Then, a tingling spread throughout his body. He felt his knees wobbling, his muscles feeling rubbery and weak. He steadied himself against the wall with one hand as a wave of numbness overcame him. He nearly toppled over…

When Brock’s eyes snapped open again, the jock he had been was long gone. A different man sat in the driver’s seat. He examined his unfamiliar hands with surprise, then gasped as he noticed the thick muscles on his ripped torso. “What the… fuck…” he said, his voice lacking all of Brock’s usual confidence. He leaned forward and gazed into the mirror. Seeing Brock’s face was a shock to the man now inhabiting his body–a 23 year old graduate student named Calvin Shanesmith.

“WHAT THE FUCK!” he screeched. The towel came loose from his waist and he gasped again, shocked to be naked. Just minutes before, sitting in the library, hunched over his engineering homework, and now he was… wherever this was… looking like some neanderthal underwear model!

As he tried to get used to be being so big, so bulging, so SINEWY–and especially the big cock swinging between his legs–he heard a scream through the wall. Another man sounding just as shocked as he did!

Calvin searched around this mystery jock’s room for some clothing, finally finding a pair of shorts that fit over his thick quads. “How the fuck am I supposed to walk with these things,” he said, disgusted by this useless display of muscular development. “Why would anyone want to look like this?” he said, horrified by the body he was now somehow trapped in. He pulled on a hoodie he found on the floor (gagging at its filthy jock-stink) and opened the door, heading in the direction of the screaming.

In the hallway, Calvin found another student–another big, burly man with a well-manicured beard standing in his boxer shorts. Calvin leapt back as the man whirled around.

“Who the fuck are you?” he said, looking just as repulsed by his own thickly built physique as Calvin had of his own.

“I-I… I don’t know!” Calvin stammered. “I mean, I do know… My name’s Calvin… but I don’t know who… who THIS is!” he said, gesturing at his body.

“Wait, Calvin?” the brown-haired stud said, shocked. “Calvin Shanesmith?”

Calvin’s eyes went wide. He’d never seen this hulking man in his life, but somehow he knew his name?

“I’m Greg Forrester!” the bearded man said.

Greg Forrester–one of his roommates! “No way!” Calvin said, shocked. “I was in the library, and now… here, somehow!”

“I was in the lab!” the man claiming to be Greg said. “Why do we look like this?”

A short, balding man, built so wide his elbows scraped the walls, lumbered up the stairs, looking at the two of them with sad, watery eyes. “You guys?” he said. “It’s me, Philip…”

“Philip!” Calvin said, shocked that the side of his other roommate in this knuckledragger’s body made his ample cock spring (quite obviously) to attention. “Philip, what is going on? Are we losing our minds?”

“I think, somehow,” Philip said, gently rubbing the sickening piercings on his nipples, “we swapped bodies with these… these jocks!”

The three erudite students, now in these meathead jocks’ bodies, came together in an awkward hug, each of them groaning as their ample muscles squashed together. “What are we going to do?” Greg whimpered.

“I don’t know,” Philip said, “but I think first, we need to get some new clothes. We can’t run around dressed like this!”

They all agreed. First stop, the mall, to get some NORMAL clothes like button downs and pleated khakis, then they would sit down and try to figure out how to get back into their usual bodies.

***

Anthony, huddled next to Wallace in the bushes outside the apartment on Roselawn Ave, kept giggling and squeezing Wallace’s arm every time he watched the three jocks bumbling around. “This is fucking awesome!” Anthony said. “Look how fucking ridiculous they look!”

Wallace smiled. The solution he’d cobbled together hadn’t been perfect, but it did the trick. Pouring it into the air conditioner helped spread it through the house more quickly. He was surprised it had taken effect so quickly.

“So, wait, does this mean there’s a bunch of nerds across town who are wondering what happened to their muscles and their big cocks?” Anthony asked.

“Oh, well,” Wallace explained, “see, I didn’t actually swap their bodies with anyone. It was just a simple personality rewrite. I overwrote their identities with their worst fear–which, apparently, is being a nerdy graduate student. Their own minds put together the idea that they’re actually engineering roommates, probably to help them cope with the change. They’ll spend the next ten days disgusted by their own muscles. I’d imagine everyone is going to treat them like the big dumb jocks they look like, which will feel even worse to their ‘nerdy’ selves.”

As the three men stumbled out of their apartment, still clumsy in bodies that, to them, seemed far too large, Anthony shook his head, his eyes wide, his jaw slack. “I just… this is so awesome,” he said. “This is amazing. YOU are amazing.”

Wallace shrugged. “I mean, compared to other alchemists, I’m just–”

He never finished his statement. Anthony tackled him, wrapping his arms around him, grinding his hard cock against Wallace’s own crotch. Before Wallace could react they were kissing, and Wallace instinctively kissed back. Anthony was so passionate, so enthusiastic. The affection seemed brand new to Wallace, like the first time he’d ever hooked up with a man all over again. Before things went too far, Anthony’s body suddenly tensed. He moaned softly, and Wallace felt a warm, wet spot forming between them.

“Shit,” Anthony said as he relaxed on top of Wallace. “Fuck, I’m so embarrassed,” he said as he started to pull away.

“It’s fine,” Wallace said. “Honestly, that was… actually pretty hot.”

Anthony stared deeply into Wallace’s eyes. Neither of them blinked for a full minute, each of them breathing slow ragged breaths.

“We should get back to the apartment,” Wallace said, finally pulling himself to his feet, then helping Anthony off the ground.

“Yeah,” Anthony said, taking his hand. “Let’s go.”

They walked, hand-in-hand, back home. With every step closer to his apartment, Wallace became increasingly concerned about the fingers interlaced with his own. He knew he couldn’t let George see this.

“I was thinking,” Anthony said, “that I might rent that extra room of yours.”

Wallace shook his head. “Anthony, you own the building.”

“Well, TONY owns the building,’ Anthony said, “but Anthony can just be… a normal college student renting an apartment with his buddies. Right?”

Wallace didn’t agree, but he had no idea how to say what was on his mind.