Midas Journal 1 Redo

I think this demands a little explanation. 

A few webcomics I read have, at one point, gone back to their earliest few strips to re-do the art, usually as a brief experiment but sometimes with the hope of giving the entire comic a consistent look that's much better than the early stuff. I had a similar, but different idea here.

Basically, I wondered how the beginning of Midas Journal would look if it were a story I just came up with today, and wrote it in my more current, much better style. This is the result of that experiment, essentially covering what were the first 4 parts. Here's a link to the original first part if you want to do a comparison. I'll have a little more commentary after it.

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Today is March 19.

When my parents were deciding my name, my dad wanted to call me "Kal-el", after Superman. My mom thought that was an impractical, stupid name that'd get me made fun of for all of my life, and suggested "Kyle" instead. The eventual compromise they made was naming me "Kael", which at least almost sounds like a normal name. At least when people don't hear how it's pronounced for the first time and assume I was named after a vegetable everyone hates.

Why did I write that?

Okay, let's try again.

Nobody should be reading this. But in case someone does, I assume something terrible happened to me, maybe before I even started writing it like me going actually crazy, so I'm writing this in the middle of the night when I'm supposed to be asleep, and burying it as deep in my computer's files as I can, so maybe my side of the story could be told. I dunno, maybe it could help find out what went wrong and keep other people from going crazy too.

Okay. To clarify, I don't actually think I'm crazy. It's just that I don't have a really good explanation for what's been happening lately. I think if I keep procrastinating on talking about what happened lately then the police detective or psychiatrist (ologist?) reading this is gonna get really bored and miss out on what I actually wanted to say.

Today is March 19. A week ago was March 12. That was also my 18^th birthday. Happy birthday to me! Right? It was Friday, we had a small party—I don't really have a lot of close friends, honestly, most of the people I knew when I was younger moved away for one reason or another—anyway, I went to sleep and I had a dream. I think it was weird, because it's the only dream I can remember having that I also remember what happened in it. I can remember it like I actually saw it, like I was awake to see it. I mean, not exactly...

It was a lucid dream, sort of. Even though I didn't feel like I had control over what was happening, I knew I was dreaming right away. Like: Yep, this is a dream. I saw a man touching some fruit, and it turned into pure gold, metal the whole way through. He picked up a cup to drink out of and it turned to gold, too. One thing after another was handed to him, from, I wanna say, "offscreen" even though obviously my eyes aren't a screen: Some kind of cone-shaped hat, a cat statue, some ice cream, a clock, a diamond, a mirror...each one was turned to gold by a touch from his hands. After a while, there was a kind of flash to white, and I woke up.

You probably don't think a weird dream that I can actually remember is a big deal. Well, I wouldn't be thinking about the dream if nothing else had happened. Carlos—one of my friends—stayed the night, sleeping on the floor under a blanket. I woke up to some bright light from the window—the kind that always screws up a perfect day of sleeping in, and gave up after flailing around for a while—he was still there. The other side of my bed was up against a wall, so I had to step out past where he was sleeping, practically on top of him, but I didn't want to wake him up and have him beat me to the shower. I managed to get around him, and I thought didn't touch him, but my bare foot did catch on the blanket for a minute.

It gets weird when I came back out. The part of the blanket my foot had been was pink. Bright, hot pink. And that pink was spreading like someone was pouring a big bottle of dye on the spot, and it somehow not staining anything else but the blanket. I couldn't help but stare, which...gave me a clear view of what happened next.

There was motion under the blanket that I wasn't sure how to interpret at first. In fact he was shrinking. Like—his feet were moving up toward his head without the rest of him moving, so he was getting shorter, and he was getting slimmer too, as the blanket seemed to get loose and find more room to fall down over him. This was until he made a slight "Mmh" noise which I thought sounded a little odd—a little too high in pitch, and kind of batted at the blanket, tossing it most of the way off (it was already mostly pink at this point). Then I could see that even more had changed: His skin looked soft and smooth, without any hair on it—including his face, which usually had some unless he'd just shaved the day before, and he hadn't. The hair coming from the top of his head looked longer, though, and it had a strange outward motion to it that I took a second to register as actively growing longer.

Now that the blanket was off, I could see how slim he'd gotten; his arms and legs looked small and soft, and his waist especially looked really flat and narrow. His shoulders had caved in a little too, and his face, on top of the skin looking soft, really looked kind of..pretty? It occurred to me at this point that he looked kind of girly. His boxers—the only thing he had on—looked oddly tight, too, and I started to see that his hips were actually growing wider, his thighs turning thicker too. Carlos made another soft "Mmh" sound, and what came out was a low, but very girlish voice. He pulled his arms up around his chest, and then...well...

Carlos took a sharp, high breath, and then kind of sighed, a little "Aa~ahh" sound that seemed very feminine to me. And..his shorts had shrunk suddenly close against his legs and hips, and also between the legs...what I'm trying to get at is that the half-asleep person I was staring at really didn't look male at all anymore. Then she made a soft, long "Mmmm" noise as her chest visibly puffed forward against her arms, clearly growing out into a big, full pair of boobs in just a few seconds' time.

Then she opened her eyes. "Wha're you lookin' at?" she mumbled, still in that deep, girly voice, and sat up, still keeping her chest covered with an arm. Her hair was almost shoulder-length, with a bit of blue at the tips, and she was blushing with a..really cute, teasing grin at me for a second before grabbig the blanket from behind her, pulling it around her torso and standing up. I was still too stunned and confused to react in any way other than staring, and she just giggled, moving toward the bathroom, stopping next to me and leaning in to peck my cheek once before continuing inside.

I was...still in shock and denial. I thought there was no way that had just happened, my male friend could not have just suddenly turned into a hot girl in the process of waking up. I'd known him for years and if that was a thing then I would've known by now. And even if it was some weird secret of his, why'd he—why'd she react that way to it happening for the first time right in front of me? It didn't make any sense. The only thing I could come up with was that I was dreaming, or had somehow managed to hallucinate the entire thing. I think I might have mumbled to myself "that didn't happen" a few times for good measure, just to try to believe it.

It didn't really help my confusion when Carlos came out of the bathroom near the end of my panic as...well...himself again. He noticed me watching him come out and was like, "What?" Like nothing out of the ordinary had happened. So what could I do? Now I didn't have any real evidence that anything weird had even happened in the first place.

"Uh...nothing," was what I managed to say, and went on with the day. It seemed like, after seeing that one bizarre thing, my life was back to normal.

Except, after he left I happened to go in my bathroom and...Carlos had dropped the blanket into the laundry basket. And it was still pink. I picked it up and looked at it, and couldn't help the feeling that maybe it always had been. Except—why would I buy a pink blanket, or why would my parents get one for me? Staring at the one remaining shred of evidence that something bizarre had happened that morning, it finally clicked in my head that the whole...change...had started on the blanket, and in fact from the point my foot had touched it. Which meant...well, I wasn't sure. But thinking through the day, I hadn't come close to physical contact with him again since that point. I made the decision right then and there to try to avoid touching him, hoping that would keep things normal. Even though, of course, I didn't really have any idea whether touching was important or why I thought it might be. Maybe that dream?

If that was the only thing that happened, I wouldn't be writing this. I would have gone on with my life, maybe never forgetting that incident, but after a while I would've stopped worrying about it. No such luck for me, I guess.

This Tuesday, March 16, it happened again. Not to Carlos, but well...

Let's say, I would call my family upper-middle class. We—and most of my friends really—live in the suburbs, where almost nothing ever happens. It's a safe neighborhood with a watch program, the police exist, all that sort of thing. This makes it especially strange that—when Carlos and I were walking home from school, in broad daylight, taking a cut through a narrow space between a couple of shops that we use all the time, we were mugged. Or—maybe I should say we were almost mugged. A guy came out from behind a dumpster wearing a ski mask and waving a handgun.

I know. What? That isn't the weird part. Well, not the weirdest part. What??? Right.

"Give me your money!" Both of us put up our hands. I don't think Carlos has ever had a gun pointed at him before, and I know I haven't.

"I don't have anything!" It so happens that neither of us carries any cash around. We don't need it, right?

"Come on! You kids have phones, right? Give it to me." He waved the gun back and forth slightly.

"Uh, okay." I got out my phone and sort of slowly reached it over toward him. I'm not sure, but I don't think Carlos was gonna give up his as easily. Maybe he would've yelled for help and hit the ground or tried to come around and hit the gun out of the guy's hand or...I don't know, something. The point is that didn't turn out to matter.

When he reached out and grabbed the phone from my hand, still pointing the gun my way, my fingers brushed across his hand. Just a little bit. He drew his hand back holding the phone and there was..it was like this glow had started from where the touch had been and was very quickly spreading up his hand toward the wrist. He noticed it too—he was looking at his hand, probably because it felt pretty weird, and then looked back at me and then at his arm again while the glow brightened and raced up to the elbow.

"What's—what the—" At this point the mugger's body was lifted into the air, just a foot or so, and in his surprise he let go of both the gun and the phone. They both...stayed, floating in the air, while the glow raced up to his shoulder and from there spread across his entire body, even covering his clothes. It was—it's kind of hard to explain, but it was like his body was giving off a bright light, but it wasn't blinding, I could see the outline and shape very clearly.

He yelled in surprise a couple of times as that shape started very quickly shrinking. He got shorter and slimmer by the second, his big, muscular body losing both traits very fast. The mask burst off of his face, turning into a bunch of sparkles in the air just in front of it, and then two long streams of hair pushed their way out near the sides of his head and the—what had been his mask went and placed itself near the top of each one, turning into a long ribbon tying it together. The rest of his hair grew out too, but not nearly as much—just framing his face and giving him some longer bangs.

He wasn't exactly yelling any more, but making some confused "Aah, aaa~aah," noises in a voice that sounded less and less mature, like it was aging in reverse. He had the build of a teenage guy at this point, but then he shrank even more, his shoulders narrowing and his waist trimming in at the sides, his arms and legs getting small and slender. At this point I realized that his clothes were kind of missing from his 'form', but the glow kind of made it where there wasn't anything to "see" from the lack of clothes either. Again, I'm trying to describe something too bizarre to really put entirely into words, but...anyway, I was having flashbacks to Saturday and it was kind of obvious where this was headed with that in mind.

His voice, in another confused "Aaa", sounded like a young boy's for a second, and then there was an eruption of sparkles up near his shoulders. This flowed down his body, taking on the look of an oddly loose short-sleeved blouse, growing ribbons up near the chest, and then continued its way down, spreading out into a skirt. The skirt kind of spread out to the sides as the hips under it grew bigger and wider. I'm pretty sure at this point he'd turned into a girl, as the sort of spreading motion came with a louder, more surprised "Aah!" in a very high, girly voice. Then a little more of it sort of dripped off the bottom of the skirt, landing on the thighs and spreading all the way down to the feet, clinging close to the legs—turning into a pair of stockings. Finally, her chest pushed out, seeming to grow into the top and fill it until it was fairly tight there—not huge, but definitely...well..a girl's chest, anyway.

The glow erupted off of her in a bunch of bright sparkles and she floated down to the ground. Her blouse was mostly yellow with green accents, the same green on the skirt, with white stockings, and the ribbons holding the twintails now trailing out from her head were a bright yellow, too. I hadn't even been keeping an eye on my phone or the gun, but—well, the latter was gone, replaced by some kind of brown briefcase-purse thing, and she caught each of them neatly in a hand as she landed.

It took me a second to realize just how much closer to me she'd landed, compared to where she'd "taken off" from. When she looked up at me (being much shorter than me now, after starting out a little taller), I made a short, confused noise (I think "Wah!") and stumbled back, falling over and landing sitting down.

"Oh, um. Excuse me," she said, moving slightly closer. "I don't know how I didn't see you. You dropped this," she added, offering me the phone back.
"Uh...thanks?" I took it, and then after a second realized her hand was still out in an offer to help me up. After a second's thought, I did. I felt kind of like she had just bumped into me..even though I knew that wasn't quite what had really happened.

"Really, it's my bad," she said, carefully helping me up. Her grip was a little stronger than I expected. "Are you okay? Oh wait, do you go to..Phalos High?"

"Yyeah," I said slowly in response to both. "Why?"
"Well, I just moved in a few days ago. Today was supposed to be my first day of school but I sorta, got lost looking for it. I can tend to be a little bit of a klutz, you know. Oh! Rio, bytheway." Her hand was pointed my way again—offering a handshake, which I carefully took.
"Right. Um, Kael."

This got a slight giggle out of her. "Like the leafy green?"
"I dunno, are you named after a city in Brazil?"

"Not exactly?" Her head tilted slightly, and I got the impression she was more confused by my annoyed snark than anything else.

"Nothing. It's K-A-E-L."

"Neat. And you?" she turned toward Carlos for the first time. I did, too; he looked a little pale, maybe still in shock. But he responded normally.

"Carlos."

"Good to meet you both. Aahm, I'd better be on my way home, but I'm sure I'll see you again. Bye!" She gave a cheerful wave and then ran off in the direction I'd been facing, the bag-thing the gun had turned into still in her hand.

We stood there for a long minute or two, staring the way she'd just run toward. Eventually he cleared his throat. Okay...did I hallucinate, or was that cute girl a..guy with a gun trying to mug us, like, two minutes ago?"

"...You saw that too?" He nodded.
"Did you...?"
"I, don't know," I answered slowly. "Nobody would ever believe this." I looked back and all around; there were no other witnesses, for sure.

"It's kinda hard not to though, actually seeing it."

"Let's..go," I suggested, pointing forward.

We were awkwardly quiet for a while. I mean—both of us could probably have died from that? It was hard to go back to normal talk. I was also trying to figure out whether I really had somehow been responsible for that. Again...it all started when I touched him! And if I can turn muggers into schoolgirls? How am I supposed to react to that?

I couldn't bring myself to say anything about Saturday. I was kind of glad he wasn't asking more probing questions, because I'm not a very good liar and Carlos probably could've figured out that, well, at least I thought it seemed like I was responsible for that happening, in some sort of weird way. I don't think I felt ready. Maybe I never would feel completely ready, but, well, I'm still grateful I had a few days to get more ready.

It's never good when someone says "Can we talk?" Or texts it, or whatever else. "Can we talk" more or less means "I demand that you tell me the truth about something and/or listen to how I feel even though it's gonna be super uncomfortable for you or me or both of us." Carlos hit me with a 'can-we-talk' today at lunch. Could we go to my house and talk? Sure, I said. I mean, I wasn't really doing anything else today. I was pretty sure he was thinking about what had happened Tuesday, and maybe remembering, in some way or another, the thing with the pink blanket. In light of that, I convinced myself after answering, he had a right to know. Even if it was a hallucination, at least he'd know what I thought I saw, right?

And thankfully my parents were out when we got there. I let him sit down, and then went and sat on the complete opposite side of the couch, waiting. He watched me do this, and stared for a minute or so, and then said, "Soo, Kael."
"Yeah? What do you want to talk about?" I said.

"Have you been, avoiding touching me this past week?"

"N...no."

He gave me a half-smirking skeptical look, like 'really'?

"Okay, fine, yes."

"Soo, why?"

I sighed. "I don't, know, how to explain it in a way that doesn't make me sound completely insane."

"Hey, maybe I can help with that?" He leaned his head on the back of the couch so he was looking mostly up at the ceiling. "I had a weird dream last Friday. Or, maybe it was more into the morning Saturday. Like, I remember waking up and..I was a girl. Weird, right? And it didn't bother me or anything. Actually, I really liked it. I felt—confident, happy. Really fit, full of energy." I guess I could mention he's usually been a little overweight, nothing major though. Before this conversation I didn't even know that it bothered him. "Think I looked in the mirror once in the bathroom and loved what I saw. If anything, it seemed like I'd looked that way for a while, somehow. Then I woke up and...it seemed like nothing happened? But I've felt a little disappointed since."

He waited some, and gave me a questioning look. "...Yeah. I, sssaw that too," I admitted eventually. "And then when you went into the bathroom I stood there telling myself there was no way what I'd seen was real. But now this, thing with Rio...I think whatever happened, happened because I touched him, and you. Or at least something you were touching, or wearing, or...I don't know. It doesn't make any sense, but..."

I also told him about the dream I'd had the night before. Somehow it seemed relevant. Carlos sat up again, turned a little in place to face me, and nodded once or twice. When I was done he said, "Well, why don't you try touching me again? Then you can see if you're right or not."
"Wh—but. You...if it 'works' you'd turn back into a girl," I said.

"Yeah. Maybe it'd be fun to try that for a while," he said. "I mean, you turned me back once, right?"
"But I don't know how I did that! Much less if I can do it again."
Carlos shrugged. "Well, then I'm stuck that way. Really, I don't think it's a bad way to be stuck if it's anything like how I felt on Saturday." He held out a hand in my direction, not far enough to reach me but enough for me to reach it without leaning toward him. "C'mon. Don't you wanna know if it's really you?"

I stared at the hand for a second, and back at his face. "Are you..sure."
"Yeah. Heh, I'm kind of excited to see, really."
"Oookaay..." I slowly reached out my hand and took his for a second, before sliding it back off again, pulling it back to my side. I think I felt something when I did, a little like some static jumping out but without any of the pain. Judging by the way he pulled his hand back and held it up to his face to look at it, I think he must've felt something too.

There was a second where nothing happend. Then: "Whoa!" Carlos jerked his hand slightly, jolting. Suddenly the hair was removing itself from his arm, in kind of a "motion" racing up from his hand to his shoulder. It continued up his neck to his face and (probably) along the rest of him. He shuddered slightly, pulling his arms together just in front of his stomach, and let out an almost relieved-sounding sigh as he started shrinking all over again.

"Aah—aa~aahh..." His voice changed rapidly, and I could see that he was getting smaller faster than before, his hair growing out quicker too. "Oo~oh, oh man, this a~actually feels pretty good," he said, turning his head up to look at me while he continued to slim and shorten down. His voice kind of cracked a couple of times like he was going through puberty, except it ended up a little higher and more feminine-sounding than before each time.

At this point his pants split off about at the thighs, the top part tightening and turning into a pair of gym shorts while the rest pulled much thinner and tighter, crawling down to his socks and up past the hem of the top and clinging to his slimming legs as a pair of long stockings. The tight pants showed a bump between his legs which was very clearly getting smaller, too. Then his shirt shrank too, pulling up off his belly and down from his neck, the sleeves disappearing entirely and leaving just a pair of straps hanging from his shoulders at the top. At the same time his jacket slid off of his slim shoulders and landed on the couch behind him, mostly just holding on by the ends of the sleeves still hanging across his upper arms.

By now his face and his hair were already just as I'd remembered them looking Saturday morning, and when he made another small "Mmmh" noise it was in that girl's low, but very female voice. He was blushing brightly as his waist narrowed more, his hips and thighs pushing their way out, and then let out a quick gasp as the bump disappeared from between his legs and I started to find it difficult to think of the person sitting in front of me as male.

She panted softly and shuddered again. "O-oh..aa~aahh.." she sighed as a pair of small bumps raised themselves up beneath the top. Then she made a slightly louder "Oooh" noise as the new bust quickly burst itself forward, seeming to stretch its material out as they went until it just barely held the big pair of boobs that resulted.

She panted softly a little longer, turning her head down to look at the new assets and up again at me, still blushing. She grinned. "Hey, that felt amazing!"

"Do you..how do you um," I tried, but it was hard to make words for a minute after seeing that.

"Heheh. You can call me 'Carla'," she said, standing up suddenly. "I've gotta go get a look in the mirror!" Sweeping her jacket up behind her, she ran off to my bathroom to do that.

Sitting there in mild shock, but shock anyway, I felt an odd sense that things weren't as abnormal as I knew them to be. From the instant she'd reintroduced herself with a new name, my brain seemed to start filling in the blanks that this wasn't just who she'd turned into in the last few minutes, but who she'd always been. It's a little hard to describe—I remembered everything that I did before, but also more, a second, more real version of those memories where she'd been a girl her whole life, or at least ever since I'd met her. Most things were basically the same (I have it in my head that Carla is a major tomboy), except that she had a habit of, well, teasing me or trying to make things awkward. Like Saturday morning, making sure to go to sleep after me so she could do it topless and mess with me the next morning, right down to pecking my cheek.

She's attractive, definitely, but I'm not...I think both of us know she isn't serious with any of that.

That really isn't what I should be thinking about right now. The point is, when Carla came back from the bathroom both of us felt like she always had been Carla. We compared notes and both had the same kind of double-memory, which now that I think of it is also exactly the same kind of thing as my memory of first meeting Rio. There's more evidence than just our memories that this is who she was too, including her ID and phone and my phone's address book, and we even tried kind of fishing for information from some mutual friends and they seem to think she's always been this way too.

Eventually it occurred to me to ask her. "Are you...okay? I mean, how do you feel about this?"
"I feel great!" Carla said, pumping her fist a little and giving a wide grin. "I'm serious, I feel amazing. Fit, beautiful, confident. Just like I said before. I don't know if I've ever liked my body before, or I mean—if Carlos did. I dunno how to explain it, but I love it. Really, thank you."

"I'm not sure if thanking me makes much sense," I said. "I mean—neither of us has any idea how this works, or..."
"It's obviously you though," she said, pointing. "And you agreed to touch me to try it out, and it worked! This is great."
"But...you're...I mean, what if it just makes you think you're okay with it? What if whatever this is screwed with your head to make you think you always wanted to be..that?"
Carla shrugged. "I guess I don't have a way to answer that right now. But at least we both know I wanted the same things before I was changed, and now I have those things and like them."
"But—" she put a finger on my lips.

"Shush! You have a power that can turn guys into hot girls! It saved our life three days ago! Quit being such a downer about it for a second, okay?"

I sighed. My concerns aren't going to go away just like that, but...she was right. I can't dwell on it constantly forever. And she really did seem to be happy, and I didn't want to mess that up for her. "Okay."

That leaves me where I am now. We started hanging out like we always have (? I guess that's true for "both" versions of my memory). It felt normal, and good. She's really cute, even if we're not interested in each other, and still fun to be around. But I don't know what's going to happen from now on. Am I going to change everyone I touch? That can't be, I've touched lots of people, guys and girls, in the past week. There must be something else to it. Maybe I can figure it out before I do accidentally ruin someone's life.

Anyway, that's it for tonight. I'm getting too tired to make sentences that even mean anything anymore. I feel insane and I hope this is the end of it, but I really get the feeling it's just the beginning. Good night, weird diary and whoever's reading it after I'm long dead (hopefully).

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In addition to (I hope) much better writing overall, which more sharply characterizes Kael and his way of writing early on, there's a lot of this stuff that I'm inclined to write differently as a result of how I know things go in "the future". I've come to really dislike the old image for Carla and also for Sarah, besides which the latter turned out to have no part whatsoever in the story, so just cutting her out entirely seems wise. I happened to find an image which I think much better fits Carla's overall characterization, and also downgraded her from "best friend" to "a friend" because that turned out to much better reflect Kael's relationship to her in the later story.

Knowing the future also gives me the opportunity to play with foreshadowing things well ahead of time, including giving Rio a "magical girl" transformation because she turns out to be a witch (therefore, a girl with magic). There's maybe one or two other inconsequential transformations I might cut out later on if I were to redo the whole thing, but I suspect the overall story would mostly be the same. Maybe more of the transformations of "important" characters left in would get more varied transformations than they originally did, too. 

Anyway, this has been a fun experiment, but I suspect this is as far as I really want to go with it. There's too much new stuff I want to write to keep treading old ground for long.