Ben hesitated. So many possibilities. He noticed a box at the bottom of the screen to limit the time of the transformation, and he clicked it with relief. Then he began to look over the options. There were so many, and when he looked at one, another seemed more intriguing. At last he closed his eyes and pointed the cursor and random. He had chosen “New Jersey”. Although he had meant to make a random choice, he decided to cheat and try again.
He closed his eyes and moved the mouse. He opened his eyes to see the cursor at “Russian”. Before he let himself change his mind, he clicked. Then he felt a sense of disappointment after all that build up. He returned to the screen and began compulsively playing a game. He clicked on with no sense of the passing of time, and having won as many rounds as he had lost, he mindlessly closed down the game to open another. When the home screen came up Ben found he couldn’t read the wording, it was all in unfamiliar letters. He noticed a small Russian Federation flag in the top right corner, and clicked on it. The wording was now in Cyrillic script, and Ben had no difficulty understanding it.
He felt unexpectedly energetic. He got up and walked over to the full length mirror behind him. As he did so, he felt first some sort of dizziness, and then a clarity he had never noticed before. His face began to re-shape as he looked, and afterwards he was not aware there had been any change. His face narrowed, with a pointed chin with a marked cleft, and formed a V from the sharp chin to the dominant Slavic cheekbones beneath his slanted eyes, eyes which were ice blue in colour, as if to freeze a bottle of vodka by looking at it. His hair lightened to the lightest of Nordic blondes, almost white, in narrow eyebrows slanting outwards and upwards, and in the sharpest of flattops on his head, trimmed almost to stubble at the back and sides.
His skin was flawless, and a light tan. Ben, no that didn’t sound at all right, something beginning with B. Basil. Only Russian of course. Vassily sneered in the mirror at his intimidating handsome good looks. A hand, veined and finely shaped but with nervous muscular power, rose gradually to his throat, and began to undo the buttons on his shirt, and then impatiently shrugged it off to appear topless. Vassily undid his belt and allowed his boring trousers to fall to the floor, appearing naked in the mirror. His body began to transform next...