There was a very loud SLAP followed by a particularly high pitched “OWWWWWWW!!!!!!”
Did her hand just teleport to her forehead, or was that just me? And why is there a literal dust cloud around where her arm used to be?
Soon after, the same thing happens except this time it's her left hand and the whine is slightly lower in volume.
What do I even do here? Should I ask if she's ok? Should I comfort her? Should I just do nothing? In my already somewhat limited social skills no experience before this has prepared me for a situation this absurd.
After writhing around with her hands to her eyes for a bit, counter girl very slowly moves her hand away from her face, squinting at it as if it betrayed all of her trust. After slowly putting her hand down, she looks over at me, still sitting there, staring with my mouth open. She stares back.
This continues for an uncomfortable amount of time until I just start laughing. The situation is just so completely unheard of that I can't help it.
“Aren’t you bigger?” A simple question pulls me away from my now coughing fit and I look at her in confusion.
“What do you mean?”
“You look taller and have more… muscle.” Now that she mentions it, I seem a bit higher when sitting than usual and when I look at my arms, they seem much bigger. Not body builder kinda size but more of a lean and defined shape, still much bigger. I stand up and before, I was a kinda tall guy already around 180 cm but now I’m well over 200. Hell, I might even be approaching 250. That was cool, but what wasn’t was how I discovered that I needed to hunch my back to walk naturally when I got up due to the now much closer roof.
“Huh. well you seem to have some improvements of your own too.”
She was still around the same height but her arms and legs were certainly not that defined before. Her body was now much more akin to that of an extremely well trained sprinter or endurance runner. Now that I think about it, she moved so fast that her hand literally blurred so…
“You also went through that pain when we were… right?”
A nod.
“This might sound really stupid but I think our bodies… how should I say this… were upgraded during that time.”
“What would your upgrade be then?”
I suspect it would be something to do with strength since I now have more mass to my muscles and my obvious height difference but I didn’t have any way of knowing until we met with other people. I said as much to the counter girl and she agreed. I’ve just realised now but I never actually got her name. “My name's Ben, what's yours?”
“I Guess we never mentioned it, huh. I’m Eva. I would say it’s nice to meet you but so far, apart from these upgrades or whatever they are, it hasn’t been the best experience.”
“Yeah, that makes sense.”
“...”
“...”
And thus, I managed to kill the conversation.
Not wanting to awkwardly sit around, I got up and decided to have a poke around outside to see what was damaged and holy shit. The first thing that hit me was the wind. Due to my change in stature, my shirt became completely useless as many tears appeared all over it and with its now comparatively small size, I just looked plain stupid so I took it off completely only to feel the full brunt of the sea breeze. The second thing? That bus that flipped over was on its side, just like before but what wasn’t like before, was that it’s now pushed right up against the shop next to the café. Wouldn’t there be people in there? I rushed over to the bus and looked into the front window but no one was to be seen. They must've all gotten out then.
Everything looked so destroyed and damaged that I genuinely didn’t think Diennard could fully recover from this for years and years after today. I wish I could take a… Picture… MY CAMERA! Holy shit, my camera!
I worked my ass off at a shitty factory job in high school to be able to afford that camera so I ran right back into the café and started rummaging through the rubble. A part of the roof had unfortunately collapsed right where I set my camera up so I got to work moving all the fallen material and before I knew it, I had found my case filled with lenses and not long after that, I found my camera. The battery was well dead and the lens as well as the screen seemed to be cracked so I changed the lens and battery and to my surprise, it still worked! I’m not sure If I’ve ever been so happy in my life!
I got up with the broadest smile on my face, looked over at Eva and immediately faltered.
She was looking at me in complete shock. I glanced around and jeez, I had somehow managed to carve a path out of the fallen concrete, just casually moving it away. As a sort of test, I grabbed one of the larger pieces of concrete with one hand and lifted.
“Well I think I know what my upgrade is.” I had managed to easily lift a large bit of rubble when it should have been plain impossible, especially with one hand.
Moving on… I ducked (literally) outside and was about to snap a few photos when everything went into shadow. I looked up and holy shit that is a rock. A very, and I mean very large rock. It’s moving slowly across the sky at around, if not slightly slower than the speed of a commercial airliner but is large enough to give us somewhat of a solar eclipse. I quickly took a picture. Maybe I’m too obsessed with this thing… nahh… that would be crazy.
I turn back to look at Eva. “Should we go look for other people?”
“That would probably be a good idea. The showground was the main evacuation centre for Diennard, right?”
I nodded.
Eva looked down, nodded resolutely as if to reassure herself and looked back at me. “Then we should go there.”
Ok, that was cute.
