Last night as I lay in my bed, gazing up at the stars in the night sky, my last thought before I drifted into a state of unconsciousness was: where the heck is my ceiling?
When I opened my eyes, I immediately realized that three things were way off: the first was that I was in a school—this wouldn't usually be odd, except for the fact that I couldn't remember ever having gotten dressed, and I didn't recognize the bizarre blue uniform I was wearing. The second thing that tipped me off was that things in general—the room, the tables, the people, et cetera—were all considerably… larger. Don't get me wrong; I am short. Very short. But at this particular moment in time, I felt significantly shorter than normal, which was, well, not normal.
The third minor issue was that everyone was entirely unrecognizable, much like the uniform I was wearing. No, I don't mean that everyone looked like my uniform—I mean that my uniform was something I'd never seen before, exactly like the faces of those around me. Who the heck were these people?
"Uh…" A deep voice that I recognized (hallelujah!) sounded behind me, and I spun around, looking up… and up, and up.
"Steven…?" I managed to say, but it came out as a baffled squeak. "Did you get taller?" I quipped, hoping that a bit of humor would help me collect myself. It didn't really have the desired effect. Steven looked different. A lot different. He was taller than me (isn't everyone?), with short, straight-ish hair and a blank expression on his usually-cheerful face. Was I hallucinating? Were the janitors using some kind of experimental new product to clean the bathrooms?
Steven seemed as flabbergasted as I felt; one couldn't really tell from his passive expression, but his eyes showed alarm. "India?"
"If I look as different to you as you look to me," I began slowly, "then I really need to lay off the allergy medication."
Steven seemed to deliberate for a moment, then he picked me up. That was new.
"Put me down!" I practically shrieked, but he paid me no mind as he carried me over to a conveniently-located mirror hanging on the wall opposite us. What the reflective glass revealed to me was that I definitely needed to either see a therapist or stop drinking caffeinated things before bed.
I was small—nothing new there. But I was also blond with blue eyes. Oh, and I'd magically turned into a boy. One would think I'd have noticed.
"The… heck…?" I muttered, stunned into only being able to form simple thoughts and phrases. Steven examined his own reflection, and I vaguely wondered if he was as confused as I was. It was really hard to read his features, since his new identity didn't really allow much variation in facial expressions.
"Oh, hey." We both looked up quickly at the sound of another recognizable voice, followed by the appearance of another unrecognizable face.
"Nick?" Steven and I exclaimed simultaneously; Steven's "exclamation" was rather monotonous and didn't really fit the description of an exclamation. Nick was no longer a ginger—oh, horrors. What was the world without a ginger-Nick? The new Nick was a neat-looking character with trimmed black hair and a serious gaze, glasses propped precariously on the bridge of his nose. What was this? Some scary alternate universe? The fourth level of Hell? Sparta?
"It appears that we've somehow been sucked into an anime," the new-and-not-necessarily-improved Nick informed us. He looked so intelligent and proper that I almost wanted to call him "Nicholas". But in my mind, doing so would be the equivalent of actually acknowledging the psychosis that had developed as a result of God knows what. "Ouran High School Host Club, to be exact," Nick continued. Then he smirked at me. "Congratulations, India—you're now dating your cousin."
By this time, I had found a comfortable seat on top of Steven's shoulders, but I nearly fell off at that remark. I subtly tightened my grip on him, resting my chin on top of his head. I didn't even want to know how Nick had come to that conclusion. "Where is everyone else?" I asked, trying to keep my voice steady as I stared at our once-redheaded friend from my perch.
"Hard telling, though I imagine we'll find them soon enough. Judging by our appearances, they've probably taken on the forms of the other protagonists from the anime—"
"Did your shape-shifting cause your brain to get bigger, or are you just way too into playing the part of the character you're supposed to be?" I deadpanned, and he fell silent.
"Let's go find them." It was the first time since this freakish reality-switch had taken place that I'd heard Steven say more than one word at a time. I would have nodded if it wouldn't have resulted in knocking my chin into the top of his head.
"REALLY?!"
"Found Lucas," I said matter-of-factly, watching a flock of sparrows scatter outside, startled by Lucas's incredulous yell.
The three of us followed the sound until we found its source. Lucas was staring at himself in a different conveniently-located mirror. I was beginning to wonder whether we were secretly in a commercial for mirrors, or the people in this anime just really liked to look at themselves.
"I…" Lucas was speechless as he stared into the mirror. "I'm blond…" He said softly, touching his reflection carefully. "I'm… White…!" His voice rose an octave, and I wondered if each new realization would make his voice rise in pitch until he achieved opera-singer status and violently shattered the mirror, sending shards of reflective glass raining down and effectively killing us all. Lucas made a quiet sound in the back of his throat. "I… I'm GORGEOUS!"
Okay, I'll be the first to admit that I didn't see that coming.
Lucas straightened up and flipped his slightly-curly blond hair, his blue eyes sparkling. "I'm beautiful!" he sang, earning perplexed looks from Nick and I while Steven looked on with his "my only facial expression is 'derp'" face.
Until now, the switch from normal human being to character from a random anime had resulted in maintaining at least some of our actual characteristics, even if they were extremely vague similarities. Steven was sometimes quiet when focused on something. I was extremely short. Nick was (somewhat) intelligent.
The pattern stopped there. Actually, the pattern died there. The pattern was lying in a corner somewhere, slowly wasting away due to some fatal illness while vultures circled overhead, waiting for the phase to complete itself. Lucas, the whitest black kid known to man, the most popular antisocial person on the face of the planet, had somehow become a self-absorbed, arrogant pretty-boy with fair skin and hair that could easily rival that of Goldilocks. What the fudge?
By this particular point in time, I was at least ninety-nine percent certain that things couldn't possibly get any weirder. But I've been wrong before, and was quickly proved incorrect again when two nearly identical male voices reached my ears. Oh, God.
"Hey you guuuyyyys!" Two identical boys literally pranced over to join the rest of us—they seemed entirely unbothered by the current situation. Lucas was still fawning over himself in the mirror, which was a way more creepy than I needed, so I was content to turn my attention to the pair of twins that had just shown up.
The two boys were identical in every way but two: their auburn hair was parted in different directions, and the one with his hair parted to the left had a slightly softer voice than the other. They gave matching, ornery grins as they draped their arms across each others' shoulders. "What's up?" The question came from both of them simultaneously. I was still trying to figure out which one was Mason, and which one was Jesse.
Back when the world was a normal place to live, we'd often teased Mason and Jesse about how much they looked alike despite not being related. I was beginning to think that the pattern had somehow cheated death, but when I heard Lucas crooning to his reflection, that notion quickly disappeared and was replaced with the knowledge that the pattern had succumbed to the infection and was now a rotting pile of God knows what that the scavengers were slowly picking apart.
"Alright," I said quickly, staring down the two carbon copies with deadly precision. "I will figure this out if it kills me."
"No you won't!" the clones countered gleefully in perfect unison. I made a strong attempt to glower at them, but the fact that I inhabited a body that could have easily been that of a munchkin from the Lollipop Guild and thus made me about as menacing as a bowl of rainbows made the effort go to waste.
I quickly reviewed the options for addressing the two, should trying to actually figure out who was who end in failure. I could refer to them as Righty and Lefty, according to the way they parted their hair. Or I could call them Thing One and Thing Two, which would be nothing if not amusing.
"Hey, Mason," I said quickly.
"What?" both boys responded immediately, but the one with his hair parted to the right had turned his head toward me the fastest. Bingo.
"Okay, so Righty is Mason and Lefty is Jesse," I concluded aloud for the benefit of my other companions (i.e. Nick and Steven, as Lucas was still too busy complimenting his reflection to really give a crap about the world around him).
"You're wrong," the pair insisted together, and I snorted to hide a laugh due to the fact that they were actually pouting at me.
"Huh," I responded, still clinging to Steven and peering at them from over the top of his head. "Y'don't say."
The twins' pouts turned to glares, and then Jesse (I think) suddenly whimpered. "You're so mean…" he sniffed, tears forming at the corners of his amber eyes as I stared, entirely nonplussed by this turn of events.
I managed to keep my mouth from hanging open all the way up until the point where Mason (again, I think) pulled his twin into his arms, using his slender fingers to tilt Jesse's chin up so that he could gaze into the other boy's eyes. I think that's where I started catching flies.
"Dear brother," Mason murmured softly to the teary Jesse. "It doesn't matter what they say—they don't know anything." His voice was soothing, but firm at the same time. Jesse sniffled and fluttered his eyelashes. My right eye twitched. "We don't need them," Mason insisted quietly, earning a slight nod from his other half. "Not when we have each other."
Jesse managed a stronger nod and the two straightened up (did you catch the double entendre there?) as though nothing had happened. I silently closed my mouth and cast a glance at Nick, who looked highly disturbed by the display of uh… "brotherly love". I leaned down to gauge Steven's reaction to the little performance. Judging by his behavior so far, I figured that there wouldn't be a reaction. I was correct. My boyfriend's face was completely void of emotion, which was a little scary.
Actually, now that I thought about it, the fact that I had been unwittingly thrown into a male body (granted, I was a very cute a fluffy boy, but still a boy) made me a little unsure about how this whole relationship thing was going to work out. Not to mention that Nick's random remark about an unexpectedly-acquired blood relation made things even stranger. Mason and Jesse seemed to be figuring things out, but that was entirely different. Sort of.
But I digress.
"I want some cake," I declared rather loudly, attracting the attention of a virtual zombie, a fake genius and a pair of twins with slight homosexual tendencies.
All of Lucas's attention was still on himself—I could still hear soft, drawn out coos of "bea-yew-tee-ful!" and similar self-flattering remarks coming from the corner of the room. I cast a curious glance over my shoulder; the mirror at which we'd left our formerly-black acquaintance now bore several smudges on its reflective surface, and I realized with a touch of sheer horror that Lucas had actually attempted to make out with his own reflection. Oh, God.
"Cake?" Mason and Jesse echoed me, as well as each other, calling my attention back to my previous statement. I was glad to be so abruptly yanked away from the very idea of Lucas's apparent love affair with himself.
"Uh-huh," I said thoughtfully, peering at them from over Steven's head. I liked it up here. It made me feel tall. "We should have some cake or something."
Nick pushed his glasses further up onto the bridge of his nose. "Now who's trying to play the part?" he asked. I took the question as a rhetorical one and thought it appropriate to stick my tongue out in response. So what if whoever the heck I was supposed to be had a thing for cake? Put something sweet in front of me, and I'm certainly not going to just frolic away without my noms.
Surprisingly, the next person to speak was Steven. His voice was quiet, deep and void of any inflection whatsoever. Yet his words made me break into a grin that would look goofy on my actual face, and more so, I figured, on the face of the little blond who's body I was currently controlling.
"Let's go make a cake."