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Found in the Vikings Locker Room
🕑 Added 2021-01-23 20:39:24 +0000 UTCThis 3,963 word story features the Medallion of Zulo (a rarity for my stories, surprisingly, given its classic status in the TF pantheon) and was spawned from a conversation with cicerosg2003.
The 1,105 word epilogue was added after a discussion with my good friend Nate who had a brilliant suggestion that I wanted to write out. I hope you all enjoy the addition!
Simply put, the Minnesota Vikings were not having the most successful season. They’d already been eliminated from playoff contention and there were still two games left to play in the season. Morale was low with both the team and their fans, but they were all doing their best to salvage what they could from the unfortunate situation. A number of the younger members of the team roster and even some of the trainers had muttered things along the lines of “there’s always next year” but the team’s quarterback wasn’t quite so sure.
Kirk Cousins had been something of a polarising figure for Vikings fans but nobody was harder on him than himself. He felt like he’d failed his team and he wasn’t all that optimistic about the future. He was at least guaranteed another year on his contract, but beyond that seemed far more uncertain than he’d like. Most likely, the head coach would try to get a rookie quarterback in the upcoming draft and train him up to replace Kirk once the 2021 season was over. The only thing that could combat that from becoming a reality was Kirk putting his best foot forward in the remaining two games and proving that he still had a lot left to offer the team, so that was what he was going to do.
Although he was sure that some of his teammates held some doubts about his abilities, none of them dared question his work ethic. Kirk absolutely loved and adored his wife and kids, but he also held football incredibly close to his heart, so he was always one of the very first to arrive at the Vikings facility in the morning and one of the last to leave in the evening. Such was the case that fateful night, when Kirk was one of only two people remaining in their training facility’s locker room after what had been a particularly gruelling team practice. He had spent almost twenty minutes just standing under the showerhead before actively making an effort to get clean, such was the extent of his exhaustion. A dull ache was beginning to settle within his muscles and he knew that there would be a minimal amount of time between him getting home to his family and his head hitting the pillow. Given the late hour, his wife had likely already put their kids to bed, and while he felt guilty about spending time away from them, Kirk wasn’t silly enough to overlook the incredible opportunities afforded to him by his career. There were hundreds of thousands of men who would kill to be in his position and he did his best to remain humble under that knowledge.
The only other person in the locker room at that late hour was Ezra Cleveland, one of the team’s offensive guards who was coming to the end of his rookie year after being a second round draft pick. Although he hadn’t been a starter in too many games for the Vikings through their season, both the coaches and Kirk himself had seen enough from him to be impressed. Kirk always had a special appreciation for the guys on the offensive line because they were the ones who kept him safe from the defenders attempting to sack him and it helped that Ezra was such an easy-going guy who was blissfully devoid of ego. Despite his intimidating measurements of six-foot-six and three-hundred-plus pounds, the rookie was something of a gentle giant and always very respectful when addressing the veterans of the locker room. He was eager to learn but sensible enough to know his own limitations and that honesty and earnestness had endeared him to the older members of the roster.
Kirk was very almost completely dressed, his practice gear replaced by joggers and a loose-fitting sweatshirt that would keep him comfortable for the short drive back to his family home. He was just packing away the last of his things into his bag and sending a text to his wife to assure her he’d be home before the hour was out, when the other man in the room cleared his throat. “Uh, is this yours?” Ezra asked, pulling Kirk’s attention away from his cell phone. The rookie O-Liner was a few feet away and held a rather strange looking medallion. It looked like nothing more than a cheap costume piece: gold in colour but almost certainly plastic in material, with a bright red gem at its core.
“Definitely not mine. Where did you find that?” the quarterback queried, his lips turning up into a confused smile. What a bizarre thing to find in a locker room full of athletes. “Can I see it?”
“Knock yourself out, QB,” the younger man confirmed, taking a couple of long strides towards the other and offering out the cheap piece of jewellery. Kirk reached out to accept it, intending to inspect it closer, but when his fingers made contact with it, both men were shocked by a sudden jolt of electricity that seemed to originate from the medallion and ripple throughout their bodies. While it might have been easy to dismiss the static shock as a random happenstance, the fact that their bodies locked up and were suddenly restricted from movement was much more difficult to rationalise. It was as if somebody had hit pause on the scene, but the consciousnesses of the two men maintained awareness and were enveloped in understandable confusion that bordered upon fear.
Then, as if things weren’t weird enough, Kirk realised that his hands were beginning to change shape. He watched as the digits thickened one by one, and his skin adopted a paler shade that spread from the point of contact with the medallion, over his hands and then up his forearms. Those same forearms quickly began to expand and broaden, while the hairs became more populous and darkened to near-black. The developments continued up past the elbow and considerable mass packed onto the upper arms, hiding the biceps and triceps of the quarterback’s arm behind a coating of softness, but without ever compromising the power and strength those arms possessed. Kirk’s heart raced as he watched the inexplicable changes occurring to him and silently prayed that what he was seeing was all part of a bizarre daydream or, better yet, that he was safe in bed with his wife and this was just a nightmare.
Unfortunately for the Vikings quarterback, the modifications he was undergoing were all too real, and progressing quickly. The tendrils of transformation passed across his shoulders, stretching them out, before taking their time in reshaping his torso. While he’d never been cover-model ripped like some of the other athletes in the NFL, Kirk had always kept a healthy diet and consistent training regime in order to maintain a slender physique, but all of that careful consideration was for nought as his upper body began to swell and amplify. His tight pecs inflated, like a tire being pumped up, until they were swollen and powerful. The subtle outlines of his abdominal muscles were hidden behind the padding of extra weight until his midriff was muscular and thick, capable of holding out against tackles that once would have absolutely floored the quarterback.
To compliment his burlier upper body, his waistline began to stretch out while his ass received further cushioning and his lean quads inflated to serve a new purpose, no longer to escape the pocket or make runs for a first down but rather to hold ground and protect a quarterback from the oncoming storm of defenders. His calf muscles bulged to provide further support to his sturdier frame, while his feet widened and a small forest of hair spread upon the surface and travelled up the thick tree trunks of his legs. It was a minor blessing that he had been wearing loose-fitting clothes or they most certainly would have been torn apart by the addition of over a hundred pounds of mass and even then, they were pushed to their limits by the massive increases to every part of his physique.
While Kirk’s attention had understandably been mostly captivated by the changes to his own body, the transformation of Ezra’s body wasn’t invisible to him either. The offensive lineman had seen a massive reduction to his powerful build, with the size that and made him so good at his position disappearing like the daylight come sunset. Instead, his muscles became taut and slender, resculpted to better suit their brand new purposes. Even his thick neck slimmed down as the alterations began to make their final stop and reconfigure their heads, hair and faces. Their true identities were scrubbed away by the power of the medallion, the features that had greeted them in the mirror every day of their lives up to that point beginning to warp, taking on new shapes and finally settling in arrangements that were familiar - but not their own.
Kirk could do little more than watch as Ezra’s cheeks lost some of their density and his cheekbones rose, making the roundness of his skull less pronounced in the process. The O-Liner’s lips thinned and a faint dusting of facial hair sprung forth from his sharper jawline, while the warm hazel of his irises brightened to become a very familiar shade of blue. Kirk’s heart raced as he began to recognize more and more of himself in the other’s features - his nose, his brow, even his teeth. The mop of dark hair on the rookie’s head retreated towards his scalp to adopt a more conservative cut, and the hair lightened until it settled as a light brown, to give Ezra the perfect Kirk Cousins style.
Each part of the transformation process had made the real Kirk feel incredibly sensitive and that was no different when the changes washed over his face to pull his identity away from him, like the harsh removal of a bandaid. His cheeks became fuller as his face adopted a rounder shape and his hair grew out into something of a wild spread of black hair. Although he still had no control over himself, Kirk could feel that he was bigger and heavier and that was a dizzying sensation in itself, without acknowledging the backflips that his brain was performing as he desperately attempted to make sense of the impossible circumstances that he had been experiencing. Those sensations felt like they had lasted hours but in reality must have only been minutes.
Then, as if the transformations that both men had endured hadn’t been alarming enough, the medallion held between them vanished into thin air, as if it had never even been there in the first place! Its disappearance seemed to release the men from their stasis though and the suddenness of it caused them both to crash into each other. Kirk was the first to steady himself and used his superior strength to grab the other and prevent him from getting knocked down as a result of their collision. In the process though he came face-to-face with… well, his own face. It sent his stomach for a loop as his brain registered just how wrong the out-of-body moment was. “Are- are you--” He hesitated, startled by how different his voice was, carrying a little more bass than he was used to. “Are you okay?”
There were clear signs of panic written all over the other’s - Kirk’s own - face, but the veteran quarterback couldn’t exactly blame him. He was sure that his own expression was pretty much the same. “Okay? Sure, aside from the fact that we--” He stopped suddenly, and appeared surprised by such. “The fact that we--” Once again, the sentence was halted in its tracks, as if the door had been slammed shut on it. “I can’t say it, man. It won’t let me say that we--”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the real Kirk huffed, puffing up his expansive chest. “You’re trying to tell me that something’s stopping you from saying we--” Sure enough, he found himself unable to vocalise what he wanted to say. No matter how hard he tried, he simply couldn’t get out those simple words: we swapped bodies. An idea suddenly sprung to the forefront of his mind. If they couldn’t say that, then… “My real name is Ezra Cleveland.” Needless to say, those hadn’t been the words he had been intending to say, but the rookie’s name had burst forth from his lips even as he attempted to declare his true identity. “No, it’s Ezra Cleveland. Oh frick, this isn’t good.”
“I’m Kirk Cousins,” the other attempted, a look of distraught flashing over his features as he heard the spoken name. “No, you’re Ezra Cleveland and I’m Kirk Cousins.” Ice cold dread began to spread through the body that the quarterback had found himself deposited into, prompting him to shiver. This was really, really bad. If they couldn’t tell anyone that they had switched bodies or even who they truly were, how were they ever going to explain the situation? “Do you see that medallion?” Hearing his own voice - his former voice - snapped Kirk out of his nightmarish thoughts, but it didn’t exactly grant him any optimism.
“It just vanished,” Kirk lamented. “We were holding it and then poof, gone.” Despite knowing that it was a fruitless search, he still scanned the area around their feet to see if it had dropped anywhere. As expected though, luck wasn’t on their side. “We… we aren’t stuck like this, are we?” He had a wife and kid to get home to! “This is some crazy shit,” he grumbled, only to stop short in surprise. He never swore, even when under extreme stress, so where had that come from?
Beginning to pace around the locker room, Kirk was fascinated by his longer strides, and pointedly didn’t look back to where his former body stood. Just seeing it from the outsider’s perspective made him feel a little nauseous. “What are we gonna do, Kirk?” He flinched as he once again addressed the other with his own name, but there was little else he could do. Besides, he was more caught up thinking about what their immediate futures held. It wasn’t as if he could be expected to go home to Ezra’s bachelor pad and then come back to training tomorrow, not as the team’s quarterback but rather a rookie offensive lineman, right?
Before the other could even begin to respond, the two men were startled by the sound of the locker room door opening. Their attention snapped towards the new entry: the facility manager, who flashed an apologetic smile at the pair of athletes, evidently recognising that his entry had caught them off guard. “Sorry gents, I thought everyone had gone home already,” he explained with a sheepish smile, “I was actually hoping to lock up and get home soon…” He let the words trail, not so subtly implying that he wanted them to hurry up and get out so he could leave for the night. The implication made Kirk’s heart race with uncertainty.
“We were just leaving,” it was the rookie-turned-quarterback who spoke up first. “Right, Ezra?” The two men made eye contact and Kirk was met by an uncompromising gaze that had him quickly nodding in agreement, as if he really was the rookie and deferring to the locker room veteran. “Sorry for holding you up, bud.” The comment was directed to the facility manager, who just replied with a polite smile as the two men somewhat reluctantly moved to collect their bags from each other’s lockers, then proceeded out of the locker room and into the terrifying uncertainty of whatever their future would hold.
They didn’t talk as they exited the training facility but as the doors clicked closed behind them, the pair felt as if they’d stepped through a sheet of water. Although there was no physical indicator that anything had happened to them, their minds seemed scrambled and they struggled to remember what had caused them to exit from the facility so late after the rest of the team. The thought lingered at the very edge of their minds but seemed to become more and more distant with every passing second.
“I should be off home,” the body of Kirk Cousins declared, slapping the rookie O-Liner on the back. “Can’t keep the wife waiting, and I want to read my kids a bedtime story.” The words were said with such genuine fatherly energy that it seemed there was no doubt in his mind about his true identity.
“Sure thing,” the new Ezra Cleveland replied, nodding in respect at his quarterback. “See you tomorrow, QB!” While Kirk was being a family man, Ezra was planning to settle down in front of his games console to knock out a few rounds of Warzone with his fellow rookies. Maybe one day he’d want to be a husband and father but for now he was happy just enjoying his life as a bachelor making a name for himself in the NFL and while 2020 hadn’t been their year, he was confident that they’d come back next season stronger than ever!
Seven months later...
The off-season had been a refreshing experience for Ezra, who had taken time to do some traveling with a couple of the other younger members of the Vikings roster to further build up their camaraderie. Their vacation days had been anything but quiet too, as their paths had crossed with no shortage of women, many of whom were complimentary of Ezra’s thick frame and expressed interest in wanting to see more. As such, the young offensive lineman was rather proud of the amount of cardio he’d been doing during the break, and it had only made his muscles firmer and stronger. He was sitting comfortably over three-hundred pounds and loved how every step he took made a thundering stomp and how he was regularly outlifting his friends whenever they hit the gym together. Simply put, life was good, but he was looking forward to getting back to training camp and starting his sophomore year in the NFL.
As he crossed over the threshold to enter the Vikings training facility though, it was as if he had received a static shock and suddenly his mind was full of thoughts and memories that were not his own. No, they were his own - back from when he had been Kirk Cousins, the team quarterback. He and the real Ezra had discovered during the final weeks of the previous season that they only seemed to be aware of their swap when they were in the place where it had taken place. They were still unable to communicate their true identities to anyone, nor even when they were on their own (Kirk had attempted to make a voice recording in private that he could play to try and explain what had happened, but even then he kept announcing his name as Ezra), and as soon as they stepped out of the locker room they were once again wrapped up in their new identities. It had been a full six months since he’d last been in the facility - six months of living a life that wasn’t his own without ever thinking anything was wrong.
Truthfully, Kirk wasn’t sure if that was a curse or a blessing. At least he didn’t have to spend all of his time worrying about how his replacement was treating his family, because the other saw them as his family instead and treated them how Kirk always used to. That didn’t stop him from missing them whenever they were in the locker room and he was aware of his true identity, or feeling any less ashamed of his summertime antics as a young bachelor. He reminded himself that he couldn’t help what he did when he truly believed he was the younger man, but that didn’t make it sit any easier during the moments when he was aware of who he was supposed to be.
In the days after their swap, whenever they were in the locker room for a break, Kirk had taken to researching on the web to see if he could find any possible explanation - and hopefully solution - for the crazy situation they were in. It took some time but eventually he stumbled upon stories about the Medallion of Zulo which presented itself as a cheap costume item but secretly hid the power of transformation. It was the kind of thing Kirk would have scoffed at had he not fallen victim to its power, and there was no doubt in his mind that the tacky piece of jewellery they had discovered in the locker room on that fateful day was indeed the Medallion of Zulo.
Unfortunately the one thing that all of those stories seemed to have in common was that the medallion had vanished after making its impact and none of the victims had ever come across it again, no matter how fervently they searched for it. As such, that didn’t exactly leave much hope for Kirk and Ezra, but the former wasn’t about to give up hope. Maybe one day he’d stumble across somebody in possession of the medallion and be able to use it to get his body back… It was unlikely, but nothing was impossible. The pundits had insisted in the past that the Vikings and he, Kirk Cousins, were a bust and yet they’d made it to the playoffs. They had a habit of making the impossible happen, and the switch had opened Kirk’s eyes up to just how true that was.
Catching the eye of his replacement across the room, Kirk nodded in greeting. Seeing his own face and body being operated by another man was no less disconcerting than it had been the first time, but he supposed in time he might end up getting used to it. Then again, even that felt like a disaster waiting to happen. It opened the door to the two men completely forgetting who they were even in the confines of the locker room, and then there really would be no hope in Kirk getting back to his family! Before he could dwell in those thoughts for too long though, the team were being summoned out onto the practice field by the coach. Standing up to his full height, the former quarterback prepared himself to step out of the doors and once again lose himself in the identity of Ezra Cleveland, second year offensive lineman, for the next few hours.
He supposed there were worse fates though. At least it hadn’t been the team’s awkward waterboy or elderly general manager who had been in the locker room with him on that fateful evening. In comparison to what could have been, it felt fair to say that Ezra’s life really wasn’t all that bad. At least he still got to play football, despite it being a different position. Even in those brief moments where he was aware of his true identity, Kirk still experienced something of a thrill at the thought of making dominant plays as a member of the O-Line and protecting the (admittedly more fragile) quarterback. It was a different kind of rush to the one that came when he’d been delivering touchdown passes or pulling off quarterback sneaks, but no less rewarding. Indeed, if he spent the rest of his professional football career protecting the quarterback from getting sacked then he supposed he’d be okay with that.
As the team made their way out onto the practice field, ready to get started in preparation for the upcoming season, they took up the Vikings war cry and as his former life slipped away from him once again, the new Ezra joined in with the rest of them: “Skol! Skol! Skol!”
