Matt’s mouth tasted like a nasty combination of stale bread and sickly sweetness.

That was the first thing he noticed as he came back into consciousness.

The second thing he noticed was an annoying numbness in his right arm, as he realized he’d slept on it weirdly.

And the third, as he was starting to realize was the norm with this body, was the mildly-bothersome tightness he felt in his underwear.

He blinked a few times and rubbed his eyes despite knowing that was bad for them, trying in vain to clear all the grime that had built up overnight. Swiping his phone from the bedside table, he saw that it was already past noon, which wasn’t surprising. He and Kat had stayed up late into the night doing all manner of research, trying to dig up any leads on Edgar Lund and what had become of him after his story was put on the Mandela Effect site.

Unfortunately, everything had turned up zilch. Most likely, he had posted on one of the long-dead forum sites they weren’t able to recover through the Wayback Machine, and they weren’t about to go calling one of the many random numbers belonging to the numerous Ed, Edd, and Eddy Lunds they’d found on WhitePages. In the end, when the pizza ran out and the leads dried up, they decided to turn in for the night… or rather the morning, seeing as it was already six.

All of this was running through Matt’s mind as he clumsily waddled to the restroom, but it was all flushed away soon after, when he realized he had a massive problem on his hands.

Well, more like in one hand.

The present engorgement was proving to be more annoying by the second, as with it, he was unable to so much as direct the stream he so desperately needed to release without pinching off all flow. In the end, he had to resort to an awkward thirty-degree wall lean, as if doing a wall pushup and stopping midway, in order for things to go in the direction he needed.

As frustrating as that experience had been, however, it was also strangely validating. As in, he had to go through that whole song and dance like other men did because he was a man too and his body was just doing normal man-stuff, and the knowledge of that fact gave him a warm, fluttery feeling in his chest. Hell, the experience of standing up to pee was, in and of itself, incredible, though he’d already experienced that a few times the day prior.

And of course, now that the ordeal had been ordealed, Matt’s meat chose this moment to start releasing its internal pressure valve, bringing things back down to nearer his ordinary size. He rolled his eyes but still ended up grinning anyway.

Looking in the mirror was as refreshing as it had been all day yesterday. He made some faces, did some poses, manipulated his voice a bit as he tried making it take on different tones, then finally did what he came there to do and washed his damn hands. He’d slept shirtless for the first time in ages, and as he got clean, he was able to admire the decidedly flat-chested certified pre-owned body he’d recently gotten the keys to. The previous owner didn’t treat it well and he could do without the flab, but it still ran. He was willing to put in the elbow grease to begin a refurbishment project that could create a meat machine that ran more smoothly than anything he could have dreamed of before. The testosterone coursing through his veins would make losing weight and gaining gains so much easier than when he’d tried in the past, for sure.

When Matt finally left the bathroom, he encountered a very sleepy Kat, covered in one of Amber’s graphic tees. It was emblazoned with the words “Black Mesa Research Facility” and a logo of some vague shape within a circle; the titular Mesa, perhaps. It was far too big for Kat’s diminutive frame and god did that make Matt’s heart skip a beat. She was just goddamn lost in the fabric, like a little animal snuggled in a big blanket and fuck I shouldn’t be seeing Amber’s gay girlfriend like this Matt get yourself under control!

Presumably in the absence of any audible speech from his side, Kat decided to speak up. “Mornin’, Allll… Matt… sorry ‘bout that…” she mumbled, punctuating her exhaustion with a yawn.

“Heya Kat, good morning. And no worries,” Matt replied, yawning right back. “It’s only been, what, a bit less than twenty-four hours? And you’re, like, half asleep. Not gonna hold that against you.”

“Thankies, much appreciate… Uh, are you done with the, um…” Kat started trying to snap, but in her exhaustion, could only manage a weak little skin-slapping sound. “The, uh, the… fuckin’…”

Matt awkwardly grinned, trying to hide how he felt about her increasing levels of adorableness and hoping no blush was forming on his face. “You mean the bathroom? Yeah, I’m out here, aren’t I?” He walked (maybe too quickly) over to Amber’s computer desk, wanting to distract himself ASAP.

“Yeah, that… Thanks again…” Kat weakly responded as she went in and shut the door behind her.

Matt woke up the slumbering technicolor beast and punched in the PIN that he apparently shared with Amber. Some Discord notifications came in, but Matt noticed one of importance, from Jessica.

[8:34 AM] jessiferparker85: Hey, Amber. I’m so sorry about not being able to return last night, but by the time my work at the lab was concluded, it was already nearing ten. I figured it would be better to get some sleep and have an early start this morning. I’d meant to tell you then, but it simply slipped my mind. Let me know when you three are free.

[9:13 AM] jessiferparker85: Amber, are you there? Am I able to head over?

[10:27 AM] jessiferparker85: I’m going to make the assumption that you’re all asleep, like the animals you are. A consistent sleep schedule would do wonders for your health, you know.

[12:21 PM] jessiferparker85: You’ve got to be kidding me. It’s past midday! How can you still be sleeping at this hour? I’m coming over there to rouse you, and you better not make me wait outside.

Matt rolled his eyes. Jess would make a good mom someday. He checked the clock in the system tray: 12:25 PM. They still had some time before she got there, regardless of if she was walking or taking the slow city buses.

He heard the bathroom door open behind him and turned his seat to face Kat as she exited. “Jess is coming over right now. She was trying to ask if she could but got tired of waiting at about the same time we woke up, and now she’s just on her way anyway.”

Kat yawned, hand over her mouth. “Guess it’s probably about time we started the day, but god do I not feel up for it.” Her face scrunched up cutely, and Matt had to look away lest he get affected. “D’ya think we have time to go to the, uh…” Weak snapping again. “…place with the snacks and drinks and stuff down the street?”

“The convenience store?” Matt thought for a second. “It’ll have to be Maplewood Market and not Rodeo Grocery, though. It’d take too much time to get there and back.” Rodeo Grocery was the largest tenant in the building that also housed Chet’s Waffle Stop and provided a larger selection than Maplewood, but Maplewood was only two blocks away in the opposite direction compared to Rodeo’s five.

“Ugh, but they don’t have fresh coffee there!” Kat moaned. “You’re seriously gonna make me drink a shitty energy drink for breakfast?”

“It’s either that or a decaffed Kat, so…” Matt shrugged. “And don’t they have those Starbucks thingies, with all the different flavors?”

Kat made a disgusted face. “That. Isn’t. Fucking. Coffee.”

“Picky this morning, aren’t we?” Matt chuckled, getting up from the chair and stretching. “C’mon, we gotta hurry if we want to get back before Jess finds an empty apartment and throws a fit out on the front lawn.”

* * *

They did, in fact, return to Jessica waiting for them outside the apartment, though tapping her foot impatiently and sending messages to Kat did not yet qualify as a ‘fit’, Matt decided. As they made their way up the front path, Jess whirled around to glare at them.

“You know, if you were going to go out for snacks, the least you could have done would have been to let me know,” she huffed. “I could have asked for one of those Starbucks drinks as recompense.”

“Nice to see you too, Jess,” Kat muttered, taking a sip of her nearly-empty Red Bull. “And, gross.”

“Sorry, we thought we’d be back before it mattered!” Matt sheepishly replied. “Mr. Chaudhary’s too nice to turn down when he wants to chat, but god can those conversations last a while.”

Jess sighed. Matt stepped around her and unlocked the front door with the key he’d found in Amber’s desk, and the three of them went inside.

“Is Amber still sleeping?” Jess whispered, glancing towards the open bedroom door. Matt looked at her in confusion, before realizing she hadn’t actually been told what had happened yet.

“No, she, uh… kinda fell into another portal. And she’s probably back in my universe?” He scratched the back of his head, watching as Jess’s eyes got as big as saucers. “Though we have no way to be sure of that, which isn’t… great.”

“When? Where? How do you know that’s what happened?!” Jess was frantically looking around the room, eyes settling on her notebook that she’d left on the dining room table the afternoon prior. She dashed over to it, picked it and her pen back up, and began clicking the pen rapidly. “I can’t believe I missed yet another interdimensional event!”

“I mean… not that many two-inch mud puddles out there that can suck up entire adults, right?” Kat remarked.

Jessica paused her writing. “…Explain. Please.”

“As it turns out, the puddle I fell into by the dumpsters out back was what brought me here,” explained Matt, taking over. “I thought I just tripped on the curb, I didn’t realize I also took a trip interdimensionally.”

“And then last night, he was gonna take a swan dive right into the pavement, and Amber fuckin’ rushed in and saved him, and suddenly she was gone!” Kat finished.

“Into the…” Jessica’s hand froze as she looked up at Matt, shock plainly visible. “Why on earth were you going to do that?!”

 “Because the stupid fucking piddle wasn’t letting me in and so I figured why not try to recreate my fall? Only…” He put his hand behind his head, sheepishly. “I miscalculated my speed or strength or something, and I was gonna split my head open like a cantaloupe on the concrete pillar that holds up the dumpsters, at least until Amber pushed me.”

“Oh shit right, and then the fuckin’ streetlamp exploded!” Kat interjected. “When Amber disappeared, it got really bright really quick until-” She made a poof sound effect with her mouth, hands splaying out.

“It did? Shit, that’s… that can’t be a coincidence, right?” Matt was surprised that he hadn’t noticed, but to be fair, he’d had a lot on his mind.

“Doubtful, yes…” Jess had returned to her furious scribbling. “So the phenomena might have an effect on the local electrical fields…”

“After that, we got to doing some research on stuff related to people being transported to other worlds through water and found this.” Matt pulled out his phone and quickly navigated back to the page of interest on the Mandela Effect site.

Jessica squinted at the screen Matt held out to her. “’Inter-Plane Travelers: Documenting Our Multi-Faceted Universes Since 1995’?”

“Okay yeah, we know what it looks like, but, like, fuckin’… just read the page!” Kat said, nearly vibrating in place.

“Could we possibly pull this up on a bigger screen?” Jessica kneaded her temples. “I’m getting a headache already.”

The trio sat themselves around Amber’s computer, Matt taking the driver’s seat and wiggling the mouse around. The dual screens blinked to life, revealing tabs upon tabs of pages from their long session of research. The currently selected tab was one of the broken forum links they’d found, with a GIF of a stick figure man digging a hole surrounded by the WordArt text “Under Construction… Check Back Soon!” Matt switched over to the very first open tab, the one with the same page he’d tried to show on his phone, and got up to present his seat to Jess with a flourish of his hand.

She sat down and began to read, scanning the whole page with impressive speed. When she got to the end, she scoffed. “No bibliography? Amateurs.”

“Literally, yeah.” Matt leaned past her and took the mouse, clicking on the ‘Sources’ link in the footer. “This is all that we have, and it’s incredibly fucking hard to parse. On top of that, half the links are broken, and half of those aren’t cached anywhere like the Internet Archive or anything."

“Some of these are Usenet posts, so maybe that’d explain why they seemed ‘broken’ to you,” Jessica smirked, unable to contain her occasional smugness in this instance.

“Jess, we love you, but do you really think we have no idea what Usenet is?” Matt rolled his eyes.

“Speak for yourself, I fuckin’ don’t,” Kat commented, flopping down onto the bed as she was wont to do. “Some old-timey not-really-Internet thing, as far as I got from Matt.”

“More or less, sure, though that undersells it by quite a lot, I would say.” Jessica was clicking through all the open tabs, seemingly double-checking them against the sources list she’d pulled out to its own window.

“We already checked all the archives we could find, Jess,” Matt sighed. “It’s just not there.”

“All the archives you can find is different from all the archives I can find,” Jess mumbled, still doing her cross-checking. “I’ve got some contacts in the data hoarding community, and I can bet you that someone there has archives of these more obscure Usenet groups. I’m less confident about the World Wide Web forum posts, however.”

“Data hoarding? How the fuck do you end up in that?” Kat asked, bending her neck to look at them without actually sitting up again.

Jessica shrugged, a small smirk playing on her face. “I’ve always been interested in lost media, and the people there helped me find a show that ran for one season, never got a home media release, and was dear to my childhood. I’ve even given back by digitizing some old VHS tapes I had that held some long-lost commercials.” She opened a private browser window and went to a web-based IRC  chat client. “If one of the users I’m thinking of is online, I should be able to get them to spin up a private endpoint for us to browse soon.”

“Kickass.” Matt plopped himself down next to Kat. “Super grateful you’re on the team, Jess. Seriously, I literally don’t know what we’d do without you.”

“You’d probably be throwing yourself into mud puddles every fucking night, you dumbshit,” Kat quipped. Matt turned to look at her as she laid next to him, and she grinned. His face began to flush and he hurried to twist his head away, hoping she hadn’t seen.

You and Kat doesn’t work, moron. Not this Kat, not your Kat. She’s a lesbian, and you’re not a girl. You were never gonna work. Why can’t you get that through your thick skull?

He groaned.

God damn it, why couldn’t accepting I’m a guy make this any easier?

“What’s up, my guy?” Kat was concerned. Of course she was, seeing as how she was generally a good person and all and he’d just made a sound associated with negativity.

“I dunno, just…” He sighed, internally debating whether it was appropriate to lay this on her and if she’d be weirded out, but ultimately… “You remember what I said Friday, about my attempted relationship with my Kat?”

“Mm-hm?” God, her eyes were just so big and curious and adorable and gaaaah.

“I thought… I was hoping that finally coming out to myself as a guy would make it easier to…” He sighed. “I dunno, to get over this stupid crush I have on you – on her.” A quick correction, but unfortunately not quick enough to escape Kat’s scrutiny.

“Still feeling the big feels for me, huh? I can’t exactly blame you, I’m pretty damn awesome.” She grinned. “Unfortunately for you, big guy, I can’t turn this shit down, the dial’s stuck at eleven.”

“Not asking you to change, I definitely don’t want you to be less amazing. Just…” He groaned, his hands clamping over his eyes, as if he could squeeze the frustration out of his head like a particularly juicy and plentiful orange.

“Yeah, there’s a bunch of new shit you gotta unpack now, but to be fair, you’ve only known you were a guy for like a day. Give yourself some time, space, and leeway to make mistakes.” She snickered. “Hey, if nothing else, me not being attracted to you back then should be, like, super affirming of who you’ve always been.”

A conflicted feeling of simultaneous euphoria and heartbreak washed over Matt, like a nice warm shower that smelled of rotten eggs. “It helps a bit. Maybe more with time.”

They laid there in near silence, with only the click-clack of Jessica’s fingers on Amber’s mechanical keyboard going louder than the whoosh of the air conditioner.

“Anyone else on your radar?”

This roused Matt from his stupor. “H-wha?”

“You know. Any other crushes, people you got the hots for? Surely you couldn’t have just been crushing on me and me alone for two damn years.”

“I… huh.” He’d been pining after Kat for so long, wanting things to work but not really getting why they weren’t going to, that he hadn’t put much thought into it. “That’s a good fucking question.”

“No, the fucking comes later, let’s just start with who you wanna kiss.” Kat was smirking again.

“Ha… ha… ha.” He laid a thick layer of sarcasm on each ‘ha’, rolling his eyes for added effect, but couldn’t stop the corners of his mouth from curling up a bit. “Seriously, I have no clue.”

“In that case, lemme give you a parallel-dimension cheat code.” Kat wiggled a bit on the bed, bringing her mouth closer to Matt’s ear. “After Amber and I started dating, Fer confessed to me that he was disappointed Amber was… well, he called it ‘straight’ at the time, but clearly that was the wrong word for it,” she whispered.

“Okay… so?” He was unsure what she was getting at, and the expression on his face must have given it away.

She rolled her eyes. “So, dumbass, you’re bi, right? As in, into women and men?”

“…Right? Maybe enbies too? I dunno yet, I don’t really get them, exactly, though-”

Kat waved her hand in front of his face, dispelling that train of thought. “Whole other can of worms there, let’s just focus on the ‘and men’ part for now.”

Matt shrugged as best he could but let her continue.

“And Fer’s gay, yeah? Meaning he’s into…?” Kat paused, seemingly waiting for Matt to fill in something obvious.

“Men, right, yeah, we have that in common. We’re in competition. So what?”

At this, Kat sat straight up, twisted herself around, and grabbed Matt’s head by the cheekbones.

“You’re a man! Fucking… you’re compatible now, dumbass!” She was speaking loudly now but not quite yelling, in what seemed like a futile attempt to not distract Jessica by not screaming what she clearly wanted to. “You were literally just complaining about how you and other-me wouldn’t work because you’re a guy! You dense, dense motherfucker!”

“…Oh.” Matt’s eyes widened. “Oh! Holy… whoa!” He’d grasped it on a conceptual level, that he was now able to be with gay men, but hadn’t yet recontextualized his existing relationships with that new understanding.

“Yuh-huh!” She was nodding rapidly now. “And… and… Fer was into Amber! So…” Kat stared intently into his eyes, almost begging him to understand more quickly.

The gears were turning faster now. “So… my Fer might be into me?”

“Bingo, Mattie! Fuckin’ bingo as shit!”

Matt couldn’t even process the nickname with how overwhelmed he was with this realization. Having known Fer was gay nearly the entire time he’d known him, he was never on his radar as a potential love interest. But now? Now he was suddenly thrown into a whole new universe of romantic possibility as he rethought every interaction they’d had.

Fer was kind, sweet, caring, calming, and, well… definitely physically attractive. His sandy blond curls carefully whipped into a mop that looked simple and effortless but he knew actually took time each morning to get just right, his oh-so-slightly toned arm muscles betraying just a hint of their power, his calves jutting out so far they almost looked angular, and most importantly…

Matt sighed.

His eyes.

Stormy greenish-gray that reminded him of the sea on its coldest days, yet still managed to fill him with the warmth of a beach on its sunniest. They gave him a mysterious aura, which when combined with his natural tendency to be a quiet observer in new social situations, left people with the incorrect impression that he was a stoic ‘dark and silent’ type, which was proven to not be the case once he got comfortable; he simply felt that people-watching was the easiest way to get used to the rhythm of a new group. Furthermore, the way his eyes crinkled when he laughed, contracted in confusion, and widened when concerned for someone else…

Fingers started snapping in front of his eyes. “Earth to Matt. Mattie. Matias. Mattholomew. Mattster. Matt Daddy. Ma-”

“Fucking what do you want?” Matt slapped Kat’s hand out of his face, stopping her from bestowing any more nicknames upon him.

“Oh, nothing. Just that you were spacing out.” She grinned, a mischievous glimmer in her eye. “It’s been, like, a couple minutes since you started hardcore crushing on Fernando.”

“I- no! Wh-” Matt could feel the heat on his face and knew he must have been hardcore blushing.

“Dude, right after you picked up what I was putting down, you fuckin’ stopped talking and just stared at the ceiling for, like, two minutes straight. And you sighed, and you got a cute little smile on your face when you did.” Kat reached over him and grabbed the pillow closest to them, holding it over his face in a very threatening way, or at least as threatening as one could be with a soft, fluffy rectangle. “So either you admit it, or you’re gonna get bapped.”

“N-no, shut-”

BAP!

Matt yelped, more in surprise than actual pain (which, yeah, it’s a pillow). He quickly rolled over into a sitting position and snatched the other pillow before she could attack again. “You wanna go, bitch? You really wanna fuckin’ go? I’ve got big meaty man muscles now, I’mma bap you into next week-”

“I don’t suppose you two would be willing to take a short break from your goofing around to take a look at this?”

Immediately, the playful tension between the two collapsed and they both swiveled around to face Jess, who was looking back at them with an indiscernible expression on her face, caught somewhere between a smile and a frown. Matt scooched himself off the bed and leaned over her, one hand on the desk, to stare at the contents of the monitor.

From: "EdgarTheUnperson" <email redacted>

Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy.beyondweird

Subject: Re: THEY CHANGED BERENSTEIN BEARS SPELLING

Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2003 18:21:29 -0500

Holy shit its like this but on a worldwide scale for me. Theres no record of   

me having been born?? My parents still exist, there still together, but they    

had a daughter named Eva not a son named Edgar so Im an “unperson” now.

I dont have anywhere to stay and Im writing this from a library on a machine   

made by Apple Computer -- I thought Apple went bankrupt in 97! And what the   

hell is Bush doing in the office?? Where did Pres Gore go? I feel like I lost my   

damn mind! Please someone in this thread take me seriously I need your help…

Matt’s breath caught in his throat.

It was him.

This was the post, the place where it all began.

“The email’s been redacted from the archive for some reason, but…” Jessica clicked over to another tab, this one a search page for ‘EdgarTheUnperson’. “Got a few hits on Google, which led me to Facebook…” Another new tab, a Facebook profile page with a default icon and banner, and the name ‘Eddie Lund’. “Which got me some connections to friends, which when combined with his own name in a new search, finally leaves us with…”

One more click.

‘Edgar James Lund (1982 - 2009) - Obituary’