SKIN DEEP: 
THE POSSESSION DEVICE
An artifact-fueled possession story by JohnManTD
Chapter 3
The Prank
The journey from the women’s dorm back to my own was a masterclass in alien kinesiology. Walking as Jordan was an unconscious act, a simple matter of putting one foot in front of the other. Walking as Elise Hartwood was a complex, full-body negotiation with gravity. My hips, her hips, were a revelation. They were wide, womanly, carrying a substantial, satisfying weight that felt entirely foreign. With every step, they swayed with a powerful, metronomic rhythm, a pendulum of soft flesh and solid bone that dictated the motion of my entire lower body. It felt like I was carrying a precious, heavy cargo low on my frame, something that required a constant, subtle adjustment of balance. It was cumbersome, inefficient, and yet… there was an undeniable power to it. A primal, feminine grace that I was only just beginning to comprehend.
And then there were the breasts. They were a constant, distracting presence, two heavy, soft orbs that swayed in a gentle counter-rhythm to my hips, their movement contained but not entirely tamed by the expensive silk of Elise’s blouse and the formidable architecture of her bra. They weren’t as monumentally, comically large as Mrs. Flemming’s, but they were still substantial, a proud, matronly D-cup at least, and they made their presence known with every step, every turn of my torso.
But the strangest part wasn't the physical sensation. It was the looks. As I crossed the main quad, the evening sun casting long shadows on the grass, I became acutely aware that I was no longer invisible. As Jordan, I was just another face in the crowd, part of the scenery. As Elise, I was a focal point. Men, young and old, turned to look. It wasn't the simple, almost cartoonish lust I sometimes saw directed at the sorority girls in their tiny shorts. This was different. It was a look of appreciation, of respect, mixed with a definite, palpable desire. It was the look men give to a woman who is not just beautiful, but powerful, confident, and utterly, intimidatingly, a woman. A MILF. God, I had never truly appreciated the sheer, magnetic pull of a woman like Elise Hartwood. Women looked too, their gazes a complex mixture of envy, admiration, and a subtle, critical assessment of my clothes, my hair, my very existence. It was an odd, exhilarating feeling, to be so thoroughly, completely seen.
I reached my dorm building, the familiar, slightly grimy brick facade a stark contrast to the elegant woman I currently inhabited. I took a deep breath, steeling myself, a wicked, triumphant smile playing on Elise’s perfectly lipsticked lips. Showtime.
I could hear the tell-tale sounds of Counter-Strike from behind our door, the frantic clicking of a mouse, the muffled explosions, Kyle’s occasional, frustrated grunt. Perfect. He was settled in, unsuspecting. I raised my new, slender hand, my knuckles adorned with a simple, elegant gold ring, and knocked. Three sharp, authoritative raps.
The in-game sounds stopped abruptly. I heard a chair scrape against the floor. The door swung open, and there he was. Kyle. My best friend. My roommate. My unsuspecting victim. His hair was a mess, and his eyes were wide and slightly bewildered, clearly annoyed at the interruption.
And then he saw me.
His face went through a rapid, hilarious series of micro-expressions: confusion, recognition, and then pure, unadulterated panic. His posture straightened instantly. He subconsciously tried to flatten his messy hair. His eyes darted around as if looking for a tie to magically appear around his neck.
“M-Mrs. Hartwood!” he stammered, his voice a full octave higher than usual. “Oh, uh, hi! What… what are you doing here?”
I didn't smile. I gave him a long, appraising look, my head tilted slightly, my expression a carefully crafted mask of stern maternal concern. I let the silence hang in the air, watching him squirm. It was delicious.
“Kyle, dear,” I said finally, my new voice a smooth, cool alto that dripped with condescension. “We need to talk. I’ve been doing some thinking. Since it seems you have no intention of going anywhere, and my daughter seems inexplicably attached to you, I decided it was time I had a few questions answered. To clear the air. To make sure you’re… suitable.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard. “S-suitable? Uh, okay. Does… does Emily know you’re here?”
“Emily is busy,” I said dismissively, taking a step forward, forcing him to retreat into the room. “This is between you and me. May I come in?” It wasn’t a question. It was a command.
“Oh! Yes, of course, please,” he said, practically tripping over himself to get out of my way. I swept into the room, the scent of Elise’s expensive perfume momentarily overpowering the dorm-room funk of stale pizza and unwashed laundry. Kyle shut the door behind me, looking like a prisoner who had just willingly locked his own cell.
I remained standing, a deliberate power move, forcing him to look up at me. He fidgeted, eventually perching nervously on the edge of his desk chair.
“You see, Kyle,” I began, pacing slowly in front of him, letting the gentle sway of my hips and the soft click of my sensible flats on the linoleum floor set the rhythm of his interrogation.
“I have very high standards for my daughter. I’m sure you can understand that. And after all these years, despite my… reservations… she seems quite set on you. So, I’ve decided that instead of fighting it, I should make sure for myself that you are the right man for her.”
Kyle was sweating now, visible beads of moisture on his forehead. He wiped a clammy hand on his jeans. “S-sure thing, Mrs. Hartwood. Anything. What… what did you have in mind?”
I stopped pacing and turned to face him directly, pinning him with Elise’s sharp, intelligent gaze. “Let’s start with the basics, shall we? A simple yes or no question. Do you love my daughter?”
He blinked, relieved by the simplicity of the question. “Yes! Of course, I do. More than anything.”
“Good,” I said, my expression unchanging. “That’s a start.” I let the silence stretch again, enjoying the way his nerves were practically vibrating in the small room. Then, I leaned in slightly, my voice dropping to a conspiratorial, almost predatory tone. “Now for the more… practical matters. Tell me, Kyle. Do you know how to please my daughter?”
His face was a perfect mask of confusion. “Please her? Like… make her happy? I mean, I try to. I buy her flowers, I listen when she’s stressed about her classes, I—”
I cut him off with a sharp, dismissive wave of my hand and an exasperated ‘tsk’. “Tsk, tsk. Silly little boy. No. That’s not what I mean, and you know it.” I took another step closer, invading his personal space. “I mean pleasure her. In the biblical sense, Kyle. Sexually. We Hartwood women… we have certain appetites. A certain… fire. And I will not have my daughter wasting her youth on some fumbling, inexperienced boy who doesn’t know his way around a woman’s body. I want only the best for her. In all aspects of her life.”
Kyle’s brain appeared to have short-circuited. His mouth opened and closed a few times, but no sound came out. He looked like a fish that had just been asked to solve a calculus equation. He was clearly trying to figure out what the correct answer was, if this was some bizarre, fucked-up test of his character. He had no idea how truly bizarre and fucked-up it was about to get.
I broke the silence, my voice soft, almost a purr. “Words are cheap, Kyle. I’m a woman who believes in action. In demonstration.” I reached for my purple shirt. “Show me.”
His eyes widened in horror as I took off the top, letting it fall to the floor in a pool of purple fabric. I reached behind my back, unhooked my bra, and tossed it aside.
And then I was standing in the middle of my own dorm room, in the body of my girlfriend’s mother, topless.
Kyle made a strangled, squeaking noise and immediately averted his eyes, staring intently at a poster on the wall as if it held the secrets to the universe. His face was a shade of crimson I had never seen before.
I laughed, a low, throaty, distinctly female sound that belonged to Elise. “Oh, don’t be a silly boy, Kyle. Look at me.” When he didn’t, I walked right up to him, my bare breasts swaying with the movement. I grabbed his chin with my slender fingers and forced his head to turn, made him look at me. At the two large, pale, heavy breasts hanging in the air just inches from his face.
“I need you to show me, Kyle,” I whispered, my voice dripping with mock-seduction. “Show me how you would pleasure my daughter. How you would make her scream your name.” I took his hand. It was cold and clammy. I lifted it, ignoring his weak, token resistance, and placed it directly on my right breast.
The jolt of contact was electric. His touch was hesitant, clumsy, his fingers splayed awkwardly against my warm skin. “I… I can’t, Mrs. Hartwood,” he stammered, his eyes wide with terror. “This is… this is wrong. This is cheating.”
“Nonsense,” I purred, moving his hand for him, guiding his fingers to knead the soft, heavy flesh. “Think of it as… a practical exam. A final. I know these are a lot larger than my daughter’s,” I said, giving the breast a little heft. “I’ve had three children, of course. But a breast is still a breast. And she has my genes. So show me, Kyle. Show me how you pleasure a woman.”
He was still hesitating, his mind clearly at war with itself, when a small detail I’d dropped seemed to snag in his panicked brain. “Wait… three children?” he asked, his brow furrowing in confusion. “I thought… I thought Emily had three siblings?”
Shit. I’d forgotten. Emily had two sisters and a brother. Four kids. I had misremembered a key detail of my own cover. I stumbled, but only for a second. “Uh, yes. Four,” I corrected myself smoothly. “A slip of the tongue. This is very nice, dear,” I cooed, trying to get him back on track as his hand finally, tentatively, started to move on its own. “But focus more on the nipple. That’s the key.”
He was so flustered he didn’t even seem to register my mistake. He started to fondle me, his touch becoming slightly more confident, and I had to admit… it felt good. A strange, warm, pleasant sensation was spreading through my chest. It was different from when I’d touched Mrs. Flemming’s breasts myself. This was… passive. Receiving pleasure, rather than creating it. And Elise’s body responded differently, too. Her nipples hardened, but the overall sensitivity was lower, more muted than Mrs. Flemming’s hair-trigger responses. 
I glanced at the elegant gold watch on my wrist. 6:40 PM. Twenty minutes left. The prank had reached its peak. It was time to bring it home.
I pulled his hand away from my breast. “That’s good, Kyle,” I said, my voice turning serious again. “Very good. You have… potential. But there’s one final test. The most important one.”
I took a step back, letting him see my full, semi-naked form. “I need you to fuck me.”
That snapped him out of it.
He leaped back from his chair as if he’d been electrocuted. “Whoa! Whoa, whoa, whoa, Mrs. Hartwood! No! This is… this is too far! I can’t! I’m telling Emily!”
He was genuinely terrified now, his eyes wide with a mixture of fear and righteous indignation. The prank had worked perfectly. Too perfectly. It was time for the reveal.
I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I burst out laughing. Not Elise’s cultured chuckle, but my own, loud, slightly goofy laugh, coming out of her mouth. It was a bizarre, discordant sound.
“Oh my god, Kyle, your face!” I wheezed, clutching my bare, jiggling breasts as I doubled over with laughter. “Wait, wait, stop! It’s okay! It’s me! It’s me!”
He just stared at me, his expression a chaotic mess of confusion and horror. “What do you mean, ‘it’s me’? This is so fucked up, Mrs. Hartwood! You’re… you’re having some kind of breakdown!”
I straightened up, wiping tears of laughter from Elise’s eyes. “Kyle. I’m not Mrs. Hartwood. It’s me. It’s Jordan.”
He just shook his head, taking another step back. “What? No. What kind of weird, twisted test is this? Is this to see if I’ll sleep with my girlfriend’s mom? Because the answer is no! Okay? A thousand times no!”
“I can prove it,” I said, my voice still laced with amusement. “The night of your eighteenth birthday. You got so drunk on cheap vodka you tried to pay the pizza delivery guy with a sock you claimed was ‘legal tender in the republic of Kyle-istan’.”
His jaw dropped. His eyes widened. That was a story only the two of us, and one very confused pizza guy, knew. “How… how do you know that?”
“And,” I continued, pressing my advantage, “last semester, when you thought you’d failed your chemistry midterm, you stress-ate an entire family-sized bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and then cried for two hours while watching videos of soldiers coming home to their dogs.”
He pointed a trembling finger at me. At Elise’s body. “What… the actual… fuck?” he whispered, his brain audibly breaking. “But you’re… you’re…” He gestured vaguely at my breasts, my face, my entire female form.
I sighed, the prank finally over. I sat down on the edge of my own bed, the mattress sinking under Elise’s weight. “Okay. Sit down, man. This is going to sound insane.”
And so, sitting there in my dorm room, in the naked-from-the-waist-up body of his girlfriend’s mother, I told him everything. About finding the device. About Ashley on the quad. About Dave in the hallway. About Mrs. Flemming in her office. About the answer key, the camera, the whole sordid, unbelievable story.
He listened, his expression shifting from terror to confusion to stunned, slack-jawed disbelief. When I finished, he just stared at me for a long, silent minute.
“So you’re telling me,” he said slowly, “that you have a magic… body-swapping… phone thingy?”
“Pretty much,” I said, giving one of my new breasts a little jiggle for emphasis.
“Let me see it,” he demanded, his eyes glinting with a new, manic excitement.
“I can’t,” I explained. “It disappears. Along with my own body, my clothes, whatever I’m carrying. It’s all in… storage, somewhere. But in about…,” I glanced at the watch again, “ten  minutes, the timer will run out, and I’ll swap back.”
He leaned forward, his fear completely replaced by an insatiable curiosity. “Dude. What’s it like? Being her?”
I laughed. “It’s a trip, man. And you totally fell for it. The look on your face when I took my top off…”
“You’re an asshole,” he said, but he was grinning now. “A complete and total asshole. But seriously. What’s it like?”
“It’s… heavy,” I said, hefting my breasts again. “And powerful. You should see the way people look at me. At her. It’s like being a celebrity.”
“What happens to her memories?” he asked, his mind clearly racing. “When you swap back, is she going to remember coming here and trying to seduce me?”
“I don’t know, honestly,” I admitted. “That’s the big question. It seems to cover its tracks really well. It creates a new memory for the person to explain what happened. But this is the first time I’ve told someone what was going on while I was possessing someone else. I have no idea how the device will handle that. Maybe it won’t need to cover its tracks with you, since you’re in on it now.”
“We have to test it,” he said, his eyes wide with possibilities. “Dude, think of what we could do with this! We could possess anyone! We could… we could ace every exam! We could find out what girls really talk about! We could be… I don’t know… the President!”
“Easy there, killer,” I laughed. “Let’s start smaller. Maybe we can test the memory thing on you first.”
“No way,” he said, shaking his head. “You are not possessing me until I get to use it too. Deal?”
“Deal,” I agreed.
We kept talking, a mile a minute, our minds buzzing with the insane implications of this discovery. He was so engrossed, so lost in the fantasy of who he could become, that for a moment, he seemed to forget he was having this conversation with a naked, middle-aged woman who looked exactly like his girlfriend’s mother. He was just talking to his best friend.
And then, mid-sentence, as he was excitedly pitching a plan to possess the dean to cancel Friday classes, it happened. The lurch. The sickening, dizzying, reality-dissolving spin.
The world snapped back into focus with a jarring suddenness. I was standing, not sitting. The air was different. The lighting was wrong. I was back in my own body, wearing my own clothes. But I wasn’t in my dorm room anymore.
A high-pitched shriek ripped through the air.
I looked over. I was in Emily’s dorm room. And Emily was standing by her closet, half-dressed in a pair of sweatpants and a sports bra, her eyes wide with shock and fury.
“What the fuck!” she yelled. “Jordan? How did you get in here? Get out!”
My brain scrambled to catch up. The timer. It must have run out. And the device, in its infinite, reality-warping wisdom, had returned me not to where the possession had started, but to where my host body was. Elise had clearly left the dorm while I was still talking to Kyle. And I had ended up… here.
“Sorry! Sorry!” I yelled, scrambling for the door. I fumbled with the handle, my mind racing for an excuse. “The door was open! I thought… I thought I dropped my keys earlier when I was talking to your mom! I was just looking for them! Sorry!”
“Well, next time, knock!” she yelled back, throwing a pillow in my general direction. “Ugh! Boys!”
I didn’t wait for a second invitation. I bolted out into the hallway, my heart hammering against my ribs. Phew. Close one. I really needed to start keeping a closer eye on the timer.
And then a horrifying thought hit me.
If I was here… that means Mrs. Hartwood… Elise… was back in her own body. A body that was, last I checked, topless and alone in a dorm room with my best friend.
“Oh, shit.”
I sprinted back towards my dorm, my own familiar, male legs pumping furiously. As I rounded the corner into my hallway, I saw her. Elise Hartwood. Walking towards me, looking as calm, composed, and fully-clothed as when I’d first seen her. She saw me, offered a small, polite smile, and continued on her way towards the exit, completely oblivious.
What the hell happened in there?
I burst into my room. Kyle was standing in the middle of the floor, looking utterly shell-shocked.
“Dude!” he said, his voice a hushed, awe-struck whisper. “One minute, it was you, sitting on the bed, laughing. The next… it was her. I swear, I couldn’t even tell at first, you were in mid-laugh, but then the laugh just… died in her throat. Her whole expression changed. Her eyes went from amused to confused, and then… she just looked at me. And her tone was completely different. Something just… shifted.”
“What happened?” I demanded, closing the door behind me. “Was she freaking out? Was she screaming?”
“No,” Kyle said, shaking his head in amazement. “That’s the craziest part. She just… looked at me, then down at her bare chest, then back at me. And she just… composed herself. Instantly. She turned to me, all serious and motherly again, and said, ‘Oh, thank you, Kyle, dear. For checking. I know it was an odd and uncomfortable request, but I didn’t want to worry Emily. We have a history of cancer in our family, you know.’ And then she just… picked up her bra and blouse, put them back on like it was the most normal thing in the world, and thanked me again. She said, ‘You might not be so bad after all, Kyle. This stays between us, though, right?’”
My jaw was on the floor. “What did you do?”
“I just nodded!” he said, throwing his hands up in the air. “I was completely dumbfounded. I didn’t know if it was still you, trying to fuck with me. I even whispered, ‘Jordan?’ And she just frowned and said, ‘Jordan? Dear, Jordan’s not here.’ And that’s when I knew. It was her again. Not you.”
We just stared at each other for a second, and then we both burst out laughing. A loud, hysterical, can-you-believe-this-shit laugh. The device wasn’t just a memory eraser; it was a goddamn improv artist. It had taken the absurd, chaotic scene I had created and spun it into a serious, plausible, and emotionally resonant narrative. One that, bizarrely, had actually made Elise Hartwood like Kyle more. It was insane.
“What a fucking day,” I said, collapsing onto my bed, pulling the device from my pocket.
I held it out for him to see. He took it reverently, turning the sleek black object over in his hands, his eyes wide with wonder. “So this is it.”
He moved his thumb towards the button.
“Whoa!” I yelled, slapping his hand away. “Not yet! And not on me, you idiot! We need a plan. A real test.”
He grinned, handing it back. “Yeah, you’re right.”
We looked at each other, the same thought clearly in both our minds. Our lives were never going to be the same. The possibilities were endless, terrifying, and exhilarating.
But first things first.
“Pizza’s on the way,” Kyle said, booting up his computer.
“I’ll get the drinks,” I replied, heading for our mini-fridge.
We launched Counter-Strike, the familiar menu music a comforting anchor in a world that had suddenly become untethered from reality. But as we joined a server and started buying our weapons, the conversation wasn’t about strategy or callouts. It was about who we would be tomorrow.