diatu | The Bodyswap Post

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The Bodyswap Post

The Bodyswap Post

One: Nothing Wrong With Me

Something's Got To Give

Push Me Again, This Is The End

Perhaps shockingly, the Sundered aren't the only people affected by this mess of Modification. Students by the dozen find themselves in the wrong bodies, and that means the Magicademy is chaos. Cat familiars given human form raid the newly-reopened Great Hall, stealing every piece of food they can and knocking down every glass, book, or valuable item left on a horizontal surface above ground height. Unscrupulous souls take advantage of the anonymity in new forms to steal, bully, swipe, or even just catch a glimpse of attractive students of their desired gender at inopportune moments. Others are taking respect of their new bodies so far that they, well, kind of smell thanks to their unwillingness to bathe. Though classes continue as normal, attendance is a nightmare. In short, chaos rules the Magicademy, and spills over uncomfortably often into those doing their best to muddle through...

LET THE BODIES HIT THE FLOOR! LET THE BODIES HIT THE FLOOR! LET THE BODIES HIT THE FLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOR!

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"I know," he said, a little too quickly. "Er, I mean, he told md about you. You had a lizard."

She did catch how quickly he responded, there, and she can't help wonder if she really is talking to Louie, or... Hmm.

"Yes, that's right. A salamander."

"What? No, those catch on fire, we use them in potion class. You said you had a ..."

Lightbulb moment.

"Aw, phooey. ... hi, Punzie."

"Hi Dewey," she responded with a soft smile, as she crouched down and ruffled his hair. "Sorry about that."

"Aaaaare you though?" He smirked, even as he squirmed out from getting ruffled. "Seriously though, Webby ... pulled a Webby, surprise! ... and now everyone's switching bodies. I woke up as Hendrick, which was kinda cool, and I was hoping I'd just go back to myself.... But now I'm Louie, and there's barely anything different about that at all!"

She noticed that squirm, and drew her hand back fast. After all, she wouldn't have wanted anyone touching her hair without asking... Though, of course, she had her reasons for that.

"I've noticed. It's been a pretty weird day, even though I've been lucky so far, I guess." She stopped to regard Dewey-in-Louie's-body, and smiled a bit. "You two do look alike."

He didn't seem like she'd made him tweak out or anything, at least: it just seemed like a gesture he was unfond of.

"Lucky is definitely the word I'd use." Dewey nodded his agreement, shrugging. "And yeah, all three of us do. People get us mixed up all the time, even though we figured out this color scheme thing when we were really little, to help. STILL, some people can't get it through their heads. It took Uncle Scrooge for-EH-ver to get us straight."

With a mother like Gothel, one learned to err on the side of apology and guilt, essentially.

"Hmm... I like the idea of color-coordinating. And Louie's hair isn't up like yours is!" Was hair the right word to use when they were actually feathers? It didn't much matter, now, did it? "But... Still, it must be frustrating when people you know can't tell you three apart."

"Once, I thought about growing it reeeeeeeally long like a picture my Uncle Donald had of our Mom? Just to see what it would do? But Uncle Donald said I'd look like a hippie and that all it would probably do would get really fluffy and look dumb."

He made a face.

"So I didn't. ... And yeah, it's ... people already kind of treat us like one person split between three bodies, because we're triplets? It's bad. I - we know we're different! And when people get to know us, they figure it out! But whenever we first meet anyone, it's a gigantic tweak to the tailfeathers."

Rapunzel listened quietly to all Dewey had to say before she spoke up, herself.

"Long hair can be a pain," she began, starting things off light. "Believe me. But you should wear it how you want to, really. I..." She sighed. "I think that's an important choice to have. Anyway, I know that's not really what matters here, I'm sorry. I just- Well, it's nothing. Dewey, I've only known you for about a month, and I can't imagine there being anyone else like you. So I hope more people take the time to get to know you each."

"Seriously, how are you real?" He actually said it, now that he didn't have to pretend to be Louie. "I've never met anyone as nice as you, except maybe Mom. Only she's pretty crazy, too, so most people don't notice the nice part."

He hugged her, tight, maybe a little for both of them, but mostly for him, then looked up at her.

"If the hair thing is important to you, um, duuuuuh it matters. Did something really bad happen to you at a hairdresser? Were the scissors cursed? Ooh! Did the chair try to eat you? Was the sink a portal to another dimension?!"

Go ahead. Guess which side of the family he gets it from.

What he says means so much to her, as does the hug - it takes her a bit by surprise, but she returns it as best she can, considering the height difference.

"Thank you, Dewey," she manages to get in, before he goes off about 'the hair thing' and disasters that even Rapunzel could never have dreamed up to worry over, back in the tower. She holds back a giggle, and instead, shrugs.

"No, nothing like that. I've just always grown my hair out," she explains, the half-truth better than an outright lie, she hopes. "But speaking of other dimensions, you know, this isn't the first time I've been to one."

She thinks Dewey would appreciate hearing about how she first ended up in a new world, given his adventurous spirit.

The hair topic is, indeed, completely forgotten in the wake of that subject-drop. He seizes on it immediately. "Really? I wanna hear about it! Tell me everything. Eh. Vuh. Ry. Thing. Like ... did your hair get stuck or cut off when you swapped dimensions?"

Rapunzel shook her head. "No, no... I appeared there all at once, just as suddenly as when I appeared here. The place was called Verens. It was a town, also on a floating island - a lot like this place is - and, there was magic there, too. But it was a different sort of magic - it was controlled by emotions." She paused, biting her lip. "Well, controlled isn't quite the right word."

"... Emotional magic?" He made a face. Knowing his family's track record with talking about how they felt, and all, that just sounded like a disaster waiting to happen. "Yeeeeeesh."

"It was tricky," she said with a nod. "Some people who had been there for a long time could control it well, but I couldn't... Whenever I was afraid, I'd freeze things," she added with a light, self-deprecating laugh.

"That's ... I mean ... I guess if something was chasing you, it could be really useful!" He said brightly, then sighed. "But I'm gonna also guess there wasn't really much chasing you, huh. It figures, whenever there's something cool like that, it always ends up happening in the most uncool way possible."

"There were these training dummies that made a lot of trouble, once, actually," Rapunzel pointed out. "Verens wasn't always the safest place, but it wasn't as dangerous as it could have been, thank goodness."

"Training dummies? How can those be dangerous?" He wondered, immediately picturing a row of Gyro robots gone wrong, shooting lasers and fire everywhere.

"Well, remember what I said about the emotion magic? Well, just before I got there, there was a festival that mostly focused on the emotional magic connected to love, but I guess... To balance it out, I believe, there was some magic about hate, too. People were getting out their anger by fighting those training dummies, but too many people felt the anger too strongly."

She sighed. "The magic brought the dummies to life a little while after I arrived. It was really bad for a while, but a bunch of people were able to stop them. I even helped, a little."

"So they wanted to balance everything out but there was more hate than there was love?" Dewey made a face, shifting on his feet uncomfortably. Something about that really hurt: especially for someone who really did think it was most important in life for people to have fun, and be happy.

"That ... that's awful."

"Hey..."

Rapunzel knelt down on the ground, to get right on eye-level with Dewey. "It was awful, but it's not like Verens was a bad place. There was only so much hate because people were focusing on making it. I'm sure of that. I met so many kind people there, Dewey."

"Oh." He looked up, met her warm eyes, and instantly felt a little less awful. It was hard to feel bad with friends nearby, after all.

"I think I get it. Like when you're making a bowl of cereal and you add too much milk, so then you need to get the cereal out again?"

"Oh, yes, actually!" While Rapunzel didn't have experience with the kind of cereal Dewey meant, it was easy enough to carry the comparison over to something like making a soup and needing to more vegetables if it got too salty. "Like I said, it all worked out. And after the dummies were stopped, some people put together a petting zoo to bring more love back into Empatheias."

"Petting zoos? Awwww! That's cool. What kind of animals did they have? Were there any really weird or crazy ones? Still cute, obviously. Like sheep with eight legs or buffalo with no eyes?"

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healingincantation - 2019-09-02 13:14 (UTC) - Expand

Care to start wrapping this one up?

couldabeenturbo - 2019-09-05 15:36 (UTC) - Expand

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