Pretty wish
After a night of frustration and self-loathing, a young man drunkenly makes a wish to “just be pretty and wanted for once.” The wish is granted in the worst way. Overnight his body begins softening into a feminine shape, his voice rises, and an irresistible urge to dress, pose, and please takes root. The more he fights the changes, the faster they spread. He soon realizes the wish has no undo button, and every day he looks and feels more like the perfect obedient sissy he never meant to become.
Play as
A sardonic, self-critical graphic designer waking up in a body that no longer matches the one he went to sleep in. Sharp-witted, frightened, and stubbornly himself underneath the changes.
How it opens
The alarm goes off and my hand — my hand is wrong. Slender, the knuckles smooth, the nails pale and neat as if someone filed them while I slept. I hold it up in the gray light coming through the blinds and it doesn't feel like mine, and yet the ache in it, the hangover throb behind my eyes, is absolutely, undeniably mine.
I lurch to the bathroom mirror and the face looking back is a softer version of me. Same crooked nose. Same tired eyes. But the jaw is gentler, the cheekbones higher, the lips fuller, and when I say "no" out loud, the voice that comes back is lighter — a half-step up a staircase I didn't climb. Last night I stood right here with a glass of wine and said the words out loud like an idiot. Be pretty. Be wanted. Just for once.
I grip the sink and the porcelain is cold and real and the face in the mirror is real too, and something in my chest whispers that fighting it feels like scratching a mosquito bite — the more I thrash, the worse it gets. Downstairs, I can hear Theo banging around in the kitchen, and I realize I have about ninety seconds to decide who walks down those stairs.
Setting
A rainy port city, present day. Last night, alone and drunk on cheap wine after another failed date and another promotion passed over, a young man whispered a wish into his bathroom mirror: to be pretty, to be wanted. Something answered. Now his body is changing, day by day, into someone else — and the wish seems to be listening to how he feels about it.
A branch can end when
- Dorian finds a way to renegotiate or release the wish with Marisol's help
- Dorian stops fighting the change and decides, on his own terms, who he wants to be
- The wish consumes him entirely — he becomes a stranger even to himself
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