David moves a hand through their short black hair, looking a bit nervous. "Well," he began, "I found out magic is real... so that's kind of a mind-blow." Alex's face turned incredulous, their lips flattening and their eyes giving the impression of a non-existent frown. "I'm serious," David insisted.
Alex put his hands on his hips, pursing his lips. He took a moment to collect his thoughts, fixing the bra-strap at the shoulder of his average size breasts. To anyone else, Alex would appear as a woman, but to David he had no issue with the transman and that's part of why they got along so well. "Some new role-play setting you want me to try?" he asked.
"Fair question," David conceded. "But, no... um. OK. So," they thought about how best to prove it, and took out their phone to consider their options. Opening the TMS app, he looked over the sentences as suggested after selecting Alex as the target. "I can't see your underwear, but this sentence says 'Alex's panties are blue'," he offered, looking back up at their friend. "It makes 100% true statements about people. When you change one word in the sentence, it remains 100% true, but all of reality apparently changes to make it true."
Alex smirked. "Sure. Neat. OK. Well, change the color of my panties," Alex suggested.
David took a breath, but he had permission. "OK," they nodded. "So... I'll just change it from your favorite color of blue to red, and..." he tapped the screen a few times and hit Submit. "There you go. Your panties are red."
"Yes, David. We just established that," Alex said, a bit condesending. "My favorite color... you just said that."
David looked up at Alex. "Your favorite color is blu—wait! Oh, shit. No. No-no-no-no," David realized their mistake. They hadn't make Alex aware of the settings. They wanted to change something small, but they changed something large. Alex really had loved blue until ten seconds ago.
They glanced around the room and David saw some changes. Since Alex had picked their underwear color choice because of their favorite color selection from when they were very young, objects of Alex's which themselves had been blue for the same reason were now all red: their favorite cup in the open cabinet, the lines on his rain jacket, and even the rugged phone case around their cell when he took it out of his pocket to look at the screen, somewhat distracted from David's concern.
David looked back down at their phone. The last sentence was listed there as the only recent change. Taking a chance, David tapped on the sentence again, and it repopulated the previous sentence into the edit window. "Didn't know that would work," they blinked. Alex looked back up. Quickly swiping onto the screen, David changed 'red' back to 'blue' and hit Submit. Quickly, David looked up and the cup, jacket, and phone case all turned back to blue as they had been.
"What was your favorite color, again?" they asked to make sure.
"We just went over—it's blue," he said, taking up a place lounging on the couch. "You know that. You're also off topic and freaking out, dude. What's the deal about my color of panties? If boxers were more comfortable I'd wear those. Well... boxer-briefs, maybe," he offered.
David was tapping on the phone until they hit Submit again and then looked up at Alex. "Because I didn't select you to be immune to universal changes," David explained. "Blue is your favorite color, the reason you picked the panty color. I switched it to red without making you aware and lots of other things changed to red because your favorite changed—It's all connected!" Alex frowned finally, looking up at David. "And then I changed it back, selected you to be unaffected by reality changes like me... and then—"
"Well, that's all convenient but also contrived. 'I changed reality, but you didn't notice, because you were affected too' sounds really self-contained," Alex said. "You know I love role-play stuff because it's an outlet for me, but if you want to dip your toe into storytelling, you need to work a bit on your believability of your setting."
"Your panties are red."
"No, they aren't," he said, unzipping the front of his pants. "As we just said, they're blue." He looked down past his breasts and toward his crotch and saw there that he had on red panties underneath his blue jeans. "What the hell?" Then, they changed color before Alex's eyes and were now yellow. He quickly turned his head to look up at David who was just looking up from his phone.