Some treasures are hard to find, and harder to hold onto.

Gems of Ordon

by Cleo Kraft

Chapter III

I woke up but everything was a blur and I shivered from being cold and wet all over.

Someone helped me up out of the chamber and I nearly stumbled to the floor in my weakened condition.

A towel was wrapped around me and I walked along, trying to focus but my vision blurred in and out and I felt dizzy and as weak as a newborn kitten. The floor felt really cold on my bare feet as I stumbled along, guided by some kind woman I could barely focus on. I was so dizzy and disoriented I just looked down at the white tiled floor and let the woman guide me to wherever it was she was taking me.

She helped me sit down in a chair in some strange white hallway and just huddled there shivering and pulling my towel closer to me for whatever warmth I could obtain.

Everything was really confusing so I closed my eyes and tried not to think of what was going on or what happened to me.

Awhile later I opened my eyes and my vision started to clear.

I saw there was a girl sitting beside me with a white towel wrapped about her body. She just sat there with her head hunched between her knees while she shivered and quaked. Her wet, tangly blonde hair trailed down to the floor and she coughed every now and then as she trembled from the cold.

My vision finally cleared all the way and I looked past the girl and down the hall to the suspended animation room I'd been in awhile ago. The nurse was helping another girl out of one of the booths.

A hand clasped my left knee and I turned to see Shawna sitting there on my left.

"Feeling better, Jeanette?" she asked letting go of my knee.

I nodded a "yes."

"Good," Shawna said admiring the new me. "You're a lucky, lucky girl. What I wouldn't give to have a princess model for my own body . . . and the best part is you'll never age now. Well don't thank me. If you hadn't called me up to your room for some new clothes, you'd still be stuck in your old ugly body. You'll fetch much more money now, and I'm sure both you and your new master will be more than pleased with the results. Oh, and even better still, I've been told these new princess models have some sort of regenerative ability, so you'll never run out of eggs. That means you'll be able to have babies forever if that is your master's wish. You're a lucky, lucky girl."

I heard feet shuffling to my right and I turned and saw the nurse escorting another girl to sit down on one of the chairs nearby.

"Another waker," the nurse said shaking her head back and forth like she was just tired of her job already.

"Will I ever be able to get my old body back?" I asked Shawna hopefully.

She looked at me like I was out of my mind for asking such a thing.

"Girl," Shawna said to me. "You're must still be delusional from this experience. You can't honestly want your old body back, can you?"

I shrugged and said,"What if I wanted to though?"

Shawna turned to face the nurse and said,"Nurse when is the deletion set for on the old bodies?"

"Tomorrow morning," the nurse replied.

"Would you do me a favor and have it done within the hour?" Shawna said.

"Certainly," the nurse nodded. "No problem at all. I'll page the maintenance boys."

The nurse headed over to a phone nearby.

"See?" Shawna asked turning to smile at me. "Now there's nothing for you to worry about, is there? So get those silly thoughts out of your head, girl. This body is a gift. I advise you to forget about your old body and start accepting this wonderful gift I've given you."

"Done," the nurse said to Shawna while hanging up the phone. "Someone's on their way right now to take care of it."

"Good," Shawna said standing up. "Come on, Jeanette. Time for you to head back to the cargo ship where you'll be nice and safe now. I've had some new clothes laid out for you in your room. One of the guards will escort you back to the ship. Come on. Follow me back to the waiting room."

I stood up and wobbled a bit as I tried to get used to balancing my new body.

Nervously I took a step, and then another, and realized it wasn't so difficult to adjust to walking at all. My hips swayed some, but I guess that's to be expected now that I'm a girl. Other than that, my new walk was pretty easy to adjust to.

My breasts didn't bounce about like I expected. They were firm and trim and held in place quite snugly by my bikini top. Still, they did tend to sway from side to side a bit as I walked. Not overly large breasts, nor too small, but kind of medium. Perfect, I suppose, for a body like this.

The hair on my head was long and still a little wet. It's soft, tangly strands tickled across my back as I followed Shawna down the hall and into the waiting room.

"Guard," Shawna said to one of the men in black armor. "This princess model is through here. Please escort her back to the ship and return here for the others."

"Yes, maam," the guard said and took me by the arm. "This way, girl."

___-----___

Back in my stateroom alone, I sat on the edge of my bed and cried as I looked at my face in a small hand mirror.

My familiar masculine face was gone now and the strange hormones in my new body gave me the ability to openly cry out of control and I did.

In the mirror I saw the face of perhaps an eighteen year old woman with brown eyes, a slight little button of a nose, and ever so kissable lips. My hair color was dark, dark brown, almost black, and some of it kept getting in my eyes and I had to brush it aside every now and then.

I touched my face in disbelief and ran my hands along it's features. Smooth cheeks and chin, soft little nose . . . smoothness all over.

There was also the constant baby skin kind of smell. I smelled new and fresh. I smelled like a girl, and it was inescapable. Just sitting here crying at myself in the mirror, I could smell the girlness all about me. Though it was a nice scent, I began to understand one of the reasons women wore perfume to variate it a little.

I set the mirror down with a sniffle and picked up a bottle of perfume in the box of makeup sitting on the bed beside me. I squirted a little perfume here and there on my neck and arms until I smelled a little bit like some sort of flower garden.

I set the perfume down and brought both my legs up on the bed and spread both legs out to my left and right until I was doing the sideways splits.

If I was my old self and walked in the room right now and saw this pretty girl sitting on her bed doing the splits, I think I'd be so turned on I'd have to walk back out of here crouched over to avoid showing the hardon in my pants. However now there was nothing. This wasn't turning me on at all and it really disturbed me because I thought girls would always be turned on by their own actions, but nothing stirred within me at all. It was almost like being sexless. There just wasn't anything happening down there between the legs now.

I pressed both hands between my legs flat up against my new sex and still there was no apparent sexual stimulation at all. I rubbed my hands up and down against the outside of my bikini briefs and nothing seemed to happen. It felt good, like a massage, but other than that there weren't any fireworks going on.

I put my hands on my bikini top and rubbed my breasts a bit. My nipples got hard and a little tingly, but the feeling only filled me with repulsion and shame. I rubbed my breasts all over and jiggled them about but nothing came of it. It was easy to tell that as a woman, I'd be pretty useless at turning myself on. I'd heard of this though. I'd heard that some women rarely ever climax except a few times in their whole life, if at all. I wondered if I was going to be one of those women. I hoped not. If I had to be a woman at all, I wanted everything to work the best that it could. I realized though that this situation was just all wrong. Who was I kidding? I was born male and that's where I belonged. Not here in a woman's body.

I stopped fondling myself because it just wasn't working, and I picked up the mirror again and cried, wishing that I'd never gotten into this mess to begin with.

After awhile, I glanced at the new clothes left for me on the bed and wondered what I'd look like in them. Anything was better than sitting around half naked in a bikini.

Before they'd given me three red dresses, this time I got two dresses and one gegrothin, all black.

I picked up the gegrothin and dangled it there before my face. It looked like someone took a body stocking, sewed a short skirt on it and then ran the thing through a gigantic hole puncher until it looked like Swiss cheese.

I lifted up the skirt portion of the gegrothin and felt the soft, warm material in the panty-area. Though I couldn't see or feel any mechanism built in the material, I knew the famous crotch grabber of the gegrothin was there. I think they called it "smart fabric" or something. It looked like normal material but if you put the thing on, it would grab hold tightly until it became like a second skin. Supposedly the effect was pretty erotic for a woman wearing this, though I'd heard it didn't affect all women. Probably like the orgasm thing. Some could, some couldn't. Kind of sad but I bet I was the kind of woman that couldn't.

I got up off the bed and stood there holding the gegrothin, pondering on whether or not I should try it on.

I decided I'd give it a try.

Since my black bikini matched, I left the top on as a sort of bra, just as an experiment, but I took my bikini briefs off.

There wasn't any zipper or anything in the back of the gegrothin, so the only way in the thing had to be through the neck. I discovered the neck area was pretty flexible and I took both hands and stretched the thing wide enough to slip both legs inside. I placed my left foot in, then the right and tugged the material up until my legs slipped all the way in.

My right foot accidentally stopped in the crotch grabber and the material grabbed my toes and let go. It felt oddly enough like a kiss. I guess the crotch grabber could tell the difference between my foot and my crotch and let go after realizing what it grabbed ahold of.

I slid both legs down into the stocking portion of the outfit and even before I could pull my arms into the sleeves, the crotch grabber started doing it's job and pulled tighter and tighter up against me between the legs. If I were still a man, I'd be in considerable pain right now, but oddly enough the sensation was quite pleasant, even comfortable. The silky material simply snuggled up close and grabbed on tight like glove. It fit perfectly like a second skin just as it was designed to do.

I pulled both arms though the sleeves of the gegrothin and the rest of it just slid into place.

I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror.

I had to admit, the gegrothin not only looked nice, it felt nice too.

I guess now that I've tried on a gegrothin, I've finally done what could never do as a man - survive the crotch grabber in this thing.

___-----___

I felt the rumble of the ship as we departed the space station and began our approach of Neptune's population grid.

Since life on Neptune was out of the question due to high winds and poisonous atmosphere that ranged from below freezing temperatures in most of the upper atmosphere to boiling temperatures at the core, scientists early on devised a way to both harness the wind power and provide a means of supporting life by herding hundreds of asteroids into low orbit just above Neptune's fast moving clouds. The asteroids in most cases were hollowed out to extract metals and also construct cities and bases inside.

During the asteroid harvesting, the asteroids were placed in a safer, higher orbit in preparation for connecting them together with invisible gravity fields using new technology obtained from the discovery of a remarkable new substance found in the asteroids themselves. That material was called kelleniualite and changed the course of science forever.

Once the gravity discs were in place, and the underside of the asteroids were fitted with enormous steel windmills, the asteroids were carefully lowered into place above the clouds of Neptune and the gravity discs activated, keeping the giant web of cities securely in place.

The windmills, once in place in the incredibly high winds of Neptune, would provide more than ample means to supply the cities with a virtual eternal power source. Energy without waste matter.

Even better, the cities disposed of their own trash by ejecting it into the core of Neptune where winds tore it apart and gravity took it down to be melted into nothingness.

Originally, scientists considered Jupiter for the first stratospheric population grid, but after careful evaluation it was decided that Neptune, being a smaller gas giant, would be an easier undertaking.

I've never been to Neptune before, and this was going to be my first visit to a stratospheric population grid. Unfortunately whatever excitement I had was replaced with fear because I wasn't going to Neptune for a mere visit, I was going there to be sold as a slave girl. Something I wasn't at all looking forward to.

___-----___

Sometime later Shawna came to my room and informed me we were beginning our final approach to land on Neptune.

"You'd better come with me down to the main cargo hold," Shawna said. "You'll find the conditions aren't as nice as this stateroom but Neptune slave Lords insist their women are treated as cargo. Us traders try and be a bit more civilized for most of the journey to Neptune, but we must put on a show for the slave Lords, so to the cargo hold you go."

I followed her out the door and down the hall.

"You know," she said. "When your old body was being archived, one of the nurses discovered something unusual and reported it to me. Would you by any chance happen to know what they found?"

I gulped but didn't answer.

"The nurse told me that she discovered a man's body," Shawna said shaking her head like she couldn't believe it. "Now I know the lab's entitled to make a few mistakes every now and then, but not anything like this. Do you, by any chance, happen to know what the slave Lords would do if they found out one of their new princess models was walking around with a man's mind inside?"

She stopped and turned around to look at me with her hands on her hips.

"They wouldn't be happy," I guessed.

"Darn right they wouldn't," she said and handed me a card. "We found this . . . along with some male clothes stashed away in a maintenance locker just after we departed Mars. At the time I didn't know about it, but after what the nurse told me about finding a male body in your shunting chamber, I checked with security and found out. It seems to make sense considering you had no clothes in your stateroom, right?"

"Let me explain-"

"No," she interrupted, holding her hand up. "Let me guess. A red headed girl in the park, right?"

"How did you know?"

"Because this is the third time it's happened," Shawna replied. "But the other two men simply called the front desk and we dropped them off at Gamma Station. Look, I don't care why you crossed Imlari or her gang, but you would have saved me and yourself alot of trouble if you just came forward to begin with. Now it's too late. The chips are already on the bidding table and someone's already interested in purchasing you. Now there's nothing I can do to save you now. You're going to be sold as a slave girl and it's all your fault for not coming out and telling me the truth about yourself. Now I've had the nurse spare your old body from deletion, so you owe me one, but it's going to be up to you to to get back to Gamma Station on your own if you want to get swapped back ever again. Oh, and there's going to be a hefty fee you're going to have to pay for causing all this trouble. Princess models aren't exactly cheap, you know."

We walked in an elevator and the doors closed.

"Cargo hold seven," Shawna called out and the elevator descended.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't know this was going to happen. Thanks for saving my old body though."

"It's alright," Shawna said smiling at me. "You probably won't ever see it again anyway. Once you're sold at auction, you'll probably be lucky if your new master ever lets you out of his house. Now body storage costs money, so you've got thirty days to get to Gamma Station before they figure you're not coming back and they delete your old body for good. Don't look so shocked, they were going to delete it after a week, but convinced them to extend it to a month."

"Thanks," I said. "Honestly, I didn't know what to do. I'm sorry."

She looked at me and shook her head and said,"You don't know what's going to happen to you, do you? You don't even have a clue. Do you realize what your new master is going to ask you to do? You're going to be some guy's sex slave. Are you prepared for that? I don't think you are. Look, I'm really tempted to save you from this, but it could cost me my job. What you've done really makes me sick though, and I don't know whether to save you because I feel sorry for you or let you go because you make me sick. For one, you're treading in territory no man was ever meant to tread. How dare you come along and think it's okay to masquerade around as a woman? You have no right to know what we know or feel what we feel. Why you're no better than a peeping Tom."

"I didn't know. I was-"

"Just shut up!" Shawna ordered, crossing her arms.

The elevator stopped and the doors opened. We walked out into a massive cargo bay where hundreds of other women were huddled about...naked.

"I'm sorry," I said as Shawna pushed me away from the elevator.

"You have thirty days," she said remaining behind in the elevator. "Good luck, for what it's worth, girl."

I guess she decided not to save me then. I guess I deserved that, though, for letting her think all along that I was a woman.

The elevator doors closed and she was gone.

"Clothes off!" a black armored guardsman ordered. "Remove your clothes and discard them in that laundry chute."

I slowly got out of my gegrothin.

My arms slid out easily enough, and so did my breasts and stomach, but the crotch portion wasn't budging. It was locked on tight.

"I said NOW!" the guard demanded.

"But I don't know how to . . ."

He walked over and grabbed me right between the legs and squeezed and the gegrothin relaxed it's hold on me.

The guard let go of me and I quickly finished removing the gegrothin, tossing it in the laundry chute.

"Stupid woman," the guard said to me. "Didn't your mommy ever teach you how to undress? I bet you never wore a gegrothin before in your whole life."

I suppose that was true, but I never took one off a woman before either, so how was I to know that you had to squeeze the crotch to get it to release?

I pulled off my bikini top and threw it in the laundry chute.

"Over there with the others," the guard said gesturing with his rifle.

I hurried over into a crowd of young naked women.

"Oh, oh!" a brunette said waving at me. "Another princess!"

She and two other girls, one a blonde, and one a redhead, hurried over to greet me.

I realized their bodies were identical to mine, except the hair color was different on two, but that brunette could have been my twin sister now. These were the other three women that went with me to get body swaps. We all got basically the same clone princess models.

"Hi," I said. "I'm Jeanette."

The girls giggled.

"Don't get used to your name too long," the blonde said. "You'll be assigned a new one once you're sold."

"I'm already sold," the brunette boasted adding. "To a man named Guron
Harrkar. I was sold on video auction just last night. My new name's Lacey. See this pink earring? It's the receipt. I'm not supposed to remove it though because I'm already sold, but you're the same princess model as I am, Jeanette, so why don't we play a fun game on the slave Lords and trade places? Nobody'll know except us girls. What do ya say?"

"Well I don't know . . . ," I said.

"Come on," Lacey urged. "You're just gonna be sold to some other creep anyway. What's the difference to you or me? It'll be our little joke on the slavers, okay?"

I guess it really didn't make any difference. Plus it would save me from the humiliation of being placed on an auction block in front of bunch of strange men.

"Okay," I agreed and Lacey took off her earring and put it on me.

"Good," Lacey said laughing. "This'll be a fun trick, right?"

"Sure," I shrugged.

"Okay, slaves," a guardsman said. "When we land the facilities at the auction will be limited, so . . . bathroom line, NOW!"

Before I could react fast enough all the women rushed to the sides of the cargo bay and got lined up beside some bathroom doors.

I walked over to one of the lines while tugging gently on my new earring.

It felt weird to be wearing an earring. I'd never worn one before. It kind of just hung there and jingled a bit. I guess earrings must have been for more than just looks. It was probably kind of a girl's way of reminding herself of her pretty ears. The gentle pinching was indeed an almost constant reminder that an earring hung there on my right ear.

By the time I got in the bathroom I could hear the outer cargo bay doors opening and I realized we'd landed.

I hurried up so fast that I couldn't really react to the new sensations of using the bathroom in my new gender. I just did what I had to do and got out of there.

I saw the girls lining up to depart the ship down a ramp and into some hova-trucks.

Shawna walked past me and pulled one of the princess clones out of the line. It was the brunette one! Shawna must have thought Lacey was me!

The two walked back past me and I heard Shawna say to Lacey,"Shut up.
No questions. I'm saving your ass, now be quiet and come with me."

Lacey turned back and looked right at me and gasped with a wide eyed expression of shock and confusion and she turned back around and followed Shawna back to the elevator.

I reached up and tugged on my earring, realizing Shawna must have seen it on me and determined immediately that I was the other brunette princess clone.

Shawna was going to take Lacey back to Gamma Station . . . They were going to swap the wrong princess clone into my old body!

"You there!" a guardsman said jabbing me in the ribs with his rifle barrel. "Where do you think you're going? You're already sold, now get down that ramp and into that car over there."

I walked down the cargo ramp and out onto the dirt. Bright artificial sunlight beamed down from anchor pods under a gray rock roof some two or three hundred feet above me.

A green scaled Ventrusian man grabbed me by the arm and shoved me in the back seat of a nearby hova-car and closed the door. He got in the front seat and pressed a button that locked the back doors.

"Who are you?" I asked.

He pressed another button and a steel divider quickly sealed off the front seat from the back.

I turned around and looked out the back window at all the other girls being marched into slave trucks. Marched right in the back of slave trucks as if those girls were cattle.

Then I turned back around as the hova-car took off.

From here on out, I guess I'm on my own, just like Shawna said.