Real life problems have kept me rather busy but I finally had a chance to finish and edit the rough draft for part two of the story.
For those who have forgotten, the fantastic Four were called into action and one of the villains who fought them used his mental powers to exchange their bodies.
Now Reed is Sue and Sue has become her husband Reed! And Johnny is Ben Grimm, the Thing, and Ben possesses Johnny's handsome face and body!
And now the story continues...
A Freaky Fantastic Fourth
Written and edited by Caleb Jones
PART TWO – Settling in to their new surroundings...
Prologue
After the swap, he had been too busy with the after effects of the battle, cooperating with the police, while trying to convince the others that acknowledging the changes would be a weakness their enemies could not resist. They had to pretend to be who they looked like.
And when they got home to the Baxter building, no one was in a mood to talk about the changes. The battle had taken a toll on all of them both physically and mentally and a quick meal and sleep was the only thing on their agenda until the next morning.
It was late by the time the four got home. Reed made some quick preliminary brain scans but confirmed to the others that he would indeed need more time to attempt a reversal. So they locked up the lab for the night and ate a dinner the computerized kitchen had prepared for them.
There was little talk. It was almost too strange to talk to someone, hearing the wrong voice when you spoke, and knowing that when they looked at you they saw someone other than the real you, even if that other person was a 'fantastic' friend.
Everyone was tired, and they retired soon after for the evening.
4 JOHNNY STORM
Johnny Storm couldn't fall asleep.
Because of a crazy body exchange, he now occupied the body of his best friend and second-best friendly antagonist, (Spider-Man being number one, of course!)
Johnny Storm was now The Thing.
He didn't realize how much Ben put with since the cosmic rays blasted them and they had become the Fantastic Four. Johnny was simply lying in bed and yet everything felt odd. Simply moving an arm or stretching out a muscle moved the massive, rocky skin of his borrowed form, which in turn created an ever-so-slight grinding sound against another part of the same skin he now possessed.
Adding to Johnny's discomfort, Ben's bed had been specially built for his powerful and rough body, so Johnny had to switch bedrooms for the duration.
At least it kept his mind off his looks. His girlfriend wasn't going to like it when she learned of his new 'skin condition'.
There was also the unspoken fear that Reed would be unable to swap them all back into their proper bodies, and he would be forever trapped as "The Thing" for the rest of his life. Talk about a never-ending nightmare...
No wonder that Johnny couldn't get a good night's sleep...
4 BENJAMIN GRIMM
Ben Grimm couldn't fall asleep.
Johnny's bedroom was quiet.
Very quiet...
It was too damn quiet!
Ben was so used to background noises created by his rocky body that they had almost become a siren song for sleep every night. But Johnny's body was not only way too small, but it was as silent as a submarine running deep during World War Two to avoid the enemy.
He would have considered selling his soul to regain his lost humanity, but there was only one problem with losing his craggy granite-like physique through a body swap. He might look human again, and the blonde Johnny Storm was a handsome young man, but the face in the mirror didn't look much like Ben Grimm anymore!
He wanted to pull a practical joke on the young man reflected in the mirror, but the joke was on Ben. The man in the mirror was HIM!
On the other hand, for Ben, the thought of Johnny looking in a mirror and seeing Ben's rocky orange skin for a while was not just the best prank of all time, it was... priceless!
All in all, though Ben figured that things could be worse. BEING the Thing was worse than being a flesh and blood human again, and Ben didn't have to look into a mirror until the morning.
Ben began to relax and finally fell asleep...
4 SUSAN STORM-RICHARDS
How could Sue Richards possibly fall asleep?
Normally, she had no trouble sleeping. But the situation was hardly normal. SHE wasn't normal! She had a hairy, flat chest. When she spoke her voice was deep and masculine. Her hairy male legs needed shaving.
Her body was on the wrong side of the bed, and she didn't occupy it. She was now a man, her husband! And her husband was the woman in their bed now.
It was so odd being a man, even if that man was her husband. She knew every inch of Reed's body intimately, but occupying his masculine body was something new and strange, scary yet exciting! Thinking about Reed's body made Sue feel something grow larger on her lower body. It was a foreign feeling, undeniably masculine, and not something she was ready to explore.
Not yet.
She loved Reed and his body with all her heart but Sue wanted to lie next to Reed, not BE him... This was taking equality for the sexes to a ridiculous extreme.
It was a bit scary to realize that if they were unable to reverse the mind exchanges, she might never live life as a woman again. That brought her thoughts back to her new body, and its unwanted growth.
How did guys get rid of these unwanted... feelings? She considered a cold shower, but the thought of seeing her new body nude just made things worse. An old boyfriend once told her he had to think of boring things, like math problems.
Of course, mathematics might just excite her husband's borrowed body further.
Reed often became obsessed with a good math equation, but Sue rationalized that her feminine thoughts were the trigger for the body, and she found math rather boring and dull. So she began reciting multiplication tables in her mind.
1x12...
By the time she got to 7x10, Sue Storm was falling asleep...
4 REED RICHARDS
Reed Richards couldn't fall asleep.
How could he possibly sleep? He loved his wife's body, and now it was closer than ever before to him. His female body was just a touch too close for comfort, Reed thought, as he tried to sleep on his stomach. His borrowed breasts objected to being flattened against the mattress. Reed turned around again and stared at the ceiling... He yawned, but sleep refused to pay him a visit.
Perhaps counting the things he loved about Sue would put him in a mood to sleep.
There were so many things he loved about Sue, like her vibrant spirit and 'never say never' attitude.
He loved her mind. She was more practical than he. There had been many times when a problem's solution eluded Reed, but Sue found the answer, usually by bypassing standard logic and thinking outside of the box.
He loved her trim, slender waist.
He loved her bountiful breasts, neither too big nor too small. Perfection. But now they were on his chest and they moved slightly with his every breath. It was rather distracting...
He loved her long blonde hair. He brushed some errant blonde strands away from his face and felt his soft, smooth cheeks. More hair fell into his face. It had happened quite often since the body switching. Reed had never had long hair before and it was proving to be rather an annoyance.
What else? He also loved her perfume. It gently wafted about his body as a gentle reminder that he was now a beautiful, and fragrant, female. That was a thought that could keep him wide awake all night.
Reed was made all too aware of all those physical things simply by taking a deep breath. If only he didn't have to take a breath, then he might get some needed rest tonight. But not breathing was unfortunately also not a feasible option.
A simple act like breathing had become a novel experience for Reed. The movement of his lungs caused his curvaceous chest to expand and contract. And each movement of his chest caused his new breasts to move ever so slightly. Such movement might go unnoticed by Sue, having lived in her body for her entire life, but to the current, male oriented resident those otherwise ordinary sensations which now surrounded him were rather intoxicating.
The key phrase in that line of thought was 'surrounded him'. Much in the same way, Sue's very feminine body now surrounded Reed's masculine mind! Reed truly loved his wife and both had vowed to share everything in their marriage, but that had certainly taken on unexpected new meaning for them today!
This body-switch between the four of them was – and there really was no better word for it – 'Fantastic'! It offered Reed an amazing opportunity to study identity, sexuality, and gender differences from new perspectives as well as many under-explored aspects of biology and the mind-body connection.
The problem was that the exchange wasn't intentional, and none of them had volunteered to make the identity swaps.
His first priority had to be to reverse the exchange. The only question was how to do it.
It was a long time before Reed fell asleep, and a few all too short hours later the alarm clock rang.
The end of Part Two.
To be continued...