The first thing was the smell. The smell of Luke's room changed, it was something sour. Lemon, maybe. Luke noticed it, and looked around for the source of it. It wasn't an unpleasant smell, but it was sour, and unusual. He opened the door to the hallway and saw no one and nothing. Hmm.
He puckered his nose up at the smell. It bothered him.
As he closed the door and turned back, he noticed a black leather wallet on the nightstand. He didn't have a black leather wallet, and his roommate had been using a satchel for years. So whose was this? He opened the wallet and saw a picture on a passport card of a young man with impossibly chiseled cheekbones and wavy golden hair. "Lucas Wolfenstein III" read the name. Luke had never met this guy. Out of curiosity, he opened the wallet.
Inside was about $300 in cash. He gasped. Who carried $300 around? It was college! Who even had $300?
Luke was hardly a thief. He left it there. How could it have even gotten into the dorm, anyway? He, nor his roommate, didn't know anybody who carried hundreds in cash on their person.
That sour smell still was there. Hmph. He took off his sweater and threw it on the bed. Immediately, it changed into a navy blue Polo sweater, even though he didn't see it.
That was when he felt something, though. It felt like his brown shirt was getting tighter. Like it was shrinking in on him. He looked, and for a second, it seemed like that was the case. The shirt was much more snug on his twig-like body. Then it was too tight, and he realized that maybe the shirt wasn't the problem. He was.
He rushed to the bathroom to splash some water on his face and look at his expanding torso. The shirt was properly hard to breathe in by the time he reached opened the bathroom door, and he was afraid he would pass out. But then the growth stopped. His shirt was impossibly tight, and ripping at a seam or two, but at least his torso had stopped growing. His legs, however, had just started, and his skinny jeans were NOT going to make it. He was right.
His legs hardly became tree trunks, but they were strong, and his tight jeans exploded at the thighs. They broke at the seams all the way down, until his pants were basically two sheets of demin hanging between his legs. His underpants were stretched beyond belief. Luke looked at himself properly—his body was beautiful. For once, he looked, in his tattered clothes, like he fit all 6'4" he had.
Then his face began to change. Fat seemed to melt away like ice cream in sunshine, revealing high, protruding cheekbones and a jawline sharp enough to cut steel. A short, shocking flash of light, and Luke's muddy eyes were a light blue. There was something in them, too...something that almost portrayed an emotion, a message, a...something.
Luke's scruffy brown hair softened. He ran his hand, now a sturdy, thick hand with long, well-shaped fingers, through the hair and it flowed like tall grass in the summer wind. And, like summer grass, it turned a beautiful, natural shade of golden blonde as a breeze swept through the bathroom, flowing it to the side naturally and beautifully and leaving him with a wavy, pomaded golden part.
Perhaps with all the absolute insanity going on, Luke hadn't realized before this, but now he did. He felt the wallet in his pocket—the pocket now uncomfortably close to his crotch—and stumbled with somewhat foreign hands to reach in and grab it. He took the wallet of Lucas Wolfenstein III out, and looked at the passport ID picture, and then back at the stranger in the mirror. The two images were one and the same. If he were wearing some better clothes, perhaps, he could pass for this person. This person in the wallet that had three hundred (three hundred!) dollars inside of it.
The universe obliged on the clothes front. It began, oddly, with the incredibly tight underwear. They loosened, and softened. The brand name read "Frigo" and they were wonderfully comfy boxer briefs. A number popped into Luke's head—$100. They were $100 underwear.
"Shit," he muttered, "if they're a hundred, for some flippin' underwear, what on Earth comes next?"
What came next was the near disintegration of the bottom half of his pants. It just disappeared into dust and swept away. The remaining fabric, which came to just above his knee, rolled around his legs and rejoined seamlessly. (Seamlessly is good, he thought. It can't explode again if it's seamless.) The demin softened and became light gray, and a brown leather belt materialized through the loops. It, too, looked expensive. A pair of Sperry's materialized on his feet, lowering the room a quarter of an inch. The dilapidated shirt loosened and filled in the holes, becoming thinner and softer in the process. "Brooks Brothers," said a voice in the back of Luke's mind. The shirt, which was beginning to manifest buttons down the front, was of Brooks Brothers make. The brown faded completely, replaced quickly by a light blue. A collar appeared, and monogrammed red bowtie slung from the dark corners and tied itself in rapid succession. The tie was neat, and Luke gave it an instinctive tug. It fit perfectly.
The sleeves on the new Oxford shirt rolled themselves up.
"Oh come on!" he yelled into thin, bathroom air. "I could have done that. What kind of priss do you think I am that I can't even roll up my own sleeves?"
A voice seemed to laugh at him. It wasn't verbal, but he felt it almost whisper, "you have no idea."
Luke glanced around suspiciously, pausing only when he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He was the poster boy for a preppy kid. He looked like he dripped wealth. He looked like the grandson of an oil tycoon. He looked like he'd write an essay about the self-regulating nature of a free market. He looked like a proper douchebag.
"Well, am I?" he asked.
Luke glanced back at the wallet. The image of Lucas Wolfenstein III raised an eyebrow at him. Luke could have sworn he was hallucinating until he looked up in the mirror at the same damn face, and unwillingly, an eyebrow raised. That was when the whispering in his head began.
It started soft, as whispering does. A small chant he could barely hear—"if it exists, you own it. If it exists, you own it." It got louder and louder in his head until Luke started to feel it humming in bones. Another chant joined it, overlapping: "Your name is Lucas Wolfenstein III, and you are kin of one of the richest families in the world. Your name is Lucas Wolfenstein III, and you are kin of one of the richest families in the world." Another chant joined those two: "People can be bought. People can be bought." And still another: "You deserve the best. You deserve the best." There were so many voices, overlapping, rolling through his head, blinding his natural thoughts, shaking his skin to his bones. He leaned on the sink for support and watched it clean itself and shrink, becoming a shiny glass bowl. The mirror he looked into framed itself as he watched. The sinkhead flattened into a fountainhead shape. All around Luke, Lucas, Luke, Lucas, the bathroom was becoming more and more gilded from the toilet seat cover to the bronze-colored toilet paper roll holder and lacy, pattered toilet paper.
"Who needs this useless stuff," Lukas gasped out through breaths of trying to hold himself upright. He felt the voices in his head sorting his thoughts, erasing those of humility and kindness and replacing them with a money-fueled ego and the tendencies to be a douchebag to anyone worth less than himself. For the last time, Luke—just plain Luke—looked into the mirror and saw the emotion behind those stunning blue eyes. It was undeserved pride.
He screamed out "no" in a voice wholly unlike his, a whiny and spoiled one. It was too late. The voices haunting his head reached the peak of their crescendo, and Lucas felt Luke flushed out of his cranial center. Good, he thought, no one likes one of those poor losers. Then Lucas Wolfenstein III promptly forgot he was ever anybody else.
Lucas walked back into the dorm room. It was slightly bigger, though he, of course, didn't notice. His roommate walked over and grabbed his shoulder. "Hey, are you alright? I thought I heard you screaming in there."
Lucas sneered. "First of all, don't touch me," he said. "Secondly, your business is not my business. I would know, because my business is successful and yours isn't." He raised his signature eyebrow. "Thirdly, I am having a champagne party tonight. Some friends and I are taking the limo to a high-class club downtown. You are not invited, so don't touch the champagne bottle under the bed."
The roommate sighed and gave a half-smile. "Champagne, huh? I thought I smelled something sour in here."