This is an alternate branch of the storyline continuing from [5a] (Inspired by readers on [1], especially LunaSoliel. I will try to include all readers and commenters who offered inspirations. Please correct me if I miss or mislabel. Thank you!)

The Tall and Short Problems of a Cute Gamer Girl

[6A]
For the Primary Branch [6]

Leaving the bathroom, they both glanced at the master bedroom and realized that something was different. The bed was no longer an Alaska King to fit Jeremy. It was just a regular king. Furthermore, a pink pillow covered in shooting stars topped Jeremy’s side. Glancing in the closet revealed that none of Jeremy‘s old clothes remained. Rather, it appeared to be mostly Rachel’s stuff, along with clothing in a colorful array more suited for a girl Giselle‘s age.

Giselle stood there with her mouth clenched, as though she were balanced on a high, tight rope over a chasm. Just the littlest shift one way or another she feared might be enough to throw the rest of reality into chaos. Carefully, they walked to the living room to find some things the same, while others were drastically different. The same TV was still there and some of the production lighting, but the collection of video games and board games looked far less extensive.

Kirby and other family titles featured prominently, along with a selection of what appeared to be anime titles, some lighthearted adventures, and a handful of equestrian ones. Rachel scrunched her eyes up, approving of certain ones but finding others disappointing. Giselle felt gamer heartbreak that none of the rare titles seemed to be left. Not fair.

Looking around, they also discovered Giselle and Rachel had essentially traded phones. Rachel had the fancy one, while Giselle had the one a few models ago. That made sense, if it was like a hand me down to a kid. Upstairs though, was the biggest surprise as the complicated setup of everything for game streams had been muted into something more like a teen girl’s bedroom. Yes, they still had a fairly nice Apple computer and some viewing monitors, but all the lighting had been pruned back and the camera looked like an older model. Otherwise, Giselle had a bed lengthwise beside the window with star maps and collections of lenses, a telescope, and an old Nintendo Wii U set aside.

Overall, they both gathered the young girl that Giselle had become still had filmmaking ambitions, astronomical interest, and some sort of streaming presence on the Internet, but it was much more nascent than what it should’ve been. More advanced than her juvenile efforts with a camcorder in her own youth, but nothing like what she was expecting. Fortunately, Herschel appeared puzzled but unaltered. Rachel picked him up and carried him as they walked. And he protested the whole way.

In Rachel’s office, the setup appeared similar and included a large touchscreen with link capability and stylus and a physical canvas in the corner. She had been hoping to expand from just seamstress creations and some graphic work to stuff like this. The guestroom had a lot more stuffed animals and pillows.

Before they could really process all of these new developments, there came a knock on the front door. They both approached carefully, and Giselle found herself creeping behind Rachel‘s leg for protection. It was Jeremy‘s parents. Giselle turned away and smacked her fists against her side. She shook her head and took a deep breath before telling Rachel to open it up.

Lily and Gerald walked inside and greeted them warmly. Lily had her usual, soft slightly-curled bright blond bob cut with some of the color fading with age. Gerald steadied his uneasy right hand with his cane as he carefully stepped through the threshold. His thinning hair still had a few flecks of gray near the top and along the sideburns. He pushed his thick glasses up and beamed at the two of them.

No matter the confusion of all this, Giselle stepped into an enveloping hug from her mom, which she hadn’t felt quite like this since she was a boy of perhaps nine or ten. Years she barely remembered now. The hug from her dad didn’t have quite the same bear-like sweep, as he was several decades stiffer and slower. But she still wouldn’t trade it for anything.

“Sweet little cherub. It’s so wonderful to see you. Did you have a good day at school?” Gerald brushed her hair back. Lily kissed her on the forehead and touched her on the shoulder as she asked, “What are you wearing? Something‘s not fitting right.”

Rachel stepped in and attempted to explain that they had gone shopping earlier because Giselle had been out of sorts and not feeling well. She noted, “She’s growing up and I took her to more of a grown-up store. And she tried on one of mine I discovered. Growing up a little too fast there.”

Gerald held a hand up to block his sight, mainly as a joke. He eagerly agreed she was growing up too fast and learning too many things but sounded more melancholy than stern. Lily offered to help her change. Giselle felt a little bit internally rebellious. If she was meant to be almost twelve then she could change her clothes on her own. But that sounded like the thoughts of a kid her age.

So she retreated from that and just obediently let Lily help her change into something that felt like a sports top underneath what they got at the store. It helped some of the lingering icky feelings from being through several rounds of sweat from a cat and life-changing terror. Giselle wobbled like she was a scarecrow stuck on a stick that wasn’t planted well. Lily questioned if she was all right, touching her face, arms, and forehead. Giselle gave a weak nod that totally felt like a mood from a tween going on teenager.

Lily reassured her by saying that “Your auntie has a nice big slice of cheesecake over at her house” for her and as much minestrone, bread, and peeled shrimp as she could eat. Aunt and uncle… so that was how it was going to play it. Her mom and dad had been switched into her aunt and uncle even though the resemblance was still uncanny. Who or what had it made into her actual parents though?

The next piece of the puzzle dropped when she enthusiastically agreed to all that food over at their place and Lily followed it up by asking if she had, “…a good day with your mom?”

Mom. By adoption. For how long? What had the blasted seat done to her family and her life? She had the irrepressible desire to stomp on it with a steel, spiked boot until it was plastic rubble. But she shared as much of a smile as she could give and assured her it was a nice day. After making sure Giselle didn’t need a trim, they went back to the living room as Gerald mentioned someone in the neighborhood who was planting a new garden. He illustrated with gestures of his cane.

As a family, they rode over to Lily and Gerald‘s house. It didn’t quite look the same as the last time Jeremy visited. They had a massive remodel in their front room along with new fixtures and different wallpaper. All the old wallpaper was still around, and the rest looked like it was patched up as well as possible.

It had to be because Rachel and Jeremy set up an online presence for them to sell artworks of their own. Lily had some custom wigs, while Gerald painted rocks lightly chipped to look like different animals, and they had ambitions for more. That income beyond what work Gerald could still manage and Lily’s full time at the salon had allowed them to fix things up comfortably.

With an 11-year-old girl instead of a workaholic, 33-year-old man with several online projects, life was very different. It was like stepping into an unfamiliar universe. The balm against so much uncertainty and change was the familiar, soul-soothing flavor of Lily’s cooking. Giselle dug in with several servings of soup. She barely resisted drooling on the edge of the tablecloth.

The cheesecake after was standard supermarket fare, but she still relished it with a renewed vividness to her youthful palette. One of Jeremy‘s problems as he grew up and got older was getting overly sensitive to the textures of food. He was never terribly fussy when it came to what his parents made because they were often accommodating but they never had a lot of money, so making the most of everything was essential. From a young age, Jeremy despised wasting any food because he knew how much it cost. Even in the back of Giselle‘s mind at this moment, she was filing away the presence of the receipt from that clothing boutique as a necessary return for the bra she could no longer wear.

Giselle tried to go back for extra portions, but her tiny stomach wasn’t having any of that. She made sure to abundantly, enthusiastically, and exuberantly shine her appreciation on “her aunt and uncle” for a fantastic meal. She embraced both of them to the point that they teased she was trying to butter them up for something.

After dinner, Giselle felt relief to see that her oldest cat, Bixley, still existed despite all the terrible twists that the toilet seat had thrown in her way. The white kitty, with patches of black and silver, was getting on in years but happily fed and thoroughly loved by Lily and Gerald. He snuggled up to Giselle as though this was just another normal day. Gerald eased into the long green couch in the living room to watch some cowboy murder mystery series on cable which Giselle didn’t recognize, not because she thought the reality changes had invented it, but more because she rarely watched any sort of cable.

All the while, she kept a watchful eye out for suspicious details about her life and the lives of those affected by this day. The room in the back of the house, which used to be her bedroom before college, had all the stored equipment and extras she expected but her bed had been replaced with a fold-out sofa bed and a deflated air mattress that had to be for guests.

Plenty of decorations appropriate for a young girl lingered in the back along with albums, an old computer, and plenty of books and papers carefully hidden away. She found what looked to be a cotillion dress along with photos of her wearing it. Jeremy had been prom king back in high school but not because of any actual popularity but more because everyone thought it was a great, good-natured joke.

Beyond that, she found it difficult to really hunt down any clues to the chaos spun into her life. She tried to piece it together though. It seemed quite strange that the seat had done so many things to her, but it hadn’t shifted where she lived. She still had a place that was both workspace and a girl’s bedroom. And several of the other spaces retained many of their qualities. Rachel‘s room and the guestroom still existed the same way. That could just be from how she decided to set up the house, although it raised many questions about why an apparently single woman adopted Giselle from some unseen parents, despite the fact that she grew up in the Midwest instead of the South. It didn’t make sense that she would move all this way just to adopt a girl and then live in this area.

Giselle suspected there had to be something there so far as the rules that the seat had to abide by. It seemed that it couldn’t do monumental shifts. It couldn’t suddenly transplant people across the country or throw into flux a large variety of things. Somewhere in her brain, a little spark lit up… as she realized it was self-preservation. The toilet seat couldn’t change things so monumentally that it didn’t exist in the space it was trying to change! It couldn’t alter its own history.

Therefore, it had to plausibly be on the toilet. If Rachel moved across the country and Giselle was still in her parent’s house as a kid, then it would be literally impossible for what happened to happen. That was interesting. Self-preservation, despite the fact it was “broken“. She would have to keep that in mind and see what she could do with it.

As the evening wound down, Giselle noticed Rachel trying to carefully dig into family history, but it was clear Lily and Gerald had little interest in discussing Giselle‘s biological parents, whoever they were. Ultimately, they both decided it wasn’t worth upsetting their family.

After a tile-laying game that they used to play more of when Jeremy was younger, they headed back home. Rachel froze the leftovers and made sure the master toilet had the storage bath seat until she could come up with something else to put there. Giselle set aside all her oversized bras with the receipt and flinched when Rachel folded her arms and raised a playful eyebrow to say, “Now, missy, you better make sure you get washed up and ready for bed. You have school early tomorrow.”

With wide, fearful eyes, Giselle gave her head a little shake. Words fled from her until a blanket of relief fell as she noticed Chel’s smirk. She tapped her head and announced, “Not brainwashed yet, fortunately. You? Any desire to let a ‘mom’ slip out?”

Giselle confirmed that the thought was nowhere near her. And she had no interest in going to school again. The confinement. Forced to be among so many other people. Having to make connections with them at random and all that stuff that working from home and having her own community tilted away from. Having to understand math. Freaking gym. And so many other things she didn’t want to even think of.

Rachel rocked her head and had to agree. She wouldn’t be caught dead living that over again. But this was the situation they were trapped in until they could get a fix from that website. “I gathered which middle school you’re attending. Though you haven’t been going very long. Just a few weeks. Fortunately, you finished up sixth grade. No need for elementary. And yeah, I think it’s dumb. But this is how things are and if we can’t fix them, then we have to deal with it.”

Giselle felt woozy even considering the possibility again that she would be stuck as a junior high girl and have to deal with at least six more years of school along with the insane expense of college. It was beyond daunting. It was like having a fully developed character in an RPG one minute and then your save is corrupted and what you have now is a character at a low level without any specialties, all the system details have changed, and XP is even harder to grind. Yeah, that was about as close as she could imagine it.

Despite many internal protests, she washed up and put on some generic pajamas from the closet. Her bed upstairs, despite the inclusion of the cosmos, felt desperately lonely. Jeremy hated when Rachel had to travel on her own, and knew the feeling was mutual. The empty space on the other side of the bed felt like a hollowness inside. Herschel curling up sometimes helped.

The unusual pillow on what had been Jeremy’s side suggested there was a place for Giselle if she needed it. She did. Scampering down the steps after lights out, she peeked into the master bedroom. Rachel had fallen asleep quickly, but her arms still seemed to reach out for where Jeremy would’ve been. Creeping over and slipping underneath quietly, Giselle squeezed Rachel‘s hand and laid her head against the star pillow. Rachel‘s breathing quieted, and it didn’t take long before Giselle joined her in restful slumber.

[Since this is meant to be interactive, feel free to suggest ideas and prompts for future/alternate branch storylines. Some branches are already written but this will allow me to best pick new/alternate ones. I'm currently just rolling dice.]

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