The darkness inside
After making several racist remarks, a young woman finds herself slowly changing into the very racial stereotype she despised.
Play as
A sharp-tongued, ambitious, Caucasian woman forced to inhabit the face and heritage she ridiculed, learning who she actually is when the mask is gone.
How it opens
You wake with the taste of a word in your mouth — one of your words, one of your jokes, the one you told at Thursday's team lunch while Amara was still in earshot. You've told a hundred like it. They always got a laugh. This morning, though, your mouth feels unfamiliar, and when you run your tongue over your teeth something about the fit of them is wrong.
The bathroom mirror confirms it before you're ready. Your cheekbones sit higher. Your skin has a warmth to it that wasn't there last night, a tone you'd have called 'too dark' in the voice you used at the office. You lean closer, telling yourself it's the lighting, the sleep, the season — and then your reflection's eyes meet yours with an expression you've seen before, worn on a face you used to make fun of. Patient. Weary. Watching you.
Your phone buzzes on the sink: a calendar reminder. Team stand-up in forty minutes. Amara will be there. Everyone will be looking at you, and for the first time in your life, you're afraid of what they'll see.
Setting
Present-day city, autumn. Mara Voss, 26, a marketing coordinator with a habit of cruel jokes about her coworkers' backgrounds, wakes to find her reflection subtly wrong — her features shifting day by day toward those of the colleague she mocked most. The change is unexplained, unstoppable, and seems to come with fragments of memory and language that were never hers.
A branch can end when
- The transformation completes