My world contracted down into two simple things, screaming and pain, with the recently descended darkness allowing nothing else as we plunged down into the abyss. Desperately I curled into a ball, trying to protect my head as best I could. Something occurred to me in that fall, an odd part of my brain quietly analyzing the situation and coming up with something strange. Specifically, we’d been falling for an awful long time.

I opened my eyes and uncurled slightly from my defensive curl to get a look around. What the hell? Our bus was just… floating in a vast chamber, so vast in fact that it didn’t appear to have walls, regardless of the massive granite pillars that thrust up into the dark above us.

A flash of vibrant green light and the bus was gone, each of us in the class gently floating to the floor like feathers carefully dropped by an ancient scientist. I felt myself settle on the cold stone, gasping as an unnatural chill threaded up through the meat of my body and into my bones.

The voices of my classmates rang out around me, flat and without echo. “Where are we?” “Is this heaven?” “Feels more like hell.” “But it’s so green! Hell isn’t green!”

That last was Joan, and I pushed myself up to look around at this strange place. She was right. Vines and moss covered everything beyond our immediate surroundings, as though we had been dropped into an overgrown ruin that stretched off into infinity. The only patch of stone with any size was the perfectly circular area we now found ourselves in.

“No, no, no,” a gentle woman’s voice said, whispering and rasping, deeply weary while both young and old. “Their bodies… that’s not right.”

The class stilled as one, and we turned in the direction the voice has come from. A young woman lay collapsed on a bed of moss, staring at us with pain-glassed eyes. She twitched and whimpered, one hand clutching at the other. “No, it’s not right… IT’S NOT RIGHT!” she murmured, her voice quickly rising into a desperate scream. “I can’t… I can’t do it again. I can’t fix it… I’m sorry.”

The air twisted and shuddered as a palpable power ripped out from her twisted form and my vision went white. Thoughts close to panic, I desperately tried to understand what my senses were reporting. Damage reports came in from all over, but with a calm that was more terrifying than anything they had to tell me. My body was unravelling like an old woolen sock, or a roll of toilet paper taken on an adventure by a pesky pet.

All too quickly, I was nothing, just a suggestion of the person that had been Daniel. Distantly, the woman whispered, her voice carrying over to us, despite the low volume. “Just have to make do… they’ll just have to… make… do.”

Her hand rose, frail and quivering, proving that I could still see despite my lack of eyes. Her hand paused for a brief moment, hanging suspended in midair like an arrow at the apex of its flight. Then she snapped her fingers, a brisk, sharp crack that echoed like destiny. The stuff that had been my body began to rush back in towards my soul, coalescing eagerly once more into a mortal shell that I could pilot.

Clothing came too, I could feel it as it wove itself together even as my muscles threaded themselves across my bones. A part of me wondered why this whole process hadn’t been painful, but I was too dazed and confused to really dwell on the issue. Most of me was busy spinning in circles and screaming in fear as new and unwelcome sensory inputs knifed themselves into my newly made brain.

The sensation of breathing once more lit my consciousness with the fire of life, my heartbeat drummed steady and strong, and my hands curled reflexively into fists. Too strange, too new, why did this feel so odd? Like putting on a brand new pair of shoes, everything felt stiff, chafing against me and threatening blisters. There was something else though, beyond the newness. A sense of rightness, deep and visceral, shocking me right to the core.

“Yes… wrong bodies… it wasn’t meant to… where did I go wrong?” the woman murmured, whimpering quietly in pain. “Nevermind, the spell is moving now, there is no stopping it.” Her eyes focused on us properly for the first time, sharpening for just a few moments through whatever torment she was enduring. “Look around, take note of your friend’s new appearances, the ears… find each other and save… save me, save everything. Please.”

With that, she collapsed, unmoving except for the slight rise and fall of her breathing. For many seconds, we all stared at her, before slowly turning our attention to those around ourselves.

I saw Leon, or a person I assumed was Leon. Gone was the lanky nerd, replaced with a man that could only be described as superman. Dark hair, dark eyes and a hard jawline, plus a physique like the aforementioned superhero. He wore a knight’s mail and plate, and with a start I realised why I recognised him.

“You look like that character you were using to test!” I exclaimed, voice slightly muffled by the mask I now wore. Wait… oh no…

“So do you!” he blurted, the surprised expression on his face almost comical on such a rugged and handsome face. He looked like he should only know one expression, the intense stare.

Shit, shit, shit… if I looked like my character… A quick clench of my thighs confirmed my suspicions. This new body was a woman’s body, the same one I’d designed not hours earlier. Sitting as I was, it wasn’t hard to look down and see it all, the wide hips, thick thighs with smooth muscle lurking just below the surface.

With my heart beating at a million miles a minute, I carefully took my hands and ran them down my sides. My breath caught as they found my waist, which felt like it just kept getting thinner and thinner. Wow, oh my… wow. There were tears in my eyes as my hands continued, now travelling out for what felt like minutes as they traversed the swell of my hips.

I had to pull them away as emotion rolled through me, a tsunami of conflict and confusion. Fuck, fuck fuck… I was a girl now, I could feel it in every curve, and even in the way it moved as I slowly lowered my arms, palms coming down to rest on the cold floor.

I was wearing that weird ninja suit that I’d been running around in as I tested things, although what I hadn’t taken into account was the chest wrap that was keeping my new nipples from poking through the otherwise skintight bodysuit. Didn’t stop the boobs from being visible if you knew what to look for, they were definitely there, just small.

Carefully crossing my arms, I looked up at everyone else to make sure I hadn’t already been found out. Leon hadn’t noticed shit, but he was oblivious, and probably more so now that he was in a big ol’ himbo body. Even the weird slightly pointed elf ears he had didn’t detract from the look.

There was a girl I didn’t recognise staring at me, she was short, with small pointed ears and medium length ginger hair… wait ginger hair. “Joan?” I mouthed, then realised she couldn’t see because I had a mask covering my face. “Is that you Joan?” I called, audibly this time. Ugh, now that I was listening for it, I could hear that my voice was definitely higher. I still had my masculine inflections and speech patterns, but my voice was higher, sweeter now.

“Yeah… you’re, um… Dan, right?” she asked, shuffling over to sit next to Leon and I.

Oh she totally knew. She wasn’t oblivious, she could see it, hear it. “Yes, I’m Daniel,” I told her, although I couldn’t maintain eye contact as I spoke.

“We all have pointy ears,” she said after a few seconds of silence, leaning forward and invading my personal space.

My breathing shuddered to a halt yet again and I froze, motionless as she poked at my ear, running her soft, warm finger along the slight, tapered length of it. Her eyes drilled into mine, penetrating deep as she explored the length of my strange new ear, one that we now all had. Wait... shit! I realised with alarm that she’d used it as an excuse to get close, to confirm it.

She opened her mouth to speak, but I shook my head in the negative, quickly and desperately. Her brows furrowed, knitting together in confusion as she stared at me, trying to figure out what my problem was. You and me both, Joan… you and me both.

“Oh my god, is that Victoria?” Joan asked, pointing past my shoulder.

I turned and followed where she pointed, and then promptly had to catch my eyes as they fell out of my skull. Oh my god, indeed. She was sort of similar to what she’d looked like previously, in that her eyes were still brown and her hair was still dark, but the rest… my eyes couldn’t help themselves as they ran down her body.

She wasn’t wearing a whole lot, just a short skirt and a crop top, although she had a cloak over her shoulders that looked like it could be wrapped around her to cover everything properly. Her body was almost obscenely hot, and I gulped when her piercing eyes landed on mine again, just like they had so many times during the testing day.

I jerked my head back around and hunkered forward, hugging my arms to my chest even tighter. That of course, only served to squish things that previously I hadn’t possessed. This was too much, overwhelming to the point of reducing my layers of cognitive thought down to sheer emotion.

“You okay, Dan?” Joan asked carefully, inching forward again.

Stupid question Joan. “Why the hell would I be okay? We just fell off the edge of a cliff in a bus, then ended up in some weird ass purgatory with a dying goddess who just tore us apart and remade us as our fucking testing characters from that shitty ass free labor job we just did!” I exclaimed, throwing my hands in the air for a brief moment before securing them around my new boobs once again.

“Whoa… okay, chill,” she frowned, irritated now. “You just… you’re usually calm as, I think this is like the first time I’ve ever seen you lose your cool.”

She was right, I should be more chill about this. Why wasn’t I more chill? I mean, besides the fact that actually being even remotely calm about this situation was definitely not normal, but still.

Taking a deep breath, I nodded, “Yeah… sorry. I guess I usually am more calm, but—“

I didn’t get a chance to finish my apology, because the weird magic of that goddess and this place was once again on the move. It was like gravity was moving, changing its direction on an axis that I couldn’t comprehend. I felt myself sliding, slipping through space and time as darkness shifted to engulf me. The last thing I saw before everything turned black was the same thing happening to Joan, Leon and everyone else in the class.