Alex finished selecting and paying for his tux. He left the store, texting his girlfriend the good news. Prom was a couple weeks away, but the tuxes took a while to prep, so he'd gone in today to make sure everything was straightened out.
Alex grinned as he caught a brief glimpse of his reflection in a store window. He really was quite the specimen, wasn't he? Normally he wasn't given to self-admiration, but this time he took a moment to reflect on how he'd gotten here. Especially considering how different things used to be.
Five years before, when Alex was twelve, he'd been very short, very skinny, riddled by acne, cursed with big glasses and a mouthful of braces. In short, Alex had been highly unpopular. And when I say short and skinny, I mean he was 4'10" and 100 pounds on a good day. Puberty to that point had been quite unkind and he dealt with constant bullying.
Two years later, Alex had turned fourteen. Although he'd grown to 5'2" and 125 pounds, and his braces had been removed, the bullying continued. It got so bad that his parents decided they had to get him as far away from those bullies as possible. So they moved across the country for Alex to start at a new high school.
Over that summer, Alex realized he had a chance to reinvent himself, and he got down to business. First, he asked his parents to get him contacts to replace his huge glasses. Then, he began hormone treatments to help with his acne and to gain a healthier height.
But the most important thing he'd done was to start working out. Alex had gotten a gym membership and attended every couple of days, which soon became every day. Some regulars noticed how he changed little by little that summer, as the treatments began to take effect and his workouts started to show.
So already by the time he started high school, Alex was almost unrecognizable. With almost no acne, no glasses, a brilliant smile free of braces, and a growth spurt combining with treatment and workouts to make him 5'6" and 140 pounds of lean muscle, he was a new boy.
Immediately Alex started redefining himself as an athlete. He joined football, basketball, track. He rose to prominence as a star in each one.
Throughout the next few years Alex's good genetics combined with his workout regimen to produce the current specimen: 17 years old, 6'2", 240 pounds, with model good looks.
Alex shook his head and continued walking. He'd really gotten carried away thinking about the past just then. He checked out his phone again, noticing a new app he didn't remember downloading. It claimed it could change reality by altering one word within a sentence.
Obviously Alex thought it was a joke. But just to see what would happen, he generated a sentence about a nearby kid: "This 10-year-old boy is obsessed with Fortnite." Alex changed "Fortnite" to "muscle" and hit Enter. He was astonished to see the boy instantly become very muscular, his clothes barely able to contain him.