[Activity] The Foot is on the Other Shoe

[Will Stanton]

The Will brigade had returned to the dorms; the two unaffected Wills and their guitars re-entering the mirror, as was the new status quo.

That just left the poor brown-haired Will, who awkwardly watched as duplicates rejoined his main 'self'. With the polarity of his powers reversed, he didn't feel like it was safe to re-enter the mirror; he might infect the rest of him, and that would be terrible. So, he stood there awkwardly, watching his reflection -- a reflection of him as he should look, green hair, shifting powers and all.

((This is an open thread, but it's going to involve Will causing other people to shift into things. That's not everyone's cup of tea, so I'm leaving this as sort of a content warning))

[Toshiro Narumi]

Tosh knocked on the door to the dorm.

[Will Stanton]

Will sighed for a moment, breaking away from the mirror. "Yeah, one second," he called out, shuffling over to open the door. "Oh, heya Tosh."

[Toshiro Narumi]

Tosh was still dressed in his X-Men uniform from the response team the school sent to Hyde Park. They had arrived after it was over and only really helped keep the victims calm until Muir showed. Tosh volunteered to help, but the doctors shooed him away.

"Hey. I wanted to ask you how you're holding up."

[Will Stanton]

"At the moment? Not great," Will sighed. "Whatever that gun did to us did a number on me; I'm counting on you tech guys to reverse engineer it."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"It's not going to be easy given the amount of damage the device sustained. But it's not the most impossible thing we've done."

[Will Stanton]

"I'll be honest with you, most of the specifics fly over my head," Will shrugged, somewhat apologetically. "It's not quite my area of expertise."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Well, the incident with the golem did lead me to theorize about what the weapon seemed to be manipulating. And about the spatial rift you guys witnessed when it blew pretty much confirms it for me. So we've got a foothold. Between our science department, Sam's juju, and Muir, I'm confident we'll find a solution if there's one to be found."

[Will Stanton]

"Well, I'm sure you guys will have it handled," Will said, patting Tosh on the shoulder.

As Will touched Tosh's shoulder, a tingling sensation would start to go through Tosh's body -- not unlike the feeling he'd get when he switched to Bruce or one of his other forms, but outside of his control.

[Toshiro Narumi]

Tosh shuddered as if someone had just walked over his grave.

"Huh... that felt strange..."

[Narrator]

The tingling didn't stop there, however. Even after Will had moved his hand away, Tosh could feel the strange-yet-not-entirely unfamiliar sensation of his body changing, this time entirely outside of his control.

His entire arm was tingling now, and he could see it getting progressively shorter. Shrinking wasn't an entirely new sensation for him -- not all his forms were as big as Bruce, after all -- but they usually at least shrunk proportionally; if anything, he was proportionally more muscular in other forms than as his nerdy human self. But this time, it was almost feeling like his arm was hollowing out as it shrunk and began to regress back into his shoulder. It didn't hurt, which was a good thing, but for someone not used to it, it was probably at least a little disconcerting.

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Gah! Wh-what?! My arm!" Tosh shouted in alarm, eyes wide and confused.

[Narrator]

But while the effect started on one arm, it certainly wasn't limited to there. The same tingling and reducing sensation started taking over his other limbs, too, as everything around him seemed to be getting just that much bigger...

[Toshiro Narumi]

Tosh frantically waved around what was left of his dwindling arms as he struggled to maintain his balance.

"What did you do?! Stop!" he said before falling forward with a shout.

[Narrator]

Will cocked his head, and watched as Tosh continued to shrink and reduce, his limbs gradually being reabsorbed into his body; his neck forced back so he was briefly forced to look directly up. And then, he wasn't looking anywhere at all, as his head was absorbed into his body as well.

For a moment, his senses began fading -- things got dark and hard to see, sounds muffled, and so on, as his body continued to shift, change and distort. That probably wasn't the most pleasant experience in the world, but they quickly came back, just a little more...floaty. Like his brain was trying to adapt the sensations he was getting into information it could normally process. Again, this wasn't entirely new to him -- there's an issue of his brain figuring out how fins would work, or a tail, not to mention electricity-producing glands or however that worked. But 'seeing' without eyes? 'Hearing' without ears? It was taking a minute for his brain to make heads or tails of all of this, to the point where it might take Tosh a minute or three to realize that no, he wasn't breathing.

[Toshiro Narumi]

Tosh spent some time in a daze as if being anesthetized for surgery, aware but not processing. He had experience with being something inorganic with only the facsimile of senses, but that was under his own power. Being forced into it was entirely different and, because of that, frightening.

And then came the screaming, or at least that's what his mind sent the signal to do. He may be far braver than he gave himself credit for, but this was too much.

[Narrator]

No sound came when Tosh tried to scream, for well-established literary reasons. It did something, though, even if Tosh couldn't quite figure out what just at first blush. Something was shaking and vibrating, much like your vocal chords would shake and vibrate when yelling. But as his mind was still trying to put together just what had happened, it might take Tosh a little bit to figure out just what he was doing.

Now that the changes had stopped, Tosh would have a moment to kind of grasp what was going on. He didn't have limbs, that much was for sure -- any attempt to wriggle said arms and legs was going nowhere. And he didn't appear to have a head or anything, though he could look around -- and, in fact, he could find he could look around in a full circle, rotating his vision quite easily. How that worked without eyes or a head or neck was another question, perhaps one for non-screaming Tosh on another day.

His senses had come back decently strongly; that sense of being anesthetized and the slow fuzz fading away as his brain (did he have a brain? Mind?) gradually started processing the information it was receiving in more familiar ways. He could feel the carpet of the dorm room underneath; hear the shuffling of people outside. Everything was much bigger, for sure; Will stood there, looking down at him, the size of...well, it was hard to put into context. A city bus, flipped onto it's end? A shipping container on it's side? He certainly wasn't tree-sized, unless it was a smaller tree. Tosh was clearly taller than Will's ankle, but didn't reach his knee.

He also felt a little strange. Well, OK; he felt very strange from the whole shifting process, but that had at least stopped actively tingling and happening; he was shifted, as in the past tense. But now, he had a sensation of...well, again, difficult to exactly translate in his head. Of like he had just had a big lunch? Something like that. A feeling of fullness. Not an inherently unpleasant feeling -- it wasn't like he had had too much to eat and was regretting it. More like the kind of full you are after you had just had a great meal and couldn't eat any more, thank you, no need to bring out the dessert menu. Or maybe it was like shifting from Tosh to Bruce without changing into an unstable molecule uniform -- a feeling of tightness, before his rippling shark muscles would shred through a labcoat?

It was a new sensation, at the very least.

[Toshiro Narumi]

Tosh took a moment to... well, not breath, just to calm. He couldn't breathe but he couldn't as Kabuto either. That wasn't as frightening as the inability to speak or move. Was he stuck like this? Was he going to...

No. Think like a scientist. What do we know?

We're round?

Seems like it.

This is unjust!

Not helping Kabuto.

We can vibrate something. So, mayhaps we ain't so silent and immobile.

Worth testing.

Tosh attempted talking again, this time listening closely as he tried to say "Help."

[Will Stanton]

Tosh concentrated as he tried to verbalize the word 'help', and something vibrated again. Inside -- maybe that's why it couldn't be heard from the outside? Tosh could make out a small 'blurble' of some description, and could feel the vibrations continuing inside after he tried to speak -- an echo?

Will walked over to Tosh, bent over, and wrapped his hand around him, picking him up -- almost like being on an express elevator. Being lifted into the air that quickly likely would have given Tosh a sense of vertigo, but without a stomach to drop or anything, any such effect would be psychological only. He did feel more of those vibrations, though, as he was lifted towards eye level; a bit like being on a boat and rocking from side to side?

"Hrm," Will said, looking at Tosh and turning him around in his hands. "Well, that was...unexpected, to say the least..."

Will walked over to the mirror. Tosh could see Will's reflection, looking back at the him. In the reflection's hands was a bottle of water. The label had a cartoon shark wearing sunglasses and carrying a surfboard, giving a thumbs up, next to a logo which read NARUMI NATURAL SPRING WATER.

[Toshiro Narumi]

What he tried to say was: "A water bottle? Why the hell am I a water bottle?!"

What resulted was a prolonged bubbling. So instead he put all his effort into possibly moving the letter N up a little by visualizing it as connected to a finger, though he didn't know if it worked that way.

[Will Stanton]

That was not, indeed, how it worked. Tosh's shifting functioned entirely differently than Will's; he had no ability to shift the letter 'N' and frankly would have a hard time even figuring out to do that. It'd be like trying to flex your collarbone or bend your femur or something; it's just far beyond the realm of anything he could even visualize doing. That's not to say there's nothing he could do with his shifting, mind you! He'd just have to find something in his current situation that better matched his normal self-image to control. There was probably at least one thing he could work with, if he thought about it.

"I don't speak H20 right now, friend," Will said, frowning at the water bottle. "I lost that ability when Conduit zapped me."

"Although," he said, pausing for a moment, and tapping his chin with his free hand.

And then, with a shrug, he twisted Tosh's cap off, brought the bottle to his lips, and took a drink.

The opening of his cap released some of the pressure Tosh had been feeling, as some of the trapped air inside of him was released back into the atmosphere. Being lifted further and tilted might have triggered more vertigo, if he was afraid of heights at all, and he could feel the liquid inside of him pouring out, slowly fading from his consciousness and awareness as it left the bottle. The logical parts of Tosh's brain may or may not have been a fan of Will's actions.

On a sheer physical level, however, it wasn't that bad. In fact, there was a feeling of....contentment? No, that's not quite right. Satisfaction? It was kind of like a variation on the feeling he got when he solved a tricky engineering problem that had been bothering him for days, or when he beat a tough boss in a video game. A weird sense of...accomplishment? From being drunk from? Will had mentioned previously something about a feeling of things being right as an animate object, and Tosh was experiencing some of that right now. However, Will's whole...mental state of mind was deeply attached to that feeling; he wouldn't have had any real qualms with what was going on on a psychological level to override or diminish any of those positive physical vibes. I mean, the dude identified with inanimate objects; you know that he was a few eggs short of a dozen up there. Tosh had likely never considered what it would be like to be a water bottle, and likely would never have sought out means to experience that. In other words, whether Tosh would find the experience interesting, disturbing, frightening, pleasant, fulfilling, aggravating...well, that would be, as much as anything else, based on his own mental state.


Will swished the water around in his mouth for a moment, before swallowing.

"Why the hell are you a water bottle? I guess I was just thirsty; it's been a while since I had biological needs to take care of, and I guess I wasn't staying hydrated," Will answered, as if he had heard what Tosh had said moments prior.

[Toshiro Narumi]

Tosh was deeply disturbed by the idea of Will swallowing his bodily... fluid. More so by the fact that it felt right somehow, too disturbed for words. So this time Tosh tried making the cartoon shark cross its arms/fins and glare or, failing that, change it into a ferret as if he were trying to turn into Ennio. Then maybe he could do something more.

[Will Stanton]

Success! The Bruce on the bottle now looked way less like a happy product spokesman and more like...well, an angry shark-man. Hey, some control is better than no control, right?

Will screwed Tosh's top back on, causing some of that pressure sensation to reform as he closed the seal. Tosh felt less full now, mind you, likely because he, well, was less full.

"...What?" he asked, noticing the angry sharkman.

[Toshiro Narumi]

Encouraged, he imagined a comic book speech-bubble reading "Don't drink me! Turn me back!"

Or just picturing Bruce miming it by shaking his head, turning a few times, pointing to himself, and then at his back.

[Will Stanton]

No comic-book speech bubble; that was beyond Tosh's normal abilities. Some fancy mimework did get his point across, though.

Or, so it seemed, with Will frowning at it. "That bad, huh?"

[Toshiro Narumi]

Toon-Bruce nodded and put his fin- arms on his hips. Well, at where hips would be on the more humanoid version.

[Will Stanton]

Will thought some more for a moment.

"Are you in any pain? Your body's not meant for this," he mused.

[Toshiro Narumi]

He visualized Toon-Bruce using his surfboard to point at the letters in "Narumi Natural Spring Water" and "Bottled in California."

Code: Select all

N o j u S t W e i r d

[Will Stanton]

"Says the man who can turn into half the London zoo," Will frowned. "You know that I'd kill to be in your shoes right now, aye?"

[Toshiro Narumi]

Code: Select all

y o u d
f i n d
m i n e
w e i r d
t o o

[Will Stanton]

"I like to think I'm a little more open minded than that," Will sighed. "But very well."

He placed the Tosh Bottle down on the floor, and concentrated, trying to will him back into human form. It took him a few minutes of concentrating, but then Tosh would feel the shifting tingle return as he slowly began to reform.

[Toshiro Narumi]

When human again, Tosh checked himself over and sighed in relief.

"Much better. Sorry I freaked out on you. I guess being an object just isn't for me. Not without warning anyway."

[Will Stanton]

"No harm, no foul," Will said, frowning a little. "Sorry to have bothered you.

Good luck figuring out...whatever the hell this is."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"We'll fix this. I promise," Tosh said.

"And, hey, at least now I have a better idea what you mean when you say you enjoy being used when you're an object. It was almost like a dopamine reaction when you drank from me. Disturbing at the time but then I was still in shock over the alien-ness of it."

[Will Stanton]

"With all respect, no I don't think you really do," Will said. "And that's alright. I shall remain inscrutable for now.

Don't worry; I'll make sure it won't happen again."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Honestly? I think I might have reacted better before finding out my DNA was being used to change other people against their will."

[Will Stanton]

"Look, I appreciate you trying to make me feel better," Will said, holding up a hand. "But honestly, all I need is to get this fixed. That's all. I don't need..." he paused, trying to find the words.

"I don't need explanations as to why things were weird or uncomfortable, and I don't need hypothetical situations in which they wouldn't be. I know how strange I am; I just went to a concert wrapped around someone's behind, and I'd be there right now if we hadn't gotten attacked by a crazy woman with a gun. And, sure, maybe if you hadn't been experimented on in the past, you'd feel different, or if your mutation was different, or if mine was, or if a pebble had fallen from a tree in the 5th century BC and caused a rat to move to the left, darting in front of a cart and killing Aristides the Just prematurely. It's...all irrelevant; things are what they are."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"Sorry. Pathological need to explain things. I'll just... get back to work," he said, feeling like his foot couldn't get further into his mouth.

[Will Stanton]

Will sighed, rubbing his temple. "I'm sorry; I'm sorry. This is just...a lot. And the second time it's happened recently, too.

God, what I wouldn't fucking give for some of that MGH right now."

[Toshiro Narumi]

"I dunno about the MGH, but having your powers messed with definitely sucks. Especially when identity is involved, I'm sure."