Brady and Rajani

When Brady was younger, he had attended a school of magic. Unfortunately, so many spells had been cast on him that he had developed a chronic shapeshifting problem: he kept turning into a giant snail. At first, he found himself morphing at the most inconvenient times. He had finally gotten it under control, though: as long as he let the spell turn him into a snail for one night every few weeks, he wouldn't need to worry about it happening in public.

Still, he wanted to get away from all the people in his hometown who had seen him in his snail form, so he moved to the faraway realm known as Minnesota. He started taking college classes and found himself a nice isolated forest where he could shapeshift in peace.

One day in economics class, a young woman named Rajani caught his eye. For some reason, he couldn't stop thinking about her. It was obvious they had nothing in common, though. Brady kept trying to build up the nerve to walk across the lecture hall and talk to her, but he could never follow through.

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Near the end of the semester, on a warm May evening, Brady went to the forest and started to relax while the magical spell took hold of him once again. But this time, a figure approached him from a couple of trees away: another snail-person.

And she looked awfully familiar.

The other snail froze when she saw Brady. Slowly, she began to inch forward.

"I didn't know there were other snail people here," she said. "I should introduce myself. My name's Rajani."

Brady always assumed his curse was just a fluke from a potpourri of spells cast over many years. He was taken aback by seeing another person in snail form - his unrequited crush, no less.

Rajani slithered up to him.

"I don't think I've ever seen anyone like me before. Do you live here? You look kind of familiar."

She peeked around to look at Brady's shell.

"What kind of snail are you?"

Brady looked around nervously. "I don't usually look like this," he said. "I'm actually a human."

"...Wait. Are you..."

Rajani suddenly seemed to recognize him. "I can't believe my mind is doing this to me," she groaned. "I shouldn't be doing this. You're just an innocent kid from my class, and now I'm imagining you as a snail! But I've been so lonely..."

"Imagining?" Brady asked. "What do you mean?"

"You're not real. You're just in my head." Rajani looked down at herself. "Just like I'm not really a snail. I know it's not really happening, but I always feel like people are going to see me like this. That's why I have to find places to hide."

"What makes you think this isn't real, though?"

"It's not possible. There's no such thing as magic. It has to be a hallucination."

How could she not believe in magic? Brady knew it was real; he had taken magic classes in school. That was how he got in this mess in the first place. But what had happened to Rajani? Was she under a spell? And why didn't she realize it?

Rajani sighed.

"Now I'm going to think of this every time I see you. I'll never get the nerve to actually talk to you now."

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Brady sat next to Rajani in class the next day. She sheepishly averted her gaze when he sat down. They sat in silence for a few moments.

Finally, Rajani spoke up.

"Hi, I'm Rajani," she said. "Sorry I'm so quiet. I had a bad dream last night."

"How so?"

Rajani closed her eyes briefly. "It's a nightmare I keep having. It was just... a little different this time."

A nightmare? Brady should have figured it out earlier. She was so scared of her transformations being real that she had convinced herself they weren't. Maybe there wasn't anything he could - or should - do to convince her otherwise.

But he still wanted to get to know her better. And suddenly, he felt like they had something in common after all.