Copyrighted characters and the televised episode referenced below are owned by others.
This story minus those elements is copyrighted to the authors.
The Body Castaways
featuring
Igor, the Hollywood Starlet!
(An alternate version of the body-switching episode of Gilligan's Island!)
Part One
Written by Caleb Jones, and Eric
& edited by Jones
Igor stood tall at the helm of the boat. He found it rather difficult piloting the small vessel in the big Pacific Ocean. The last time he had sailed this boat his arms had been hairy, muscular, and strong. He had towered over the wheel at nearly seven feet tall.
But that had been yesterday. Now his arms were thin and weak, his fingers slim and sharp, with red-painted fingernails. The long, red dress wrapped tightly around his body restricted his movements while doing little to hide his newly curvaceous figure. He had never worn such form-fitting clothes before, but then he hadn't chosen to wear the red dress. It came with the body. His wonderfully new body!
He had started off piloting the boat while wearing unfamiliar high heels but that proved impossible. His new body was used to wearing them and he had little trouble walking in them, but the fragile shoes were not built for the floor of the boat or the motion of the ocean. It was too difficult to balance on them with the constant rocking of the boat as it plowed through the Pacific Ocean so he had long since kicked them off and stood comfortably barefoot at the wheel of the boat. His sexy, long red hair kept falling into his eyes as he watched the waves pass by, but he didn't mind. His long hair was so beautiful! Without his former upper body strength, steering the boat was proving to be tougher than he had counted on, but he could do it! He pushed more red hair away from his eyes once again and continued his struggle to pilot the boat to Honolulu.
Once there, he could continue on to HOLLYWOOD!
The opportunity he had been waiting for all his life had arrived! His impossible dream had come true at last! Igor had literally become the gorgeous GINGER GRANT! He was now a very sexy, impossibly beautiful movie star! He was no longer Igor, a hulking monster of a man, and he planned to make the best of it!
The world was waiting for him… for Ginger Grant to return … with open arms!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It would take more than a rough boat ride to forget his past though. During the three hour boat ride back to civilization, he had plenty of time to remember why he was so grateful to put his old life as the brutish Igor behind him.
Igor had been born with an agile mind, but it was housed within an ugly body. Added to this was the inability to express himself with little more than slow and stuttering speech. His sentences often were disjointed or incomplete fragments of what he would have liked to say. Doctors said he had some sort of speech disorder, perhaps due to a genetic flaw, and eventually his parents wrote him off as a lost cause.
Worse yet, as young Igor grew up, his ugly body matured into that of a freakishly strong giant. He was shaving at nine years of age, and he measured six and a half feet tall by the time he was twelve years old. By his eighteenth birthday he towered over people at seven feet plus, and had been on his own since age fourteen, when his father the prominent scientist kicked him out of the house. He could still hear his papa's most repeated complaint to his mother about him ...
"We could feed the other five members of our family with what Igor eats by himself."
Eventually Igor learned that he was an embarrassment to the famous physics professor. At the time he thought he was adjusted to the man's scorn, but his father's last words to him were burned on his brain, never to be forgotten.
"You can not be my son! The hospital must have made some ghastly mistake! You must be one of those switched babies the newspapers write about. No son of mine could be so ugly, or such a freak! Get out of my house!"
His father had never considered the possibility that perhaps his radical experiments with elementary particles could have caused Igor's condition. Obviously, he was incapable of producing a son like Igor, just look at his pretty sisters for the evidence to the contrary! No, Igor could be no son of his!
His father kicked him out of the house two years before he could even get a driver's permit. He made a meager living doing manual labor, He was deformed but his body was stronger than most men and could get menial jobs done - although he had to lie about his age. He lived in one room apartments for the longest time crying himself to sleep. Inside his huge, hulking body lie a sensitive soul.
Igor often remembered back when he was a young boy, wishing with all his heart to change places with any of his three sisters. None of them were taller than five and a half feet tall and they always had girls and boys to play with. No one wanted to play with Igor except some of the grownups who needed him to move something heavy or had a tree stump that needed to be removed.
But everyone loved Inger, Margot and Greta, his sisters. The evil bitches! They were the cruelest of all his tormenters! Once, Inger had said, cruelly as usual, "In a certain light you could almost pass for human, Igor." How everyone - even his mother - had laughed. Greta was the one who came up with the nickname "Igor the Bigger". None of his sisters deserved the lives that came along with their pretty little bodies!
If only a magic genie would come along and swap their souls. He would love to see one of the girls struggle to live within his 'bigger' body while he got to play around in her little body! Igor almost daily prayed to wake up as a fourth sister or maybe exchanging bodies with one of his sisters. He would rather be a little girl than a boy in a freakish giant man's body. But it never happened. Magic was something to be read in books from the library, not in real life.
He wasn't welcomed in schools since his huge size scared the other children. He spent school hours in the public library as he grew up. After he had been thrown out of his father's home, Igor spent most of his afternoons working on the docks moving heavy boxes to make enough money to stay alive and pay for a small room in a blind woman's rental building. Any spare time after work was spent back at the library again reading text books and learning all about math and science, his favorite subject.
He knew he was smarter than most, and certainly smarter than he looked. After he was eighteen, Igor got a job in a scientific laboratory where he was able to learn first hand about many scientific principles and theories while moving heavy equipment and occasionally volunteering as a human guinea pig.
It was during one of those tests that he met a weird doctor named Boris Balinkov who was perhaps even more of a freak than he was! Doc, as Igor came to call him with his limited speech abilities welcomed the help of the strong and usually silent aide.
"Igor, my friend, you have the gift of silence. It is very rare in a human being. It sets you apart from the rest of the world." he once commented in his fake Russian or Hungarian accent. (The accent varied from day to day and mood to mood! Igor was no fool, and from occasional linguistic slips, he knew that 'Boris' was really from Queens.) But he humored the only person who had called him a friend. Let him pretend to be a mysterious foreigner! After all, didn't Igor understand all too well the desire to escape from your self.
So he did his best to help Doctor Balinkov.
Igor found the man's theories to border on the insane, but he was working on something long term that fascinated him. The Doc had the notion that the human psyche, memories and all, could be transferred into another body. Igor realized there was a possibility, a remote chance, that his dream might come true, and he might someday escape the prison which was his monstrous body!
They worked together on the project for over twenty years.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Eventually, Doc Balinkov's other projects paid off and he relocated himself and Igor to a remote pacific island to protect his great invention as it came closer to completion. They built their personality exchange experiment in its final revision in an old castle apparently built by Spaniards and abandoned centuries ago.
Some innovative suggestions from Igor enabled Doctor Balinkov to complete and test his great project! After twenty years of working as a team, it was as much his work as Balinkov's, although Doc could never allow such an admission. Igor might be a friend but to Doctor Balinkov he would always be a servant and an assistant, never an equal. Finally the day came when they were ready to exchange the minds of animals!
It was a complete success! Igor's big heart beat faster as he saw a dog meow and a cat bark! He knew that he was now only one small step away from freedom from his hated, misshapen body! If Doc hadn't been so ugly, he might not have had to wait, but becoming Doctor Balinkov would not be much of an improvement. Luckily, the Doctor had plans to continue testing their invention on humans!
That night they drank champagne and toasted each other's success!.
"I couldn't have done it without you, Igor, my friend! All that remains is to find humans to test it on. I have picked up weak radio signals from some castaways less than forty miles away from us on an supposedly deserted island. No one will miss them! They will be perfect! They will not be able to tell anyone of my - ahem - our experiments!"
Igor was sent to scout out the castaways. He was not to be seen. It was a tough task for someone of his size to remain hidden but the castaway's island was big and it gave him unusual room to maneuver. After watching the castaways deal with a wild lion, he knew he had found the perfect subjects. These people were clearly idiots! The so-called Professor couldn't even build a boat to get them off the island, when natives had been sailing between the islands for centuries with no more materials than the castaways had available to them.. A plan began to form in his mind while he made the journey back to the castle. He docked the boat and gave his report to the Doctor.
"Apparently they are the survivors of a small cruise boat sinking several years ago. I found the remains of a boat called the Minnow. There were seven of them... an excellent variety... of subjects for tests, Doc!" he summarized in his halting way of speaking. He did not mention how surprised he was to find two missing older millionaires, and how very thrilled he was to see a beautiful movie starlet and another young woman who was more attractive than any of his sisters among the castaways. They were indeed a wonderful group of subjects!
Dr. Balinkov cackled and rubbed his hands theatrically.
"EXCELLENT! Well done, my friend! Very good indeed! Let the fun begin!"
He persuaded Doc to personally go to the other island in their boat and gather up the subjects with a ruse of rescue to make them cooperative enough to visit their castle. Neither he or Doctor Balinkov could be called charming, but at least Doc wouldn't send the castaways running and hiding. Both knew how people reacted to Igor and they needed these people to be compliant until measures could be taken to restrain them. Fortunately, the island's centuries-old Spanish castle came equipped with a fully functional seventeenth century dungeon and it was well-stocked with plenty of chains and other restraints!.
Igor was eventually introduced as a strong but quiet manservant to the Doctor and he was terribly hurt when, after his friend said he was 'as gentle as a little baby', he heard the stupid young deckhand respond with "As gentle as a little baby what?"
When the beautiful movie star finally stepped ashore with rest of the castaways on the second trip, the red-headed beauty saw him, and she screamed!
"My god, I am in the middle of a real-life horror movie with an all-to-true monster! This has to be the ugliest guy I've ever seen!"
Any doubts Igor had of whether these seven should be human guinea pigs for their experiment died with her statement. Igor's conscience no longer had a problem with Miss Grant's and the other castaway's fates!
Continued…
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