Changing Island: Entries 4-6

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Just as a bit of trivia, not that I think anyone cares too much, but Entries 4 and 6 here are entirely new, while Entry 5 is a full reworking of a partially-written caption from way back when I was trying to do this as a series of captions. Also, wow, it took me days to figure out that I had managed to misspell the word "Entries" on the first post of this series. That kind of error is usually unlike me, and feel free to point out any other similarly glaring errors elsewhere.

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Entry 4

As of this morning, I have started to change. But I'm going to save the details for a full entry after it's over. Anyway, today I got an interview with someone whose presence and appearance may very well corroborate the theory that this island keeps people young. Her name is Doctor Lauren Haden, formerly Larry; she is a botanist.

Dr. Haden was just over seventy years old when he washed ashore. He was still in active study, however, and had been on a research expedition to some South American islands, on a smaller ship going between two of the islands, when some kind of explosion rocked the ship. Lauren told me that she still speculates occasionally on what caused that explosion, but in the moment Dr. Haden focused his efforts on getting everyone safely off of the rapidly sinking ship. There was a second explosion, very close to him, just as he was about to get into one of the lifeboats, and something from that explosion hit the back of his head, knocking him out.

Around this time last year, he woke up, uninjured like everybody else, on the beach. His clothes were still intact, but soaked from the water. There was nobody there when he first stood up and looked around, noting the weather and the plant life and initially concluding that he must have washed ashore on either the island his boat had started out on or its destination. He went what seemed like farther inland, but began to notice strands of hair falling before his eyes.

On closer inspection, his hair had grown enough to frame his face, and more surprisingly, its grayish-white was starting to take on a reddish tint. Dr. Haden had been a redhead before the color began draining out with age, she tells me, so this was intensely curious. He called out at that point and a few girls showed up, welcoming him to the island and explaining what sort of place this was (and, is). As they lead him toward town to try and find some dry clothes and a towel, his hair continued to grow out, the pale red slowly becoming more vibrant.

By the time someone thought to take Dr. Haden's first photo, his hair had spilled halfway down his back and fully regained its original color, and his complexion looked generally more youthful than it had started. His height and build hadn't begun to change yet, however. Even though he was a botanist and not particularly well-studied in human anatomy, he decided to try and get a more full record of the ongoing transformation in case anybody else wanted to study the effect, so he borrowed a camera and asked to be left alone in his room until it was over.

At this point in the interview, Lauren pulled up on her computer a series of pictures taken in her bathroom mirror, arranged in chronological order, and began pointing them out to me. I'm referring to a copy of those files while writing this section. The first two depict the man I described before: Someone old, but with vibrant red hair. The next few show his skin becoming visibly smoother and more youthful, his height slowly decreasing by just a few centimeters at a time by some markings he had made on the mirror at that point. Lauren told me that about at this point he started to become excited as he realized that he seemed to be losing some of his age, and he actually felt younger as well, more energetic and limber.

Dr. Haden's entire transformation took place over that afternoon, and was over in time for supper. The photos show his height loss accellerating briefly before abruptly halting again, his body becoming a little slimmer along the way. By the time his height stabilized, Dr. Haden had the look of a healthy young man, albeit with unusually smooth, hairless skin. Then he starts to look steadily more feminine, with a bit more curve to his face, an increasingly slender frame and narrower shoulders.

His arms and legs slim down more, his hands (which at this point start having indivual pictures devoted to them) become smaller. His stomach visibly gains a slight inward curve, and his nipples grow slightly. I should note that Dr. Haden took these pictures after stripping completely, but took care to cover his private area in all of them. Lauren doesn't regret this decision, even though an important part of the transformation did take place there, the slow shrinking of what had made Dr. Haden male.

Before he even became female, Dr. Haden's chest visibly rises up near the nipples into a pair of small bumps. Lauren noted that the new skin formed by this growth was strangely sensitive to the touch, but refused to elaborate further. The pictures show Dr. Haden's hips widening at this point, his stomach continuing to curve inward more. A few profile pictures show his backside becoming larger and rounder as well.

He hummed to himself periodically, trying to trace the change of his voice. Lauren does tell me she wish she'd bothered to get something to record that with, as it was an interesting experience. Each time he aimed for the same set of pitches; at first, predictably, the lower ones were easy and the higher ones impossible. But his range audibly changed over time, the lowest pitches coming out as squeaky croaks and ever higher pitches becoming possible.

It seems that Dr. Haden's chest stopped growing just at the same time as he became fully female. There are a few pictures after that point that simply depict the exact same body, the same pretty face and hourglass figure as before. Right after the last one, there was a knock on the door.

Dr. Haden had given his soaked clothes to one of the girls who welcomed him; she had hung them on a clothesline. But when she came back for them, she found a different outfit entirely. About this time, she knocked on Lauren's door and nervously reported the state of her clothes. She yelped in a little bit of surprise when a woman's voice came from inside the door asking her to just leave them and turn around for a minute.

She put on the striped bikini and little white jacket, finding that they fit her new appearance perfectly. Besides that, she opened a few of the formerly-empty drawers in her bedroom to find several more bikinis and other feminine clothes, just the same way everyone had said there would be.

Sometime the next morning, she gave back the camera (having dumped its contents into what was now her own laptop) and let the owner take the usual "after" picture.

Given that Dr. Haden is both visibly youthful and feels as young as she looks, and given that the island's doctor (which, of course, there is one) found her to be in perfect health, without even a trace of the issues she had developed in the process of becoming a seventy-year-old man, I suppose it's reasonable to guess this island has a positive effect on its inhabitants' health, which amounts to or at the very least includes keeping us young. That's at least one good thing, I suppose.

Although Dr. Haden had been rather fond of the idea of remaining male, she told me near the end of the interview that she feels getting to be young again, and possibly even being able to stay that way, is a more than even trade for that. She's been studying this island's plants since the day she washed ashore, and apparently has discovered some new species, as well as a few that were thought to be several years to decades extinct. Apparently she takes the occasional day off (such as today) to just sunbathe, but between her prior life, her extensive knowledge and the work she has done even here in only one short year, I firmly believe she's earned the right to relax as much as she wants.

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Entry 5

After learning that the island had decreased a person's age, I became curious whether it had ever done the opposite. And it has. Two years ago, an eleven-year-old boy named Cier went too far out into the water in his inner tube and the tides caught him, pulling him out toward sea. He tried to get back, but he couldn't actually swim so he had to stick with the tube, which was at the mercy of the tides. The beach went farther away rather than closer, and eventually it seems he passed out from exhaustion.

Of course, I wouldn't know about this if I hadn't interviewed him, or rather a woman named Ceira he became. This interview was a little difficult to conduct: Ciera still acts like a child in some ways, but like an adult in others. The point is that she wouldn't sit still and had trouble staying on topic, and at one point took my notebook and drew a picture of a penguin over some of my notes. But I'm doing my best to compile only the relevant information here.

Cier was the first (and I think only so far?) person under the age of eighteen to wash ashore; nobody was entirely sure what to do with him. He was sobbing, and unwilling to talk to any of them at first, as they were strangers, but after a little while they managed to calm him down. Efforts were made to find some way to contact his parents, but even though he was sure he'd known his last name before it didn't come to him, and his parents, of course, he mainly knew by the names "mom" and "dad". The messages that were put up online in an effort to contact Ceir's parents are still there, but there's never been a response to any of them.

On the first day or so, nothing seemed to happen—Najira told me some of the girls even suspected the island wouldn't change him because he was so young. But the next morning, he woke up with purple hair. He would go out and wade in the shallow end of the water, and ate some ice cream. (I think he probably ate normal food as well, but Ceira only seems to remember the ice cream.) Throughout that day, his hair grew a little longer, and his body subtly changed. His hips widened slightly, his body taking on gradually more feminine proportions.

Najira was largely the one who took care of Ceir those first few days; on the third she offered to try and teach him how to actually swim. He took some work to convince, but she promised to stick right next to him the whole time. Ceir hadn't changed much overnight that night, but began to slowly mature that day, growing a little taller, with longer arms and legs. His body gained small curves, and his trunks shifted into something more closely resembling a bikini bottom; Ceira told me that she doesn't know when the switch happened because she had been busy swimming and playing in the water all day, but by sunset she was definitely a girl.

The next day Ciera's change seemed complete. Somehow a bikini top had appeared to match the bottom, and small breasts had grown to fill it. She went out to play in the water with some of the older girls, but found herself slowly growing even taller, her chest filling out more. She matured throughout that fourth day, her upward growth soon stopping but her body growing generous curves, and by the end of the day she was a full-grown adult. In Ciera's words, the little chest she'd started with had become "huuuuge" (accompanied by her picking them up with her hands and grinning up at me).

I'm a little conflicted on whether Ciera should be considered an adult; technically she's only thirteen years old. But even though she acts childish, she seems to have some degree of mental maturity and apparently "knows all about sex and stuff," and everyone else here seems to treat her about the same as any other adult. I suppose it makes it easier when the adults here don't really have to work, and can splash around in the water, play with water balloons or water guns, or basically just do whatever they want anyway. Thinking on it...in light of that, it's a little strange how so many of us seem to have taken on roles that are more or less work, often even the same kind of work as we did before coming here. We don't really have to; no one's making us. We'd have food either way, for example.

Well, I feel like it would be a shame to end these logs before covering myself. Perhaps everyone else feels something similar.

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Entry 6

I intended to get four entries done today, but just after I'd finished writing Ciera's entry, my computer started acting up. I was on my fifth try to fix the problem myself when Lauren (who I hadn't even heard walk up) leaned her head over my shoulder and told me I should probably just let Nikki have look at it. This lead to the obvious question of who Nikki was, which leads to this entry. She was kind enough to answer a few questions for me while repairing whatever had gone wrong with this thing, and I felt gratified that my habit of taking notes down on paper rather than typing them was paying off.

Nikki told me that before coming here, she was Niko. He lived decently well on money from doing freelance tech support work—repairing computers, phones, game systems, anything with a circuit board in it really. She told me that people came to Niko when the big businesses that sold the computers in the first place overcharged them or told them the problem was unfixable, and ninety percent of the time it was something so simple he barely even needed to open the case. Since the work tended to be so easy, he didn't need to charge much to make good money on it. When he wasn't doing that, Niko was a gamer. Given that I found Nikki sitting on the couch in her house playing on a Gamecube that I honestly have no idea the origin of, I suppose that's one thing that hasn't changed.

What's especially strange about Niko's story is that unlike nearly every one of us here, he never went out to sea: In fact, the last thing he remembered before arriving on Changing Island's shore was going to bed in is own house, which is in an entirely landlocked state, in an area that hasn't even had a major flood in decades.

Nikki told me that she wasn't overly happy with her body, as Niko. He was (in her words) "fat, overweight, weak, and too lazy to do anythin' about it." Being suddenly surrounded by a bunch of beautiful women (again, her words) only made him feel more self-conscious, and he wasn't sure they were being serious about the island's changing people, either. It all seemed like some kind of elaborate prank. But either way, Niko did need a place to sleep, and he was grateful to be given one of the bedrooms in a house.

One of the other residents of that house had been having computer trouble for an entire month; in fact she had switched computers twice only to have each new one give her the exact same errors. The afternoon of his arrival, Niko noticed her repeatedly punching the keyboard in frustration and offered to take a look at it, and within five minutes told her exactly what she had done to all three computers to make them act that way. She was embarrassed at having been the cause of her own troubles, but extremely grateful for the help anyway.

Niko didn't obviously change in any way that day or that night, but woke up the next morning to find that his hair was nearly down to his shoulders and, even more noticeably, his gut had shrunk in an inch or so. He confirmed that the hair wasn't a wig, and thought at this point that even if it was a trick, or even if he was being turned into a woman, this might make it worth it. He was just going to sit at home and play some games that day, but the girl he'd helped the day before saw someone else having trouble with their computer and brought him to it. He shrugged to himself and got to work.

This sort of thing continued throughout the day: One person after another would refer the newcomer to this or that problem they were having. Niko didn't really mind: It just felt like a normal day at work, but with friendly, pretty girls instead of the occasional angry old man who didn't understand the function of a power button (her words, again). He found himself brushing his hair back occasionally as it slowly trailed its way down his shoulders and beyond, and it seemed like every time he stood up his shirt was a little looser in the stomach area. But when he sat down, his butt would occasionally take up even more room than before.

Niko caught a break after supper, and went to his room to try and figure out just how much his body had changed throughout the day. Taking off his shirt, he discovered that what had once been (in Nikki's words) a big, round, fat belly was now just a little bit of pudge. In fact, his arms looked slimmer too, maybe even a little bit stronger. Taking off his pants, he found that his legs had become trim like his arms, but his hips were indeed fairly wide now. he ran a hand down his side, feeling the slight inward curve of his stomach and the outward curve of the hips, and he realized that his body hair had actually mostly disappeared as well. He ran his hands down his arms and legs to find the skin soft and smooth, as if he'd used some kind of lotion on them, which of course he hadn't.

His underwear had shrunk a little bit, but not enough to really worry him too much. Having heard several stories of people whose clothes disappeared or abruptly changed when out of sight, Niko decided to try keeping his clothes on all the way through and into bed. He'd taken them off and laid them aside the night before, but he was sure they'd probably change now that his body had started to do so, and was curious how much they could change while he was still wearing them.

It turned out they didn't change at all over that night. Niko's hair seemed to have stopped growing as well. But with the new day came a new torrent of requests to fix computer troubles, and soon he was busy with that. It was a little less than the day before, and no repeat customers at least. When he spoke, he sounded progressively less like himself, and more like a girl. He got a few looks at his face in black computer screens and could see it becoming more rounded and feminine, as well.

A little after lunch, Niko took a moment to examine himself again and found that his stomach had completely flattened and had become narrower as well, the slight inward curve from before becoming more pronounced. His underwear was now a check-patterned bikini bottom with a very awkward fit. Throughout all of this, it seemed like he'd never gotten any shorter, which Nikki told me she kind of liked, and likes, as it's convenient to not have to adjust to a new height.

Sensing that the end of his change was near, Niko announced he was taking a break for the rest of the day after supper. He took off his shirt and pants again to find the bikini bottom fitting a lot better than before, but also, with some surprise, a matching top hanging awkwardly from his narrow, girlish shoulders. It was very loose on his flat chest, its material soft and elastic.

Niko sat on his bed and watched the bikini bottom slowly pull close as the change completed down there, and then she experimentally crossed her legs and leaned back a little, finding the position comfortable and relaxing. She leaned forward again as she felt the top moving a little strangely, and looked to see what was happening. As you may be able to predict by this entry, Niko's chest was what was moving, rapidly expanding outward, already a pair of average-sized breasts by the time she had the chance to look.

Nikki told me that she didn't feel anything too extreme from the growth like some of the others had. She felt a little neutral about it, but kind of liked the idea of that extra mass making her attractive instead of ugly. They continued to grow, soon filling the sizable bikini top, but even then they apparently weren't satisfied. Nikki stared as the top stretched and strained against the big globes of flesh, before finally they gave up and stopped growing.

Some people congratulated Nikki on the end of the change the next day, or asked how she felt, or other things. She gave them the same response she gave me near the end of the interview, a vague shrug. It seems like she is fond of her new look, but never really put that much stock in outward appearance anyway. It seems her old clothes are still around, in addition to all of the new clothes actually designed to fit her body. She actually was still wearing the old shirt while fixing my computer; despite the size of her bust, it's still baggy and oversized on her.

As an epilogue to all of this, it turned out that what was wrong with my computer was a bit of sand that had gotten into the keyboard, between the keys. I suppose that's bound to happen on an island with so much of it.