femanon
11/12/2016 (Sat) 07:15:26
[Preview]
No.
15
del
Caveat Emptor TG
To say that James had virtually no real-life friends whatsoever could hardly be considered an overstatement.
His “life” and “hobbies” largely resembled those of any personal disappointment of a human being from among the younger generations growing up in the first two decades of the 21st century: video games, hentai, 4chan, reddit, literal 10-hour anime torrent marathons; seemingly no sense of personal responsibility, living with his parents instead of either moving out of the house or going to college at 18, a lousy part-time cashier job, mountains upon mountains of empty Doritos bags overflowing from the trash bin in his bedroom?the list goes on. If there was one lucky thing about him, it was that he was one of those people who, because of genetics or some other inconceivable sorcery, seemingly never got fat no matter what or how much he ate or how little he exercised?doubtlessly this fact was capable of doing relatively little to discourage his continued idleness and hedonism.
If he wasn’t busy squandering his disposable minimum-wage income on junk food, dakimakuras, or “valuable/limited edition” CS:GO weapon skins, James was usually either watching some anime series he wasn’t even interested in just so he could later rant about how terrible it was on /a/, or was spending literally hours on 4chan busying himself in these follow-up rants or otherwise lurking in some other deep, dark hole of the site such as /pol/, /b/, /s4s/, /v/, /int/, /d/?objectively any of the really popular boards more generally.
As far as it concerned James the world did not extend far beyond his own PC monitor, and doing things such as trolling and quite literally “shitposting” “ironically” and getting even just a personal giggle out of its sheer, deliberate stupidity held more meaning to him in life any actually intelligent discussion. James fluently spoke the e-language of greentexting, dank memes, smug anime girl reaction images, roll threads, thrice-overdone copypastas, and basal use of the word “cuck” as an insult on the most arbitrary of terms.
James’ story, though, is fairly short, and it was, ironically, through the very same daily rituals with which he had always been so familiar that his own world suddenly changed forever, all due to yet another seemingly inconspicuous copypasta?and there are indications that he was not alone in being affected by it.
[b]
“Anonymous 06/12/1X 15:32:09 No. XXXXX19[/b]
[b]In Japan, there are 3 ways to say “I love you”:[/b]
[b]You say “Daisuki (大好き)” for the friends and person you like,[/b]
[b]you say “Aishiteru (愛してる)” for a more serious relationship,[/b]
[b]and you say “Koishiteru ( 恋してる)” to the person you want to spend the rest of your life with.[/b]
[b]And they follow this rule. They preserve the meaning of ‘I love you’ and never lose its essence unlike us.[/b]
[b]Share this with 5 people if you want to turn into a loli.”
[/b]
From behind his screen James managed a slight grin upon seeing this random post while on /s4s/ one particular day. Attached was a generic smug anime girl image. The irony of the copypasta in the post was self-evident by the entirely non-sequitor context, or lack thereof, for the last sentence. Either you thought it was funny for this reason, or it made virtually no sense, and left you wondering just how people subjectively considered such use of irony subjectively “funny”. But James, a veteran of such nonsensical imageboard hipster-ism, incidentally thought it was clever?a message resembling the beginning of a generic motivational chain letter or “copy and paste this in your profile to receive X/share this with Y people to get Z”, and which at first in all seriousness did not seem like an attempt at ironic humor until the sudden, nonsensical curveball at the very end threw the reader off.
[b]
“Anonymous 06/12/1X 15:35:46 No. XXXXX20[/b]
[b]File: chentopkek.jpg (62 KB, 331 x 224)[/b]
[b]>>XXXXX19 (OP)[/b]
[b]nice meme”[/b]
[b]“Anonymous 06/12/1X 15:40:02 No. XXXXX21[/b]
[b]File: sadpepe.jpg (305 KB, 430 x 356)[/b]
[b]>tfw you will never be qt 2D little gorl
>tfw you will never have siscon onii-chan who pays attention to you”[/b]
[b]“Anonymous 06/12/1X 15:42:22 No. XXXXX22[/b]
[b]>> XXXXX21[/b]
[b]gtfo frogposter”[/b]
[b]“Anonymous 06/12/1X 15:48:15 No. XXXXX25[/b]
[b]File: smuganimegrill.jpg (55 KB, 907 x 718)[/b]
[b]>>XXXXX22[/b]
[b]nice dubs m9”[/b]
[b]“Anonymous 06/12/1X 16:10:49 No. XXXXX38[/b]
[b]>>XXXXX19 (OP)[/b]
[b]guys holy shit nobody will believe me but if you actually do it then it literally fucking works im dead serious ok don’t believe me try it but theres no going back you actually become a fucking loli and i think im about to disappear fuckfuckfuckfuuuuuuuuck oh well my life sux anyways”[/b]
[b]“Anonymous 06/12/1X 16:12:02 No. XXXXX40[/b]
[b]>>XXXXX38[/b]
[b]lol can I be your onii-chan then anon”[/b]
[b]“Anonymous 06/12/1X 16:15:20 No. XXXXX45[/b]
[b]File: 12765435shb2e.png (95 KB, 772 x 585)[/b]
[b]>>XXXXX38[/b]
[b]This isn’t /x/ or some otherkin ERP board you dumb fucker.”[/b]
[b]“Anonymous 06/12/1X 17:00:59 No. XXXXX82[/b]
[b]File: burypinkgirl.jpg (67 KB, 751 x 604)[/b]
[b]>>XXXXX45[/b]
[b]rudeposter, don’t be rude, this is nice thread”[/b]
[b]“Anonymous 06/12/1X 17:02:33 No. XXXXX86[/b]
[b]>>XXXXX45[/b]
[b]that’s right, /s4s/ is SERIOUS MOTHERFUCKING BSNS anon”[/b]
[b]“Anonymous 06/12/1X 17:05:45 No. XXXXX90[/b]
[b]>/thread”
[/b]
Another day, another shitposting thread in the designated shitposting section of 4chan. All of the replies except for the one that seemed to be trying to sound genuine were absurdly predictable in their nature. But James couldn’t stop snickering stupidly at the copypasta itself, and regardless of whether or not it promised to turn him “into a loli” (and everyone knew there was simply no way it could do that anyhow), he felt it would be a good waste of 5 minutes of his ever-precious time to post it on the Steam comment walls of several of his CS:GO-playing friends. Since everyone he knew on Steam already had more or less the same interests as him, frequented anime-themed imageboards on a daily basis, and were not exactly dense, it was safe to assume that they would understand the reference in all of its irony.
With that note he redoubled his arguably marginal efforts, and ultimately ended up posting the message on eleven pages instead of just five. It was at this point that he logged onto the usual CS:GO server and began playing. For whatever indiscernable reason, he noticed only a few minutes in that not only was he doing more poorly than usual, his muscle memory and reflexes also seemed almost unnaturally bad compared to just yesterday. It was like his hands and fingers didn’t fit into their usual places on either the mouse or the keyboard, but as far as anyone would be able to tell he was simply out of it and nothing else, however atypical his performance seemed to be. The monitor almost seemed the slightest bit taller at eye level, though, and additionally it was almost as though his seat was slightly more spacious.
Cursing, and thinking he may have been coming down with something, James closed the game and stood up, still unable to shake the feeling that everything around him was just a bit taller than it should have been. His clothes almost seemed baggier, too, but he figured that the mild dizziness he was feeling was to blame for everything he seemed to be feeling and was about to collapse on his bed and wait for the feeling to subside when, scratching at his chin, he finally noticed that something was more than coincidentally way off.
He had not shaved in two days, and although he never let facial hair build up long enough to ever become prominent, he knew quite well that after two days the usual familiar feeling of stubble and peach fuzz would absolutely, definitely be there. In fact, it had been there only minutes before. How on earth did the lower half of his face suddenly feel so smooth and hairless like he had just shaved, then? He tried to shrug it off again, but instinctively his blood turned to ice out of a sort of irrational shock and instead he found himself stumbling over to the mirror across from his bed, where he was greeted again with a surprising sight that only made things worse.
He was somehow shorter, thinner, and his skin, although unhealthily pale to begin with, now also looked seemingly less beaten and dirty, almost as though he had gotten a few years younger. There was also no doubt at this point that he had physically shrunk by perhaps as many as three of four inches, and that his clothing was certainly looser than it should have been. But James barely had enough time to notice how much shorter he had gotten, and how loose-fitting his black T-shirt had become on his body, when he suddenly felt an aching in his jaw as it began to feel like it was quivering and moving around on its own. With no less shock he watched as his jawline softened and narrowed enormously with a loud POP!, the bones in his lower mandible physically shrinking down in size along with his chin before smoothening to a gentler slope that connected directly to his ears, which also seemed to be becoming smaller as his skull became rounder and narrower.
Wh-what the…fuck… virtually none of what was going on was even computing right now to James. For a moment he almost thought he had fallen into some lucid dream state, because he simply could not rationally fathom how whatever was happening to him right now was, indeed, happening.
Simultaneously, although he was too busy watching his own face to notice at the time, his skin began to become smoother and softer as all the hair on every part of his body save for his scalp gradually retreated into his body as if never there. Like his other features, his nose and mouth were also slowly getting smaller and an indescribable aching sensation pervaded his teeth, his wisdom teeth disappearing entirely as the shrinkage of his jawline seemed to envelop the space they had been occupying completely, as if swallowing and absorbing them whole. With a sudden jolt he felt his nose become small and round, retreating to a tiny nub on his face as his jawline visibly snapped back into place, his chin withdrawing and turning round to match and his lips seeming to puff up a bit, while his cheeks became rosier and expanded slightly to accommodate newly re-emerging, residual baby fat.
In an attempt to keep up with his regressing face, James’ limbs and overall bodily proportions followed suit, his height continuing to diminish as layers of thin muscle, fat, bone, and cartilage in his legs, accumulated through more than 10 years of steady growth and maturation seemingly peeled away, his arms additionally shortening and becoming small and slender as his ribcage, shoulders, and pelvis all steadily caved in and diminished. Millimeters quickly gave way to centimeters, then after about 10 seconds the process of height loss and miniaturization of his skeleton rapidly accelerated without warning to the scale of an entire foot in the space of no more than 2 seconds, before stopping just as suddenly. It was accompanied by a strange, vertigo-like sensation throughout his body, in turn only adding to the constant dizziness he was feeling as his skull continued to shrink and his face became rounder and younger-looking at the same time.
James’ T-shirt was now so baggy that it covered at least half of his entire body (if not more), yet strangely his boxers and socks did not become looser in turn, but instead seemed to scale down along with him, still fitting just fine and not becoming too loose (even though his feet, hips and waist must have diminished by now to as little as a third their former size and width). His blue jeans, on the other hand, had fallen completely off his body, now being many sizes too large to fit him.
“H-how is this even possible?!” James cried out loud, greeted rather predictably by the sound of a now vastly higher-pitched, squeakier, prepubescent voice. He appeared to have lost almost 2 feet in height, and quintuple that number of years in age?he looked and sounded no older than 8 years old now. Yet at once the young boy staring back at him did not look very much like he did when he was 8 years old; he couldn’t at the moment place how or why, but even after losing some years his features had somewhat less of a resemblance to his natural face than they either had when he was still 18, or when he was actually 10 years younger many years prior.He was now roughly only 129 centimeters, or 4’3”, tall, significantly down from his adult height of 186 cm/6’1”. Every part of his physique from his arms, legs, neck, torso, face, hands and feet had regressed to those of a young child’s; his skin, now far removed from the effects of puberty, was baby-soft, smooth, and completely hairless everywhere, and the chestnut brown hairs on his head had softened and changed their texture from the androgenic terminal hair ubiquitous to teenagers and adults to the thicker, immature vellus-type hairs found on prepubescent children. In part because his skull was now much smaller and rounder, his hair also looked quite a bit longer?it reached well below his ears now even though it was still arguably a boyish cut.
Somehow, James had spontaneously aged backwards, something that was utterly impossible even in theory according to the laws of physics. And the observed “immortality” and “reverse-aging” of hydras?those primitive and biologically incomplex organisms?definitely did not constitute the same phenomenon. Physical time travel made more scientific sense than this, and time itself was not even a strictly observable, physical thing but rather a concept. Things such as maturity, decay, and atrophy, on the other hand, whether of living things or of inanimate geological or cosmic bodies and phenomena via physical processes, were readily observable, predictable, and self-evident even without being measured mathematically. Not even black holes or stars “aged” truly backwards. Yet somehow James just did, virtually without any logical explanation.
But even though he had just now finished “regressing” in age, the weirdness most certainly did not stop there for James, as the feeling of dizziness continued to intensify until his vision now became blurrier and blurrier and the room seemed to almost spin. The now-young boy quickly lost his balance and fell down backwards onto the floor, catching an ephemeral glance of the ceiling overhead in all its indistinct fuzziness before a sudden, sharp pain behind his eyes briefly forced them shut.
When he opened them again only moments later he could suddenly see clearly again, but now something seemed…different. For a moment he could not quite put his finger on it, in part because the initial extent of his field of view consisted of that same dim, unlit bedroom ceiling, but when he raised his head and sat back up, looking back into the mirror, his blood almost literally felt like it had turned to ice when he was forced to try to comprehend the impossible sight that now greeted him in his reflection.
“What the…fuck?” he let out in his now-tiny 8-year-old voice.
Everything was still there?the half-open bedroom window, the beige curtains, the clean white mattress. Desk, check, PC, check (still open to the page on the imageboard which he had been browsing mere minutes ago), lampshade, TV, video game consoles, bookshelf, manga collection, mirror, all check. His now much younger self, check; but all of these things, including his own self, were not “quite” the same-looking, but instead merely recognizable as the same entities. For everything around him including himself had seemed to have…lost an entire dimension. Either his vision had become 2-dimensional in a physically impossible manner or the entire universe had?he couldn’t quite be sure at this point, what with the spontaneous rush of incomprehensible things taking place over the course of mere minutes.
Not only that, the aesthetic looked immediately familiar. Everything was marked by smooth, highly detailed, indistinct contours, with the only arguably unrealistically drawn entity in the room being, in