Years since I last published anything I wrote. So this is going to be a semi-new thing for me. Let's see if I can give justice to MELANIE EZELL'S BIG CLOSET ULTIMATE WRITER'S CHALLENGE, the first week challenge:

1. In the Blink of an Eye

idea: Write a story with an instantaneous transformation. Aliens, magic, weird nanobots, the method is up to you, but the change is instant. Explore how the change affects the character's views of social situations and day to day activities.

Length: 2000 words or less

Seeing the Light

The ageing reporter was standing in front of a chain link fence on top of the ridge of a crater, looking down at the frantic activity of the military personnel below. Several arms of the service were involved and just about every rank and specialisation could be found. Particularly engineers and technicians for the equipment around the unknown object were milling around.

The object was a metallic blob, maybe twenty metres high and a hundred and twenty wide or so. Originally since it impacted the ground and created the crater it had just sat there, but recently it had started swelling, and all dust and grit had somehow left it's surface, leaving it's surface more perfectly reflecting the light than any man-made object ever had. All tries at identifying it's nature through radiation, vibration or mechanical measures had failed, the object returning all energy affecting it, even amplifying it. It was particularly noticeable for radio waves, since all the radio traffic in the area that hit it continuously had by now reached a level where the object was with a delay of microseconds returning the radio waves at thousands times the strength of the original emission.

The reporter was interviewing some scientist that had been called in from ESA, who was talking about how they were going to try more radical techniques and explaining how the low-radiation nuclear impact they were preparing was going to give them more data as to the nature of the object. As he was talking however, the object was rapidly starting to glow, until after a few seconds the screen was all washed out by the white light.

Half a minute later the camera was again starting to be able to show an image. An image of a young woman standing in a way too large suit looking a lot like that of the reporter, pants around her ankles, standing near another woman in a too large lab coat. Inside the crater, only a black sphere the size of a small car remained in the place the original huge object, and all the personnel around it seemed to no longer fully fill their clothes. Remarkably many of them were women, and of those few that were not, their clothes problems seemed the opposite of the women.

The changes didn't stop at the camera side of the broadcast however. As the white light reached the viewers, they too undertook the strange changes that had affected those in front of the camera. Even recordings of the events caused the changes when played back in front of those that had not yet seen the light. Even then, it took at least four hours until those in charge of various news networks around the world stopped playing up the recording in their headlines.

As the event got more in control, and reports of it's effects started to come in, astonishing numbers were being given. Only a third of the leaders of the world remained their original sex. Depending a lot on the local time when the event hit the news, and the percentage of the population that had a TV, populations around the globe had between nearly half to nearly no transformees. Thanks to the internet and it's video sites, what could have been limited to a single occurrence event turned into a continuous process.

It was rapidly discovered that the transformees were, except for those that had not hit puberty yet, all regressed to a biological age shortly after puberty, and in perfect health.

* * *

“Miss Reginald Spencer to report to the principal’s office immediately!” echoed through the stone corridor from the PA system.

Reginald giggled to herself and went to her lockers to deposit her pack before she went to the office. As she arrived, she was immediately pointed to the headmaster’s room by the secretary.

“You’re expected. They're in there.”

As she closed the door behind her, she looked at the two teenage girls in stuffy, old ,and very much too large, suits.

“Miss Spencer, can you explain to us why we found ourselves like this after setting in for work today, and why you can be seen in the security tapes leaving the office last night?”

“Oh, I only rigged the Solitaire game with showing a quick glance of the light if played during office hours, Ma’am! If that is grounds for firing Fa… Mother, it should be punishable for any other employees, right?”