As I sit in my large home on Lake Tahoe, one of many properties that I now have in my legal possession with riches beyond my wildest dreams, I count my blessings at what I had agreed to. Sitting in my office, I watch as the clock strokes midnight and I feel the changes of the boon taking hold of me, thinking about what had transpired less than a week ago.
I switch between tabs on the computer to occasionally check the news from my former locale, a small corner of Ireland resting under the granite mountain range which protected the small town I grew up in from the winds of the sea. Several young men found gruesomely murdered or tortured, horrifically mutilated with large piles of gold and money left behind for them. I read up on the obituaries as I hear the rolls of thunder rolling over the waters that are deceptively calm, watching the clouds come towards me.
I look at the stock portfolios in one small window and the bank accounts in others, on the second monitor connected to the desktop computer, but I also see my reflection in the switched off third mirror, the improvised black mirror. The thunderclouds suddenly dissipate and I groan in relief, the stock portfolios having been updated with hundreds of new listings, a few extra zeroes added into my accounts…
My body ripples and pulses. The chair groans and squeals as I grow larger - grow heavier. The thousand-dollar clothes on my body become rags that burst apart and flop to the ground as I change. Muscles ripple and grow. My weaker, feeble form is replaced by another form, growing well past 6’6” and putting enough strength into my body to sweep the competition at strongman competitions without effort. Any woman and some men who saw me like this would probably get hot flashes just from an automatic lust response…
But I focus solely on my head. My dark brunette hair rapidly greys out and thins, growing down to the floor with most of it falling out in seconds. My eyes sink into my sockets slightly as bags begin to form underneat them. Lines start to deeply engrave themselves in my face as the skin loosens around my cheeks, forehead and mouth. Darker spots form on my newly-bald, glistening scalp as my hairline continues to recede, while I push my lips backwards to see my teeth either become rapidly stained yellow or are replaced with obviously-fake teeth drilled directly into my gums.
I lean back into the luxury office chair, ready to collapse under my weight as it transforms into a bigger, handmade leather armchair. I can just feel a tingle as my thousand-dollar clothes are replaced by articles costing ten-thousand dollars each. In the face at least, I am physically ninety years old but still only about eighteen by real age, and I curse my misfortune due to “Agreeing” to this, while blessing my luck to what else I had agreed to.
‘You have a chance to become rich beyond all measure, but there’s a chance you’ll die horribly instead.’
That was what appeared on that website only a week ago. I was sitting around with the rest of my class in one of the school’s IT classrooms near the end of the school year. We had finished the last of our exams before graduation and were just killing time in our IT class during the last week of classes - most other high schools would have allowed us to either voluntarily come in and use the study room for preparing for exams and leave us to our own devices when our last exams were over, not even need us back in the school. But once again, like our school’s formal being banned from every hotel in Ireland or the cancellation of the ski trip, this was ruined by students previous and we were mandated to appear even if we had nothing to do.
One of my classmates opened up the web browser and started searching for websites that weren’t blocked by the school network’s firewall and he typed into Google, “Would you rather” to find such sites. Since sites like YouTube, Reddit, most music streaming sites and nearly all other social media sites were blocked, it was either wasting time on Wiki Walks or finding games that we could still play.
That was when we found the site, and among bored seventeen-to-eighteen year olds who weren’t even allowed to bring out their phones without them being confiscated, it spread like wildfire throughout the room. Even if I were more interested in looking into odd histories on Wikipedia, I kept alt-tabbing into that page just because pages of text were getting bored.
I believe that out of about twenty people in the A-level course, only about five people chose to click on the button for even some of the prompts, with some others closing the site because they couldn’t get something they wanted.
“You can play any musical instrument like a master but you have a terminal illness”, “You are the most beautiful person in the world, but a monster becomes obsessed with you and will always hunt you down”, “You get to travel the world without worry or expense, but if you ever visit the same place twice you’ll burst into flames”. That kind of stuff.
One person copied a link to a specific prompt and mass-emailed it to everyone else and I now know of five people who answered it, the one I had already stated. I was given riches beyond my wildest imagination and I now own some of the biggest, most luxurious properties all over the world and some stakes in the richest companies in the world; I lucked out, it seems.
Michael had gotten drunk after graduation and had been driving, attempting to harass a truck driver on the road late at night. He had managed to get the truck to drive into the path other another, which he was unfortunate enough to get compacted between them; he only expired after emergency services spent hours trying to get the trucks separated, just discovering he was kept alive by a piece of debris in his heart, stopping the blood from pouring out.
Finbar was camping with friends in a wood, beliving that he could get high from eating mushrooms that grew there. He unfortunately ate a Destroying Angel, a mushroom almost as toxic as the Death Cap. It took him seven days to die from the poisons, in agony the entire time.
Jack was camping illegally in a forest park and tried to light a fire in an area surrounded by trees, hoping the rangers wouldn’t find him. He ended up lighting the entire wood on fire, burning to death as a result.
And Seamus was at a festival with friends when he kicked a peg out of the ground, unaware that it was helping to suspend a mooring for a large festival tent. The crowd watched in horror as the structure started to give way and the rope shot backward, catching Seamus and destroying his spine before throwing him about like a ragdoll, smashing him against tent poles and breaking his body before he was freed and flung through the air, landing right in the middle of the crowd.
I saw the sun peaking out from over the mountains and across the lake, seeing as it was now morning as I read about Seamus’ death, of others in that classroom that were also cursed. I had read about concerned messages as we all realized we were all cursed in some manner, with people posting on my page to ask if I had pressed the button. I merely replied that I had and I was affected, but that was all - I couldn’t bare to get into contact them right now.
I slipped on the leisure shoes beside my desk - rather unusual how I considered a pair costing $40,000 to be leisure wear - before heading out among the trees that lined my property, letting the end of summer winds blow over me; feel the wind across my new bulk as I considered everything else. I rubbed my gigantic hand over the bark of a tree next to the lake, feeling it over my coarse, aged fingers.
I knew the pattern by now - the prompts would now be granted if you pressed the button at Midnight relative to where you were, one per day until you ran out of prompts you answered to.
I swung wildly at the tree, shattering it completely across my fist and felling it in less than two seconds. I screamed as I grabbed the now-destroyed tree’s trunk with one hand, digging my fingers into the wood before ripping it out of the ground, roots and all, before hitting it into the ground with enough force to leave a three-foot deep crater.
I was hoping to take my frustration out on the tree, to kick it with enough force to send it into the lake, but my attempts at a running kick proved completely useless as I came in so fast and strong that I had instead kicked right through it, the movement of my feet faster and sharper than any axe. So instead, I stomped the tree into splinters, trying in vain to calm myself from my own self-inflicted predicament.
What was I meant to do? I had mindlessly pressed that button well over five-hundred times and I could only remember those two prompts!