It all began on the morning of December 19th, 2014, when I woke up in an unfamiliar bedroom. A simple room with plain white walls, wooden flooring, and a ceiling fan whose light shined down on me, nudging my eyes to flutter open. There was a dresser and a wardrobe in the room, both very minimalistic in their design, and both up against a wall with a wooden door. It was all pleasant, if not basic, but the fact that I did not recognize this room immediately concerned me.

In the pursuit of answering the obvious questions filling my brain, I tossed the soft and warm covers off of myself and stood up. In doing so, I felt a strange weight on my chest, and absentmindedly sent one of my hands to investigate. I felt skin, which was already odd considering I always wore a shirt when sleeping, but something about its form felt wrong. It was soft, squishy, sensitive, and… swollen. As I peered down to observe my chest, I moved my hand out of the way, where it crossed my field of vision.

The hand was a shade of brown far darker than the skin tone I’ve grown accustomed to, being White, Caucasian, of European descent, or whatever term you prefer. Surprised by this sight, I naturally shot my eyes down to the rest of my body, where I was greeted by what was unmistakably the body of a woman. A fully naked woman at that. I jumped back in response, covering my chest and pressing my legs together.

I know that to most teenage boys that this would be a sort of sexual fantasy. Waking up in the body of an attractive naked woman. But I was not the sort of person who would be enticed by that proposition. Instead, I was desperate to be clothed, to retain some sense of… modesty.

I immediately went to the wardrobe nearby, thrusting it open, only to be met with some especially bizarre contents. I found sex toys, a dominatrix outfit, and some provocative outfits that looked to either be used for nightlife activities… if that’s even the right term. There was also a collection of half a dozen suits, men’s suits, all of which were very clearly tailored for a tall woman’s frame.

Amidst all the bizarre choices in clothing, I was able to find enough normal looking clothing to assemble an outfit. A basic bra and panty that matched my current skin tone, a long-sleeved light blue and navy baseball tee, and some black skinny jeans. 

Even after dressing my new ‘self’, I was still overcome with… discomfort. The way the panty tightly brushed against my crotch, the way the bra clenched my chest, and the way the shirt and pants encased my form, tightly locking its already slender features. It all was a harsh reminder for me. A reminder that I was no longer myself. A reminder that my body was different in oh so many ways, and that I had no idea how or why this happened. It frustrated and frightened me. But even in this state, I knew that I would get nowhere by staying in this small bedroom, so I quickly made my way out the wooden door.

I entered a large foyer, one that kept with the theme of the bedroom with its white walls, wooden floor, and limited furnishings. There was a large circular crimson rug placed in the center of the room, along with a bungee chair, a wooden desk, and a laptop plugged into a single power outlet in the wall. As opposed to the usual pair of two. Beyond that, the room had a total of four wooden doors. Three along the same wall as the bedroom door, and one on the opposite wall. On that wall, there was also a small window, the sole source of light in this dimly lit room.

I quickly made my way to the light, my now long and black hair falling into my field of vision as I did so. I peered through the glass to see a gorgeous view of snow drenched mountains. Pine trees poking from the sea of white. And the low morning sun, shining down on what looked to be a winter wonderland. I let out a ‘wow’ as I took this majestic sight in. But the sound of my new voice was enough for me to remember that I should get back to figuring out how and why I was in this situation..

I turned to the three doors, all equally and neatly aligned on the long western wall, the bedroom door still open to my right. I went into the center door, which led into a pristine and white a bathroom that featured a large circular bath filled with water. There, I was met with a gust of steam upon opening the door. To my left were a porcelain sink and toilet. To my right was a wall-bound full-length mirror. A mirror I naturally went to in order to get a better look at myself. At my new body.

I began examining myself from the top down, starting with my black hair, which was a little disorganized from a night’s sleep, a classic example of bedhead, and ended right before reaching my shoulders. Without a brush or comb in sight, I opted to tidy up my hair with my hands, parsing my fingers through its smooth yet thick strands. For a second, I found myself twirling a clump through my finger, pleased by its texture, but my attention was soon diverted to the face I’d revealed by tidying my hair.

I’m not even sure how to describe it beyond terms like beautiful, gorgeous, stellar, stunning, and so forth. It looked to be idealized, youthful, and did not resemble my true face in the slightest. As I stared, I began to note a few oddities with my new appearances. Such as the color of my irises, which were a dulled crimson. It was unusual, a bit intimidating, and went to raise another question I developed as I stared at my complexion and visage. For I was unable to parse what ethnicity this new body of mine was. Despite saying that the skin tone was a shade of brown, which it is, I was certain the ethnicity wasn’t purely African, Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian, Indian, or so forth. If anything, my new face led me to believe that it was an amalgamation of those and probably several other ethnicities. 

Curious about the rest of my body, I hesitantly removed the baseball tee and jeans I had dressed in moments ago. Everything was optimized, toned, slender, and without any sort of excess fat, blemish, or defect that I could see. It, not unlike the face, looked to be idealized. This body looked… perfect. I was amazed that a person like this actually existed in the real world, and the fact that I was in control of a body like this made the sight all the more surreal. As I thought this, I looked up to the mirror and saw my new reflection looking back at me, their face faintly reddened with embarrassment. 

“How is this possible?” I thought out loud, finally hearing my new voice speak a full sentence.

I flinched as I let those four words trickle out my mouth. For they were dripping with a sense of authority and strength. It was a far cry from what I was used to and with this new baseline, I attempted to speak again.

“Hello? Hel-lo? Check, check, testing one-two-three. I am Jad Novus, and I woke up in a mysterious place in another person’s body… Or maybe this body was custom made, like, in a genetics lab or something. That would explain why everything is so… perfect… But the amount of effort and time that would need to go into that would be absurd… Just as absurd as… switching bodies.”

Satisfied with my exploration, I put my clothes back on, left the bathroom, and returned to the foyer to finish my exploration of this simple home. I moved over to the third western door but was met with the sound of a lock refusing to budge. Thus limiting my options for discovery to the laptop curiously placed next to the window. I swiftly made my way to the wooden desk, sat myself down in the comfortable bungee chair, and a pricey-looking laptop. Pressing the power button immediately opened up an unfamiliar Linux based operating system. One with an equally unfamiliar web browser covering most of the screen, showing a series of search results. No password prompt or lock screen, just a browser window.

The search results were for ‘Oransen High.’ My high school, creatively named after the town, Oransen, Illinois. I wondered why anybody would look this up, and was met with a deluge of basic and familiar results. At least until I went to the second page of results, which painted a very different picture. 

My eyes widened as I spied terms like ‘murder,’ ‘disaster,’ ‘travesty,’ ‘terrorist attack,’ and ‘deaths’ among news headlines that were published mere minutes ago. It all seemed nonsensical, if not impossible, considering how tranquil my hometown was. So I mustered up enough sense to take a deep breath before diving into these articles in order to learn more about this supposed story. And the results… left me mortified.

The story was still developing, with the accompanying articles being rife with corrections, speculation, and slightly different permutations of the same information. I struggled to make sense of what they were saying at first, but after going through dozens of permutations of the same story, I was able to digest and piece the story together. The summary went something like this:

The events transpired from 8:55 to 9:45 AM CST, on December 19th, 2014, in the moderately sized township of Oransen, Illinois. Oransen High student, Jad Novus, male, age eighteen, went on a rampage at his school using homemade explosives, an as of yet unidentified toxic gas, and several weapons including an axe, an assault rifle, and a shotgun.

Using these weapons, Jad Novus murdered an as of yet undisclosed number of students and school staff, estimated at over eighty and over twenty respectively, and injured hundreds. Jad Novus was found dead on the school grounds, amidst several other dead students. He reportedly died by his own hands, having penetrated his eye with a scissor blade.

My mind went blank after reading through the articles. How? How was any of this even remotely possible? It wasn’t, I thought. It had to be fake. 

“This can’t be real!” I said to myself. “I’m just dreaming right now! This entire day has been nonsense so far. This is all a joke… the worst joke I’ve ever heard in my fucking life!”

I tried to rationalize this to myself, saying how I was incapable of doing these things. But it did not necessarily need to be ‘me’. If I was in this woman’s body, she, or some other third party, would be in mine, committing these atrocities. However… I still could not accept that this was possible.

“The police should’ve been able to stop them!” I thought. “There’s no way my body would be capable of murdering that many people! My school had security guards in place to prevent this kind of shit from ever happening!”

I escaped from this paranoia by reminding myself that I was not the only victim here. Oransen High had a student body of just over five-hundred people, and if over eighty of them were dead, there was a good chance that some of my friends did not make it. They would have gone after me, after this fake Jad Novus, and… they would be among the first to die, wouldn’t they? As far as the world at large was concerned, I could have killed my own friends in cold blood.

I feverishly began searching for more information, details about those who had perished, and searching for the names of my friends. Thankfully, I was unable to find Maxxie Flare, Zoe Xing, and Shiaka Kurokawa on the developing list of the deceased students. But I was able to uncover a series of photos that showed… the deceased students. 

The first photo I uncovered demolished all ambiguity I was clinging onto as I took this situation in. Shattered glass littered a hallway stained by ash and blood. Bodies with missing limbs, burnt skin, and torn uniforms, five of them pushed to the side of the hallway, their faces tattered beyond recognition. In the center of this gruesome image was a young woman, a freshman by the look of it, crawling along the floor with both of her legs missing, and a trail of blood following her. I recognized the pure, undeniable anguish and pain that must have filled her final moments as she tried crawling away from this disaster, desperately clinging to life. But it clearly was not enough… 

I took all of this in. The murder. The mass destruction. My unresolved confusion about where I am and why I looked like a completely different person. It was a lot. It was… too much. So much that I felt something in the back of my mind, something deep within my psyche, shatter. I was incapable of processing this vile reality, and after releasing a scream at the heavens, my consciousness shut down.