Best Friend
My name is Lucas, a 19-year old man. I’m a huge online gamer, and made a lot of friends in that circle. I was a member of several Discord servers that I would often use to just hang out and bullshit about games, and to get into voice chat when playing online. It was through this discord and online gaming that I met Courtney.
She was older than me at 22, but we played a lot of the same games. After playing together for hours every week, she had said something about craving a particular restaurant. It just so happened that the restaurant she was talking about was just down the road from me. That got us talking and we discovered that we were practically neighbors.
It was amazing meeting her. We connected instantly over the games we played and our shared, nerdy interests. And the best part was that there never was any sexual tension. We just were genuine best friends.
Depending on what game we were playing, we would meet up and play together in the same house. Granted this only worked if we were playing console games, but we played enough of those to make it worth it.
Today was one of those days. We were at her house, I brought my system and hooked it up to the extra tv in her gaming room. She lived pretty far from her neighbors, so we would really crank the volume up and just go nuts. Today we were playing a team deathmatch first-person online shooter.
“Oh shit, that was a good kill,” Courtney said, sitting cross-legged in her gaming chair, her feet tucked up underneath her not-so-subtle ass as she always did. “I was getting ready to flank that bastard.”
“Please, you know my sniper skills are on point,” I responded with a smug smile. “I don’t need your tactical bullshit.”
“Sniper skills on point,” Courtney mocked me with a nasally tone.
The game continued like that for a while. Our team dominating, of course, and the two of us playfully bickering back and forth like bratty kids. Finally the game ended and we put down our controllers for a bit, waiting for matchmaking to set us up with a new one.
“I gotta pee, don’t back out, it’ll only be a sec,” Courtney said and left the room quickly.
I sat for a minute or two flipping through my perks to see if I wanted to change my loadout for the next game. But then something caught my eye. My phone, which had fallen screen-down on the floor at my feet, seemed to have a red flashing light coming up around it like something was playing on my screen. I reached down to pick it up and turned it over.
“Oh shit!” I sat bolt upright. My entire phone screen was lit up with the words: ‘ALERT, ALERT, TF STORM IN YOUR AREA. SEEK UNDERGROUND SHELTER IMMEDIATELY.’
No one knew where the Transformation or, TF, Storms came from, but they have been devastating the world over the past year or so. They seemed like a fairly normal thunderstorm in most respects except for the eerie green glow they generated. That was the only way to identify it. Weird things happened to people caught in the open in these storms. People have shrunk down to a foot tall, others have spontaneously changed sex or race, and others, the more unlucky ones, have been turned into objects or even the body parts of those close by. It would be impossible to believe the kinds of things that happened in these storms if there weren’t so many videos of it happening. Haunting images of humans being turned to a smoke-like substance and pulled into someone else’s body or into a nearby object.
Sheltering underground, in basements and such, proved to be pretty effective against the storm for some reason, and was the only defense against them as of now. TF Storm drills were common everywhere across the world. The only positive development in the area of TF Storms was the new tracking systems. Combined with the alert system that overrode every cell phone screen with a warning message, incidents of TF storm casualties went way down.
But it didn’t take into account high tv volume and the incredible focus of two video gamers hard at work.
“Court! Court!” I shouted, leaping up out of my chair, letting my controller clatter onto the ground. “TF Storm! TF Storm!”
I saw her at the end of the hallway coming out of the bathroom looking concerned at the commotion I was causing.
“What the hell?” she asked with concern.
“TF Storm. We gotta get the fuck in the basement!”
“Oh shit,” she muttered and made a break for the basement door, which was between the two of us.
I got there first and threw the door open for her, waving her toward me as a green light started to shine in through the windows around us. She rushed toward me, but her big thick socks that we always wore slipped on the hardwood. Her toe ran into the outside corner of the wall and she fell hard to the ground.
“You good?” I shouted at her refusing to go into the basement until she was with me.
She tried to stand, but her sock had gotten snagged on a nail sticking out of the baseboard. With the way she was laying, it would be an awkward twist to reach back to pull herself free.
“I’m stuck!” she responded, terrified. The green light was getting brighter.
“I got you,” I said and ran over, jumping over her and dropping to my knees. I grabbed her sock and her ankle and pulled, working her foot out of the thick fabric. I almost had it off her when I had to shift my grip, grabbing onto her foot at the heel and pulling. A noiseless bolt of green lighting struck, phasing through the walls of the house and hitting me square in the back.
A strange numbing sensation ran through me and my muscles refused to respond. I looked down at myself wide-eyed in terror as I watched my body fading into green smoke. I had seen enough videos of TF storm victims to know what was happening. But what was I becoming…?
Courtney rolled over enough to look at me, seeing the bolt go over her shoulder. The hand that gripped her foot was the only part of me that stayed solid and a chill ran through me. No, I’m not… becoming her foot!? My entire body faded into green smoke and drifted down toward my friend.
“No, Lucas!” she shouted as we both watched my body disappear into her foot.
The storm outside subsided as I looked desperately around, my point of view now from my best friend’s foot. Like all other cases of TF Storm victims, I lost the ability to communicate in any way. If she didn’t see it happen, even Courtney would have no idea that anything was different about her foot.
“Lucas, no!” Courtney shouted, sitting up and cradling me in both hands. It was a weird, disorienting sensation, my entire body being just a foot. Her hands felt like she was cradling my entire body, which was… twisted and out of shape.
As the numbing of the initial transformation wore off I was able to instantly answer the hotly debated question: Just how much can TFed people feel? I could feel it all, I could also see and hear. But by far worse than anything else was that I could smell… and taste. And right now I could smell and taste the sweaty, end-of-day stink of her foot.
Courtney and I sobbed at the cruel twist of fate. Me to myself in my own personal prison, and her out loud, constantly apologizing to me for this happening.
Starting from them on, Courtney vowed to take care of me, and to her credit she did as good a job as she could. She gave up wearing those big thick socks so that I could breathe, metaphorically of course and see. It had the added benefit of preventing me from smelling and basically drinking her sweat, but she had no way of knowing that.
Even before my change, I knew how much she hated being barefoot. She always complained about her feet being freezing, even in the summer. Though now, it was me experiencing that cold, and I could attest to just how bad it could get. Still better than being a sweaty mess.
Though being barefoot wasn’t all good. It meant that I felt every piece of debris on the floor stab into me when she stepped down on me with her whole weight. Barely noticeable to her, but painful to me.
And I had to taste it. That was something she never considered, because why should she? In all the coverage of the TF Storms, not one person ever speculated that the TFed people could taste with every square inch of their surface. So as she walked around barefoot, doing a favor to me, I was tasting her floor. She wasn’t a messy person, but a floor is a floor.
It took her a while to get used to it, but she stopped sitting on her feet too, either setting me on the floor in front of her, or kicking me up on something. At least this way I could watch her play video games, and get some amount of entertainment. It was bittersweet though, as I knew I could never play them myself. And I was better than her in many of those games, so not being able to help her or get her through tough parts of the game was agonizing.
So as good as Courtney was to me at home, she still had to work. And her job had her on her feet all day. So for 9 hours or more I was trapped in sweat-damp darkness, my world nothing more than being crushed under her repeatedly while basically baking in her sweat. Sure she would wash me as soon as she got home, but every hour of work was pure hell.
Courtney would even talk to me. Not at work of course. It was known to her inner circle that I was her foot, but even in this crazy world of TF Storms, it was weird to talk to your own body. So during those hours I had nothing. But when she was home, she tried to basically think out loud so I would at least be able to hear her talk. When she was deciding what games to play or what food to order, she would talk through it. I was grateful for that at least, so I didn’t feel quite so alone.
And of course she stayed on Discord with our group of friends. Or rather, her group of friends now, as I had nothing to contribute to them anymore. Again, she was kind to me and would read back some of the comments and conversations they were having so I could still feel like part of the group.
One of these days she was reading comments to me, and the topic turned to my sad fate.
“They are saying how sorry they are that it happened,” Courtney conveyed to me in the darkness under her desk.
“Trekfan said he lost his wife to it. Thinks that she was turned into one of her dildos…! Oh god, that’s awful,” Courtney continued, reading the usernames of our friends. “But then Stan-lyee says: ‘they are just objects now, best to…’ well… I don’t think you need to hear the rest of that.”
After that last comment she went silent, but she leaned forward in her chair, a sign that she is getting focused on something. I bet Stan-lyee was telling her to move on and forget about me. He had lost someone early, in the first storm, I think. He had always been cold about the whole thing, preferring not to even talk about it.
The conversation continued for a while but she didn’t say a word to me. I knew she was still engaging because I heard the keyboard going. It was a long conversation, but I guess she didn’t want to share any more of it with me.
Something changed after that day. But it started slow. Maybe one day she wouldn't talk to me until she got back from work, going through her whole morning routine without so much as a word, which meant that I endured nearly 12 hours without acknowledgement. Other days she wouldn’t wash me right away when she got home, but would after being home for an hour or more, leaving me to bask in the stink for that much longer.
More conversations on Discord happened in the meantime. For a while Courtney would read them to me still, though she would fade out and stop earlier and earlier. But then eventually she wouldn’t read any at all.
She never used to go out after dinner, preferring to stay in, relax, and play video games. But lately, she was burying me in a sock and shoe and going out for what felt like hours in the evening. Most times she wouldn’t wash me afterward, going to bed with me stinking of the day. Then later, she wouldn’t even take her sock off, so I stayed buried and sweaty until the next morning’s shower.
One day before she climbed into bed, Courtney broke down in tears and addressed me, after 3 silent days.
“I’m sorry…” she said between sobs. “I’m sorry… you’re gone… but you’re still here… I can’t… I have to…” She couldn't get any more words out after that. She just pulled a sock over me and cried herself to sleep.
Another evening came and she put a sock on me and went out. But this time, fairly soon after we left, I felt her kick me up onto something. I felt the shoe come off, and then the sock, revealing a room in a civic center with a circle of occupied chairs around me. It was a group therapy session, and I was on a footstool for all to see. All 12 or so people were looking right at me.
“Now face him, and face your demon,” the woman who must have been the group leader said.
I looked up to Courtney, wondering what the hell was going on. She looked down at me with tears in her eyes. No, she wasn’t looking at me, she was looking past me as if she didn’t want to make eye contact.
“You were once my friend,” she said like she was reading a script. “But you aren’t anymore. The world took you from me, but I can’t be held back by you anymore.”
Shit, they were making her say goodbye to me, like I was some bad part of her past that needed forgotten. But I’m still a man in here!
“I said goodbye to you at your funeral and now I have to let you go,” Courtney continued, her eyes still not quite meeting me. “You are my foot, and nothing more. Good bye now, I will not address you ever again.”
At that, the class applauded as if she made some big breakthrough. What the hell? I screamed at them. You’re making her torture me!
And I was right. Her life went back to normal after that. She kept me in dirty, stuffy socks all day, only really washed me in the shower, and then only if she remembered. She tortured me in a sweaty sock under her fat ass when she played games and watched tv. She had well and truly forgotten me, and in so doing left me in hell.
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