You stay for a week

You lie back and enjoy your convalescence. You endure a visit from your family twice, and try to impress upon them that complete discretion is of the utmost importance, while also leaving them as much as possible in the dark as to what has been going down. From their point of view, you haven't spoken in two months. You still don't understand where the jump will have occured. Were you out for a single week the first time you overslept? Or did something happen during the explosion?

You've seen and heard the news now. The investigation is likely going to take a month or two before the powers that be either admit defeat or choose an official scapegoat. A square mile of solid objects, cars, buildings, trees, lampposts, telephone boxes etc were utterly destroyed in a vast circle. No amount of digging through the ruins has so far turned up any trace of explosive substances nor given any clue as to the source of the destruction. There were several survivors, with only two dead, and eight with serious injuries. All lived in private homes on the edge of the 'blast radius'. The single officially unidentified individual who was well inside the circle, you, was at the dead centre of it. It's been determined from examining the way in which the debris rest that the outermost objects were destroyed first, and that the destruction concentrated inwards toward the middle -- you. No wonder there are so many conspiracy theories.

You plan to leave tomorrow, Monday. It's unclear how to do this. It has unfortunately gotten out that you, whoever you are, are a patient in this hospital. At opening hours there are hordes of journalists. No one looking vaguely your age gets out without being hounded and photographed relentlessly. You could freeze everything and get out and not have to worry about them, but that would draw attention to you. The hospital knows who you are and it will surely get out that a certain patient disappeared. Then there only remains for people to connect the dots and you become a fugitive. You don't want to have to halt everyhting just to get away. You want to be left alone, wherever it is you end up choosing to go. The only way you can see to achieve that, is to be officially signed out of the ward of the hospital and to leave it as just another healed patient, all in real time with no room for suspicious occurrences. It means you need some kind of subterfuge to get past the reporters outside without them noticing you.

Only yesterday you hatched a vague plan. It was midway through the morning, and you'd gone through cleansing and breakfast, and then a little more downtime watching the news and such as normal. Round about 9 o'clock you'd gotten up out of bed and out of your room for your morning walk. No one knew this of course; you froze time. You made a point of working out a routine for the day that involved temporal halting. At first you simply went wandering around the wards, exploring the administration, getting into every nook and cranny of the buildings, insofar as you could without having to steal keys or anything. It was on the fourth day you happened upon someone on their computer going through information on a rather special patient.The person was unable to draw pleasure from sex. This wouldn't necessarily have kept your attention, but you were already in a state of heightened sexual awareness. It seems your body has changed so much as to affect your libido since the explosion. In the absence of access to porn, reading anything on the subject grabbed your interest, almost in spite of yourself. Anyhow, one of the things that were wrong with the aforementioned patient was their body's ability to react to certain pheromones released during intercourse, specifically those associated with emotional bonding of the two individuals engaged in lovemaking. The chemical reaction that occurs in the brain in those intimate moments simply would not manifest in this person. There was a host of other problems, but this is the one that stuck in your mind. The idea of bonding. A naturally occuring pheromone that created an emotional link of sorts between people. If there was a way to harness it, you could gain an accomplice... if only temprarily.

Today, Sunday, Nurse Watkins, who had been at your bedside when you woke up the day after emergency surgery, is due to come and see if you were fit to discharged and released from hospital care. She will examine you, your scar, see if the stitches are dissolving as they should etc. All of that being satisfactory, she will then go through the paperwork to have you officially signed out of the ward, at which point you'll be expected to be on your jolly way within 48 hours.

You have a plan. A plan A which might fail due to your possibly reading too much into sciences you don't necesarily understand fully, and a plan B that can't possibly fail, but might have long term discretion issues, depending on how badly someone in particular takes to being blackmailed. You hope it doesn't come to that.

1 pm. It'll be time soon. Nurse should be here any minute. As you wait you think back to your morning walk during time freeze hour. You happened upon one of the luxury wards in the privatised wing of the hospital. You were curious, you wanted to see what accomodations these places offered. You couldn't just walk in to one of the rooms, because they had locking mechanisms that only trusted members of staff could open, on patient's discretion. You wondered through the entire ward until you found a door that had just been unlocked by the nurse or doctor that the occupant or occupants had entrusted with permission to enter at will. You slipped past her, now a somewhat difficult size given how much bulkier you were - and are - to enter. The place was like an oversanitized hotel, with a giant flat-screen monitor integrated into the wall, and a big high tech hospital bed with all sorts of user-adjustable features. The window gave a very nice view of the City (not accounting for the enormous circular area of rubble visible only a few blocks away), and gave onto a large balcony with a retractable canvas roof. When you stood looking out, you noticed a door to your right, just beside the bed which was empty. The door was part open, and there was steam hanging petrified after having gotten a few inches through the opening. You walked over to the doorway. As you passed through the steam cloud and disturbed the molecules they immediately started acting like steam again, and so when you were fully inside the bathroom beyond you left a you-shaped hole in the cloud. This you only noticed as you returned a few minutes later. And you only left after having taken the time to fully appreciate the sight. A pretty girl, showering, eyes closed, face turned up to the water, droplets exploding all over her glistening skin, forming little translucent petals all over her, and warm stalactites of liquid hanging from her limbs, frozen where they were. But the most interesting that you like to replay in your mind is what happened when you had the bright idea of reaching over, snaking your arm between the thicker jets of water, and simply prodding one of the petals on her left shoulder. The water molecules suddenly broken out of stasis into your version of time resumed their interrupted movement to collide with other droplets, bringing them in and so on and so forth, all the way down a long and almost silent chain reaction across a perfectly formed female body.

You're thinking about exactly what possible reason such a beautiful and healthy looking young lady could have had happen to her that might require her prolonged presence in a medical establishment, momentarily forgetting that there are such things as Not Ostensibly Visible Injuries & Illnesses, when there's a knock on your door, ending your reveries. The knock is more an announcement than a request for permission, and in the same second the door opens and Nurse Minnie Watkins enters.

Before, at the beginning of the week, you only noticed that she was beautiful. It didn't radically impact on your thoughts. Now in your new body, because it is a new body, having seen yourself in the mirror you wouldn't recognize it were it not for the face, it's a lot more distracting. Your sensations are heightened, such that the visual trigger of appealing body summons much greater stirrings, and much quicker than before. Miss Watkins' uniform with the tied up hairdo and opaque white fabric, though it downplays her features somewhat, doesn't hide her form's immensely pleasing overall proportions. Even as she begins to speak, you can't help but try to think what it would look like if she were naked and frozen under a stream of water, fire-brown locks plastered to her neck and shoulders, and to have the exploding flowers of water droplets cascade down her body, snaking over the curve of her ample chest, down the cradle of her hips, and all the way along her legs to her feet.

Fortunately the words spoken that you missed relate merely to the paperwork to be done relating to your discharge, and you regain focus by the time she gets around to the examining part. She seems mildly surprised when she gets a good look at you. The stitches are gone completely, which may or may not be normal; you don't happen to know, but you don't feel her attention is quite provoked by that alone. Perhaps when she last saw you there wasn't so much... ostentatious muscle, giving some idea as to when the change began roughly: after the operation while you slept. It's unclear whether your new physique has any further effects on her. However, she raises an eyebrow at you and you realize your own arousal is very ostentatious. You're not properly hard for lack of overt stimulation, but your damn man-snake is unquestionably more rigid than not.

Finally the examination is over and she tells you all that remains are formalities and you'll be soon able to get out into the world and get on with your life. Time to execute stage one of the Grand Masterplan.

"The press are still outside aren't they?" you ask her as she's about to leave.

"How could they not? It's their routine now. They've become a fixture, a part of the hospital. The patients in the private wing all want to find a way to sue the reporters. I can't say I blame them. They positively predate on everyone who walks out of here looking a day under thirty. Even young women. Perhaps it would have been better if the police had let it slip that you are a man. When you get out and they see you maybe we shall finally have peace..." she stopped, remembering something, then "You won't want to talk to them will you? How will you get past them? They really linger before the gates like hawks all damn day. We can't keep you inside until they give up, we need the room. Unless you're rich of course, then you can bribe the owners of the private wing for a short stay..."

You cut her off, "I was going to ask you for help, actually. I think you have access to a certain number of ressources that could allow me to pass completely under those reporters' radar. Just long enough to get out of here. It would be quick too."