Sleuth School

The Van Nuys Boarding School for Hot Virgin Girls, ages 18 to 22 had been desperate to add a little grit to their spotless campus. So when they started a detective course, they hired the only duo in the Valley whose reputations were bigger than their caseloads: Jonny M. and his pug partner Boris. The moment Jonny walked into the lecture hall in his trench coat and henna-dyed beard, every student sat up straighter. Gidget the All-American surfer, Judi the wholesome blonde triple-threat, Wednesday the gloomy goth who never blinked… they all watched Jonny with a starry-eyed intensity that could melt the varnish off a file cabinet. It wasn’t detective work they were interested in—it was Jonny. Three times their age and dumb as a post, but with a bulge in his wrinkled slacks that was all they could think about.

Boris noticed the way the class hung on Jonny’s every word, sighing at the way he flicked ash from an unlit cigarette or shuffled evidence folders with a weary hero’s grace. The girls couldn’t concentrate worth a nickel, and the syllabus was going down faster than a getaway car on Sepulveda. So Boris, being the brains of the agency and the only one immune to Jonny’s accidental charisma, marched himself into the filing room and dug up a case cold enough to freeze the whole classroom’s hormones where they sat. The unsolved murder of Robert Vestal—a butchered body, a trail of dead-end clues, and a mystery that had gnawed at the agency for months.

Jonny remembered the case like a bad scar: every alley, every witness, every lead that crumbled like cheap chalk. But Boris slapped the file down on the desk and announced to the class that this would be their final exam. Suddenly the room’s dreamy haze sharpened into something electric. The girls straightened in their seats, pencils poised, eyes alert. For the first time they weren’t imagining Jonny as the hero of their perverse daydreams—they were imagining themselves as heroes alongside him. And with Jonny’s grit, Boris’s brains, and a classroom full of would-be investigators hungry to prove themselves, the Robert Vestal case was about to get hotter than it had ever been. They were hunting for a killer waiting to be caught… assuming he didn’t catch the hunters first.

The Trim Machine.

Jonny M. was the kind of guy who made women flinch without knowing why. Something about the way he smiled—too wide, too needy, like a man selling counterfeit charm in a cheap suit. His best and only friend was Boris, a squat little pug with the brain of a physicist and the patience of a saint. Jonny lived off instant coffee and failed pickup lines while Boris tinkered in their dingy Van Nuys garage with glowing tubes, copper coils, and theories that would’ve made Einstein sweat. Nobody thought much of the pair—one too dumb, the other too furry—but that night, when Boris’s machine began to hum like a choir of dying angels, the air split open like a cheap dime novel cliché—and sucked them both in.

When Jonny came to, the world had changed. The smog of Van Nuys was gone, replaced by a city skyline that gleamed like chrome and sin. His reflection in a mirrored tower made him gasp—his skin smooth, jawline sharp, eyes glinting like he knew what he was doing. The first woman he met nearly fainted when he smiled; the second one followed him down the street without a word. Jonny M., the guy who couldn’t score a phone number if he’d mugged Ma Bell herself, had become a walking fantasy. Boris, puffing and panting beside him, adjusted his tiny lab coat and said in his gravelly voice, “Looks like the wormhole did some editing.”

Jonny took to this new world like a rat to whiskey. Nightclubs welcomed him with open arms and low-cut dresses, and the air smelled of perfume and bad intentions. But beneath the glamour, Boris knew something was off—the women’s laughter echoed a beat too long, their eyes shimmered like mirrors, and every corner of the city hummed with that same low frequency as the wormhole machine. Jonny didn’t care; he was too busy basking in a life he’d never earned. But as the pug scientist watched his friend drown in charm and illusion, he began to suspect the truth: this wasn’t paradise—it was the punchline to a cosmic joke, and Jonny M. was still the fool in the middle of it.