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Once upon a time, there was a completely ordinary town, where oak trees grew and the grass was always green. This town had a junior high school, where every weekday, a group of friends would meet each other for lessons.
“Can anyone tell me the square root of forty-nine?” Miss Simmons asked her class.
In the front seat, a young boy in an orange hoodie raised his hand. “Seven!”
“Very good, Armand.” Miss Simmons wrote this answer on the board before moving on to the next square number.
But as we know, most disasters begin to occur when everything seems completely normal. And such was the case of Elmore Junior High that fateful day.
“I’m surprised you were paying that much attention in class,” said Armand’s older brother Zach after class.
“Yeah!” Armand squeaked. “I’m totally gonna get an A!”
Zach was going to respond with a snarky, but still supportive comment, when he looked behind his brother’s head at a strange glowing light. “What is that?”
“What’s what?” Armand turned around to see the light too.
They all say that curiosity killed the cat. Well, this time, curiosity killed the human, and in its place left a cat.
Zach reached out to try and pick up whatever that object was that was glowing. However, he found it was not a tangible item…and before he knew it, he had blue fur beginning to grow on his hands.
“Dude! What did you do?!” Armand yelped. However, just like his brother, he was beginning to have an animalistic transformation, as the mellow brown skin on his fingers began to grow scaly.
Now you see, humans are said to have evolved from apes. But certainly not from cats or fish. But that day, those lines were all blurred…and they certainly wouldn’t be the last ones to do so.
Zach, if he could even still be called that, woke up on the floor, in the hallway of his school. “What…what happened?”
“Gumball!” Armand’s voice rang in his ears. “What were you doing passed out on the ground?”
Zach…Gumball, looked around. The school looked rather different. Rather than grays and blues, the walls and surrounding furniture were red and cream coloured. But of course, he no longer remembered it being anything different. “I don’t know, man, I probably hit my head on something. Come on, Darwin, we need to get back to class before Simian lands us in detention.”
Unbeknownst to them, the light that had robbed them of their humanity was traveling throughout the building, changing everything from what it once was, and leaving no traces of what once was there.
In another classroom, Mx. Small was teaching a music class to a small group of students. They led with a guitar, while Carmen and Teri played drums, and Leslie played a flute. The twinkling lights seeped in through the cracks of the door, and while they all had their eyes closed, focused on the music, their appearances began to change.
Mx. Small, being spacey and soft-hearted, grew fluffy white fur, like a cloud. Carmen, being a little prickly but a sweetheart underneath, became literally prickly as she became a cactus. Teri, being anxious and prone to crumple at the slightest problem, flattened down as she became a paper doll. And Leslie, always chasing after the latest trend, became a flower with soft pink petals.
When they all opened their eyes again, none of them remembered their previous human forms. All they knew was the new normal. “That was very nice, everyone,” praised Mx. Small. “It has a hopeful vibe to it, and heaven knows the world needs a little more hope in it.”
"I agree," mused Leslie, flipping his petals. "I'm so tired of everyone acting like the world is nothing but a sad wastebasket when there's so much beauty all around us."
"Aw, come off it, Leslie." Carmen rolled her eyes. "You're always so obvious when you fish for compliments."
The light continued through the entire school, turning what was once a beautiful educational facility into a mess of misshapen students and unsafe conditions.
However, there was still one who was able to resist. One who could see the inherent danger of what the light represented, and the changes it brought with it.
Robert Lane was only twelve years old. He didn’t have it in him to defeat a monstrous entity taking over his entire town all by himself. All he knew is that suddenly, everyone around him had turned into these grotesque, inhuman caricatures of themselves, who paid no attention to the obvious changes all around them. And he was the last person left who hadn’t been touched.
Seeing the light coming towards him, his first thought was to run. Run, run, until there was nowhere else to run to. No one thought it odd that he was running away from a threat; they paid no mind, as if he wasn’t even there.
Eventually, the light caught up to him; he had no way to escape. Being surrounded, Robert felt his body begin to change. He wailed in sharp, stinging, unending pain as his eyes began to fuse together, his skin tingling as it turned bright blue, and his limbs aching as they became stick-thin. Eventually, the agony of the violent shifts in his body knocked him unconscious in the closet he’d tried to shut himself in to hide.
When he eventually woke up and opened the door, he found nothing outside had changed; everything was still new and different. But as the days passed, and he slowly grew accustomed to his new body, the new normal began to show itself. Suddenly, hardly anyone acknowledged Robert existed at all. Sure, he enjoyed it when they did, but now he felt much lonelier. Like no one remembered him, just like they failed to remember their human forms, and what their school used to look like. Whenever he saw his old friends passing by in the halls, he tried to call their names, but could only muster them in whispers. Alan…Carmen…Teri…what happened to them?
And eventually, everything just stopped. No one talked to Robert. No one seemed to even see him.
That’s when the light came back.
He saw it when he was sitting on a schoolyard bench by himself, trying to hold in his angry tears, when something bright began to shine in his eye. He looked up to see a tear in the world in front of him, that was sucking him in. He clung to the bench, unable to understand what was happening until it was too late.
For you see, Elmore had gained a sentience of its own, and now had the ability to determine what deserved to stay and what didn’t. And this poor child did not belong anymore. Now he was doomed to wander a void of mistakes for the rest of his life. No matter how many times he tried to escape, he was always sent back, to roam and sit eternally, never for anyone to remember again.
“Seriously, dude?” Cray-Cray the frog rolled his eyes. “You’re so dramatic. There’s no way an entire town got flipped completely on its head and no one said anything about it.” He walked away to hop to another platform.
“No, it’s true! It’s real!” Rob insisted as Cray-Cray wandered further and further away. “I watched it happen! I…”
He sank to his knees. “I wouldn’t lie about something like that…”