Young Writers Society

Raiden slapped the back of his hand into the palm of his other.
"Its. Gay. Period." He said, punctuating each word with a clap. He stared straight at Boris for a solid half a minute, before he broke into laughter.
"Ah, whether it's gay or not, we're stuck like this for a little bit aren't we?"

"The older generation?" Aegeas said. He scowled and crossed his arms. "I'm not even thirty yet, and I can live for a pretty long time. Also, this body happens to be Kartiel's, so I'd really like it if we leaned on the side of 'not gay.'"

"Exactly. Not to mention, young Raiden, that our age difference would make the situation a bit unsettling. There are many things I can be accused of, but I would not let improper relations with minors be one of them."

Even as I kept a solemn tone, I mentally shook my head at my own fickleness.
It currently suited me to side with Aegeas, but had I switched bodies with Bo rather than Raiden, I would have accepted any accusations of gaiety without protest.

Nadira looked over at Raiden and mouthed the word "gay" before hesitantly getting to her - Bo's - feet. She hadn't truly gotten a chance to try walking around like this because she had made a beeline for Aegeas once her legs had regained feeling. It was disorientating to be so tall and so large - she nearly knocked over a table covered in medical supplies just trying to walk around the room.

"Age differences is right," said Aegeas. "How old is Kartiel, anyway?" Not that he exactly wanted to know the answer - if Kartiel was a god, he had to be very old. Which would make the whole thing a little more awkward.

"Older than a few hundred years I'm guessing," Raiden replied, with a bit of a shrug.

Bo was thankful that somehow his doofus brain was able to understand Atlantean. He pulled out books with semi-reckless abandon, flipping through ones that looked useful quickly (somehow he was able to read much faster than normal? he wanted to blame it on robot brain functions). It took him a moment before he finally found something useful. A section in a book about the little rock objects. And how they worked! He let out a victorious: "AH-HA! I found it!"

Nadira nodded in agreement.

"He has to be pretty old, doesn't he?" She thought for a moment, suddenly missing the wells of information she could access in a proper place with a decent WiFi signal - and when she was in her own body. "I don't believe Kartiel is a god from Earth, but don't gods tend to be older rather than younger?"


Maahes suddenly appeared at the end of the aisle with Kartiel only a few feet behind him, startling Codix so much that he almost knocked Bo over in his surprise. "Let me look at it," Kartiel said, pushing past Maahes and making his way over to where Bo was standing. He wrenched the book out of his hands and started flipping through the pages. "I've been studying Alteran technology so I could make Atlantis operational-"

"Could I look at it?" Maahes hesitantly said.

Kartiel's gaze shot up from the book and centered on Maahes. "Why?"

"You were just studying the technology," he said. "I spent my childhood surrounded by it, and I still encounter it on a daily basis. I'd probably understand some of the terms and information a little more than you would."

While this argument was going on, Codix had sneakily grabbed the book back from Kartiel and returned it to Bo's hands. He peered down at the page that Kartiel had landed on and just stared at what he saw, eyes growing steadily wider before a laugh started to escape him.

"I don't think you need to understand the technology," Codix said, doubling over in laughter at their own obliviousness. He pointed at the words on the page. "You just have to know how to unplug the device!"

Aegeas shivered and hid under the bed again. "I need to get out of this body," he said, half to himself.

Raiden stretched this borrowed bodies' arms.
"I wonder..." he mumbled to himself. He stood up. He had been sitting for way too long. The feet of this body was beginning to go numb from lack of circulation.
He began walking around the room, inspecting what else there was while he waited for some feeling to return to his feet. As he did so, he tripped over something. As the ground came closer to his face, he wondered how hard the slam would be. If it would hurt more than the dull pain in his chest. If it would break his nose. Well, Boris' nose.



The next thing he knew, he was standing on the opposite side of the room.
"Huh?"

Nadira suddenly found herself standing in the library.

She blinked, looked around and tried to figure out what had just happened. She had been walking around the infirmary. Why was she suddenly here instead? Had the connection severed? But if it had, she should have noticed something. There had to be some sort of trigger. But what could that trigger be-

"Nadira?"

She spun around to see a man that could have only been Maahes - his form was different, but he could shapeshift - standing only a few feet away from her and right next to Aegeas, looking at her with wide eyes. When she gave a hesitant nod, Maahes immediately darted over to her and tackled her to the floor. "We're back to normal!" he said, giving her a tight hug as he pulled her back up.

She stared at him. Codix had been standing next to her prior to the tackle, but he wasn't even looking in her direction. He was staring down at his hands, a small smile began to come across his face as he inspected them. Why was Maahes acting so personable towards her? And why was Codix ignoring her?

His expression immediately dampened. "Nad?" he hesitantly said. "What's wrong?"

She blinked.

"Codix?" she whispered incredulously, glancing between him and who she had thought was her best friend. If she stared down at the hands of the man holding her, she could make out the telltale fractures that accompanied Codix holding a form that wasn't his own for too long. "Codix, you look like Maahes."

Codix stared. "But I'm-"

"You forgot to change your form back," Maahes pointed out, having taken on a form identical to the one that Codix was using. There hadn't been a flash of light, and there's hadn't been a gradual change - one moment, he had looked distinctively Sixen. The next, he looked human.

"Oh," Codix said.

His form shifted gradually, unlike Maahes' had. But when it had returned to normal, he still continued to hold her as tightly as he possible could, and she eagerly returned the gesture.


Kartiel, who had been quite intent on retrieving that book from Bo's grasp, suddenly found himself hitting his head on something hard and metal. He let out a frustrated swear and instinctively rubbed the injured area with his hand - a hand that, now that he was paying attention to it, looked like it belonged to a wraith and not an otter. Someone must have unplugged the device. But who? Why? And, more importantly, why on Earth was he under a bed?

The floor slammed right into my face, and I awoke to a splitting pain in my nose, and wet blood trickling over my mouth.
I stumbled to my feet, and proceeded to bark at Raiden.

"Ow! Raiden, you wretched little- you broke my nose! Kartiel, I demand you switch me with a clone this instant! ...Oh. Right. Damn it all. How long do those damned things take to grow?! I cannot live with a crooked nose, I cannot."

In an instant, Bo was no longer in the library but was standing back in the medical wing - or whatever you were supposed to call it. It was jarring. This time, he noticed how his vision was different. The lack of depth once again returning - a familiar disability, that was oddly comforting. He looked around the room, assuming that somehow, someone must've figured out to unplug the device in the room.

Then his head was pulled over to the sound of Boris in pain. And complaining. He hurried over to him, bumping into something on the way there.

That was... odd. For a moment, he was still treating his body like he was in a smaller one.

He put a hand on Boris's shoulder and leaned down slightly to get a look at his bloody nose.

"I think... it's not crooked. You hit it, for sure, but it's not broken. I would know. I've broken people's noses many times." He paused, realizing how... morbid that sounded. "Uh- in self-defense and - well - anyways, yeah, you'll be fine."

In the blink of an eye, Aegeas found himself in the library, reaching out to try and grab something. Whatever Kartiel had been doing, Aegeas was almost thankful for it, because it helped him realize that he was back in his regular body. Granted, his regular, blood-covered body, but that'd be easy enough to clean.

Aegeas stretched, breathing a sigh of relief at having knees that hadn't been shot through. He then realized he was now in a room he didn't recognize, surrounded by people he barely knew, and still had one sprained shoulder. Oh, and he'd just violently killed a bunch of creatures after slipping into one of his spells of anger. That killed most of the euphoria he had, leaving him feeling weary. It had been a long day.

He walked over to Codix and Nadira, who were distracted by being very platonic friends. Aegeas rolled his eyes. "I'm guessing we should wait a little longer?" he said, trying to hide the sarcasm in his voice without much success.

Codix and Nadira reluctantly broke apart, understanding the subtext behind the thinly-veiled sarcastic comment. Aegeas couldn't understand what it was like for the two of them to be separated - not many people could. They had spent so much time together keeping their secrets from the rest of Earth's population that it felt like they had lost a part of themselves when they were separated. Even though it hadn't been for long, it felt like they had been apart for an eternity.

"We should probably head back to the infirmary now," Maahes hesitantly said, gesturing in the direction of the door. "We don't have Kartiel to guide us anymore, but I should be able to."


"Your nose is fine," Kartiel said, trying his best to crawl out from underneath the table. Normally that wouldn't have been much of a problem, but he had forgotten how bad the pain was in his legs when he was in Aegeas' body. It took him several tries, but he finally managed to heave himself from underneath it - just in time for him to once again get used to the pain.

He unsteadily got to his feet and brushed the dust off of his pants. "If it wasn't, you would just have to deal with it. Clones take awhile to grow, and you'll likely be long gone by the time they reach the right stage."

He paused, looking around at the carnage that had occurred in the infirmary in the short time he was gone, and then added, "Unless, of course, you want to be stuck in the body of a child. I could arrange that."