To say Kendra was an athletic nut would be an understatement: this high school student practically ate, drank, and dreamed sports. And it wasn't hard to see why: with her highly toned, athletic build and sleek yet shapely body, the the 16-year-old brunette was a born athlete.
There was just one hurdle she just couldn't overcome: the fact that she looked like everyone else on the various teams at her high school. She just came off as being...generic.
That wasn't to say that she hated her body: what she hated most was being in the shadow of her school's star athlete, Antonia. And as someone who came from a family of natural athletes, she found that unbelievably galling.
She had just come home from school, from yet another tryout where she was shown up by Antonia, when the doorbell rang.
"Yes?" she asked when she opened the door.
"Package for a...Kendra Blake?" the delivery guy asked, visibly unsure if he had the right address.
"I'm Kendra Blake." Kendra replied quizzically.
"Sign here, please." the delivery guy answered, handing her the delivery receipt, followed by him setting a modest-sized, unmarked box on the front step of her house.
"But I...wasn't expecting a package." said Kendra, wondering who would be sending her a package. "Or anyone else in my family, for that matter. Who's the sender?"
"Don't know...and at this point, don't care." the delivery guy politely snapped back, just wanting to be done with what he considered a 'junk' delivery. "Anyway, have fun with...whatever's inside."
Kendra picked the package up off the front step and took it back to her bedroom on the main floor, a spacious, but rather modest, affair with a small attached bathroom. Setting the box on the bed, she studied it, noting the lack of a return address.
"Whoever wanted me to get this must've paid out the nose to see that it came in an unmarked box." she thought. "And since there's no return address...I don't see the harm in seeing what's inside."
She cut the tape with a knife and opened the flaps. He dug through the Styrofoam and found a device like a wide-angle camera, with a CD-ROM packaged with it. She picked the device up and looked at it: it said "Chronivac Reality Alteration Machine v6.0" on it. After plugging the device into the wall, she then proceeded to load the CD-ROM onto her desktop computer, a bulky, tower-like affair she'd had for several years. Once the software finished loading and the device finished syncing up to her desktop, she activated the program, which brought up all her stats:
Name: Kendra Blake
Age: 16
Gender: Female
Height: 6'0''
Weight 125 lbs.
Build: Athletic
Status: Single
Sexual Preference: Straight
Occupation: High School Student
Species: Human
"No way! How does it know all of those things about me?" she asked herself.
Curious as to how the device worked, she typed in "I have sharply pointed ears, swept back flush with the sides of my head, yet canted upward and slightly outward" and hit 'Enter'. She then felt a sensation almost like a mild earache in both ears, which then subsided within a matter of seconds. She quickly felt of her ears, only to discover that they had changed exactly as she wanted them to when she typed in the change. She now looked like an elf!
Wondering what else the program could do, she then entered "I have voluminous waist-length hair." Sure enough, within moments, her once shoulder-length hair cascaded down her back like a waterfall, becoming fuller in volume as it fell.
As she quietly pondered what to do next, she had a thought work its way into her mind: "If this thing really CAN actually alter reality itself, could it somehow make me a better athlete? It can't really be considered cheating if it's a normal part of what I am...right?"
Her hatred of Antonia showing her up had finally gotten the better of her. For as long as she could remember, she'd always shown her up in every tryout for every team she'd sought to join.
Every team, save one...