Skyler awoke to the sound of his mother knocking on his door. “You ready to go?”
“J-just a minute!” Skyler yelled back. Masturbating had knocked him out and he’d slept through getting ready, breakfast, everything!
The curse moved at a slower pace on Skyler. It was in a new country and undertaking quite a seismic assignment, readying to transform the American teenager into someone very different from who he currently was. There were extensive preparations to be made, and most of all, there had to be approval for an exception to a rule: it was odd for a were-breeder curse to make a carrier into someone not allowed to breed, but Skyler’s future influence would make up for this.
He threw open his suitcase and grabbed the first things on top: his black ‘WWF’ t-shirt, which depicted two pandas hitting each other with folding chairs; a lime green zip-up hoodie, jeans, white sneakers comfortable enough to walk in, and a trucker hat with his high school’s logo on it, which he squeezed backwards over his big mop of hair. Skyler looked in the mirror to make sure he was presentable.
His hat looked kind of big. Not big...tall. Skyler's brow furrowed as he looked at it. The top of his hat seemed to be goosing upward as he looked at it. He knew he must just be delirious from sleep and jet lag, and yet, even though he kept blinking, his hat didn't stop growing taller in the air...the top of it developed a point sharp enough to prick a finger on, and that point rose higher...higher...Skyler fell back on the bed in shock as his hat stretched to nearly two feet tall, more than twice the length of his own head. The former cap’s bill evaporated off the front at the same time his high school's logo burst apart, gold threads twirling over the vast expanse of the hat to form an elaborate pattern of ornate swirls accented with freshly-formed jewels. Skyler felt plops on his back as two long strips of fabric burst out of the back of the hat like tentacles, their fringed ends reaching to his waist.
Skyler reached up to remove the huge, bizarre hat, bringing his hands into view in the mirror. They were changed - no longer his, but an older man’s, with wrinkled skin and thick fingers covered in rings. Around his wrists were a pair of bright white double cuffs clasped with big silver cufflinks. Skyler wrenched his arms in front of himself, watching as pristine white fabric swirled up his arms from the cuffs, attaching to the sleeves of his short t-shirt. He shook his body as the white spread through his original tee, obliterating the pandas on the front and replacing them with a row of buttons now tucked into the top of his jeans. A banded collar burst up around his neck, so stiff it limited his movement.
Skyler opened his mouth to call out for his parents, but he didn’t know what they would do - he was panicking, losing his mind - he needed someone more powerful than them.
So, for the first time in Skyler’s life, he started to pray.
“Oh G-God, please help me,” he sputtered, lurching in shock as he felt his spine extending, his limbs stretching him into a taller form. The buttons of his shirt tightened as his chest expanded into a broad barrel, reverberations shooting through him to pack on the weight of a grown man. Behind him, the hotel bedspread crept up over his back and over his shoulders.
“Please, Lord, whatever is happening to me...let your will be done...help me to understand!”
Skyler, feeling the weight of the bedspread on him, jumped up onto his feet - he nearly fell now that he was over six feet tall - and the blanket jumped with him, unrolling to the floor to reveal it was no longer a blanket, but a magnificent gold-trimmed cape.
“Instill in my heart a sense of pace e calme, oh God…”
Skyler noticed in the mirror he didn’t have pants on anymore, but long robes - that didn’t seem right - but he wanted to understand, because surely he was just confused. Like a bolt out of the blue, part of an answer did come, as if from heaven - his hat was called a mitre. But all Skyler had was the word. “But non lo so what a mitre is, God!” Skyler blurted out, tripping over exceedingly odd words. “Sto provando understand-”
The young American didn’t sound very American at all. He was developing quite an accent, and it was morphing his words into a different language altogether. As Skyler pleaded with God to explain what a mitre was, his first language switched fully to Italian, and his English became increasingly broken. “Per favore aiutami, Dio!” he prayed.
The mitre in question appeared to be vacuuming up his hair as it all migrated under the towering dome before vanishing, which Skyler noticed as he prayed hysterically. The only hair left on his scalp was a ring of short, thin bristles encircling the sides and meeting at the back above the neck. Skyler reached up, but before his fingers could touch his male pattern baldness, they landed on a pair of eyeglasses. Skyler didn’t even realize he was wearing them. He took them off and the whole world went blurry, smears of white and gold until he put them back on. They weren’t particularly cool eyeglasses, he thought. They were wire-framed and a bit boxy, with bigger lenses than he would’ve liked. But they were functional, which was what mattered. What even entailed ‘cool’ glasses? He didn’t know much about fashion. Nor care, for that matter. Trends were silly and impermanent. The youth focused entirely on the wrong things - all this talk of fashion and culture! When what really mattered was faith, and service…
A heavy gold cross as big as a plate thumped into the middle of Skyler’s chest, which expanded bigger at the impact. He was a very large man now, tall and imposing. By the time a handsome double chin billowed out to rest on top of his stiff collar, Skyler was a hundred pounds heavier...and completely unaware of it. He was staring at the pectorale hanging around his neck by a chain. He’d never been one to wear a cross before, he didn’t find them cool, but Skyler no longer cared about being cool. That was the only reason he’d come out of the closet, was because it was a trend. He wasn’t actually gay. Homosexuality, in fact, did not exist. The youth of the world were just confused and led astray.
“Please help them to see, oh God!” Skyler prayed, but it came out in perfect Italian, each word sending his voice deeper down the scale as it changed to a baritone. He tried again, praying harder, but the attempts just eroded his knowledge of English more, until he didn’t speak it at all. A new layer of extravagant fabric erupted out over his robes, spilling in all directions - Skyler looked at his young face perched atop a mountain of finery - his cheeks swelled, his jaw squared, and wrinkles fell into place, replacing him with an elderly Italian man. Skyler was horrified at the change - he was a young American, he didn’t want to be old - but the man smiled at himself, and Skyler felt the smile seep into his brain, and change him all the faster.
The man’s smile dropped as Skyler poked his fingers into his new aged face. He was handsome for 74, not that such things mattered...all that mattered was God...Skyler shut his eyes tight and prayed hard, praying to be home and himself again, but Maurizio remembered himself and his home very differently than Skyler did. Across the world, memories changed, records altered, even photographs and newspaper clippings adjusted. For a few moments, there was international confusion, as friends recalled a mean old man skateboarding, his robes flying around him. Or aunts and uncles recalled how Skyler reprimanded them for the immorality in living together before marriage. Alternately, in his new home country of Italy, nuns briefly remembered a happy-go-lucky American teenager greeting them.
But as the memories sorted themselves out, Skyler O’Donnell shrank into the shadows, and in his place formed Maurizio Bonfanti, nearly six decades older than Skyler, six inches taller, more than a hundred pounds heavier, and as dogmatic and pompous as Skyler was easygoing. With a final rush, everything was as it should be.
Archbishop Bonfanti opened his eyes and scowled at the reflection. Not at himself - no, he looked just as he was supposed to - but at his surroundings. He needed to leave this ugly hotel and go to his chambers in the Vatican at once.