Reality Hopping
In this story you can hop between realities following these rules:
No more then
- 1 a Day
- 6 a Week
- 20 every 4 weeks
- 50 every 12 weeks
- 180 every 48 weeks
These measurements are based on your home reality.
Your home reality is the one where you start your journey from.
When you hop to another reality you switch your mind with anybody who is there already.
If you hop to a different reality then your home reality from another reality then:
Reality 3 contains you.
Reality 2 contains the person from reality 3
Your home reality contains the person from reality 2
If someone dies then the person whose reality he/she home reality changes to that of the person who died. (Using the example above , if the person in your home reality dies your home reality becomes reality 2. If the person in reality 2 dies then the home reality of the person from reality 2 becomes
3.)
Written by Catprog on 22 August 2004
Alterntive Scenarios from Other Stories
This is for characters from the other stories in other scenarios.
Written by catprog on 21 February 2016
Costumeverse People
People in the costumeverse
Written by Catprog on 14 October 2017
Jared outside of Costumverse
Jared didn’t think much of the novelty shop the first time he saw that it had opened. All he saw were some goofy looking trinkets and gadgets hanging in the window, nothing that quite gathered his interest or delight. A deeper look through the front glass revealed nothing more than counters full of gag gifts and plastic toys, although he never quite took the time to look more closely than a brief glance. The only thing that really stood out to him was the name of it: Get it Here, emphasis the store’s. The way the word ‘it’ was so bombastically highlighted caught his eye, as if ‘it’ was the very thing he’d been looking for his entire life, whatever that may have been.
So he wasn’t bothered by the shop’s existence until one day he did see something worth his attention. Displayed in the front window, loosely draped over a porcelain mannequin was a black and white onesie. It wasn’t until Jared had passed the store completely that his brain registered what he had seen. He came to a quick halt, turned around, and stood in front of the mannequin for a closer look. Immediately in front of him was his reflection in the glass, face turned upwards. Most of the onesie was black, but around the torso was a tan oval like an underbelly. It had a hood pulled over the head. Semi-circle ears sprouted from the crown. A single white stripe ran down the center of the forehead. He saw through the legs a fluffy black tail hanging from above the onesie’s seat. His up-close inspection confirmed what he had thought: it was a skunk onesie.
It might not have been the thing Jared had been looking for his whole life, but it certainly demanded his purchase. His love for skunks carried back to his early childhood, something fostered by the creature’s unwarranted disdain by the public. He had always wanted to have one as a pet, but was withheld by state laws and his landlord’s pet policy. While this wasn’t the real deal, it looked pretty close. The fur seemed authentic and warm. It wasn’t something he thought he’d mind wearing on a cold night. Maybe it was odd for a grown man like him to purchase something so silly, but quite frankly, he didn’t care. He had to have it.
He waltzed into the shop at a brisk pace. The door opened to the jingle of a bell above his head. The proprietor, a tall old man with slick, white hair stood behind the counter. He was smiling at Jared with his hands clasped together on top of the desk. He had seen Jared staring through the window and fully anticipated his entry. “Hello there!” he said in a voice that reminded Jared of his grandfather’s. “How can I help you?”
Jared gulped. “Yes, um… I was wondering if I could buy the suit on the mannequin I saw?” He pointed to it. Looking at it from behind he could see how realistic the tail was. The double-stripe running down its center looked flawless, almost like a real skunk’s. He’d have thought it genuine if not for the seamless way the rest of the suit was pieced together. There was no way multiple animal pelts could be fashioned together so flawlessly.
Written by TheGreatJaceyGee on 03 December 2022
Take the Skunk
The old man squinted his eyes at it. “Which one? You mean the skunk one?”
Jared felt a tad embarrassed. “Yeah.”
The old man smiled. From across the room Jared could see how cerulean his eyes were. “Perfect. I didn’t think I’d be selling that any time soon. I’m glad you showed up.” He walked around from behind the counter towards the window. He grabbed the mannequin and hoisted it off of its stand. Jared made to approach and help, but the man held him back with a polite show of his palm. “I’ve got it, son. Don’t worry.” He unzipped the front zipper. As he slid it off the mannequin, Jared wondered. Was that zipper there before? The old man cradled the onesie in his hands, which Jared noticed were conspicuously without wrinkles. “Yeah, this is a nice one. I worked extra hard on it. Wanted it to be as real as I could make it.”
Jared was afraid to ask. “What’s it made out of?”
The old man rolled his eyes up to the ceiling, trying to remember. “Ah, nylon? I think?”
Jared relaxed. “OK, that makes sense.”
The old man gave him an assuring look. “No skunks were harmed in the making of it, I promise you.” He brought it to the front desk and laid it out. As he rang it up, Jared ran his fingers over the surface of the suit. The old man said nylon, but nylon didn’t feel anything like this. This was coarse and scratchy, the exact same texture he’d expect on a wild animal. He’d never had the pleasure of petting a real skunk, but this was what he expected one to feel like. “That’ll be $35,” the man said.
That was cheaper than Jared expected, but he wasn’t going to complain. He pulled out his card and the man rang him up. “Can I, uh, get a bag to put this in?”
“Not ashamed of anyone seeing you with this, are you? There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“N-no,” he lied. “I just need something to carry it.”
The man nodded. “Of course. Let me get you one.” He reached behind the desk and produced a large paper bag. He neatly folded the onesie into a square and put it inside. With a gentle push he slid it towards Jared’s side of the desk. “Here you go. Have fun with it, Jared.”
“I will, thanks. Um…” Did I tell him my name? He remembered that he gave him his card. His info probably popped up there. “What’s your name?”
“You can call me Leland. Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you too, Leland.” He took the bag off the desk. It felt heavy, like there was a small animal inside of it. “Thank you.”
“No, thank you. Until next time.”
“Yeah, see you.” Jared headed out of the store, clutching the bag’s strings tightly, Leland’s blissfully blue eyes still shimmering in his mind.
Written by TheGreatJaceyGee on 04 December 2022
Other Apartment
He wasn’t in his apartment for more then five minutes that night before he was stripping down to his underwear so he could try on the onesie. It was laid out on his bed, awaiting his use. When he was down to his underwear, he picked it up and gave it one last look. So real. Nylon, polyester, whatever, it was perfect for making skunk fur. He looked at the collar and saw the zipper. It was small, which is probably why he missed it the first time. He pulled it down and split the belly open. He noticed that the inside was shiny like velvet, inviting him even more. With a giddy smile he stepped his foot into one leg, then the other. He sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled it up until his feet popped out the bottom. He wiggled his toes and rolled his ankles, loving how soft it felt against his legs. He stood up and put his arms through the sleeves. He zipped it back up, then finally flipped the hood onto his head.
Voila! He was a skunk. The soft interior clung to his skin snugly, tingling him with delight. He rubbed his bare hands over his tummy, savoring the outer softness. He could feel the tail hanging from above his butt. If he didn’t know any better, he would’ve said it had bones running through it. But forget how nice it felt, he had to see how it looked. He scampered off to the bathroom and turned the lights on. He saw himself in the mirror, decked in that mephitine suit like a toddler on Halloween. An ecstatic smile split his face. He looked so cute! He turned his back to the mirror and checked out his tail. Oh yeah, it was perfect. He ran his hands down his back, noticing how snug the suit was so his skin. Funny, he remembered how loose it looked on the mannequin. Maybe it was way smaller than he was.
He turned his frontside to the mirror. He stood there with his arms akimbo, looking and feeling proud. There was no need to be ashamed, not when he felt so comfortable. He had found his new pajamas. Heck, it was a good thing he lived alone, because he definitely planned on wearing this thing as often as he could. Only when he cooked meals or had people over would he take it off. Oh yeah, and he would clean it of course. He loved it, but not that much. Something so special had to be taken care of anyway. Just as he thought of it, he realized with a rumbling tummy that he hadn’t had dinner yet. He grasped at his collar for the zipper.
There was nothing there.
He patted his hand around to confirm that the zipper he very clearly remembered using was gone. He slid his hand up and down his belly. There was no crease or stainless steel teeth like before, nothing but faux fur. He clawed, picked, and stretched the fabric across every part of it, including the front and back sides. There was no zipper. The first throbs of panic settled on his heart. He stared down at the suit and saw with his own eyes that there still was no zipper. Where did it go?
He had no time to formulate a theory before he felt the onesie tighten around his body like a bag being vacuum-sealed. His spine shot into a straight line. He looked at the mirror and saw that whatever slack the suit had was now gone. It had fit into the contours of his body, leaving absolutely no room in between whatsoever. Most alarming was the hoodie which had fallen on his head like the top portion of a wetsuit. He was terrified that the suit would continue shrinking and crush him.
But the suit was not shrinking. It was assimilating. He felt something tingle down his wrists. He looked down and saw the fabric lengthening down towards his hands like a living liquid spreading its territory across his skin. His wrists disappeared, then the bottom half of his palms, then his hand entirely. “What is this?” he screamed. He shook his hands frantically. It didn’t work. He shook them harder. Nothing happened. He shook them so hard that they nearly flew off by the joint. The suit continued claiming his hand until no skin remained. What replaced it was a thick cushion of fleshy padding where his palm had been. What felt like a tugging sensation on the very tips of his fingers was his fingernails sprouting into long, white claws made for digging.
He felt a pressure on his feet. He looked down and saw the same process happening to them. What had been a tightening of the suit was now more like a physical melding. Flesh bonded with fabric. The cells of his skin melted and fused with the velvet liner. The hilt of the skunk tail drilled into the base of his spine. He wasn’t wrong when he thought it had bone inside of it. He knew that now that it was latching onto his vertebrae and rendering the tail a part of him. When he tried pinching the suit off of him, he could only wince in pain. There was no suit, only skunk.
He looked back into the mirror. The outer limits of his face had been consumed by fur. The rim of his eye sockets were black. A white stripe ran down his forehead. His formally brown mop of hair was now a shaggy white cumulus. He thought a black cloud would consume his vision as the fur crept down into his visor, but was spared that punishment at least. What he was not saved from was the black fur closing in on his nose and lips. “Ah!” A great pressure pushed out from inside of his head, right behind his medulla. He went cross eyed and looked at his nose. What were two bumps on the bottom corners of his peripherals became long, black protrusions that reached out to the center of his vision. His nose and jaws were sprouting forward into a snout, a painful process that felt like someone had stuck a hook in the roof of his mouth and was pulling it straight out of his face. He gripped the rim of the sink growling through the pain. It escalated around his lip when a forest of whiskers sprouted from his upper lip, each one coming out individually.
He was in the final swing of his transformation, one that fell upon his pecs and around his groin. A groan mixed with agony and queer delight belted out of him as his manhood started to retract into his body. He looked down in horror to see his reproductive organs shrinking back into his loins. “No! No no no nonononnnonnono!” Blocking the view of his disappearing genitals was the sudden inflation of his chest into a pair of white breasts. His crosses eyes stared down at them in abject terror and confusion. The first notes of a scream started their way out of him but were cut off by his paw slamming over his snout. The sound that came out of him was not his own, but that of a woman’s. It crackled like a teenager’s, but instead of a sudden deepening in his pitch, it was a rapid incline. He cautiously uncovered his maw and let out a tepid “Ah.” It did not crack this time, but remained the smooth, unmistakable tone of a woman’s.
Then, just like that, all sensations stopped at once. He looked into the mirror to see not a reflection of himself, but that of a buxom skunkette. He- no, she? He still identified as a man, but any and all physical remnants of that were gone. God, even his visage had taken on the soft contours of a woman, albeit with the inclusion of a short snout with a pink cherry nose. He lifted his hand- no, his paw, -towards his cheek. His entire body jerked the moment his tough paw pads touched his sensitive whiskers. Yes, it was real. It was all real.
Terror set in. “Oh God! Oh no! Why?” He rubbed his paws all over his face, stretching the skin to find any breaches that would reveal normal human skin beneath. All he got was the sight of sharp canines sticking out from his gums. Nothing human besides his upright posture remained. Even his underwear had magically vanished. What was he going to do now? Was this permanent? He had to call someone, but who? 911? How was he supposed to explain that over the phone? Who would they even send? It had to be someone who trusted him, but he doubted even his own mother would believe a single word of what happened.
Written by TheGreatJaceyGee on 24 January 2023
Maria (Sister)
But he couldn’t just lock himself in his apartment for the rest of his life, or however long this curse would last. Maybe Leland will have a cure. That old son of a bitch knew what this would do to me. That would have to wait. First, he had to get help. He ran out of the bathroom, whipping his fluffy skunk tail through the air behind him. Morbid curiosity drove him to try and move it.
Sure enough, it wagged on command like the feathered fan of a burlesque dancer. That was kind of cool, but not enough to stay focused on. His phone was left on his dresser. He clicked the power button, bringing up the lock screen. A few rapid taps unlocked it and brought him to the home screen. He opened his contacts and selected the person who lived the closest, his sister Maria.
She picked up on the third ring. “Hey! What’s up?”
“Maria?” His voice was a harsh reminder that he was no longer a male. He clapped his paw back over his mouth. Shit! He cleared his throat, then tried to correct his pitch by bringing it lower. “You there?” He cringed hard. It was painfully obvious that he was trying to change his voice into something more masculine.
“Uh, yeah?” Maria said, sounding concerned. “You OK? You sound weird.”
“Um, yeah.” His attempt at sounding more natural failed. “I mean… no. I kinda have an emergency.”
“Oh. What’s wrong? What happened?” The worry in her voice cut like an edge.
“Well, I’m fine. I’m not hurt. Nobody’s hurt, but… I need you to come over.”
“OK. I’m headed over right now. What is it?”
He cringed. “It’s hard to explain. I can’t tell you over the phone.”
He heard the frown in her voice. “OK… How bad is it? What’s going on? Do you need me to call the police?”
“No! Just… Just get over here, OK? I can’t explain it without you seeing it.”
She didn’t ask any more questions. “OK. I’m on my way.” She hung up the phone, leaving Jared alone in the silence of his apartment. He spent the next several minutes pacing around, rubbing his paws nervously. His pink button nose twitched incessantly. His tail would flick and jitter behind him. He tried putting jeans on, only to find that the extra padding of fur prevented that. A towel around torso was going to have to do. A sharp buzzing sound rang through the apartment when his sister hit the intercom. He unlocked the door for her and she came running up. Jared panicked. She can’t see me like this right when she walks in! He ran into the kitchen and hid behind the doorway right as he heard knocking on the door. “Hello?” called a voice.
“Come in,” he hollered. “It’s open.”
Maria opened the door and stepped inside cautiously. “Jazz? You here?”
Written by TheGreatJaceyGee on 25 January 2023
Skunk too
Jared frowned. Jazz? Who the heck is Jazz? “That you, Maria?” Jared called from the kitchen.
“Yeah, it’s me. Why do you sound so weird?”
“Um… It’s complicated.” He heard her footsteps approaching the kitchen. “Wait! No! Don’t come in here!”
She stopped abruptly. “Jazz? Are you OK?”
“No. Well, yeah, kinda. Why do you keep calling me that?”
“I… always call you that.” There was a long pause. “What’s going on? Where are you? Where’s Jasmine?”
Jasmine!?!? “Jasmine? Who-? What are you talking about?”
He heard her take a step back. “Jazz, if that’s you, you’re scaring me. Come on out. Let me see you.”
“Sorry, sorry.” Jared took a deep breath. He stopped trying to sound like a man. “I might scare you even more when I come out.”
“OK. Are you hurt?” She didn’t seem concerned by Jared’s feminine voice.
“No, but what happened is… pretty shocking.”
“It’s OK. You can show me.”
“Whoo… OK.” God, this is gonna suck. “You sure you’re ready?”
“Just show me.” She was getting impatient.
“OK. Here I come.” With another pair of deep breaths, he stepped out into the doorway.
The reaction was instantaneous, one that involved a startled jump and a high-pitched scream. It was not Maria’s. The black and white fur across Jared’s body went into a great kerfuffle. He jumped so high the soles of his feet went almost a foot into the air. His heart seized in his chest and plummeted into a pool of ice water at the basement of his gut.
Maria was a skunkette too.
She was still Maria, of course. There was her usual outfit of jeans and a t-shirt. The purse she usually carried was slung over her shoulder and her sunglasses were perched on her brow. Her hair was even in the same long style that bobbed around her shoulders. That’s where the similarities to the Maria Jared knew ended. She was, like Jared, wholly and unmistakably a skunk, from the big bushy tail that sprouted behind her to the half-moon ears that sprouted from her hair.
She jumped when Jared did, but not because he was a skunk. “What? What?” she demanded.
Jared quaked where he stood, clinging to the towel vaporously. “Y-… y-… y-… You’re…” His quivering jaw could not get the words out.
“What? What is it?” Maria looked down at herself. Jared expected a sudden and violent realization that she was a skunk too. Nothing of the sort happened. “Is something on me?” Seeing nothing, she ran over to her brother/sister. “Are you OK? What’s under the towel?” She reached for Jared’s paw.
He turned away. “No!” Maria leapt back, startled. “I mean… Sorry… Sorry… I… Oh my God.” His eyes went up and down her mephitine form over and over. Most surreal was her face which besides its black fur and animal snout looked exactly like it had when she was a human. “You’re a… skunk.”
Maria frowned hard, then cracked a confused smile. “Yeah, no shit. So are you.” She tilted her head. “Is everything OK? I mean, obviously not, but did you hit your head or something?”
He wished it was that easy to explain. “No… I didn’t. I just…” He looked down at himself. The towel swelled around his recently acquired bosom. “I put a suit on… And it did something to me.” And to you, he almost added.
“Oh. Can I see it? Is it underneath the towel?”
Does she really not see any difference? Have I been a woman to her this whole time??? “Um… Yeah. Kinda.”
“Oh. Let me see.”
Jared blanched. “Um… I don’t know.” Showing his naked body to his sister wasn’t something he was comfortable with.
“It’s OK. We used to take baths when we were little babies, remember?”
“Uh… Well, yeah, but…” Then Jared realized. If she remembered her as a woman this entire time, they probably had grown up as sister and sister rather than brother and sister. Sharing bodily secrets must have been much less taboo. “Alright.” He opened his towel to reveal his trunk. He anticipated a severe reaction out of her, but got nothing but a confused frown.
“You look fine! Is something hurting?”
“Uhh…” Now that he thought about it, he felt kind of comfortable having a furry tummy and chest. “No.”
“Oh. Then why the hell’d you call me over?”
Written by TheGreatJaceyGee on 26 January 2023
Lie
“I…” Crap. Now I have to come up with an excuse. “Earlier… I was having a really bad… cramps… in my stomach.”
Maria’s frown deepened. “Were they that bad you had to call me? You didn’t take anything for it?”
“Um… I did. They were bad, but nothing was working.”
“OK, and why’d you get naked?”
“Well, I was when they started.”
“Right, right. Well, if they come back just call me, I guess. Did you need me to drive you to the clinic?”
“Yeah, I thought so.”
“OK. You want me to hang around a while?”
Jared needed nothing more than to be with someone to handle his new form, but being around someone he’d forever known as a human in the same form was not easy on his psyche. Simultaneously, being around someone who looked like him and did not judge him for his appearance was helpful. “Yeah, if you don’t mind.”
“You got it. I wasn’t doing anything anyway.”
For the first time since his transformation, Jared smiled. “Yeah, thanks. Um, you called me Jazz, right?”
Maria narrowed her eyes. “Yyyyyyyyyeah. I’ve always called you that.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I was just… wondering. How did you come up with it?”
“I mean… It’s short for Jasmine. Wasn’t that hard to come up with when I was 3.”
Jasmine. He remembered her saying that name earlier. That’s who I am in this universe. But was it a universe? As in a place separated from the one he was born into? How much did his current past and human past coincide? Were his parents skunks too? What animals were everyone else? Finding all of it out wasn’t going to be easy or fun. He had to ask questions without sounding like a loony, although he more than felt like one. “I think I’ll go get dressed.”
“Yeah, you do that,” Maria joked.
Jared/Jasmine strutted back to the bedroom where his/her closet was waiting. Opening it revealed a wardrobe which at first glance looked the same as it had been. His shirts, pants, socks,
and underwear were all stacked on a white metal rack neatly while his jackets hung from the rod above. He made to reach for a pair of underwear when his paw stopped. A frown furrowed his brow. That isn’t mine was his immediate thought, but it was supplanted by the realization that the opposite was true. Yes, those slim panties stacked up in a row were in fact his. But of course. The Jasmine version of him had bought clothes for women. Why wouldn’t she?
Written by TheGreatJaceyGee on 27 January 2023
Clothing
He picked up a pair and held them out curiously. He was familiar with women’s underwear, of course, but the prospect of putting them on was uncomfortably foreign. He noticed that the back of the waistband had a hole going through it. Above it was a clasp like that on a bra. He realized that it was for his skunk tail to fit through and that all of the other pairs had the same feature. A sigh left him as he unclasped the panties and brought them down to his feet. He stepped into the leg holes and pulled them up his furry legs. Without thinking, he pulled the tabs on the clasp around and over his tail. With a deft shift of his fingers the clasp bar slid into the holder, locking the underwear into place.
He blinked. Did I just do that? He looked down at his back and saw the underwear neatly wrapped around his waist. It was like he had done it a thousand times, and that was because he had done it a thousand times, several thousand, in fact. Just like putting on any other article of clothing, putting the panties on was accomplished purely by muscle memory. Now that the underwear were on him, they didn’t feel unnatural at all. “Huh,” he said out loud.
He noticed his bras stacked nearby. With his curiosity peeking, he plucked one up to perform an experiment. He closed his eyes and put the bra on. His arms went through the openings, the cups hugged his chest, and he closed the clasp onto his back. His eyes opened and looked down. Everything was perfect. “Holy shit!” he chuckled.
“Everything OK in there?” Maria called out.
“Yeah!” Jared said, smiling from ear to ear. “Everything’s awesome in here!” Who knew putting on women’s clothes could be so fun!
“Alright! Let me know if you need help with anything!”
It was only a few minutes ago that Jared thought he’d need help with everything, but that turned out to be false. He put on the rest of his outfit while grinning like an idiot. What he ended up with was just a white tank top and some jeans, but looking at himself in the mirror he saw the coolest outfit he’d ever had the pleasure of putting on. There was close to an entire 10 minutes spent bouncing and dancing his big fluffy skunk tail out behind him before Maria called to ask if he was OK again.
“Oh yeah! I’m fine,” called out the skunkette admiring herself in the mirror. Not Jared the he, but Jasmine the she.
She wandered out of the bathroom and back into the living room where Maria was sitting on the couch reading a magazine from the coffee table. Jasmine noticed for the first time that the people on the front cover were skunks too. One of his magazines was a National Geographic
depicting a mosaic of Jesus. To his amusement and wonder, he too was a skunk. She chuckled. Skunk Jesus. Cool.
Maria laughed with her. “What’s so funny?”
Jasmine pointed to the magazine. “Skunk Jesus.”
Maria looked down at it and lifted an eyebrow. “Yeah? What about him?”
Jasmine realized that she had just said the equivalent of Human Jesus. “Nothing. It’s just funny seeing him on the magazine like that.”
“Oh, OK.” Maria laughed at the absurdity of it. “Are you high?”
Written by TheGreatJaceyGee on 28 January 2023
Yes
“No.”
“You’re acting real funny. You were just freaking out a few minutes ago and now you’re laughing at a picture of Jesus. You coming off the peak?”
Shit. That’s actually a great excuse. Why didn’t I think of that? “Yeah, sorry. That’s why I called you. Having the cramps in the middle of it really fucked me up.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Well, I didn’t wanna give you TMI.”
“For smoking weed?” Maria scoffed. “Weirdo. You know I know you’ve done it before. Why would I judge?”
“Y-yeah. Sorry. I was paranoid.”
“Shit, been there.” Maria patted the cushion next to her. “Have a seat. Take the edge off. You definitely need it.”
Jasmine agreed and took a seat next to her. Her curiosity fell back on her like an anvil. “What’s on TV?”
“I dunno. The remote’s right there.” Maria nodded at the remote on the coffee table.
Jasmine snatched it up and inspected it. It looked like her old remote, maybe a little fatter? Her Jasmine brain saw everything as normal, but Jared brain could find minute changes. Giving anything else closer looks provided the same mind-puzzling contradiction: what she was holding was different from how his memories experienced them, but everything else including muscle memory, subconscious, and various other facets of his psyche registered them as perfectly normal. The contrast faltered side to side in her mind like a pair of dimensions spilling over one another inside the hull of ship rocking on its keel. Neither could take hold of another, not when the
opposing perspective would come crashing over on top as soon as the advantage had been taken. It was like he’d been trapped in her own personal Mandela effect.
Maria watched her stare a disconcertingly long amount of time at the remote. “Damn. You’re toasted.” She quipped.
Jasmine realized how hard she was staring and laughed it off. “Oh yeah. Haha… My bad.”
“Hey, don’t worry about it. Like I said, been there.”
Written by TheGreatJaceyGee on 28 January 2023
Tv
Jasmine hit the power button on the remote. The TV on the wall powered on normally with a white bar materializing in the center of the screen and blooming out to the channel he had last. A passing sports fan, Jasmine, or rather Jared, had watched a hocky game the night before. It was on TNT which today was featuring a few basketball games. Jasmine’s jaw dropped. Famous athletes had all been skunkified like she had been. They talked, joked, and debated amongst themselves exactly like their human counterparts did. They analyzed game footage, discussed strategies, and made guesses on who would win. Everything was totally normal except for the jarring yet banal fact that they were all skunks.
She switched the channels. Yes, everyone else was a skunk too. The exact same commercials Jared had seen the human version of Jasmine could now see as the skunkified edition. They all included the same lines and actors. They all featured the same products. They all had the same annoying songs and jingles. Only difference? Take a guess.
“Wait!” Jasmine yelped, making Maria jump in her seat.
“What? What?”
“Are movies the same?” she asked as if Maria knew what was going on.
“The same? What do you mean? What movies? Jesus Christ, what exactly did you smoke?”
All that did was bring up the image of Skunk Jesus again. Jasmine had to stop herself from giggling again. “Nothing. Wanna watch a movie?”
“Um, Keith is expecting me back home for dinner.”
“OK, OK. No problem. Let’s just…” She opened the streaming menu.” Let’s see something really quick.” Using the many streaming services the market had to offer, Jared had both rented and bought several movies digitally over the years. If Jasmine was the same as Jared, at least in the very tenuous and confusing sense that she hoped it was, the movie Troy starring Brad Pitt was still in her library. It was her favorite movie, one she liked to rewatch at least once a year. She opened Netflix and browsed the movies she’d seen. Sure enough, Troy was both in the library and had been marked as something she watched. The thumbnail depicted Brad Pitt as Achilles, although not quite the version Jasmine/Jared was used to.
She laughed out loud. “Ha! Oh my God!” She selected the movie and hit play. It started exactly how it normally did, veering off only when the first character appeared on screen. Needless to say, they weren’t human. Jasmine just sat there laughing herself silly, watching as the movie played itself with a cast completely replaced with anthropomorphic skunk people.
Maria kept quiet, concerned but happy to see her sister in such a childish state of euphoria. She made a mental note to ask Jasmine who her dealer was. Whatever Jasmine was smoking, it was that good stuff. “Well, I wish I could watch this movie with you… again… but I should get going.” She started to get up.
Jasmine snapped out of her hysterics. “Wait! Don’t go!”
Maria frowned. “What?” Her patience was growing thin. “If nothing’s wrong I don’t think I need to babysit you, unless you think I need to.”
“No, no… You don’t, I swear. But… do you think you can drive me somewhere?”
“Your dealer, I’m assuming.”
Jasmine couldn’t help but chuckle even though she was trying to remain serious. “No. It’s a store I ran into earlier today.”
“Oh, so you’ve got the munchies.”
Jasmine shook her head, whipping her long white hair into a halo around her head. “No. It’s not. I swear. It’s something important I have to check out, and I’m too high to drive.” She wasn’t high at all, but driving her car seemed like something too surreal to do when everything around her was so significant and thus distracting.
“What is it?”
Written by TheGreatJaceyGee on 29 January 2023
Back to the Store
Jasmine thought for a moment. How the hell was she supposed to explain Leland? “You’re right, it is my dealer. Sorry.”
“You guys are all cool, right? I’m not bringing you to settle some score, am I?”
“What? No! Just… Can you bring me over there?”
Maria would’ve declined if she wasn’t after some of that good stuff herself. She sighed and fished her keys out of her coat pocket. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
The mere walk from Jasmine’s apartment to Maria’s car was a display of wonders. They spotted her neighbor whom Jasmine had known for years when she was Jared. They were not only a skunk, but were walking their dog who, as far as Jasmine could tell, looked completely normal and unchanged. The person saw Jasmine and gave a polite wave. Jasmine waved back, if less enthusiastically.
Things got exponentially weirder once they got in Maria’s car. The first oddity was the gap in the car seats between the backrest and the seat itself. Maria sat down and casually tucked her tail through it so that it could rest upright behind the backrest. Jasmine sat down and found herself doing the exact same thing as unconsciously as she would put on her seatbelt. The drive to Get It Here was an adventure on its own, revealing a complete treasure trove of mephitine discovery. Jasmine’s pretty face was smushed into the car window as she gawked at everyone who passed. Interesting to see beyond just everyone’s having become, or simply being, a skunk was the fact that there was a variety between them. There were spotted skunks, striped skunks, hognose skunks, and hooded skunks. Jasmine wouldn’t have noticed if her Jared form didn’t have such a fascination with the animal.
That reminded her. “Hey, Maria?”
“Yeah?”
“I got a stupid question.”
“I bet you do.”
She chuckled. “Yeah, do you know what a human is?”
Maria frowned and cut her eye at her while trying to look at the road. “No? What’s that?”
Jasmine slumped in her seat. “Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
They came across the lot where Get It Here had been. The lot remained, but taking it up was a convenience store, not the bizarre novelty shop where Jared had gotten the suit. Looking in through the windows he couldn’t spot any skunk that resembled Leland. She was disappointed, but not surprised. Somebody who sells something magical like that wasn’t liable to show up when you needed them to.
Written by TheGreatJaceyGee on 31 January 2023
History
Maria watched as her sister stared at the convenience store quietly. “You OK?” she asked.
Jasmine sighed. “Yeah, yeah I’m good. Sorry for dragging you out here.” She sat back in her seat. “My dealer’s not here. Sorry.”
“Oh. Don’t worry about it.”
Jasmine tried not to, but that would prove hard.
Maria drove her back to her apartment. After double-checking that everything was OK, she left her sister alone. Now that she was past the amusement period, Jasmine had to sit down and really adjust herself. Sitting down and watching the rest of Troy was fun, but by the end of it the skunkiness had pretty much lost all its novelty. She put on some other movies, laughed at how the actors looked, then turned them off. A look through the gallery on her phone revealed multiple
pictures of herself and her family the exact way Jared had taken them, but in their places were what Jasmine the skunkette had taken, not Jared.
She perused her apartment for other changes. All her clothes were built to contain tails and other skunk features like fluffy fur and claws. She had no winter clothes, probably not necessary given her fur. More time was spent in front of the mirror gawking at her tail. A period of literal self-reflection had her repeating to herself what became a morbid chant: I’m a skunk. I’m a skunk. I’m a skunk. Holy shit. I’m a skunk. And there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.
Memories of the human Jared remained intact, making her question how in tune they were with what happened to Jasmine. Were her interests the same? Were all the people she had met still around? Dread seized her. Are the human people I grew up with still in existence? She had no way of finding out. There she was, stuck in this new universe, a perverse copy of what she was familiar with yet totally alien too.
She had to distract herself from an impending episode of existential horror. She ran to her bedroom where her computer awaited her. The chair wasn’t done recoiling from the impact of her landing on it by the time she was logged on. Her desktop picture was the same: a pretty screenshot she had captured while playing Red Dead Redemption 2. Looks like my interests are pretty much intact. She opened up her browser and clicked the search bar. Where to start? Evolution? Society? Where did things go different?
She was in the middle of typing “human history” when she quickly backspaced it and replaced it with “skunk history.” The results that came up included a few images of cavemen and pre-historic people, but of course they were all skunks. Among them was the famous image depicting the procession of human evolution, the one that started with a basic primate and then gradually moved up into the human. Not only did this one end on an anthropomorphic skunk but it started on what was a completely normal skunk in the human universe. “Woah…” Jasmine thought aloud.
Wikipedia offered a definition: Skunk history, also called world history, is the narrative of skunkity’s past. Jasmine got a chuckle out of the word “skunkity”. Browsing the wiki page as well as other informative websites unveiled a motherlode of information too burdensome for her to drink in at once. It was rife with scientific names of skunk’s ancestors, but instead of Australopithecus afarensis, it was Australopalianthropus afarensis. Other scientific names followed the same theme, replacing the human origin of the word and replacing it with the skunk version, usually “mephitis” or “palianthropus”. A translation of the former revealed that it meant smelly in latin. It was funny to her that even in a world where everyone stank, it didn’t mean nobody stank.
Written by TheGreatJaceyGee on 01 February 2023
World History
That reminded her. Could she spray? That wasn’t something she was willing to experiment inside her apartment. Another quick google search revealed that most skunks had their glands removed upon birth. In fact, there was an entire political debate on bodily autonomy which confronted the tradition. Without going so far as to check herself physically, Jasmine assumed her glands had been removed, which was kind of a bummer.
That wasn’t the end of her investigation. There was so much else to unpack and ask. Thank God that all of this had happened to Jared in the modern age when there was all of the world’s secrets at her fingertips. She slogged through a book series’ worth of Wikipedia pages that included both history and anatomy. Skunk history followed human history more or less to a tee. There were more paintings of skunk Jesus to giggle at as well as other religious and historic figures. Skunk Abe Lincoln, skunk Joan of Arc, skunk Napoleon, skunk Ceasar. Fuck, there was even a skunk Hitler. Jasmine would’ve laughed her ass if off if it wasn’t so messed up.
That brought her back to the political sphere. Issues were similar and the parties followed the same format of Left wing vs. Right wing and Liberal vs. Conservative. There were a few added issues that were interesting. There was the aforementioned bodily autonomy debate regarding the removal of stink glands. Race divides were not done by color of skin but pattern of stripes. Geez. I guess the concept of race in the human world is more nebulous than I thought.
Politics aside, there was the issue of human existence. Maria had never heard of them, but could they have existed in this universe like skunks did in the human universe? She typed “human” into the search bar. To his surprise, there were in fact a few suggestions. She hit enter and was subject to the most bafflingly hilarious set of images he had ever laid eyes on. There were several artist’s renditions of humans based on their skeletal remains. Apparently, they had gone extinct hundreds of thousands of years ago, never evolving past the Homo erectus stage. Jared had learned that there was a human bias of what people thought dinosaurs and other fossils looked like when they were alive. Artist renditions humans made tended to exclude dinosaur feathers and thus were incomplete pictures of what they may have looked like.
Skunk bias of what humans looked like, on the other hand, had the exact opposite problem. Each human was covered head to toe in thick fur just like any other animal. What were supposed to be serious renditions of what humans lived like on planet earth were instead a gut-busting comedy of errors. Jasmine found herself in another fit of hysteric giggles. Scrolling down the selection of hairy humans had tears rolling down her cheeks. It reminded her of Cats, the God awful 2019 movie.
“Oh shit!” She had to look the movie up. To her surprise, the film actually did much better in the skunk universe. Apparently skunks made to look like cats had a much less severe uncanny valley effect given the better similarity between the two animals. That did not save the movie from having a nonsensical plot and a star-studded cast of actors who didn’t care about performing.
There was so much more to delve into and gawk at, but Jasmine couldn’t let it distract her from the fact she still had a life to live as a skunkette. Jared’s job as a host at a restaurant most likely carried over to Jasmine. Was working in that environment going to be much different? Jared had been working there for over a year; maybe Jasmine could perform it like nothing had changed. She could only hope. She checked her calendar on her phone and confirmed that she had work the next morning. The rest of her work schedule reflected what Jared’s had been. Maybe she could get away with this after all.
Written by TheGreatJaceyGee on 03 February 2023
Living
The next morning was the start of her first full day as a skunkette. She performed her usual routine from showering to eating breakfast and brushing her teeth. There were some noted
differences, mainly that shampooing her entire body proved to be a hassle and a half. She had to take time to brush both the hair on her head and the floof of her tail. Upwards of half an hour passed before she deemed herself presentable.
She drove herself to work, careful not to lose her focus on the skunkified world around her. She turned on the radio to listen to some music, finding out that her taste in alternative rock music remained untouched. Getting to work was another round of shock from seeing people she recognized as skunks. Everyone had the same features. Her manager, Tom, even kept his balding head, poor guy.
Everything proceeded as normally as any other day. Jasmine was afraid she’d slip up and introduce herself to a guest as Jared, but once again muscle memory saved the day. The rest of the shift went without incident, and Jasmine left the restaurant feeling proud. Far from tired like she usually was coming off work, she was thriving. The urge to go back in there and ask if she could fill another shift was strong. If doing her job had become this fun, what else was there?
She went straight to her parents’ home and knocked on the front door. She damn near died laughing when the answered it to reveal a pair of aging skunk folk. They both got a big old hug and got asked how they were doing. They were happy to tell her that they were just fine, although her father found it pertinent to ask if she was high on anything. Another fit of laughter rolled through her. She told him no, “but I’m high on life, that’s for sure.”
The week blew by in a flurry of joy and thrill. She went to the movies to watch Avatar 2 which featured the same Na’vi, albeit with a more mephitine twist to their features. Even after that 3 hour long slug she bought tickets for other movies and sat through them. Comedic moments were funnier, action scenes were more suspenseful, and the scary moments would’ve had her skunking in her pants.
She visited an amusement park, a museum, a concert, even a ballet. These were things she never would’ve done on such whimsy. Jared would’ve complained of not having enough cash or time. Now she had the same amount of both, yet she found ways to spend it and never regretted a single moment. She had achieved a childlike sense of wonder that escalated her emotions into such extremes she could hardly control herself. The sway of perspective was done with. Jared the human was gone. Jasmine the skunkette was here to stay.
Written by TheGreatJaceyGee on 04 February 2023
