"Locke, hey, earth to Locke? You look like you saw a ghost." Yuna asked, leaning towards him.
"Shit, shit," Locke didn't notice though, and took out his phone and fired off a text to Alice.
LOCKE: Is a cheerleader with you right now? Goes by Lucy?
No reply came back, which was normal. Alice was proud to be a nerd and wouldn't answer a text during a lecture. She might even have turned her phone offer. Or Lucy was in the middle of transforming her into some kind of soul-sucking succubus. Locke switched tactics and fired off a text to Chaos this time.
LOCKE: I need to find Alice and/or Lucy, can you help?
It didn't take long for him to get a response.
CHAOS: sure why not
Locke stared at his phone for a few seconds, but Chaos didn't continue from there.
LOCKE: Can you tell me where they are?
CHAOS: don't see 'em
CHAOS: remember that hitch?
CHAOS: we can do one thing in the contest, and I already blew my load all over you
CHAOS: but I'm walking around, sticking my head into classes
CHAOS: i'll let you know if they turn up
CHAOS: oh, but since I can't use my powers, that means that the game is still going
CHAOS: and that means Lucy hasn't done anything yet so you've still got time
"Locke...?" Yuna asked, concern plain in her voice.
"Not now, Suh... Yuna." Locke turned away from her.
Yuna must have not liked that, because she grabbed Locke's wrist and spun him right back around to face her. Given the difference in size between the two (the new Locke had more than a foot on the new Yuna), that should have been impossible. But his surprise left him off guard.
She stared up at him, a stubborn look of I've had enough of your nonsense that he'd seen only a handful of times from Sun. And it was no less effective on her pretty face.
"You're acting very weird," she said. "Come on, dude. You're my best friend. You wanna tell me what's going on here?"
"You wouldn't understand, it's..." Locke trailed off, stopping to actually consider it for a moment.
Did he want to explain all this craziness to Yuna? Fate of the world, a trio of unbelievably hot women competing with him as the judge... keeping something like that to himself sounded impossible when he thought about it. And like Yuna had said, they were best friends; a bit of a surprise to Locke, since he'd have assumed Yuna's best friend would have been Alice.
Except... Yuna wasn't his best friend. Sun was. And it was his fault that Sun had gotten caught up in all of this insanity. How would Yuna react if she knew that truth? But... didn't she deserve to know?
"God, would you stop that smoldering look? It's making me shy, dude," Yuna said, taking a step back, fingers reaching up to tease her hair. Locke remembered then that Sun/Yuna wasn't the only one who'd been changed, and maybe Yuna's transformation might not be such a bad thing. And what good would telling her do?
On the other hand, being able to share the rest? He was dying to talk to someone about it.
"Hrm... fine, alright. Follow me."
He took Yuna by the hand and led her to the art room. Budget cuts meant that it only had classes in the afternoon and the door was kept locked, but it was old, and you just had to twist the knob a certain way to get it open.
He closed the door behind him, then added a second layer of privacy, going into the supply closet and shutting that door behind them too.
"Oh wow... we're really doing this, huh? I'm on the pill, but I th-think we should start with, um...some touching first?" Yuna squeaked, her voice at a stage whisper.
"Huh?" Locke.
"What?" Yuna looked at him, just as confused.
"I'm not... that's not why I brought you in here! I just wanted have some privacy while we talked."
"Oh. Ohhh... yeah. Yeah, I mean... urgh..." Yuna covered her face in both hands, leaned back against the wall. "Just forget all that then, would you?"
"Already forgotten," Locke lied. A hot goth Asian chick had just offered him a handjob. Even if that had been Sun an hour ago, it'd gotten his heart racing a mile a minute. But as much as he wanted to explore it, there was something more important to talk about.
"Do you remember two years ago when you took your mom's car out after dark to go to that concert? We put it into neutral and rolled it out onto the street to be sneaky, and then the headlight shone right into your parent's bedroom."
Yuna blinked.
"Uhm...yeah," she said. "Mom was mad about the car, but way, way more mad that I was sneaking off with a boy."
She looked confused, and so was he. It was the funhouse mirror version of memory they had together. Typical teen shenanigans. But the memory Yuna had of it gave it an entirely new context. Even so, Locke was convinced that Yuna was still Sun, deep down inside. And Sun had always had the patience of a saint whenever Locke needed someone to talk to.
"It's going to sound crazy, but... okay, this morning I met three girls."
Locke tried explaining things as best he could. The contest, the changes. He did avoid talking about the whole prom situation and was vague on what the first contest was, not coming close to mentioning what had happened to Yuna, but other than that... everything.
"I'm sorry. You know I'm like, you're best friend here, but this sounds completely crazy. You get that, right? I'm not saying I don't believe you. Ms. Hym is way too hot to be teaching high school History, and I saw that goth girl you were talking to in the hall before. But....Goddesses, Locke? Control of the world? It's....it's unbelievable!"
She crossed her arms, looking up at him. Looking down back at her, he was uncomfortably aware of the way it made that tanktop squeeze her chest tighter. It was remarkable now how looking at her eyes and her tits weren't mutually exclusive from this new angle from his growth spurt and her shrinking.
"Yeah. I know. It's real crazy. And since I'm the only one that can notice what's changed... well, there's like a solid chance that maybe I am crazy." There was a fun thought best not to dwell on. "But right now, what matters is that Lucy... Lucifier, the devil? Gah. I think she's going after Alice and--"
There was a buzz from Locke's front pocket. He pulled out his phone and felt his adrenaline surge.
CHAOS: found lucy
CHAOS: she's in studyhall
CHAOS: no sign of alice but hard to miss her red ass
CHAOS: especially when half the class is fawning all over her
CHAOS: simps
"Okay, good. We're not too late then." If Jehovah had thought that feminizing his best friend was a reasonable move, he was worried just what Lucifer had planned. And since two of the three variables had already been hit, he had a sinking feeling that Alice was next on the list.
Locke considered his options. Maybe he should say screw it, barge into Alice's class and princess carry her to safety. Or he could get 'Ms. Ella Hym' to summon Alice via the intercom like she'd done to him. Or... or there really wasn't time for a plan, Locke decided.
While Yuna waited in the hallway, Locke opened the door to the study hall classroom. He spotted Lucy immediately--the woman was making herself impossible to miss, with half the desks turned around so that people could look at her.
"Really now? None of you have had a threesome yet? That simply won't do. How about... Locke? Is that you?" Lucy asked with genuine shock, her cool, calculating, and above all, sultry demeanor dropping for just a few seconds. As she looked at him through the crowd, the students between them moved to the side to give her an unobstructed view. "You're looking... what do you mortals call it these days? Like a snack? No, no. Rizzed! You're very rizzed, Locke."
Locke's mouth fell open, but before answering Lucy he turned over to the teacher in charge.
"Hey, Mrs. Webbing, I need to borrow one of your students. You don't mind, right?" he said to the teacher in charge, a wrinkled, warm science teacher with only three years left until retirement, as she'd often remind them. As he did, he willed that mind control power that Chaos had given him to make sure that she really didn't mind. He admitted to himself it wasn't the best use of such a boon, but it was like a loaded gun in his head, and he wanted to get rid of the temptation.
The old bitty looked up at him, eyes fluttering momentarily.
"Of course I don't mind, dear. Do what you have to," she said.
"Thanks. Hey, Lucy, we need to talk real quick!"
"Of course, darling. I've all the time in the world for you," Lucy replied with an inviting smile.