When Alan regained consciousness he was still in Prunella's body, which was in bad shape. The aching of her back muscles didn't compare to the intense throbbing in her head. She tried to sit up, but was thrown onto her back by dizziness.

"She's coming to," a relieved woman's voice rang out.

Her vision was rather blurred, but she perceived three faces gazing at her—a rat man and woman, and a cat man who wore a doctor's uniform. The walls of the room were sterile white, and were decorated with pictures describing health problems and medical procedures.

"Prunella," called the rat woman, whom she didn't recognize. The other two people didn't look familiar either.

"Unngghh," the pain-wracked girl moaned.

"Prunella, it's Mom," said the woman, whose arms were adorned with bead bracelets.

"Dad's here, too," said the rat man, a rather short fellow with glasses and a moustache.

She remembered very little—only that she had gone to a school, and watched some TV shows. Nothing in her memory provided a clue as to how she had come to this place in such an injured state.

"Wh-where am I?" she choked out.

"You're in the Katzenellenbogan Memorial Hospital," said the doctor. "You had a run-in with a bus and suffered a contusion."

Prunella tried again to sit up, but the doctor pushed her back with one hand. "Rest," he ordered.

Flashes of lucidity entered her brain as she glanced around the strange room and examined the strange people in it. "Are you my parents?" she asked the rat man and woman.

"Yes, Prunella," they replied in unison.

"Prunella," she repeated. "Is that my name?"

"Looks like amnesia," the doctor said to the bewildered rat couple. "Chances are she'll recover her memory over time."

"That's a girl's name," Prunella remarked.

"Well, you're a girl," said the rat man.

A twinge of doubt entered her mind, as if something was wrong with the statement she had just heard, but she couldn't say exactly what.

She rested for another hour, her parents never leaving her side. Eventually the doctor assisted her as she climbed out of the bed and struggled to stay upright on her shaky legs. The pain in her head still tormented her, but she managed to stagger across the room to a wall mirror. Looking back at her was a pointy-nosed rat girl with disheveled red hair and a black-and-blue bruise on the left side of her head. It wasn't a familiar sight, or a pretty one.

"I feel weird," she remarked as her parents stepped up behind her, holding out their arms in case she fainted. "It's like...it's like I'm expecting to see someone else in the mirror. The face...the hair...they're not mine."

"You'll be fine," said her mother. She laid a hand on Prunella's shoulder, but the girl shuddered in pain.

"You did whack your head on the pavement pretty hard," said her father.

"Yeah, I guess I did," she said, still puzzling over her reflection. "I can hardly remember a thing about my life. How old am I?"

"You're eleven," her mother replied. "You're in sixth grade at Lakewood Elementary. You live in Elwood City. Does any of that ring a bell?"

"Sort of," said Prunella. "But I have this weird feeling...it's like everything I remember happened to someone else. Someone who doesn't look like this."

A moment later three children burst into the hospital room—Alan, Beat, and Dudley. They all wore troubled expressions, but Alan's was one of pure horror.

"Omigosh...omigosh..." he ranted in an uncharacteristically girlish fashion. "You look terrible! Will she be all right, doctor?"

"Most likely," the cat man answered.

Filled with anguish at the sight of his battered original body, Alan/Prunella grasped the rat girl by the shoulders and pressed his head against her chest, fighting back tears.

"Who are you?" Prunella asked him. "Are you my boyfriend?"

Alan abruptly went from struggling not to cry, to struggling not to laugh.

"Has she suffered brain damage?" Beat inquired of the doctor. "If so, how extensive?"

"It's too early to tell if there's permanent damage," was the reply.

Beat grabbed Alan, who still hadn't recovered from the shock of Prunella's innocent question, by the elbow. "Let's go, Romeo," she ordered.

Once they were in the corridor outside the hospital room, she gave him a grim look. "The Opticron has never been tested on a subject with a brain injury," she informed him. "If you try to return to your body in its current condition, something could easily go wrong."

"Great," Alan lamented. "How long do I have to wait?"

"It could take weeks for her brain to heal," said Beat. "The longer you wait, the better your chances of success."

"Well," said Alan dolefully, "I guess I'll have to get used to this."

"I'm so sorry for you," said Dudley, who had overheard the tail end of the conversation.

"It's not that bad," Alan told him. "It's just different. Different and weird."

"Do you think we should tell her the truth?" asked the rat boy, whose mending nose was still supported by a metal brace.

"I think it would only confuse her," Beat recommended. "Let's wait for her to figure it out on her own." She poked Alan in the ribs. "And don't even think of taking advantage of her, lover boy."

----

A host of concerned friends welcomed Prunella as she shuffled into the Prufrock house, the left side of her head bandaged. Most of her classmates were there, as well as many of Mrs. Krantz' fifth graders. Neither the house nor the well-wishers set off any alarms in her memory—with the exception of Alan.

"Are you sure you're not my boyfriend?" she inquired of the boy. "You seem so familiar—like I've known you forever."

Her sister Rubella laid a hand on her back to help her ease onto the couch. "Poor widdle Prunie, hit by a mean old bus," she said patronizingly.

Binky tried in vain to elicit memories from her. "You've gotta remember me. You have a huge, unrequited crush on me."

"I don't," Prunella answered weakly.

Finally Mrs. Prufrock decided that her daughter's friends had hounded her enough, and asked Rubella to help her into her bed. Discouraged, the kids started to wander off in their separate directions.

Beat, still speaking in the calculating tone of Andrew Putnam, tried to comfort Alan with an arm around his shoulders while accompanying the boy to his house. "I'm sure everything will turn out for the best."

"Stop doing that," Alan complained. "It makes me feel funny."

"Sorry," said Beat, withdrawing her arm.

"You said something could go wrong if we try to switch back now," said Alan anxiously. "How wrong?"

"Very wrong," Beat answered. "Remember how I became lost in Dudley's subconscious? That was a minor incident."

As they walked along the street, Beat started to sound regretful. "I spent so much of my life developing the Opticron, and all I have to show for it is a piece of clumsy, unreliable hardware. I often wished that natural evolution hadn't locked us up in our own heads and made such an invention necessary."

Alan gave her a bemused look.

"Ah, I forgot," said Beat condescendingly. "I'm not talking to The Brain anymore."

Having bid farewell to the dejected Alan, she made her way to the apartment building where she lived. A girl was standing by the main entrance—a teenage girl with short, purple-dyed hair, dark sunglasses, and a heavy metal T-shirt. Beat's heart flipped when she saw that the girl also sported a silver barette. It was Tegan.

All she had to do was smile, and Beat started to follow her away from the building.

----

Prunella emerged from the bathroom, covered in a pink robe, her curly hair scattered and dripping. "Put a towel around your hair," her mother instructed her. "You'll get water all over the floor."

"Uh, sure," said the rat girl emotionlessly. "That's a good idea."

As she tried to attach a towel to her soaked head and make it stay, she tried again to express her odd feelings. "It's like I'm washing someone else's hair and putting on someone else's clothes. It doesn't feel natural."

"You can stay home from school today if you want," said Mrs. Prufrock, who was applying rouge to her cheeks.

"I think I should go," said Prunella. "Maybe I'll recognize something at my school."

After her hair had dried, her mother started to tie a ribbon in it. "Did they ever find that girl...what's her name..." she inquired haltingly.

"Beat?" Mrs. Prufrock sighed. "No, still missing."

The headline of the morning newspaper stated, POLICE SEARCH FOR MISSING GIRL. A photo of Beat Simon was featured underneath.

"I don't know what it is about this neighborhood," said Prunella's mother as she nibbled on her breakfast of oatmeal and tofu sausage. "Little girls disappearing without a trace all the time. You disappeared, then Alan's sister, and now Beat. It's like we were built on top of an ancient Indian burial ground."

She drove her daughter to school that day, to save her unnecessary strain and defend her against kidnappers. Prunella felt that she was, indeed, afflicted with some grievous Native American curse as she wandered through the alien-looking school building. What few fragmented memories occurred to her, seemed to have taken place in another life. Even her locker was a zone of mystery to her.

"Hey, Prunella," Alan called to her as she was pulling out some books.

"Uh, hi, Alan," she returned the greeting. "Is that right? Alan?"

"That's right," said the grinning bear boy. "At least you remembered something."

"I'm in your class, right?"

"Yes. But I want to talk to you about something first."

Prunella straightened up, clutching several books under her arm. "What's that?"

"It's private," said Alan ominously. "We'll talk about it in the boys' room."

"Uh, okay."

Prunella had followed Alan all the way to the boys' washroom entrance when she realized something was amiss. "Why am I going in here?" she wondered. "I'm a gir..."

A dazed expression enveloped her face. Alan reached out and grabbed her arms, thinking she might need to be stabilized.

"I just had this weird flash," she half-mumbled. "I was in the boys' room. There was another boy in there with me. I was looking in the mirror, but it was..."

She gasped. "It was you!"

Alan only nodded proudly.

"I wasn't a girl before," she said, shaking her head in disbelief. "I was you. But that doesn't make sense."

"It's coming back," Alan assured her. "You'll understand soon."

Prunella paid no attention to the first period history lecture, as she could only fantasize about the incredible secret that would be revealed to her when she recovered her memories. One thing, and only one thing, was perfectly clear—she wasn't supposed to be a girl, despite the undeniable fact that she was one.

"I'd like to be excused from gym class today," she told Mrs. Hutchinson, the gym instructor.

"You don't need an excuse," the poodle woman replied. Prunella left her, relieved at not having to explain her uneasiness about entering the girls' locker room when her true gender identity was up in the air.

The truth came crashing down upon her halfway through math class. "If you add up the interior angles of a triangle, you get..." Mr. Boughton was explaining when Prunella suddenly leaped to her feet.

"Come on," she said with urgency, grabbing Alan by the arm and almost tearing him out of his desk. Neither the teacher nor any of his students had witnessed anything like it—two class members abruptly leaving the room without asking permission.

"Where are we going?" asked Alan as the determined rat girl dragged him along.

"To your house," Prunella answered. "We're going to switch back into our own bodies, and destroy the Opticron."

"Destroy it? Why?"

"I was chasing Tegan when the bus hit me. She knew about Putnam and the Opticron, and she wanted to talk to Beat very badly. I think she wants to be Putnamized, and I know Beat wants to Putnamize her."

They ran all the way from the school entrance to Prunella's house, leading some local housewives to suspect that sinister goings-on were going on at Lakewood.

The house was empty; both of her parents were at their day jobs, her father as an electrician and her mother as a professional psychic. She found a house key hidden in a phony rock, and let herself inside. Neither she nor Alan dared to breathe as they hurried up the stairway to the attic, and threw open the lid of the trunk where she had hidden the Opticron and its operating instructions.

They were still there.

Prunella wiped the sweat from her brow and sighed with relief.

Minutes later, Alan plucked the visor from his face and discovered to his elation that he was back in his very own, very male body. Prunella let out a squeal of delight as she beheld a dress covering her thighs in place of the pants she had worn for the past three days.

"Are you okay?" Alan asked her.

"I've got a bit of a headache," she replied. "But as far as I can tell, I'm me."

Once they were satisfied that the transfer had worked, they each took one end of the Opticron device, carried it down the stairway, and tossed it directly into the fireplace. Prunella turned on the gas, and the blue flames began to scorch the infernal machine.

"No more Putnamizing," Alan declared. "No more body-switching."

A collective cheer went up from the hordes of Arthur Goes Fourth/Fifth fanfic readers.

"I just pray Beat doesn't have another one of those devices," said Alan.

(Pray harder...)