Otto, the inventor of the Role Swapper

[This branch is for those people who would rather skip the 'figuring out how this thing works' phase of the story and start with the main character knowing how to access the additional options right off the bat.]

"Aaaaaaaand... there! It's finally done."

Otto unplugged the device from the computer and leaned back in his chair. After spending over a week in his garage building and several more days on top of that programming, he finally finished his masterpiece: the Role Swapper! With this, he could make himself a billionaire! Or a movie star! Or even the President! The possibilities were endless!

The design was elegant in its simplicity. Three buttons, two small green ones to select the targets to swap and a big red one in the middle to swap. the selected targets. By default the device will do a full life swap of the targets, with only Otto himself aware of the change. But of course, Otto had hid a couple of setting toggles he could use to refine a swap if needed, or turn on the awareness of a target if he wanted them to notice what happened. And if he needed to fiddle with the advanced settings, he could always plug it into a computer with the USB port hidden in the back to do so. And the best part is, thanks to the special experimental battery he had managed to 'acquire' from his university job, the Swapper wouldn't run out of power for centuries, so no recharging needed! Now all he needed were some test subjects.

Otto held down the center button for five seconds to close the back panel, then went into the living room and turned on the TV, flipping channels as he looked for something interesting he could use. If he was correct, the device should work through the TV, computer, or even a photograph, and Otto figured being far away from the results would be good for a first test in case something went wrong. He eventually settled on the local news, where the dark and handsome anchorman Tyler Karr and beautiful busty anchorwoman Brenda Jameson were currently reading off the 'top stories' of the area.

"Yes, they'll do..." Otto said to himself. He pointed the device at Tyler's chiseled face and clicked the first targeting button, which lit up as expected, then at Brenda's baby blues and hit the second one. Then, steeling his nerves, he hit the center button to engage the swap.

Instantly, the scene before him changed. Tyler and Brenda were now sitting in each other's places, but that was the least of the changes. Tyler's black hair, which usually was kept in a professional crew cut, was now styled down to his shoulders. The woman's jacket he was now wearing was opened slightly to show off his blouse a bit, which teased his chest ever so slightly. Brenda meanwhile had her red hair now cut short and was wearing Tyler's professional suit, with her lips being less prominent on her face now that she lacked any lipstick.

Otto waited for a reaction from either of them, but it never came. Instead, Brenda kept reading the story about some politician or another, completely oblivious to the fact that she was now doing Tyler's job.

Once she finished the story, Tyler smiled at her and said, "Thank you Tyler. And now we turn it over to Helen for the weather."

"Thank you, Brenda," the hot Latina weather woman said as she appeared on screen, "Now, this week we're going to be seeing a temperature spike..."

Otto usually watched the weather to stare at Helen's skirt hugging her nice juicy ass or what he could see in her low-cut top as she walked around in front of the weather map, but today he had a much different focus. He selected her as his first target, then curious as to what would happen, selected the coffee table in front of him, then hit the swap button.

Otto let out a shout of shock at what he saw. On the floor in front of him was Helen, completely naked and on her hands and knees. Or hands and feet more accurately, as her long legs had been shortened to be the same length as her arms. In addition, her dark brown hair now flowed all the way across her back, rigid and ironed straight as a board to create a flat hard surface for the half-full glass of water Otto left there to rest on, undisturbed by the swap. Other than that though, she looked to still be anatomically correct, with dark nipples on the large breasts hanging beneath her, and her hairless pussy and ass on full display. Her face was looking straight ahead, completely still and with a serene expression on it, and she didn't appear to react at all to her current situation, even when Otto rapped his knuckles on her back in an attempt to get a reaction.

But if that was bizarre, what was happening on the TV was downright insane. In Helen's place was what appeared to be a living, mannequin in Helen's clothes, made of the exact type of brown wood that his former coffee table was. Its shoulders and waist were noticeably broader than Helen's had been, though still maintaining a feminine shape, and the glass of the tabletop seemed to have morphed into clear strands of hair that shimmered in the studio lights. Its face only had vague indistinct features save for the mouth, which was moving as she spoke with all of the articulation of a human one.

"...as we see temperatures dip back down into the 50s over the week," the mannequin said in a voice similar to Helen's, though with slightly less vocal range, "Back to you guys at the desk."

"Thanks, Helen," Brenda said to her, before turning back to the camera, "And a wonderful job, as always."

"Oh stop," the wooden woman's voice said off-screen with a giggle.

"Anyways, onto our next story..."

Otto had seen enough. He selected Tyler and Brenda again and swapped them again, putting them both back in their proper places and confirming he could set things right at the same time. Now knowing this, he wasn't too worried about no longer having visual on the new weather woman to swap Helen back with. He could always do it later, and besides, at the moment he was liking having a hot woman as his coffee table.

Otto grabbed the class of water off of Helen's back and took a sip as he thought about who he should use his new invention on next, which could be anyone as far as Otto was concerned. There was the family of four across the street, husband and wife with a teen girl and boy, that could be fun to swap around the roles of if he could get inside their house somehow. There were also the people at the university, either the students or the coworkers who called him mad, who might deserve some comeuppance in the form of some particularly unflattering swaps that he could test the awareness features with. He could also just stay home and make more changes on the TV, or with the passerby outside, or head out into the world and see what he could find.