Displaced

Chapter 2 - Rewrite

Hours later, the morning sun rose from itsslumber to find Blake in the exact same spot where he'd first sat down the night before. He hadn't slept a wink, but he hadn't been exactly alert, either. It was more like his brain had become stuck, unable to process a coherent thought as he stared up at the alien sky in disbelief. Blake was still largely convinced that this was some weird dissociative breakdown. Even now, as the warmth of the light slowly coaxed him back to reality, none of this felt real.

Unwinding and pushing himself to his feet, Blake took a moment to stretch his body, which had stiffened up during the night. Placing his hands on the small of his spine, he leaned back and let out a groan as several parts of his body popped in quick succession. His hands moved south to scratch his ample posterior, only to pause as they found something else instead. Instead of an abundance of flabby adipose tissue, Blake's fingers encountered firm, smooth muscle.

Well, that sure wasn't right.

For the first time since his arrival, Blake had both the illumination and soundness of mind to inspect his body. What he found shocked him, perhaps more than everything else combined. He was ripped. Buff. Beefy. Shredded. Jacked.

Gone was his sagging gut that stuck out from his abdomen like an overhang over a front porch, now replaced by the sort of washboard abs that he only saw in supermarket tabloids and late-night exercise equipment commercials. Gone, too, was his considerable posterior, the nemesis of inseams everywhere, swapped out for a highly-developed gluteus maximus that looked like it could handle a thousand squats without complaint. His corpulent thighs, his flabby arms, his double chin... all gone, overwritten by powerful-looking muscle and tight skin.

Now he knew this wasn't real. Being thrown into another world he could learn to accept, but suddenly acquiring a body that would make Hollywood action stars weep with envy? That was a step too far. A large step.

A glint of light from below the horizon caught his eye. Blake looked over to find the sun reflected in a decently large puddle about forty feet down the hill upon which he stood. Carefully, he made his way down. The short journey proved to be more troublesome than expected; his shorts, fitted for somebody with a far girthier torso than the one he currently possessed, kept threatening to fall off, while at the same time his bare feet seemed to constantly find every pointed pebble they could as he went. Tightening his belt to the absolute last notch helped—he'd tightened it reflexively the night before but hadn't been in the right state of mind to process what that meant—but there was little Blake could do about the lack of footwear. It felt like stepping on legos left and right, but luckily, he avoided cutting his soles.

The man looking back from the water resembled Blake for the most part. They shared the same basic features: a round face with piercing green eyes, a long, narrow nose, and short dirty-blond hair that was, despite his best efforts, starting to recede. Still, something was off. For several moments, he stared at the face, trying to figure out what felt so wrong. Yes, the pudginess was no more, but that simply meant that he resembled the Blake Myers of his high school days.

Suddenly, he had it. His glasses were missing! But... why hadn't he noticed? Rubbing his eyes in disbelief, he looked at his surroundings again. To his astonishment, he realized that his nearsightedness, brought on by decades of staring at computer screens late into the night, was no more.

To say that this was all becoming too much for him to handle would be an understatement. Blake had far too many questions and far too few answers. Perhaps, he decided, it would behoove him to remedy that imbalance. His gaze swept up the rocky incline to the still-open entrance to the bunker or installation or whatever it was. If there were any answers to find, they would be found in there, not out here.