Chapter 2 - Awakening in Another Body

Previously on Victorian Detective Dilemma...

Luis Ramirez fell asleep reading a mysterious first edition of "The Chronicles of Lady Vivienne Ashworth," only to wake in Victorian London—in the body of Lady Vivienne Ashworth. Now trapped in 1887, he must navigate a world of corsets, calling cards, and murder most foul.

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I don't know how long I sat there on the floor, nightgown pooled around me like a fallen cloud, brain completely offline. Time felt elastic, stretching and compressing. It could have been minutes or hours before my programmer's mind finally rebooted and started trying to process what had happened. I kept running the numbers—Book + Sleep = Victorian Body Swap—but the math refused to work. Error. Error. ERROR.

The fire crackled in the grate, and somewhere a clock ticked with mechanical persistence—normal sounds. Real sounds. But that didn't prove anything—dreams could have sounds too.

Get up, some still-functioning part of my brain commanded. You can't stay on the floor forever.

My legs—these legs—trembled as I pushed myself upright. The mirror caught my movement, and I flinched away from the beautiful stranger staring back at me, one crisis at a time.

A soft knock at the door made me freeze. "My lady? I have your tea."

Tea. Right. Mrs. Whitmore had said something about tea. Every day, things continued to happen. The world hadn't stopped just because Luis Ramirez had been body-swapped into a Victorian novel.

Sarah. A name popped into my head—where had that come from? I'd barely read three pages of that stupid book—young maid, probably chatty. Whatever Victorian contraptions were waiting for me in that dressing room, I was going to need help.

"Just... leave it outside," I called, my voice still sounding foreign to my own ears. High, refined, British. "I'll get it in a moment."

"Mrs. Whitmore said I was to help you dress, my lady. The burgundy walking dress is pressed and ready."

Of course. Because I couldn't even be allowed five minutes to process my existential crisis without Victorian propriety barging in.

"I need a moment," I said, trying to sound authoritative rather than panicked. "Please."

There was a pause, then: "Very well, my lady. I'll return shortly."

Footsteps retreated down the hall. I waited until they faded completely, then made my way to the door on unsteady legs. Each step felt like learning to walk again—different height, different weight distribution, nightgown tangling around ankles that weren't where they should be.

I cracked open the door just enough to peer through. A silver tray gleamed on the floor—actual silver, not like the plastic stuff from our apartment. Steam curled up from a delicate teacup that probably cost more than my sneakers. Who just left expensive china sitting on hallway floors?

I grabbed it and retreated back into the room, closing the door with my hip—a movement that felt oddly natural despite everything.

The tea smelled like flowers—bergamot and something else. As I lifted the cup, my hand moved without thought, pinky extending in a way that would have made me cringe yesterday. The delicate china nestled between fingers that knew its weight, its balance, though Luis Ramirez had only ever wrapped his hands around chipped mugs. Small sips replaced my usual gulping, the liquid touching my lips in careful measures.

Wait. This was all wrong.

The few pages I'd managed to read before passing out had Lady Ashworth at a ballroom, surrounded by glittering society, doing... whatever Victorian ladies did at balls. Dancing? Gossiping? The prose had been too purple for me to follow clearly, but it definitely wasn't waking up in a bedroom with servants asking about walking dresses.

Where the hell was I in the story? Had I skipped ahead somehow? Mrs. Whitmore had mentioned I was "indisposed" yesterday—what did that mean? What had already happened? Was there some whole chunk of plot I'd missed?

Great. Not only am I stuck in the wrong body in the wrong century, I don't even know what part of the story I'm in. No script to follow. I have no idea what Vivienne is supposed to be doing.

I sat on the edge of the bed and closed my eyes.

This was a dream. Had to be. Any second now, my alarm would go off and I'd wake up to Abuela making coffee in our tiny kitchen. I'd complain about the weird Victorian nightmare I'd had, maybe blame it on staying up too late coding. We'd laugh about it.

Any second now.

I opened my eyes. Still burgundy curtains. Still wrong hands. Still—

"Shit." The word came out refined and British, which somehow made everything worse.

I threw back the covers—or tried to. They'd somehow gotten twisted around me while I sat there, and I nearly fell over again. The nightgown tangled around my legs, which were... different. Shorter. Definitely shorter. And shaped differently. And—

Nope. Not thinking about that right now.

I needed that mirror again. Now that the initial shock had worn off, I needed to take a closer look. To understand what I was dealing with.

I stumbled toward it—an actual full-length mirror in an elaborately carved wooden frame—and forced myself to study the reflection properly this time.

Lady Vivienne Ashworth stared back at me.

She was... beautiful. Objectively, analytically, algorithmically beautiful. Heart-shaped face, high cheekbones, those famous emerald eyes that the book had spent three paragraphs describing. Even disheveled from sleep and my breakdown on the floor, she looked like a pre-Raphaelite painting come to life.

I leaned closer to the mirror, close enough that my breath—her breath—fogged the glass. Those emerald eyes stared back at me with my own confusion. I blinked. She blinked. I raised an eyebrow—or tried to. The movement felt different, the muscles pulling in unfamiliar ways.

This was me. Somehow. But it was also definitely not me.

My fingers traced the cheekbones—wait, these weren't my cheekbones. Mine were flatter, less... dramatic? The nose felt smaller under my fingertips. Everything was wrong, wrong, wrong. I touched my face like I was trying to find Luis buried somewhere under this stranger's features. My fingers were different too—smaller, softer. Where were my typing calluses?

"This isn't real," I told the reflection, but Vivienne's melodious voice made even denial sound like poetry. I tried lowering the pitch—it came out as a husky purr that sent heat crawling up my neck. Higher made me sound like a demented pixie. My throat worked, trying to find my voice somewhere in this foreign instrument, but there was no path back to the cracking baritone I'd known.

I raised a hand. She raised a hand. The movement felt wrong—my arm was shorter, the weight distribution different. I touched my—her—our face. Soft skin, unfamiliar bone structure, and lips that were definitely not the thin line I was used to. My fingers were slender, elegant, with none of the calluses from years of typing.

But it was the body that made me freeze in horror all over again.

The nightgown, voluminous as it was, couldn't hide the fundamental wrongness of my shape. Where I expected flat chest and straight lines, there were curves. Actual, prominent curves that moved when I breathed. I pressed my hands against them experimentally and immediately jerked back. They were real. Soft and sensitive and absolutely not supposed to be there.

The weight of them pulled at my shoulders, changing how I stood. When I straightened up, they... moved. Shifted. I hunched forward instinctively, then realized that made the nightgown gap and show— I yanked the fabric closed, heat flooding up from my chest to the tips of my ears. In the mirror, the blush painted itself across Vivienne's porcelain skin in delicate rose instead of the blotchy red I knew.

My waist was more petite, pulled in even without a corset. My hips flared out in a way that made the nightgown drape differently than any clothing I'd ever worn. Even my shoulders were narrower, more sloped. Everything about this body was designed for different purposes than the one I'd inhabited for seventeen years.

I turned sideways to study the profile. The... chest... was impossible to ignore from this angle. How did women deal with carrying this extra weight around all the time? It pulled at my back, changed my center of gravity, and made me want to hunch forward.

"This isn't possible," I said, watching her mouth move with my words. "This violates literally every law of physics. You can't just... download consciousness into a fictional character. That's not how reality works."

But apparently, reality had decided to throw out the rulebook.

I lifted the nightgown slightly, then dropped it immediately. Smooth legs, curved thighs, and—nope. Not examining that. Not ready for that level of body horror. The toenails were painted pale pink, tiny and delicate. Even my feet were wrong.

My hands went to my hair, lifting the heavy mass of it. It was everywhere—cascading down my back, over my shoulders, getting in my face. The weight of it pulled at my scalp. How was I supposed to manage this much hair? I'd gotten annoyed when my hair touched my collar. This was like wearing a blanket on my head.

I needed to think logically, but my hands were shaking as I lifted the teacup again. These small, delicate hands with their perfect oval nails and smooth skin. Luis's hands had been bigger, rougher, with a scar on the left thumb from a skateboarding accident when he was twelve. These hands had never touched a keyboard, never scraped a knee, never done anything more strenuous than embroider or play piano.

A pressure in my lower abdomen became noticeable. Oh no. Oh no no no.

I needed to use the bathroom. The water closet. Whatever Victorians called it. Which meant dealing with... everything down there.

I stood up, trying to ignore how my body moved. The nightgown swished around my legs—my shorter, smoother, differently-shaped legs. Every step felt wrong. My hips moved more. My chest bounced slightly despite the nightgown's coverage. The hair swayed with each movement, tickling my back.

The water closet was through another door. I stared at the setup with growing horror. What the hell was this? Some kind of ceramic bowl with a wooden seat—like a toilet, but wrong. A chain hanging down. Where was the flush handle? The toilet paper? Just a pitcher of water and some cloths that smelled like roses.

Oh God. The cloths. Those were supposed to be toilet paper, weren't they?

"I can't do this," I whispered. But my bladder didn't care about my existential crisis.

What happened next was pure nightmare fuel. Everything felt wrong—sitting wrong, anatomy all wrong, the nightgown tangling everywhere. I kept expecting my body to work one way, but it worked completely differently. And the cloths? Victorian toilet paper was apparently just... cloths. Reusable cloths. I wanted to die.

When I finally emerged, sweating and shaking, I wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed and pretend none of this was happening. But Sarah's waiting presence—she'd be back soon to help me dress—reminded me that Lady Vivienne Ashworth had a life I was expected to live.

I stumbled to the basin, desperate to wash away whatever Victorian germs I'd just encountered. The soap smelled like roses—of course it did. Everything here probably smelled like flowers or old money. I grabbed it, and my hands just... took over. Small, precise circles. Gentle, ladylike movements.

Wait. When did I learned to wash my hands like a lady?

I stared at my hands like they'd betrayed me. Because they had.

Wait—the book.

Memories from last night crashed back—the pages glowing in the dark, moving on their own, that hidden compartment in the binding I'd glimpsed before everything went black. The overwhelming smell of vanilla and incense. The way the words had literally swum on the page.

That wasn't normal. Had the book really glowed? Had the pages actually moved? Maybe I'd imagined it, but something had definitely happened. Something impossible.

And maybe—just maybe—if impossible things could happen, then impossible things could be undone.

No. Focus, Luis. One crisis at a time.

The full weight of my situation crashed over me as I stood there, rose-scented hands trembling. This wasn't a dream or a hallucination—I'd been pulled into a book through some impossible magic. Not just any book, but a Victorian detective novel, and not just as myself, but trapped in the body of the fictional heroine. Lady Vivienne Ashworth had been words on a page just hours ago, and now I was living in her skin, breathing with her lungs, expected to solve murders with her brilliant mind that I definitely didn't possess.

Inspector Blackwood was due to arrive in less than an hour. A fictional character who would walk through that door expecting his brilliant detective partner, not a seventeen-year-old boy from San Francisco who couldn't even figure out which fork to use at dinner. How was I supposed to be a Victorian lady when I could barely manage being a modern teenager?

The impossibility of it all made me want to laugh. Or scream—or both. Magic books existed, apparently, and I was living proof. Who was I to judge what was possible anymore?

But impossible or not, it was happening. And if movies had taught me anything, it was that the protagonist never got home by sitting around panicking. I needed to play along until I figured out how to get back.

Which meant...

I looked around the room properly for the first time. It was massive—bigger than our entire apartment. Heavy Victorian furniture dominated the space: a four-poster bed with burgundy curtains, a writing desk that seemed to belong in a museum, and a fireplace with a real fire crackling away. Paintings of stern-looking people in elaborate clothes stared down at me judgmentally.

A door on the far wall probably led to a closet. Or knowing Victorian excess, a whole other room just for clothes.

I padded over and opened it. Yep. A dressing room filled with more fabric than a craft store. Dresses in every color hung in neat rows—day dresses, evening gowns, walking dresses (whatever those were), and things with names I couldn't even guess at.

Sarah would know which one. She'd probably have opinions about all of them.

Another knock. "My lady? I believe you've had your moment. Shall I come in to help you dress? Inspector Blackwood will be arriving soon."

Right. Victorian ladies didn't dress themselves. They had help. Apparently, these clothes were designed by someone who hated both women and basic practicality. And I'd already stalled as long as I could.

"I..." My voice cracked. I cleared my throat and tried again. "Yes. Come in."

The door opened, and Sarah's bright smile promised an education in Victorian torture devices. What I didn't know yet was that convincing Inspector Blackwood I was the brilliant Lady Vivienne would make getting dressed look like child's play.

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Next Time...

Luis faces his first challenge with Victorian women's fashion—and discovers that corsets are just the beginning of his troubles.