Trying to fix that, I turned my latest story, which was supposed to be just three short captions, into a longer one. Hope you enjoy it.
RIDING THE BUS
You’ve probably heard all about it. After all,
I imagine something like this would be huge news. I can’t be sure about the media
coverage it’s receiving, though, because we’ve been completely excommunicated
from the outside world.
Three months ago, something fell from the sky over
a small Italian village. We still don’t know what. Some say it’s a spaceship,
and others think it’s an asteroid. I certainly haven’t seen it, so I can’t be
sure, and everything ought to be treated as a rumor these days. In any case,
most seem to believe it only killed half a dozen people when it crashed, but
apparently it’s been changing the
townspeople in strange ways ever since it came.
No, I don’t live in that village, thankfully.
Me, my parents and my older sister live in a nearby (and even smaller) town,
though my dad was travelling to England when it happened. We haven’t heard from
him since, because the event killed the communications in the entire region.
Even worse, or only access point to the rest of the country is through the
crash site, which means we’ve been completely cut out.
Resources are starting to wane, and only a few helicopters
loaded with food have managed to get through the mountains in all these months.
Their reports are scarse and not very encouraging. The authorities are still
trying to remove the object, but they’ve apparently been unable to do so. Most
of the pilots look very afraid and don’t want to explain too much about the
supposed human transformations that have ensued.
My 15-year-old sister, Martina, is my best
friend and protector. We love each other a lot, and she’s been my support
during these difficult days. She brings the most news to the house since she
knows a lot of people in the town, though she acknowledges her sources are
sometimes contradictory. Her biggest piece of information came one night, when
she told us a few bus drivers would attempt to get people out of the village.
This seemed like a great idea. We would be able
to contact dad, who probably was waiting for us with his family at Rome. Then
we would only return home once the crisis was over.
My mother, Viola, wasn’t so convinced. She was
45 and somewhat faint-hearted. She was afraid because driving out of town meant
going very near the crash, and she for one believed all the bizarre rumors
about what that thing could do to a person.
“What do you think, Arianna?” she asked me.
We’ve always been a very close family, and that
means even the opinion of a 11-years-old counts.
“I think we should go with them. We don’t have
enough to live for many more months, and the situation at the markets is worse
every day. It’s risky, but so is staying.”
So it was decided that we would try to escape.
The buses departed two days later, carrying
much less people than we thought. It seemed that a great deal of our neighbors
were very scared to get so close to the spaceship, or whatever it was, while
others firmly believed the crisis would sort itself out sooner rather than
later.
We boarded one of the largest buses, and yet
there were only about 10 other people inside. The empty seats at least meant we
could change spots whenever we wanted, which would come useful since the
journey would last over ten hours.
But it was only two hours later when we passed
near The Zone.
The driver had the good sense not to warn us
when we approached the place, so that people wouldn’t panic. In any case, we
all did notice we were there, because something happened right away.
Since my mother didn’t know where we were, she
had just gone to the back of the bus to talk with some neighbors who were sitting
there. I was sitting silently and a bit sleepy in front of Martina. My sister
was quiet and abstracted, looking beyond the windows.
I was just watching her when something occurred
in the blink of an eye. I felt a shift in my position and Martina wasn’t in front
of me anymore. In her place, there was an unknown girl, doing exactly what my
sister had been doing.
With a start, I realized the wildest rumors
about the crash site were true, and that the girl was Martina. Apparently, she hadn’t noticed anything, and I was too
shocked to say anything.
I just looked at my changed sister for a few
seconds, trying to compare her new appearance to the one I was used to. She
didn’t look much older than her original 15 years. She was in her late teens, maybe
18 or so, and she was very pretty. Martina had been a bit plump, but now she
was extremely thin, which was showcased because her conservative clothes had
been exchanged by a revealing attire. Her hair was longer and had gone from
chestnut to very black. Her eyes had likewise changed from brown to bright
green, and were bigger and expressive. Black polish covered her nails and I
could see a tattoo on one of her bare thighs. She looked like a completely
different person.
That mental catalogue must have happened in a
split second, because just then I heard screams all over the bus and I realized
other people were becoming aware of their own changes. I also remembered I had
felt a shift myself and I was sure I had changed too. I was looking at my
surroundings from a higher vantage point, which definitely meant I was taller.
Martina heard the screams and turned away from
the window. She looked at me and she yelled too, then she finally must have
noticed something was amiss with her too. She looked down at her new body and
outfit, and then she started touching her face wildly, feeling the differences.
I imitated her and I decided to finally look
down too. I felt faint. I was suddenly aware that my chest was pushing out very
far, and my eyes confirmed it. I had breasts now. Very big ones too, it seemed.
I could see a huge amount of cleavage under the see-through fabric. Also, like
my sister’s, my legs were uncovered below the hem of the short and tight dress
I was now wearing.
Martina and I looked at each other in amazement
for a second.
“Arianna? Is that you?” she asked. I could
recognize neither her voice nor her accent.
I nodded violently, and I felt my larger body
wobbling.
I wanted to further discover how much I had
changed, but someone was worriedly calling for our names behind us. I turned
around, because even though I couldn’t recognize that voice either, there was
only one person who could be screaming for us.
My mother was absolute unrecognizable. She was
now an attractive young woman in her early twenties, and I thought I could see
a certain family likeness to the new Martina. Like her, Mom was now slim and
sexy-looking, with black hair and green eyes. She was also dressed revealingly,
with leather pants and a translucent blouse which allowed a good view of her
black bra, which obviously encased much bigger breasts.
She would have never dressed like that in her
life, yet at the moment she wasn’t very preoccupied about her attire. She was
trying to get to us as quickly as possible, but she was struggling. Maybe it
was because of her unfamiliar longer legs or maybe it was because, like Martina
and me, she was now wearing very high heels.
“Girls? Is that you?” she asked in shock when
she got to our seats. She also had a sultry voice and the same Slavic accent
Martina had.
“MOM?!”, my sister said, while I nodded
silently.
“Which one…?” my mother cleared her throat.
“Sorry, I don’t know why I’m speaking like this. “Which one is Martina and
which one is Arianna?”
“I’m Arianna, Mom,” I said, and I wasn’t that
surprised when the same accent came out of my mouth, not to mention the very
different adult voice.
”Arianna? But, dearie, you are so big!”
“I know…” I said, and I couldn’t help but
cupping my large breasts.
“I knew something like this would happen,” Mom
whispered.
She sat at Martina’s side while I looked
around. The other passengers were similarly shocked, and much different from
how they had been a minute earlier. An old man and woman sitting close by had
been changed into a younger and attractive couple, and they were now Asian too.
The pretty Japanese woman was looking at her new shapely legs and smooth hands
with a shocked expression on her large eyes.
Close by, a boy who had been a little younger
than me was now sitting in the body of a very large black man. He touched his
short beard and flexed his muscular arms with a delighted expression.
My mother and sister had both new purses
instead of their regular ones, and they were both searching for a mirror. I
looked to the seat directly beside me and also saw a large leather purse
instead of my green backpack.
The mirror I found was small, but it sufficed
to give me an idea of how I looked now.
I was indeed a grown woman, older than my
sister. I thought I was in my twenties, and maybe around the same age as my
mother, if not a bit older than her too. This realization dazed me. I used to
wear my thick hair up to my chin, but it had grown longer and silkier. I passed
my very long, red fingernails through it, surprised at the feel, and then I
dropped it and let it cascade over my breasts.
They were really quite large, at least for a
flat 11-years-old as I had been. As I’d noticed before, my deep cleavage could
be fully seen through my transparent clothes. Like my mother and sister, I too
was dressed rather provocatively. I was wearing a tiny animal print dress and a
tan jacket. The jewelry on my hands and ears was large, and I had lots of
makeup in my face. Despite that, I thought my new features were attractive. I
had fleshy lips and large blue eyes, and like my family, I didn’t look anything
like I used to. I was a new woman.
I tried to stand and walk around. Being tall
and curvy, I felt completely off-balance, and I instantly fell back on my round
butt. Struggling with my heels and proportions, I managed to get back on my
feet by grabbing the poles firmly. I strode towards the front of the bus.
The chauffeur was crying and saying he couldn’t
drive any more. He had been turned into a cute little girl with blonde pigtails
and a flowery dress. She was so small now that she couldn’t reach the pedals.
After a short discussion with other passengers,
the driver left her seat to the boy who had turned into a beefy black man, who
assured us he knew how to drive now. He also seemed clumsy when moving with his
bigger body, but he looked sure enough in front of the wheel. Indeed, he
resumed the journey and he drove perfectly until the end.
As for the three of us, were still too shocked
to talk much for the duration of the trip. When we did, though, we were equally
surprised. We could still speak Italian, though it was heavily accented and we
had to think a lot to do it. Instead, we discovered we all felt much more
comfortable speaking Ukrainian, a language we had never been familiar with.
After her initial shock, my mother was looking
much more relaxed, even pleased. After all, becoming a beautiful young woman
had been as much of an upgrade to her as my transformation had been to me. The
much prettier Martina also seemed satisfied with her outcome, even if she kept
stealing jealous glances to our much curvier bodies. Whenever she did that, my
mother smiled at me.
The weirdest thing was that it didn’t feel
right thinking about her as “Mom” any more, but rather as Viola. I reasoned
that considering our new ages, there was no way she could be our mother any longer.
Instead, we were more like three sisters now, and I guessed our new
relationship was going to take that direction from now on.
I still felt strange, yet increasingly more
comfortable and in control of my new form. I wanted to explore more of what had
happened to me, but the privacy that the bus offered was very limited. As I
reflected on everything that happened, I dozed off and fell asleep for about
two hours.
When I woke up, the new driver was informing us
that the journey was almost over. I stretched my long legs and I wiggled my
toenails, still amazed at the size of my feet and the red polish. My high
platform shoes were almost familiar to me by now, though. I got up to stretch
my limbs and I was surprised to see how much easier was to move now. I had
adapted a lot in just a few hours.
“How are you feeling, Arianna?” Viola asked me
in fluent Ukrainian. We weren’t the only ones who had gone through such
changes. The formerly old couple near us had talked in Japanese during the
whole journey, and they were now kissing romantically. A little girl who had
transformed into a teenage beauty was speaking with a heavy Australian accent.
“I’ll be all right,” I replied with a smile,
which my new sisters answered back.
I wondered what my father would say when he saw
that we had been turned into three young Eastern European women with a liking
for risqué outfits. I shrugged. He’d probably be much relived to know we were
safe as a priority.
As for me, I too was glad we were unharmed, but
I was also excited about this new body and life that had been given to me.
