two

actually the number two IRL

Thanks for playing, everyone. I'll see you around.


That is, you wake up and find you're in somebody else's body, which is in its usual location. You can't just immediately go out and start trying to live the other person's normal life because you've got no idea what it is and you're likely to mess it up entirely. You also can't attempt to convince people of what happened because this is likely to be even more disruptive, there's no way anybody would believe it without evidence and it's almost impossible to actually prove. You can try that stuff later, but what you need first is information.

First priority: are there any people around? If you're now living with anyone, I think the short-term best strategy would be to feign illness. This provides a convenient excuse for any erratic behaviour, encourages people to avoid you, and gives you a good reason to cancel any appointments or obligations you may have - work, school, whatever. How exactly you might do that is another thing you're going to need to work out, but it can wait for now.


Now you've bought yourself some time you've got to work out a few important things: who you are, where you are, and, an easy one to overlook, when you are. Hopefully you haven't time travelled, because if you haven't, the path forward is fairly obvious: find a way to get in contact with yourself. Under the assumption that you've swapped places with someone and they're currently attempting to live your life, being able to communicate with them would be extremely helpful. Any sort of electronic communication would be great here, you just need to find a device that you can unlock with biometrics or that's been helpfully left unlocked. Actually I'm pretty sure most phones have an emergency call feature which you can use to call yourself, and (if the owner has decided to set it up) a medical ID which should have your name and maybe some helpful information.

The protocol for answering phone calls in this situation is simple, just pick up any call from your own phone number and let everything else go to voicemail. You don't need to be attempting to navigate other phone conversations right now. If it's something important and the person calling has questions later, you can just lie and say that (while being dreadfully sick, of course) your phone also failed to charge and you were too unwell to do anything about it.

If you've managed to talk to yourself you're probably all set from here, you can work out a strategy between the two of you. You'll be fine, I'm sure. If not - maybe you've been sent 10 years into the future/past, or you can't unlock their phone (if they even have one), or they're just not answering your attempts to contact - you're going to want to figure out communication in another way. You can leave notes under the assumption that you'll swap places again at some point, so long as you can do so somewhere they won't be read. Keep in mind that when the notes are read you'll both be in your original places, so they should ideally focus on what you did the first day so you can corroborate stories rather than advice for, say, logging into your electronic devices.

I've given establishing contact as an early priority because it makes everything else so much easier, but let's say you can't do it. You've got a few things you need to work out on your own.

[medical discussion]First of all, health. It's possible you've swapped with someone with some condition that requires constant management, or who just takes medication on a regular basis for whatever reason. If you already did before this situation, try not to worry about the fact that the person in your original body right now might be failing to keep you/them alive. Probably just take a look around to check for any medications or medical equipment you should presumably be doing something with. Not that you should necessarily just follow the instructions on any prescriptions you find because, I'll be honest, at multiple periods of my life I've had prescription medicine on-hand that I was just not taking for whatever reason. I really don't have a good strategy for this, you're probably just gonna have to judge how important it seems in the situation. Also it's totally unclear how any medicine meant to have mental effects would work in this situation (if you swap bodies with someone do you keep your mental health conditions or do they get yours?), because, and it must be reaffirmed now that I'm somehow this far into writing this down, this is not actually a situation that could happen in real life.

Now, you're still going to want to figure out that basic information: name (and other information about yourself), approximate location, time. If you can get into basically any device this should be simple enough. Otherwise, finding any piece of mail might give you all three, finding a wallet with a credit card or ID can give you a name and rough timeframe, some of your belongings might be labelled with a name, a physical calendar would be massively helpful, and if you want to know roughly where you are you can just, I don't know, look out your nearest window and apply whatever Geoguessr skills you have. If you're at particular risk of being put into this situation due to interactions with evil wizards, magicians, magical trickster beings, etc. I suggest practicing with Geogussr actually. Don't worry too much about it though, you'd want to know just in case you're now in another country with different social expectations or ways that various things work, or you're actually really nearby so you can just pop round the corner and have a chat with yourself, or maybe you've ended up in some alternate universe or Earth-like planet and it'd be nice to know about that so you can start working out what to do about it. Otherwise, not that important.

Even on the name thing now that I think about it, there's no guarantee the name on any piece of mail or card you find is going to be the name other people call you and it might not even be yours, but it's probably better than nothing. Actually, well, it might be worse than nothing because the main benefit of knowing your name in this scenario (at least immediately) is being able to respond semi-naturally when people refer to you, in the interest of trying to act relatively normal, and if you get confused about that it could be worse, so do keep that one in mind.

The last thing you need to work out, and really the last thing you should be worrying about for the moment, is finding what appointments you might have so that you can cancel them. Any sort of school or university where they're marking attendance shouldn't be a big deal to call in sick to; you can leave this until later when you're more confident about it (just hope you don't have a major test or anything). It might be helpful to find a calendar or timetable to work out what you're missing exactly. If you have a job things get trickier.

I'll be honest, for all my thought on this I haven't decided if you should try to call in sick to work, if you figure out who you'd call. With luck it'll be a fairly straightforward conversation and better to do before you're supposed to be working. The risk here is that your boss/manager/whatever might deduce that you're faking sick for clandestine reasons (which is 100% true), or find an excuse to ask you about something at work which you now of course know nothing about. Keep in mind in all of these situations that claiming to have suddenly come down with retrograde amnesia, thus forgetting your entire life, is a usable, if bold move, especially considering how rare this kind of amnesia actually is. Hopefully the people you're claiming this to don't know that.

With any luck that'll get you through the first day without incident and without too much mess to clean up. Long-term strategy is a bit murkier; it really depends on what the parameters of this magic mind-swap situation you're in are, and nobody can predict that. If it's like a timeshare thing and you keep switching places, with enough time I think anyone could figure out how to live two different lives on an alternating basis. If you don't switch back honestly I've got no idea. You could... find eachother and swap places physically, and then hope nobody finds it too questionable that you just suddenly have an entirely different appearance? No there's no way that would work. I think your best bet in this situation is to track down the evil wizard who did this and make them pay, or start living a new life full of virtue to appease the magic spirits who are trying to teach you a lesson, or something, idk, you'll have plenty of time to work out what's going on, and you can only hope the plot demands it will eventually become obvious.

Also, post something vague about the situation on social media as soon as you get the chance. Just to make things more interesting.


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