Nicole in Hell

Nicole was in hell. What she thought was her home was a nightmarish distortion of normalicy. It was like someone had taken her life and twisted it into something horrible, something specifically designed to make her disgusted.

The first thing Nicole did when she stood up, the final details of what had occured in the VR simulation now completely gone, was stretch. Her time playing college volleyball had taught her how to stay limber. It took a few minutes to feel more normal, which was strange. She'd only been in the VR game for a few minutes, hadn't she? Why was she so stiff?

Then she bound downstairs. She could no longer hear the washing machine running, which meant it was time to put her clothes in the dryer. What was the point of visiting your parents if you didn't bring a bag of dirty clothes?!

That's when she started to notice that things were far from normal.

In the laundry room, for example, there were clothes that had no business being in that house. There, sitting on top of the hamper of dirty clothes, was a pair of boxer-briefs.

Nicole gasped as she saw them. What was going on? Had her little brother fallen into the wrong crowd? In her absence, perhaps he had become a deviant!

Then there were the pictures. On the hallway wall, just outside the laundry room, where so many family photos hung, someone had made obvious forgeries, photoshops of her lovely family. Yes, the images of herself and her mother were unchanged, but those of her father and brother?! They were hardly recognizable!

Pants! Shorts! Swim trunks! Whoever had done this had gone all out, changing every single picture of the two men into weird, gross, perversions of themselves. If someone were to see these pictures the family reputation would be ruined!

Nicole ran out of the hallway and into the living room, her heart pounding. She found her purse and pulled out her mobile phone. The wallpaper, normally a picture of her and her boyfriend Mark in matching sexy nurse outfits from last Halloween, was now replaced by Nicole wearing the nurse outfit. Mark, on the other hand, was wearing a labcoat and slacks like some sort of degenerate!

Unbidden, the television turned itself on. Nicole's eyes went wide as she saw the screen. It was the news, and the anchor was sitting behind a desk, a man with short cropped salt-and-pepper hair, wearing an expensive looking suit. The channel changed. Men wearing blue-jeans and flannel shirts renovating a house. The channel changed. Young muscular men in basketball shorts and tank tops performing feats of athleticism.

Feeling dizzy, Nicole fell back onto the couch, taking it all in. What had happened to the world? What was going on?!

That's when the voice began to speak to her.