The Beginning
January 3, 2007, early morning
“Time to get up, Teddy! Now, so you won’t be late for school,” I heard my mother yell from the doorway.
I groaned, “Uh, I don’t feel so well.”
She came up to the side of the bed. “Let’s have a look at you.” She pulled the covers off my face. “You look OK.” She put her hand on my forehead. “Not running a fever. You just have the back-to-school blues. I know, it’s tough going back to school after the Christmas break, but it’s something you have to do. Get up, now.”
The last word was said firmly without actually yelling it, so I started moving. By the time I was done with my morning routine upstairs, my breakfast was ready and waiting for me, and Dad was already gone to work. I scarfed down my food, and after another time reminder from Mom, found my schoolbag and got ready to head out to meet the bus.
As usual, Mom met me at the door and kissed me goodbye. What wasn’t usual was that I suddenly felt very disoriented, so much so that I fell down.
“Teddy, when people say I’m a real knockout they don’t mean it literally!” Mom said with a laugh. Then, with a more serious tone, “Are you alright?”
“Yeah, I think so. But everything was very confusing for a moment there. It seemed like I was seeing two different things at once - seeing you and also seeing myself, somehow. But it’s back to normal now.”
“OK, then, hurry to catch the bus!”
And I left. Mom walked out to the street and watched me all the way to the end of the block, but nothing else happened on the way to the bus.
My day at school was ordinary enough. I got homework from almost every class. I think it was the teachers’ way of trying to make us remember what school is like after the long break. Half a year of eighth grade to go and then I’ll be in high school.
January 3, 2007, afternoon
On the way out to the buses after school, I saw my girlfriend Kelly just ahead of me, headed to her own bus, so I took a small detour to go visit with her. I knew I had a good ten minutes before my bus left, and I intended on using most of it.
“Hey, Kelly!”
“Hey, Teddy.”
“I didn’t see you all day. Good to know you’re not sick or something.”
“It seemed like I was having to rush everywhere today just to get places on time.”
“Yeah, I know how that is, sometimes. But the school day’s over!” I punched my fist in the air, then pulled her toward me to kiss her. Just a quick, simple kiss was all I intended.
That is when it happened again. This time, I was holding Kelly for the kiss and used her to keep balance when I started seeing double. I also noticed there was more to it. For about ten seconds after I kissed her, I was simultaneously seeing what I should be seeing, and what Kelly was seeing. At the same time, I felt what Kelly should have been feeling, too - at least, feeling what had to be Teddy leaning against “me” and with his arm on “my” back. The fact that I was using her to support myself had to be obvious to her.
“Teddy, are you alright?”
“Yeah. Something weird happened, though.”
“Weird how?”
“For a moment I was seeing myself, as if from your perspective.”
“That’s weird, all right,” Kelly said with a chuckle. “Are you back to normal now?”
“Yeah. I’m not sure how that happened,” I lied. Well, not totally a lie. I didn’t know how it worked, but I figured it had something to do with the kissing, since when the same thing happened this morning it was right after Mom’s kiss. “But I’ll try to be careful in case it happens again.”
“All right. You do that. I gotta go get on the bus,” Kelly said, and waved as she walked off.
I headed to my own bus, trying to think about how this could be possible. How could it be that I could steal a glimpse from another person’s vision as well as their sense of touch after kissing them? I continued thinking about this during the bus ride, and I was so absorbed in this thought that I almost missed my stop. I came to realize where I was just in time, as the other neighborhood kids were standing to get off the bus at my stop.
“Hi, Mom, I’m home!” I shouted as I entered the house.
“Hi, Teddy. How was your day at school today?”
“Boring. A lot of homework. A pretty normal day, until I met Kelly going out to the buses after school. Then it happened again.”
“What happened?”
“The thing that happened here in the doorway this morning. I kissed Kelly and then for a moment I was seeing what she was seeing, and I think feeling what she was feeling, too. I didn’t fall down this time, but only because I leaned against her.”
“Really? When you kissed her? Do you think it has something to do with kissing?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. But she had to go catch her bus, so I didn’t get a chance to test it.”
“Let’s go sit on the couch and test it,” Mom said. “If you aren’t struggling to keep your balance, maybe you can learn more about what is going on.”
We sat down on the couch, turned to face each other, and kissed like we often did when she wanted to kiss me goodbye.
“Is it happening?” Mom asked.
“Yes. I am definitely seeing you at the same time that I am seeing my face from your perspective.”
“Close your eyes.
I did so. “Oh, that’s better. Now I am just seeing me. With my eyes closed.”
“Like in the They Might Be Giants song? How does that one go?”
Before I could think of it, the effect ended, and I opened my eyes so I could see normally again. But shortly after that I remembered.
“It’s from ‘Dead,’ the song where they die and come back to life as a bag of expired groceries. ‘I’ll never see myself in the mirror with my eyes closed,’ they sing. But I don’t need a mirror and I did see myself with my eyes closed.”
“Yes, that’s the song I was thinking of. Is the effect over now?”
“Yeah. Back to normal.”
“You said you felt what Kelly was feeling, too? Did you feel anything special this time?”
“No, but maybe there wasn’t anything special to feel.”
“All right, let’s try it again. We’ll kiss, both close our eyes, and I will do something you should be able to feel.”
I puckered up, closed my eyes, and Mom kissed me. She pulled away, and I could see her vision of the television as she turned that way before she closed her eyes.
A few seconds passed. “Mom!” I shouted when I realized what she was doing.
“What was I doing?”
“You were playing with your boobs!”
“Yes. I put one hand inside my bra, held my breast, and played with the nipple. What did that feel like for you?”
“It felt like I had boobs and was playing with them.”
“Even though you, quite clearly, do not have boobs.”
I put my hand to my chest - my real one - and there were definitely no boobs there. “Yes. No boobs.”
“Teddy, I can only think of one reasonable explanation for this. You have a special power.”
“Power? Powers like that are real? I thought that kind of thing was only fantasy.”
“We try to let the world believe that. But in Normal, things aren’t always so normal. A long time ago, a meteor landed in Normal, and ever since then, every so often somebody here develops some kind of special power.”
“Really? How many people in Normal have special powers?”
“I don’t know the exact number. Hundreds. NANA keeps a registry, and after you get to know more about how your power works, I’ll take you there.”
“Which Nana? Yours or Dad’s?”
“Neither. It’s the Normal Always Normal Association, NANA for short. They sponsor various kinds of events in the town, normal things. But they also help keep track of people with special powers who they can call on in an emergency, or when somebody decides to use their powers for evil.”
“Oh, right. That NANA. Pretty sneaky. How many people know they do this?”
“Most of the adults in the town do. I would have told you within a few years even if you didn’t get powers. But it’s hush-hush. We don’t talk about it, don’t say anything where outsiders could find out.”
“Do you know any of these people with special powers?”
“Well, I have one.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. It’s pretty minor. I can make fire, but it’s pretty small. I’m registered with NANA as Sparky, but I don’t expect them to ever call on me for anything, since anybody can carry a lighter in their pocket to do this.”
Mom demonstrated for me that she could make a flame about like a cigarette light come out of her fingertip.
“How did you find out you could do that?”
“I... had some trouble setting some stuff on fire when I was a teenager. Not too much trouble, because even uncontrolled, I only made little flames like the one I just showed you, but I set my clothes and my bed on fire a few times. Eventually I learned to control the fire and only make it when I wanted to.”
“And how did you learn to control it?”
“Practice. First, I had to figure out how to make it happen intentionally, since when it first started happening, it just happened when I was excited or angry about something. Once I did that, I could sort of feel where the power was coming from, and I could avoid activating it just as well as I could activate it when I wanted. It became just another thing I can do, like talking or riding a bike. With your ability, you already figured out how to activate it, though you may need to explore the limits of that activation. You need to learn what you can do with the power and its limits. Can you make it last longer? How much of a person’s sensations can you receive while the power is active? Can you control the body of a person you have used it on? Can you read their thoughts? Can you let another person see and feel what you do? Can you use it on more than one person at a time? Can you use it on animals or inanimate objects?”
“Yuck! Kissing animals?”
“You might kiss a pet, if you really loved it.”
“I guess so. Do you think my power might actually do all those things?”
“It’s always hard to tell with powers. You can only test them, experiment with them, and try different things to see what works. NANA can also help you test them further.”
“Does Dad have powers too?”
“No, but he knows about my power.”
Soon, Dad was home, and Mom told him about what happened to me today.
“Well, that’s an interesting power, son. I guess we’ll have to call you the Kissing Bandit.”
“Ugh, Dad, no. Even though that might be a good description of my power, I don’t think I want to be called that.”
“Well, you’re going to need a code name when you register. I know there was some actual Kissing Bandit historically. Maybe you can research that and take a nickname from whoever that was.”
“Maybe. I’ll look into it.”
When I did look into it, I discovered that there were several people referred to as the Kissing Bandit. The earliest (apart from general usage of the term to describe people who “stole kisses”) was an actual thief, a woman named Edna Murray who was also nicknamed Rabbit. There was also Morganna, a woman who ran onto the field during baseball games to kiss players. And Richard Dawson, the host of Family Feud for many years, was also called a Kissing Bandit. There were a few other kissing bandits as well, male and female, real and fictional, but none of them seemed to provide good code names.
Mom stopped by, and when I suggested the code name Rabbit, she said, “That name’s probably taken.”
“Are there people who get powers that let them hop around?”
“Yes. There are also people who develop an odd appearance, like having rabbit ears.”
“How come I’ve never seen any of these people?”
“That’s actually what I came to talk to you about. One of the founders of NANA cast a spell over the town, which is still maintained today by residents with magical powers. The spell hides any unusual appearance of residents with powers from anybody who hasn’t been told about the secret of NANA and the powers people have in Normal. So you might start seeing some of your schoolmates look odd.”
“Oh, well that’s probably important to know.”
“If you do, act normally around them. Remember that most of your classmates at this age will not know. But if you have the chance to speak to one of them privately, you can let them know you can see whatever it is and tell them about your power.”
And the next day I did see one with blue skin. I didn’t get to talk to him, though.
Testing
Over the next week, each evening Mom had me spend an hour testing my ability in different ways, with a bunch of testing over the weekend as well.
By making extra-long kisses, extra-sloppy kisses, and dry-mouth kisses, I learned that my power seemed to be connected to making contact with another person with saliva present at the point of contact. Completely dry kisses didn’t work. Spitting on someone from a distance didn’t work, but spitting and then touching the spit, even with another body part like my hand, would activate the power. Licking my hand and then touching with the wet hand also worked. And the more saliva, the longer and more intense the power. My first kisses were practically dry and that is why the power lasted for such a short time.
With a big, wet, slobbery kiss, the power could last for a good chunk of an hour, I got all of their normal senses, and I could control that person’s body to a limited degree. I could not read their thoughts, nor project thoughts to them. It was difficult, but with some practice I learned to manage multiple bodies while my power was in use. It was like learning how to walk all over again. I still couldn’t do much, but I could stand both bodies and walk with one without either falling over.
The power worked on men as well as women, but not on dogs or plants. It needed to be something humanoid, I guessed. This explained why my power didn’t activate on every bit of food I ate (which would have been super-creepy).
At the mall, I kissed a mannequin in a store, and the mannequin turned into a living person. I had full control of the body even with a minimal amount of saliva. I could move her, but I tried not to so as to avoid making it obvious to anybody who didn’t know. Would the spell hide it from them? I did move her a little to test it. I didn’t have the full movement of a normal body, only the movements the mannequin would otherwise make. The arms swiveled, but didn’t swing outward like a person’s arms. Which was fine, because I didn’t want the mannequin to end up in some different position where it would be obvious I’d moved it with powers. So I basically had her “play statue” until the effect wore off, at which point she turned back into a normal mannequin.
The concept of a statue gave me an idea. I knew where there was a statue in the park, so I tried the same thing there. And it worked. Interestingly, the clothes on the statue did NOT change. So I was standing there in what was basically bronze armor. With no other clothes under it. Cold and hard, and basically immobile. Fortunately, with my small kiss, the effect did not last long.
The next step was to make my own. How realistic did it need to be? I would find out. I laid out some of my clothes on my bed, and stuffed them with pillows, towels, sheets, socks, etc. A volleyball inside a shirt served as the head, with the rest of the shirt stuffed down inside the other shirt which covered the mannequin’s torso. The head-shirt was one which had Benjamin Franklin’s face on it from a $100 bill. It was the shirt I owned which had the closest to life-sized face printed on it. Life-sized for a person, not a C-note, of course.
When I finally had a whole body formed, I kissed it. And it came to life, briefly. So then I gave it a good, long, wet kiss, spitting as much saliva onto it as I could. Even after the body came to life, I kept adding more until my own mouth was dry.
The new body did not look like Ben Franklin. It actually looked like me. I stood up with the new body, came over to my old body, and carefully got both bodies lined up to look in the mirror. And yes, we were spitting images. Ha, ha, “spitting.” I bet whoever invented that phrase never thought it could be this literal. The clothes I had put on the body, which basically served as its skin to hold in all the stuffings, now actually were skin - the new body was naked. So after I clothed it, I took both bodies out to show my family.
My folks are pretty bright, so they figured out what I had done after only a moment, but it was still a surprise that the other body came out looking so much like me. That definitely wasn’t true of the mannequin and statue, which stayed looking like the people they represented. In particular, the mannequin had definitely been a girl, with boobs. Maybe this constructed body didn’t really represent anybody, and so by default it took my form.
After a while, the second me turned back into a pile of clothes, and I brought it back to life again just long enough to let it walk back to my room. Or to let me walk it back there. Whatever. It was a successful test and I would do more later, but I was done for the day.
On other days I experimented with fuller kisses, and I got a longer lasting effect and a stronger feel for the other body’s senses when I gave it a big, slobbery kiss instead of just a little peck. The more saliva in contact with me and the target, the longer and stronger the effect. There seemed to be a limit, though. An amount of saliva roughly equivalent to what I got by licking my hand from wrist to fingertip with a wet tongue and applying that to the person or mannequin was what I needed to get the maximum ability.
Telling
January 12, 2007
I didn’t intentionally kiss Kelly during that week, but when she wanted to kiss I did. And my practice allowed me to do it without losing my balance.
Friday evening my parents invited Kelly’s family over for dinner, so it was one of those occasions where we put the leaf in the dining room table and set up extra chairs so there was room for everybody.
After Mom served all the food, but before we started eating, she spoke.
“I want to explain why I invited everybody over today. Who can see what I am doing that’s unusual right now? Raise your hands.”
Mom was holding up her finger with the flame above it, and as people saw the flame, everybody but Kelly raised their hands.
“What am I missing?” Kelly asked.
“That’s what we are here to rectify tonight,” Mom explained.
She went on to talk about the deal with NANA and the meteor and powers like she had with me, ending with, “And the reason we are doing this now, Kelly, is that Teddy has used his power on you unintentionally and is likely to do it again, and we think in all fairness that you should know.”
“What’s your power, Teddy?”
“Remember when I got dizzy after I kissed you last week out by the buses?”
“Yeah.”
“That was only the second time I had ever activated my power. It activates on kissing.”
“And your power is to make yourself dizzy?”
“No. It lets me see what another person is seeing, and feel what they are feeling. I get their other senses, too. But I am still getting sensations from my own body, too, and the same time, so when I first did it, it was very confusing. I’ve been practicing with it on my family, though, and I can use it now without making myself dizzy.”
“Wow! How weird!” Then after a pause, Kelly added, “Just how much of their senses do you get?”
“Everything. Some of the senses can be pretty dim though.”
“And how long does it last?”
“For the kiss we had, it was only the 5 or 10 seconds until I was in control of myself again. But it varies. It seems to be dependent on saliva. The more saliva, the longer and stronger the effect. In the stronger versions I can also control the body, to a limited extent. So I’m not going to kiss you again unless you’re OK with it.”
After a long pause, she said, “It’s a little creepy, but I’m OK with it. Just don’t try to get all slobbery with me.”
“OK, that’s reasonable. Thanks, Kelly.”
And I did kiss her, a simple peck that got me a few seconds of her sight. With that done, we all went about eating dinner.
Other Bodies
After my success with constructing a body, Mom encouraged me to try to construct other bodies that wouldn’t come out as a duplicate of mine. If I tried to make the body taller, shorter, fatter, etc., it had the same effect, but to a much lesser degree, in the resulting person, which was still basically me. And this worked up to a point, after which it seemed that the body was too nonhuman and I couldn’t animate it at all. It seemed that below about 2 feet tall (which led to a 3-foot person) it didn’t work. Did that mean I couldn’t animate babies? Or was it because it was trying to come out as me and was too different? Some of my toys were humanoid figures, but none of them that tall, and kissing them didn’t seem to do anything.
So I stuck with the stuffed clothes body. As another way of making a person who was not me, Mom suggested making it female, and gave me one of her bras, and I stuffed some rolled-up shirts inside the torso-shirt to fill it. That worked a little. The animated body was still me, still fully male down below, but with breasts. So I tried some other things. I made a body with 3 arms. With no arms. Two heads. A tail. All of these cases worked and produced bodies with the appropriate features, except the armless one which still had two arms, and when I tried one without arms and legs, torso-boy was apparently not human enough to animate.
So Mom next suggested I make the body have a vagina. With the jeans fly open, a paper towel tube stuck inside, and a thing on the end, the vulva, that Mom helped me construct, I animated this new body. It still had my face, but was now fully female. This was actually the first time I was looking at live female genitals, as opposed to pictures, and they were on “my” body. Mom did a brief examination and said that the parts looked correct to the extent she could tell, and that it would take a doctor to tell whether they were right all the way inside. But this still wasn’t what I wanted to do, which was to make a body that wasn’t just an altered version of me.
Mom suggested, “Maybe it is coming out as you because you used your clothes as the body’s skin.”
“Could be. That could explain why it didn’t happen for the mannequin or the statue.”
So I took the whole thing apart and rebuilt it using Mom’s clothes she loaned me for this purpose, and this let me make a copy of Mom. I could make a copy of Dad this way too. If I mixed and matched clothing, then it seemed to pick one person - maybe whoever had the “most” clothes serving as skin, though it was difficult to measure that in some close cases. It was certainly true if I just swapped in one sock from a different person. And when it came out as Mom, I didn’t need to put in my makeshift vagina to make it come out with girl parts. What I saw led me to conclude that any body part not well defined in the mannequin came out in the standard form for whatever person it was.
So the next thought was what would happen if we used nobody’s clothes. Or nobody I knew, anyway. Mom went out and bought several outfits worth of clothes: a set of new, never-worn girl clothes; another set of girl clothes from Goodwill that were worn, probably by different girls, but we did not know who; a set of boy clothes from Goodwill in my size, and a set of boy clothes from Goodwill that were too small for me.
I used the new girl clothes first, and this time, a body formed of a girl none of us knew. I got the same body with the thrift store clothes, so this was not likely a girl who had touched something in the store, but another sort of default character. The boy clothes in my size gave my body, but the small ones gave some other boy. We concluded that the boy clothes that fit me were the only ones that could be considered my clothes for the purposes of my power.
Mom also bought several pillows for me to use for stuffing, instead of the various things I had been using, so that we could have our towels back for drying ourselves off after showers, etc. She cut open some of them lengthwise and sewed the edges shut to make two narrow pillows out of each one, for use in stuffing arms and legs. She got enough stuff for me to make two bodies, with the intent that I would eventually practice animating both of them at the same time, and if I ever reached the point where I could do that well, she might get more.
“Really, Mom? You think I’ll be able to control three bodies well at the same time? I’m having enough trouble controlling myself and one animated body.”
“Some people improve their skills with practice. So I want you to practice. The ability to control multiple bodies is a rare and powerful one, and I think it is the most valuable skill you have shown.”
“All right. I do find the idea interesting, though it feels weird when I’m animating a body that isn’t mine.”
“Definitely practice that. Being comfortable in bodies that are not just a copy of yours will help when you are controlling another live person’s body, as well as when you want to use an animated body as a disguise.”
I protested that I didn’t want to be a girl, but Mom said if I ever wanted to go possess a girl’s body for some reason, I’d want to know how to walk and act like a girl. So I went along with it. It was, after all, fun kissing her.
So I did. I started animating a body after school each day, and keeping it going for as long as a single large sloppy kiss could last. At first this was about 15 minutes. After about a week of this, the short sessions were frustrating, and I started recharging a second or third time each day. I quickly learned the signs of impending deanimation, and usually tried to kiss my other self before he or she deanimated. Kissing Trixie and even kissing Jack (the names I came up with for the unknown girl and boy) was nicer than kissing the deanimated cloth body, and it worked just as well. On weekends I would do extended practice, two to three hours a day when the weekday sessions were less than an hour.
February 10, 2007
An interesting thing we discovered was that the animated bodies got hungry and thirsty. It seemed that each character (the other me, the other Mom, the other Dad, Jack, and Trixie) had a body clock that only advanced while that character was animated. If I’d used the same one all the time, I probably would have noticed it in a week, but as it was, it was more like a month before, on one Saturday, I started noticing how thirsty Trixie was. She had probably been used the most because of Mom’s encouragement for me to try using female bodies, since I kinda felt like her body belonged to me. It was a little weird walking around in Mom’s body, so I did that less.
Mom suggested that Trixie should drink some water, like any normal person would. She figured that the worst that would happen would be that the water would get her stuffing wet when she de-animated, and the best was nothing would happen besides Trixie quenching her thirst. The latter was what happened. Eventually my characters got hungry and so they ate food, too.
Mom guessed that the fact that my characters were drinking and eating meant that they would also have to go to the restroom and have ... other bodily functions, though naturally it was a while before that happened. So, later the same day that Trixie drank for the first time, Mom sat down with Trixie for a “private” talk. Of course, Trixie was me, but Mom said it wouldn’t feel right to have this particular talk with anybody but a girl. Mom explained Trixie’s girl anatomy, and made me really examine it. For the first time, I was touching girl parts. She showed me the correct way to wipe Trixie’s body in the bathroom, and she also explained about periods and sex. Of course, Dad had already had the sex talk with me, but it was different being a girl and having the potential to get pregnant. (How would that work, I wondered? Would I have to keep Trixie animated for nine whole months? And would the baby be flesh and blood, or would I have to animate that too? I didn’t plan on figuring this out for a good long while, if ever, but it was something to consider.) Mom also talked about things like the proper way for a girl to sit in a skirt, how to apply makeup, and some other stuff about clothes. Basically it was like having to learn how to be a human being all over again.
It was during her session the next day that Trixie had to pee. The pressure associated with that need felt much the same as it did in my (Teddy’s) male body. And after Trixie sat down on the toilet, the way I had to release the pee was almost the same. The biggest difference, of course, was that Trixie had no penis, and some of the pee splashed against her body. Gross. Trixie had peed on herself. But Mom had explained this is normal. Girls pee on themselves all the time. Fortunately, most of the pee went down in the bowl, and with a couple wipes with toilet paper, Trixie’s girl parts were dry.
After this event, I started focusing mainly on animating Trixie and Jack, since it was clear that they had ongoing lives for which time only elapsed while they were animated, and it would probably be better if they got to live a little more often. I was not comfortable yet keeping multiple characters animated, so doing that meant eliminating the other characters who were copies of my family. With this change, I had each character animated about 5-6 hours a week, so about once a week each character would eat a meal with the family.
Kelly Visits
February 17, 2007
It had been normal for me, before I found my power, to invite Kelly over to the house on weekends sometimes. After discussing it with my parents, in mid-February was the first time I invited her over since I developed my power. Shortly after she arrived, I introduced her to Trixie. “You can think of me as Teddy’s sister if that’s easier for you, but I’m really Teddy,” I had Trixie say.
“You took control of your sister?”
“No, I created my ‘sister’,” I explained, with air quotes. “Before I kiss her, she’s more like my ‘brother’ is now,” which I explained by retrieving and showing her Jack’s un-animated body, then kissing it to make him briefly be alive.
“So when you kiss a person, you take control of their body for a little while, but when you kiss one of these life-sized dolls, it comes to life?”
“Yes. It comes to life, as a part of me. Trixie and Jack don’t have any minds or personalities apart from me. Everything they do is something I am doing with their bodies.”
Then, as Trixie, I continued, “And Mom wants me to learn to be more comfortable using other bodies. Part of that includes learning how to be a girl. So please comment on anything I do that looks too much like what a guy would do. If I don’t just completely ignore my powers, I will have bodies out in the world at some time, and if I do, I need to be able to act like a completely believable girl.”
“That’s OK, I guess,” Kelly responded. “I can help you learn to be a girl, as long as you are also the Teddy I love.”
And she hugged Trixie. This was my first girl-girl hug. “It feels interesting having boobs pressing on boobs,” Trixie said, “Even though we are both still quite small compared to most adult women. I can only imagine what that’s like for two women like my mom.”
Three times during that visit I took Trixie aside and privately had a big slobbery kiss with her to keep her active, before I let her drop. Kelly was a little jealous of this at first, but when I reminded her that this was keeping Trixie alive, and promised her that I didn’t look at Trixie as a girlfriend the way I did for Kelly, she seemed to get over it.
Trixie and Kelly managed to talk about a lot of girl stuff for the two hours that lasted, and I was exhausted (both of keeping Trixie alive as well as of the girl talk).
Continued Practice
As time went on, the length of an animation extended. By the start of March, the long sloppy kiss that got me only 15 minutes animation when I started was giving me about 40 minutes. Each weekday I was doing three sessions for about 2 hours of animation of one character, and several hours on weekends. By the start of April, I got an hour a charge, and by the start of May, an hour and a half.
Since my characters peed, it was natural to expect that they would poop also. With them each only around a few hours a week, it took more than a month of regular summonings before they did. But both Jack and Trixie did, and the urge to do so felt pretty much the same as it did for Teddy. The actual act was the same also. The down side of having two extra bodies was that I now had to poop and clean up butts for 3 bodies. At least the others did so rarely.
It was in March when I realized my characters needed to be washed. It was the same as any person, really; you accumulate sweat and dirt and whatever even doing normal things. They had been alive a few days each at this point without being washed, and that is what it took for us to notice the smell. I tried this in two ways: by having the animated character shower and by washing the clothes and such that held together the deanimated figure. Both ways seemed to work, but it was less work for me to have the character shower. You might think that it was easier to just throw some things in the washing machine, but it was actually more work disassembling and reassembling my creations. It felt weird at first, showering a body that wasn’t my own, especially a female body, but I got used to it. This also helped me to learn more about the sensitivity of a female body, since I had to touch all parts of it.
I also started animating one character in the morning before school. This character would stay behind and do things at the house, but mainly it was a test of how well I could control a body from a distance. The feelings and vision were no problem at all, but the actual control was harder at first. Once I had that working well, I mostly used this time to have Jack or Trixie do chores for me, cleaning my room, taking my laundry (and theirs; they each had multiple outfits now) down to the laundry room, and late in the school year, when they lasted longer, actually running a wash load and folding the dried clothes and putting them away. Before the charge lasted long enough for Jack or Trixie to finish these tasks, this had always been an evening or weekend chore for me.
By the start of May, this meant that my two characters were collectively animated for 6 hours each weekday and typically 9 hours each weekend day, or 48 hours a week. So Trixie and Jack each lived one full day each week. This time continued to increase.
In the first week of June was the first time that I still had a character animated (it was Jack) when my bedtime came. He had been up from 4 to 10.
“Bedtime, Teddy,” Mom reminded me as she passed where I was sitting.
“But Jack’s still up.”
“Wow, you are really improving your charge times. You just charged him three times tonight?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I guess you and Jack can both go to bed.”
About that time, Jack fell over and became a lump of clothes and stuffing, which ended that discussion. I took him to my room and went to bed. But the next night it happened with Trixie again, and she didn’t deanimate, so I walked both bodies to bed.
I wasn’t really sure how to put Trixie to bed. I only had one twin-sized bed. Normally the deanimated bodies just lay on the floor beside my bed, one on top of the other. I tried having Trixie lie down on top of Jack’s deanimated body, but it wasn’t very comfortable. Finally, I just decided to share the bed. Trixie did not have any pajamas, and anyway it was warm in June, so I just had her strip to her bra and panties, and we crawled into bed next to each other. She was only there a few minutes, and deanimated before I fell asleep, but it was a plan.
This became a regular ritual the rest of the school year, and eventually I did fall asleep before the other body lost animation. Even in bed, though, I never really felt comfortable going to sleep as Trixie, though. When I commented to Mom about that, she said it was probably because girls shouldn’t wear their bras to bed. Another girl lesson learned.
She bought Trixie a nightgown the next day, and I changed her into it each time before she went to bed. Some people would have thought it was weird to have her change while I was in the room, and I wouldn’t have had Trixie strip in front of other boys, but she is me and it felt perfectly normal to me to have her changing clothes in front of me. I see what she sees. I would see her naked anyway while she was changing, even if she was in another room. Although I kissed her with big wet kisses all the time, I didn’t lust after her. She wasn’t the object of my sexual desire; she was just me. For the same reason, though it felt a little odd to be in bed with her, it didn’t feel weird in the way a brother and sister would feel weird sharing a bed.
I kept inviting Kelly every 2nd or 3rd Saturday after her first visit, and later on, every Saturday that Kelly was available, and soon I was able to keep Trixie around for the full time of her visit. After a point, though, Kelly pointed out to me how training Trixie was getting in the way of our own relationship, so we agreed on a compromise. Half of each visit Kelly spent with Trixie, and half just with me. So every visit, Trixie got more lessons in being a girl. By June, I felt confident Trixie could interact with society and be seen as a normal girl. At the same time, I was practicing only doing those girl things with Trixie’s body, so as not to give away my dual nature when using Jack or my own body.
Summer
Over the summer, while school was out, every day was like a weekend. I did extensive training with both Trixie and Jack, including starting to animate both at the same time and control all three bodies independently and simultaneously. It was not as hard as I thought it would be, so I quickly started keeping them both going full time, except I dropped one of them at the last recharge of the day to avoid having to go to bed with all three of them. There really wasn’t room for three in my bed.
Dad helped me solve the bed problem in July by buying a full size bed and a bunk bed frame to suspend the existing twin bed above the new bed. Then Trixie slept in the bunk while Jack and I slept below. I could have arranged my three bodies in any combination but this provided Trixie with the partial privacy that would have seemed right for a sister forced to share a room with her brothers. If I had to put my bodies to bed with anybody present who didn’t know they were all me, it would seem right. It also meant that she could have a permanently girly bed, a small bit of the room that was just hers. I was still a boy, but the part of me that was Trixie wanted to be a little girly, I think, because of the training I’d been doing to make her act like a girl.
This made my room pretty crowded. As I started using Trixie and Jack more, Mom had bought them more clothes, still not what a normal boy or girl had, but it was enough that they had bought a wardrobe, a three-drawer dresser with a closet for hanging clothes above the drawers, just for Trixie and Jack’s clothes. This sat alongside my existing dresser, between a small built-in closet for my clothes on one side, and my computer desk on the other. Just past the computer desk was a cabinet where toys and games were kept. Practically every inch of wall space was occupied.
Mom encouraged me to start trying to do more, different things with Trixie and Jack, and in particular, social things with other people who didn’t know their special nature. It was no problem for Jack; I knew how to be a boy. I worried about acting as a girl in public, though. I asked Kelly to help Trixie meet other girls and do the things girls did socially. Because Kelly knew my secret, she was able to help steer activities in a way that wouldn’t take Trixie away from me for too long a time between charges. Although I had called her my sister when introducing her to Kelly, we now decided to call Trixie my cousin. This would be easier than trying to explain why I suddenly had a sister who was my age when I had never had one before.
Meanwhile, I (Teddy) took Jack out to meet my friends, also calling him a cousin. I knew how to act as a boy, so he fit in quickly. Secretly, I used Jack as an ally in games to give me an unfair advantage. Not too much of an advantage, because I couldn’t give away the secret, but a little, wherever I could reasonably pass it off as skill or good luck. It depended on the particular game what kind of an advantage I could get from him. But we had a lot of fun figuring out ways to make use of my ability in secret.
Trixie’s First Period
July 13, 2007
Trixie lived for a total of about 8 days in January through April, 4 days in May, and 6 days in June, but with me having no school and keeping her animated all day, she was going to live for about 20 days in July. It was around mid-July that Trixie started her first period. Mom had explained this in her talks with Trixie months ago, so when I saw the small blood spot in Trixie’s panties one day, after momentarily being afraid that Trixie was hurt, I quickly realized what it was. Trixie carried a small purse with makeup and some other things, and this included one of what I’d learned was called a panty liner, a very thin absorbent pad with a peel-off backing that allowed it to stick to the inside of her panties. This was a short-term solution to the problem. Trixie was at another girl’s house when she discovered this, so she just used the pad for the time being, but when she went home for her next recharge, she talked to Mom about it.
Mom was proud that I’d been so calm about it; apparently most girls really freak out about this. Maybe my multiple nature had helped the other parts of me calm her down; I did recall a scared feeling when I first saw the blood. Mom showed me her supply of thicker pads and also tampons. Mom and Trixie had talked about tampons before, which was a really weird thing to me, sticking this thing inside Trixie’s body in a spot I didn’t even have. But now Mom helped Trixie insert her first tampon, gave her a couple to keep with her, and told her that these things were free to take as needed.
Experimenting with Bodies
When I wasn’t out doing those things, I was experimenting with bodies. I wondered what it would be like to build bodies out of other substances. What would it take, for instance, to build a wooden or metal body? Dad showed me how to use his tools, and I caught on pretty quickly. After some experimentation, I decided it would take too long to make a good wooden body. But I could get flat pieces of metal and coil them into body, arm, and leg shapes, and a few holes drilled through the overlap would let me use nuts and bolts to hold them together.
Those coils alone were not enough to make a whole body, though. There were pre-made corners for ducts which, in small sizes, made good shoulder joints, and in the next size larger, hip joints. The top of the shoulders was a carefully cut flat plate, with little projecting bits that folded over to bolt onto the torso. I got a spherical enclosure meant for a light fixture to use as the head, and devised a way to attach it to the torso. It took me about a month to get all this together, and it turned out to be too stiff for me to put any clothes on other than pants, and mine were too small, so I left it “naked”. But I confirmed I could animate it. It was a different character when I did so, though; neither me nor Trixie nor Jack. He had an all-metallic body, including metal face parts, metal fingers and toes, and metal male genitals (he was, in fact, naked). All my clumsy bolt-joints either vanished or turned into nice, solid-looking ones when he was animated. I called him Tony, after another metal man, but mine was a far cry from his fancy metal suit. My guy could barely walk; I had not provided him with much mobility in his joints. It was a start, though. The mannequin in the store could move a little, in the way mannequin limbs moved. I supposed that I needed to figure out how to attach the parts with movable joints, which was a whole other level of construction.
Formal Testing
At one point that summer, Mom and Dad took me and a deanimated Trixie to a secret testing center where someone from NANA evaluated my abilities. They ran me through all kinds of tests, but I did not have most of the abilities these tests looked for. After I animated Trixie, they ran her through some of the same tests, including running the two of us through the same test and different tests at the same time. Then they performed some tests on the two of us together. We had also brought my animated metal man, but he wasn’t even able to do what a regular person could, so we didn’t spend long on that. Finally, they had me take control of a volunteer from the center, and they tested my level of control, they tested what I could see and hear and feel through the volunteer, and they tested control across a long distance (by driving me about a mile away from the center).
But except for regenerating from cuts faster than a normal person, and what they considered a pseudo-telepathic link between my different bodies, they didn’t really find that I had much in the way of powers beyond the obvious ones. If they called on me for something, it was either going to be to animate someone, to take control of a person who had been knocked out, or to be in two or more places at once to relay information where ordinary methods wouldn’t work.
And I did get the code name Dawson.
Ninth Grade
Keeping two characters animated seemed to make the duration of animations increase even faster. At the start of July an animation was lasting three hours and 10 minutes, but by the start of August, it was lasting almost five hours, and by the time school started in late August, it was six and a half hours. Mom had talked about sending Trixie and Jack to school if they were going to be around so much, but she didn’t, because I would have had to recharge them during school. But pretty soon I knew that would not be a problem.
While I was at school, Trixie and Jack stuck around the house and helped Mom with all kinds of chores, and even some cleanup of old junk that she just never seemed to find the time to work at. The time was easier to find when you had two helpers most of the day. But before long she ran out for things for them to do, and so they ended up just doing my regular chores.
By the end of September, Trixie and Jack’s animations were lasting 9 hours each, and if I charged them right before I left for the bus, they were still going when I got home, so now Mom started talking seriously about sending them to school.
“Mom, they’re all just me. They’re not going to learn anything more than I will. We’re going to end up with basically the same grades, and worse, they’ll probably think we’re cheating off each other because our work will be too similar.”
“You have shown the ability to learn things independently with each body at the same time, so I think you will be able to learn more things, and learn the things all of them study better. You can take different elective classes, so you can learn more things.”
“If you do try to enter them into school, they are going to ask for their previous records, and they won’t have any.”
“Friends in NANA can set up histories for them. It will look like they went to school elsewhere, and I’ll give them grades comparable to yours.”
Eventually we compromised and she decided to send Trixie to school, while Jack would remain at home with her. It took a couple weeks to set up all the records and get her enrolled, and by that time Trixie was lasting 10 hours on a charge. I would wake her up with a kind of normal kiss, then before we walked together to the bus, we would both go to our room to pick up our school things and I would give her and Jack each a full charge. This lasted until we got home, with a safe margin, at which time a second charge lasted well into sleeping time.
I was already taking the intro shop class, and they managed to get Trixie into an art class. The two of these together, along with higher-level classes I could take later, would help me learn more about modeling the human body and about using various kinds of tools to construct those models.
There was also a required gym class. Teddy and Trixie had gym at the same time, though the boys and girls in the class split into two separate groups supervised by different coaches. Having Trixie in this class wasn’t a bad thing - she was in good shape and reasonably athletic. But it did mean getting used to the girls’ locker room. Teddy had been around Trixie’s naked body plenty of times, but not around other naked girls. Due to their mental connection, Teddy could now see a room full of naked, showering girls after gym class every day. The problem with that was that Teddy was naked with a bunch of boys at the same time, and viewing those girls even a little gave Teddy an erection. So I avoided this by avoiding having either body look at any naked people as much as possible. This was every teenage boy’s dream, but I had to ignore it.
School also meant Trixie got more clothes. Since she was going to be out where she would meet lots of other kids, she needed to have enough clothes that she wasn’t wearing the same five outfits every week. This meant that she needed her own separate wardrobe. I had to move my computer desk out into the middle of the room, with both wardrobes back-to-back behind it. I barely had room to get around in my room now. I had had the metal body project in my room, though I hadn’t really been working on it lately, but now this had to go out into the garage.
By Thanksgiving, I got 12 hours out of a full charge, so two charges a day kept them going round the clock. I didn’t ever have them drop out of animation unless I wanted them to. Fortunately, I had learned another trick: If I wanted to drop them out, all I had to do was give them a dry kiss. This reset their animation time to the minimum, and within a minute or two they would collapse into the stuffed clothes that they started as. This was handy if I just needed to get rid of one of them for a while, or wanted to animate a different body. Our Thanksgiving dinner was just the five of us, but even at that it was two more people than we would have had in past years, if nobody was traveling. All three of me helped a little preparing some of the food.
Jack did all my chores. He washed laundry for the three of us, helped Mom with the dishes and cooking, mowed, swept, vacuumed, whatever. I had gotten very good now with doing different things with each of my bodies independently, and this led to the result that I had a good amount of free time. Jack also had an identity, though he was supposedly being homeschooled. With two of me in actual school, he was easily able to pass the occasional tests required by the state for all homeschooled students.
Christmas Break
We had a big Christmas, and for the first time invited some of our out-of-town family to come and meet my new selves. I didn’t know until we were discussing plans for Christmas, but it turned out that several of my other relatives had minor powers, which they shared. We told them the truth about Trixie and Jack. The list of people who knew my secret now was Kelly, Mom’s NANA friends who set up our identities, the people at the testing center, and several aunts, uncles, cousins, and one grandmother.
I got a bunch of Christmas presents including some tools of my own, and all three of me got new clothes, but the biggest present was that Mom and Dad were going to add on to the house. They were going to put a new row of three rooms behind the house. Jack would get my old room, I would get a new room directly behind that which connected to a workshop that ran behind the garage, and Trixie would get the room across the hall from mine. This was going to be built over a period of three months, and there would be some disruption but it was for the best in the long run.
I suggested adding a bathroom, and they were able to get the plans modified to squeeze it in between my bedroom and Jack’s. Each of my boy bodies would get a little less space, but it was so much more than I had now that I didn’t care.
Testing Round 2
After the family left, but still during Christmas break, all three of me went back to the testing center. This time, they wanted to test how I was thinking, specifically whether my brain did all the thinking and Trixie’s and Jack’s just controlled basic motor functions, or if I actually thought with all three brains. So all three of us got skullcaps fitted with a variety of sensors roughly equivalent to an EEG, and they separated us and had us do different kinds of activities. They knew what normal brainwaves looked like for the particular kinds of activities they were having us do, and the activities were chosen specifically to make the patterns distinct. So at one point one of me was reading while another was playing a video game and the third was chopping wood. There were other activities as well (including “nothing” - just sitting in a plain white room with a chair and no other features) and we switched around, so two or all three of my bodies did some of the tasks at different times.
What they saw was that each brain primarily focused on the activity that body was doing, but there was also a constant background pattern associated with my telepathy, each of my bodies telling the others what it was experiencing, and there was also a sort of “playback” of the other bodies’ activities. They explained it as each brain was devoting a small amount of time to watching what the others were doing, and sometimes contributing brainpower to the others’ activities. I was using all three brains equally, with about 90% of each brain’s focus being on what that body was doing at the time. If one of them was doing nothing, that one contributed more to the other bodies’ activities. They also noted that all three brains were telepathic, and even when they sealed me in a telepath-proof room apart from the others, Jack and Trixie could communicate information telepathically while Teddy’s brain didn’t get it.
Finally, they did one more test, one I am surprised I hadn’t thought of: They had Jack and Trixie kiss other mannequins and people. It turned out that they had a very limited version of my power, equivalent in strength and duration to what I had during the first week I discovered it. The limitation here was blamed on not practicing it. I was never going to practice it on them to the extent that I used it myself - this would just lead to an ever-growing mob of too many mouths to feed - but I did resolve to have them practice it more. The people they animated were fully in the network; I could access them as much the one activating the person did. Because of this, there was not the disorientation that I experienced in my first week of power, because the whole network took charge of reading, and when appropriate, controlling the new person, and the network was very experienced in doing that. The practice consisted of letting Jack and Trixie animate each other once in a while. This was slow at first, but by the end of the first week, with them doing 2 or 3 sessions a day right before I was due to recharge them, they were giving half-hour animations. They indeed seemed to be gaining skill much like I did.
If my other selves had been more active socially, I might have already discovered this aspect of the power already, but Jack mostly stayed at home or around Mom, and I wasn’t ready for Trixie to be dating other boys. Or at least, I hadn’t been.
Dating Talk
That fall, a couple boys had asked Trixie out on dates, but I declined. I was conflicted on this. I knew that it was normal for a girl Trixie’s age to be dating, even if only in casual, innocent, dates that didn’t go beyond kissing. But I wasn’t sure I wanted any of me to be dating boys at all. I hadn’t originally wanted to be a girl at all. I only did so at first because Mom told me it would be good experience, and only later did I decide it was fun to have part of me be a girl. Over break, Trixie had a good long mother-daughter talk with Mom about this.
“Mom, some guys at school have asked me to go out on dates.”
“Well, I’m not surprised. You’re a nice looking young woman.”
“Yeah, but I’m not sure I want to be dating guys.”
“Do you want to be dating girls instead?”
“No! Well, maybe. It’s complicated. First off, although as Trixie I’m pretty comfortable being a girl, there is still a part of me that is Teddy, and that part of me has no interest whatsoever in dating guys. So maybe I should be dating girls.”
“Well on that count, you’re lucky. It’s more acceptable today for girls to date other girls, as well as for guys to date guys, than it has probably ever been. Gays and lesbians are still rejected by a certain part of society, but the part that accepts them is bigger than it has ever been, their right to not be discriminated against is being affirmed in more and more contexts, and we don’t tolerate abuse or hate speech against gays and lesbians in Normal. There are even some places that now allow people to marry other people of the same sex, though Normal is not one of those places.”
“Well, I’m a long way from that, but I’ll keep it in mind. Second, as Teddy I’m already dating Kelly. What will Kelly think when she finds out that another body I’ve created is dating somebody else? And will this be worse for her if that someone else is a guy or a girl?”
“Trixie, I know Kelly was acting as your being-a-girl coach, so you and Teddy should just talk it over with her. She might actually think that dating is the right next step for you, and she might even help you decide who you should date, or find someone who’s looking who she thinks is a good first date for you. But what I recommend is taking it slow, finding somebody you like who also likes you, and also someone you feel you can trust before you go out on a date with anybody. And feel free to give somebody a ‘maybe’ answer, and talk it over with your friends, but just don’t leave them hanging too long. If you can’t decide, just tell them that you’re not ready yet.”
“Hmm, maybe you’re right.”
“There’s a club at your school that you should be aware of. It’s called GLBTTQ which stands for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, transgendered, and queer.”
“I understand gay and lesbian, though it’s complicated in my case, but what about all the rest of that stuff? What does it all mean?”
“Bisexual is easy. It means a person who dates and/or is sexually attracted to both men and women. A transsexual is a person who changed their body from male to female or female to male to some degree, or who wants to change the gender of their body like this. A transgendered person doesn’t necessarily want to change their body, but they dress or act as the opposite gender. Queer used to be a mean name people called gays, but as I understand it, in the name of an organization like this it’s used to describe any person with gender or sexuality issues not described by one of these other categories.”
“What kind of person would that be?”
“In most of the world it probably means people who some combination of the terms applies to, or who haven’t made up their mind, or who change regularly. There are also asexual people, who just don’t have any sexual attraction to anybody, and genderless people, who don’t really consider themselves male or female.”
“OK, that all makes sense.”
“But I told you that powers sometimes change a person’s appearance. We have within Normal people with both male and female sexual organs, ones who change genders back and forth on a daily basis, and people who are really neither male nor female, not having any of the organs. What do gay, lesbian, transsexual, and transgendered mean for such a person? If the gender switcher likes women when he’s a man and likes men when she’s a woman, does that make that person bisexual or straight? I don’t know if there are any people like that in your school, but if there are, they would fall within this category. Other than you, that is; since you have male and female bodies, you are at least potentially in this category. It would be up to you to decide.”
“Thanks. I was wondering when I asked the question if I fell into the category.”
“There are even more words I have seen used to describe some of these people. One, which also applies to you right now, is questioning, which is generally for people who have been living as heterosexuals but are wondering whether that’s not really what they want to be. The club is for all these people, partly to help them defend one another against anybody who might want to harm them (though I told you that’s not tolerated in Normal), and partly because the nature of some of these people puts their potential mates in the same group.”
“OK, I see. But it is a lot to think about. So assuming Kelly is OK with it, what is the guy who I date going to think when he find out Teddy has to give me a big sloppy kiss twice a day to keep me alive? How could Trixie ever marry someone other than one of me? Maybe I should be dating my other selves; it would avoid that complication, even if it feels weird to basically be dating myself. But so far, the whole thing about any of my selves besides Teddy dating at all still feels weird to me. I’ll definitely ask Kelly, and see what she thinks about it, before I do anything else.”
“I agree. It’s complicated,” Mom replied. “You just figure out what feels right to you. There’s one more thing. How far have you and Kelly gone?”
“You mean like, what we do in private? We kiss and hug and cuddle. We touch some, but not private parts. We haven’t seen each other naked yet. We haven’t been doing anything you don’t see couples do in public sometimes.”
“You might talk to Kelly about some of that; she may be more interested in going farther in that direction than you realize, but take it slow and don’t do anything you don’t feel like you’re ready for. But I bring it up because you’re possibly going to have Trixie dating a high school boy, and some high school boys are kind of aggressive with that sort of behavior. They might touch you in ways you aren’t comfortable being touched, or try to get you to do things you don’t want to do, including sex.”
“Oh. I think you’ve got a point. I’ve been focusing so much on my power, even in my time with Kelly, that she and I haven’t really been dating much in the last year, unless you call what we do when she is hanging around the house dating.”
Matchmaking
January 12, 2008
After break, when I did explain the situation to Kelly, she was almost as conflicted about it as I was.
“You’re right, Trixie, that this is a complicated issue. I’ll tell you right off that it doesn’t feel weird that my boyfriend wants to date somebody else. Every girl thinks their boyfriend wants to date someone else, and many of them think that they are dating someone else, and some of those are right! For most people that’s just being unfaithful, but for you it’s a special case. You have other bodies and I understand that you might want to be able to have these experiences of being close to a person with your other bodies. It is also something society expects of girls Trixie’s age. Everybody at our school besides us doesn’t know that Teddy and Trixie are really one person, and those boys don’t know they are asking Teddy out when they are asking Trixie out. So no, I will not stand in your way if you want Trixie or even Jack to go dating other people, whether they are guys or girls. And I will help you find a date for Trixie if that is what you really want.”
“Thanks, Kelly. I am still not sure I want that, but I do trust you to help Trixie find the right guy, if that is what I decide to do. Of course, it doesn’t necessarily work that way, because guys usually expect to ask girls out.”
“But it can work. Let’s say I know a guy who I really like and trust, but I don’t want to date him only because I want to stay faithful to you, Teddy. If that guy asks me out, or if we’re together in some other social situation where the subject of dating comes up, I can drop the guy a hint that Trixie really likes him and that he should ask her out, and then I tell you to watch for that guy to invite you out on a date and to say ‘yes’ if he does.”
Using Teddy, I responded, “Oh, yeah, thinking about my experience as a guy, I can say that that might work. Maybe not right away, but it would make me look at the girl, anyway.”
Then as Trixie, “I’m going to give you a solid maybe.” She laughed. “Don’t actually do the hinting yet, but at least try to find a guy that you would recommend, and tell me about him first.”
“All right, I’ll do that. One more thing, though. I want another date with Teddy, first. Not because I’m jealous, but because we haven’t been out on a date in more than a year, since you got your power. We’ve grown, and high school kids have different expectations of dates than we did when we were in seventh grade and a ‘date’ was burgers and fries, with one of our parents as chaperone watching us from the next table.”
“Yeah, Mom mentioned something like that to me.”
“What? She’s been spying on us?”
“No, she asked me about how far we’ve gone, as part of a warning that any guy Trixie dates might want to go further. And I realized that, except for revealing my power to you, we haven’t really moved our relationship along since seventh grade.”
“I have a confession to make, Teddy. When you first asked me out, I accepted mostly out of peer pressure. All the other girls seemed to be going out on dates and getting boyfriends and I was worried I was going to be left out, so I jumped at the chance. I came to like you afterward, but I would have accepted a first date from just about any guy at that point.”
“Kelly, that’s actually kind of how it was for me, too. I had actually asked three other girls before you but they were all dating other guys. But I’m glad now that we started dating, because I really like you.”
We kissed, though I kept it simple and dry to avoid taking control of Kelly’s body. And I made the kind of move I thought Mom was suggesting. With one arm around her back, I put the other hand between us, turned so the palm was on her breast. She didn’t stop me, and only seemed to push against me more. When she later pulled my hand off her breast, I thought it was going to be over for now, but she put my hand under her blouse and directly on her bra.
I don’t actually remember how we got there, but at some point her blouse came off, and she was sitting in my lap, back to me, while both my hands were cupping her breasts outside of her bra, and she had her head turned to kiss me. She reached around like she was going to unhook her bra, when she stopped.
“Wait,” she said. “Is this too far, too fast?”
“Maybe. We have some ground to make up, but it’s all right with me if you don’t want to make it all up at once.”
“All right. Let’s stop. But I will need to leave because I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop right now.”
She put her blouse back on, and went to the bathroom to fix her makeup. When she came back, I invited her to an actual date the next Saturday, and she accepted. Then Kelly said goodbye to me and left.
I talked with Dad the next day about how our talk turned into a sort-of date with Kelly. He agreed that we were old enough to go out on a date by ourselves, suggested that I move up to a slightly better grade of restaurant, and go see a movie with her afterward, and come right home after the movie. He also mentioned that boys and girls start doing more touching at my age, but to take it slow. “If she says ‘stop,’ you stop.”
He also suggested I needed some nicer clothes than what I wore all the time, and we went on a short shopping trip to get those. The date was going to be close to Valentine’s Day, so I also got Kelly a card and a small box of fancy chocolates.
February 2, 2008
There were several restaurants near where we lived which were in the right price range, so I picked one and we went there. It was nice getting to eat a special meal with Kelly, but apart from holding hands from the time we ordered until the food came, we didn’t do any more touching in the restaurant than we did on any other date. In the theater it was different, though. She leaned over in her seat and put one arm around my back in a kind of hug, which suggested I should do something similar with my arm, so I did. When the couple was kissing on screen, we kissed, too, and briefly I got to watch the movie twice over because of my power.
When the movie credits were running, Kelly whispered to me to stay behind a moment while other people were leaving. Once everybody was past our row on their way out of the theater, she continued, “You didn’t do this during the movie, but Trixie’s dates might.” She grabbed my arm, and put my hand inside the top of her blouse, inside her bra, directly on one breast.
“Now kiss me good,” she requested. So I gave her a kiss just short of what I needed to briefly take control of her. Once we broke the kiss, she continued, “Play with my nipples so you learn what that feels like.”
Trixie had touched her own nipples, so I knew they were sensitive, but Kelly’s somehow seemed twice as sensitive as Trixie’s. I wasn’t sure why. Since I was feeling the results, I could experiment to get it just right. There were two just-right touches that seemed to give equally powerful results. One was a gentle squeeze, just enough to press the sides of the nipple in slightly, and the other was a gliding motion that barely touched the nipple at all.
“Good. That’s about the level of touching I’m ready for now. We can do some more at your house some time. We were almost there last weekend but I got scared, never having had a guy touch my boobs directly.”
This also gave me more ideas about what I could try with Trixie.
February 22, 2008
It was three weeks after I set Kelly on the matchmaking task when she told me about Ben Franks. “He’s a really nice guy, kinda shy though. He somehow managed to get up the nerve to ask me out recently, and I told him that I was already seeing Teddy, but if that it wasn’t for that then I would’ve dated him.”
“And did you mean it?”
“Yeah, and he was so broken up over it I thought he would die.”
“Wow. So you think this is going to help him as much as it’s helping me?”
“Probably. And because of his shyness and his emotional state right now, he might not come forward so easily and ask you out. You might need to encourage him a little. You know him, right?”
“Yeah, Teddy has met Ben before, though I’ve barely spoken a word to him.”
“Make sure he sees you, smile at him, maybe even wink at him when you see him looking at you.”
“All right, I will. You go do your part.”
Trixie Has Dates
March 6, 2008
It took another two weeks before he did, but Ben asked Trixie out and she accepted. It was to be dinner and a movie Saturday. That afternoon, when Mom picked us up from school, Trixie told Mom about it.
“That’s great, dear. I hope your date goes well. Do you know what you are going to wear?”
“I thought I might wear my blue dress.”
“I should get you something nicer. Right now you basically only have your casual around-the-house clothes and your school clothes. What did Kelly wear on your last date?”
“Um, I guess it was something nicer.”
“Come on, the stores are still open. We can get you something tonight.”
Mom took Trixie into stores I had never been into. In the third such store she finally found something she was satisfied with. It was a striking yet simple red dress, basically a tube with thin straps at the top, but made of some shiny fabric that reflected the light in interesting ways. This was, however, the kind of thing Kelly wore on our last date, and to the extent we’d had any as opposed to training for Trixie in the last year, those other dates as well. Before we were done, I had new shoes and also a coat, since it was too cold to wear this dress outside without something to cover it. At our next to last stop, Mom put in a pizza order, and we picked it up on the way home. This shopping trip had consumed the time she would have normally spent making dinner.
Mom brought the two large pizzas to the dining room table as Trixie ran upstairs to store her new clothes away in her ever-tighter wardrobe.
As Dad came over to the table, he commented, “I remember when one large pizza was enough to feed our family. I hoped that Teddy would expand the family someday, but I never expected it to happen so soon.” He finished with a chuckle.
“The reason we’re having pizza today,” Mom explained, “is that I had to help Trixie buy some stuff for her date.”
At that moment Trixie was returning to the table, Dad spoke to her in exaggeratedly extended syllables for humorous effect. “Oooooh. A daaaate! Who’s the lucky boy? Or girl, if that’s what you’re into.”
“It’s a boy. Ben Franks.”
“Franks? Too bad, he almost has a name that means money.” Everybody got the joke and laughed.
“I guess it would be even funnier if he really was named Ben Franklin,” Trixie added. “Can you imagine going through life with everybody singing ‘It’s All About the Benjamins’ around you every day?” More laughter ensued.
After that everybody got down to the serious business of eating pizza.
The next day when Trixie met Kelly at school, she told her about the date, and also about the dress Mom had bought her.
“Oh, that’s great, Trixie. I was going to ask you about that since I know it’s your first date.”
“Well, I think Mom’s taking care of me.”
“I still want to be over there Saturday afternoon to help you get ready for the date. What time is he picking you up?”
“At 5:30.”
“OK, I’ll see you at 2 then.”
“OK,” Trixie replied, but what I was thinking was “At 2? What sort of getting ready required three and a half hours? Shower, put on the dress, shoes, makeup, perfume. How could that take more than an hour?”
March 8, 2008
She showed me. Saturday I discovered I had my first hair salon appointment. I didn’t really know what I wanted my hair to look like, so I let Kelly and Mom and the stylist pick something they thought looked good on me. That, and the travel to and from the place, took an hour and a half. And even though the dress and shoes were already chosen, Kelly had to pick out my underwear. This was the first time anybody but Mom and my selves had ever gone through any of my selves’ underwear drawers, and since I’d gotten old enough to do my own laundry, Mom didn’t even do that any more. I told her that this was a first date and the dress was definitely not coming off, but she insisted. And after doing makeup and redoing parts of it and touching it up several times, and some role-play with Kelly acting as Ben to ensure I knew exactly how to behave around Ben, I was ready to go just as he rang the doorbell at precisely 5:30.
Neither of us had a car, but it was only a half-mile walk to an Italian restaurant which was near the theater we would visit afterward. We shared antipasto and I chose a risotto entree while he had a beefy rigatoni. We shared a little of each others’ entrees, and then he had a tiramisu dessert while I had a gelato.
We had two choices for a movie that was neither a kids’ movie, nor one that one of us had already seen, and started within a reasonable time. The choices were a romantic comedy and an action film, and Ben somewhat sheepishly suggested the comedy while I could tell he really wanted to see the action movie. I, however, was not sure I was really ready to see a romantic movie, even a comedy, as a girl, with a boy. When I suggested the other movie I could see Ben was happy for that choice.
Ben was a perfect gentleman during the entire date. We kissed, not for too long (so I only got some of Ben’s feelings and not control of his body), and hugged, without him trying to get too grabby, and he walked me back to my house a little after 10. I actually would have preferred if he had been a little more grabby; he seemed cold, and not very interesting to be with. He seemed to have a hard time speaking to me. I had to keep the conversation going during our travel and dinner, which was really ironic for me, the girl who had only been alive for a year and was having a date for the first time, but it was probably his first date too. During the movie, it was fine that we weren’t talking, but he didn’t try to hold hands with me, he didn’t look at me, and it felt like I was watching the movie alone.
So when Dad asked me how it went, I had to tell him it was actually a little boring. It was, however, a success in that I was never afraid or uncomfortable to be out on a date with a boy, but it was possible that was only true because so much of the time it didn’t even feel like I was out on a date. After I described it to him, he agreed with me, and thought maybe Ben was just too afraid to be more forward. Maybe Ben needed a little more encouragement - though of course, I had to be careful not to encourage him too much. So for instance, in response to him ignoring me during the movie, I should have grabbed his arm from where it was crossed in front of him and pulled it down to the armrest between us.
In the end, I resolved to give Ben another chance, but I’d talk to him first and tell him why I thought it wasn’t a good date. I guess I’d try to be his date coach, a little, in the way that Kelly was for me.
March 29, 2008
Three weeks later, Ben and Trixie had a second date. Mom got me a second nice dress and matching shoes, and I went through much of the same hours of prep.
Though he got me a rose this time, the date itself was still very sterile. Ben and I did see a romantic movie this time, which I hoped would get him to interact with me more. It didn’t work. Ben actually fell asleep during the movie, and when I noticed that, I gave him a solid elbow to his shoulder.
“Huh, what?” he said upon waking.
“Pay attention,” I whispered sharply to him.
“To you, or the movie?” he whispered back.
“Either one!”
This worked for a little bit. He put his arm around my shoulders at that point and the next time the couple on screen kissed, he kissed me, but after he did so he pulled his arm back and went back to watching the movie alone.
So that was our last date.
April 19, 2008
I didn’t ask Kelly to set me up again immediately, and I didn’t have to. Two other guys asked me out, but based on what I had observed of their behavior at school, I thought both were jerks, and I declined. But when Matt Freeman asked me out, I agreed to go on a date with him.
Matt’s date started out pretty well. He at least was paying attention to me. He had flowers and he hugged and kissed me at the door, and was chatty during dinner and also played footsie with me. Hooray for slip-on shoes! But he got way too grabby during the movie. The first time he tried to put his hand inside the top of my dress, maybe 5 minutes after the movie started, I pulled it out gently. Kelly and I had done that, but we’d been dating for years. This was a first date!
It was only a few minutes later and his hand was back there. I tried to give him a hint by pulling his hand out and putting it on my breast on the outside of my dress. I also, through Teddy, asked Mom what I should do. She told me that I was being very reasonable in trying to draw the line on how intimate I wanted to be with him, and that I should tell him directly.
So the third time his hand was partially on my bra and partially in my cleavage, I pulled his face toward me and told him, “Matt, this is a first date. I know you want to touch me, but keep your hands outside my clothes for now.” He pulled his hand back, but returned it only minutes later. I removed it again and told him, “Last warning.” The fifth time, I walked out of the theater, into the lobby, and through Teddy I asked my parents to come pick me up. Matt followed and apologized, realizing what he had done wrong, but I had had it with him, and went home when Dad showed up.
“Sorry your date didn’t go so well,” Dad said during the ride home.
“Yeah. It’s just weird, going from the guy who won’t pay any attention to me to the guy who keeps trying to get inside my clothes.”
“Yeah, it’s tough sometimes. Teddy was really lucky to get along with Kelly so well. You see that it is not always as easy as it was for them.”
“Yes, I do see, now.”
“I also want to reassure you that the kind of thing Matt was doing is pretty common behavior after a couple gets to know each other better, but what you did was fine for a first date. The kind of guy who can’t respect your limit on a first date is likely to have the same problem later on.”
“Yes, that is exactly what I was afraid of. Exactly why I was hesitant to date guys at all at first. Just the way a lot of guys talk made me worry about going out on a date with one.”
The Dance
April 26, 2008
The next time Kelly came to visit, I had Trixie tell her all about the date, and all three of me were crying by the end. While Kelly was consoling Trixie, as Teddy I asked her, “Do you think it’s normal for my guy selves to cry just as much as Trixie when she’s telling this story?”
After a moment, Kelly replied, “Maybe? I don’t know. Like most girls, I have never been a guy, and I have never shared my mind with a guy the way your group does, Teddy. But you really feel like Trixie is a part of you, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then it’s fine. I know I might cry thinking about something like that, like a guy touching me in ways that I didn’t want. And imagine if the guy had touched one of your guy selves that way. I would totally understand if you had been crying while telling that story.”
“Ew! OK. Thanks for the confirmation. I’m still confused by some of this stuff.”
With a sly glance, Kelly added, “I wouldn’t cry if you touched me that way.”
“Yes, I think you made that clear the other day.”
As Teddy, I took the invitation, stepped behind Kelly, put my arms around her and slipped both of them inside the neckline of her loose blouse and put one hand over each breast.
Kelly asked, “Why did it take so long for us to get beyond kissing and hugging?”
“I don’t know. I think we were both unsure of the whole thing when we started. I know last time we talked about how we dated at first, both of us, just to keep from feeling left out.”
“Yeah. We were both as shy as Ben during that first date, with my dad there as chaperone.”
“But we stuck with it, initially because of the peer pressure and later because we grew into each other. But we got comfortable in this kissing-and-hugging stage, and just stuck with it. And then, of course, my powers came, and we both got involved with exploring those rather than exploring each other,” I said while I played with Kelly’s nipples.
“That feels nice, Teddy. Put your hands inside my bra and actually touch my nipples.”
As I did that, Kelly turned her head as far to the right as she could, so I could kiss her. I accepted the invitation, giving her a kiss just wet enough that I would get to feel what she felt for a bit, so I could feel what she was feeling and touch her just right. After a few minutes, I had her moaning softly and when she got to the point that she was gasping, she pulled my hands off her.
When she got her breath back, Kelly said, “Teddy, that was amazing. We have really been missing something by not doing this. But I don’t think I can take any more of that now.”
“We were talking about Trixie,” I reminded her.
“Oh, yeah. Her date.”
I had Teddy’s body step away and sat Trixie next to Kelly. “I’m wondering if I’d like it better with another girl. Teddy likes girls, after all.”
Kelly surprised me by asking, “Trixie, would you like to go to a dance with me?”
“Um, sure, I guess. Yes.”
“GLBTTQ is having a dance the Saturday after next. I’d like to go with you.”
As Teddy, I replied, “How come you know about GLBTTQ’s schedule?”
“I was always a little curious how it would be to be with another girl. And I was not getting from you what I had started to think I should be getting from a guy, so I was considering my options. I think you’ve resolved that nicely now, though. But to answer your implied question, no, I’m not seeing any girl. I started doing some checking on the club. Since Trixie is curious also, I thought it would be a good opportunity to try it. And you’ll still get to date me, just in a different body.”
“OK, sure. Let’s do that.”
Kelly approached Trixie and kissed her. Soon it was much more than that. I had to take Teddy out of there because he was stiff as a rod. Even outside the room, I could not block out the signals I was getting from Trixie, and from Kelly as well, due to how slobbery they were being in there; the feelings were too strong. I deanimated Jack and sat Teddy on the toilet, the cleanest way to dispose of the result that I knew was coming. I had learned how to block out, for instance, Trixie’s view of naked girls in the locker room to avoid Teddy getting inappropriately aroused, but this was more than I could ignore.
Kelly and Trixie both ended up topless, and Kelly actually sucked on Trixie’s nipples, before trading off and inviting Trixie to do the same. Finally they stopped, both breathless and soaked with sweat.
“We’re obviously not going to be able to do that during the date, Trixie, but that was amazing and I want to do it again sometime.”
“With Teddy?” Trixie suggested.
“Oh yeah, with him too. Definitely. Not right now, but some time.”
Kelly put her clothes back on, and went to the bathroom to clean up, while I came back into the room to help Trixie clean up.
When Kelly came back, she said, “Now this time, I’m not going to help Trixie get ready. It’s up to you, your mom, your other selves, or whoever to get you ready. But I’m sure you’ll do well.”
May 3, 2008
The day of the dance was here before I knew it. I had two nice dresses from my other dates, and considered reusing one of them for the date with Kelly, but Mom said I needed a different kind of dress for dancing, so the weekend before the dance she got me one. This time, like my second date dress but unlike my first one, we had time to have it altered to fit perfectly.
She had invited me, and the dance wasn’t within walking distance, so Kelly’s mom drove her to my place, where they picked me up, and drove us to the dance.
Kelly looked amazing. She hadn’t dressed up this nice for her dates with Teddy... but then I realized that those weren’t dances. Before I got my powers, I was afraid to go to a dance; I thought I didn’t dance well, and I’d embarrass myself. And since then, Kelly and I had barely done any dating.
“Is that a new dress, Kelly?”
“Yes. I see yours is new, too. It looks very nice.”
“Thank you. Let’s go in.”
I wasn’t sure what to expect inside. And I still wasn’t sure what I was seeing once I got in. There was no consistent theme to the decorations. There were hearts, and some decorations that looked left over from Valentine’s Day. Some of them were definitely left over from Easter. There were some pairs of crossed male symbols and crossed female symbols, as well as a single symbol which was a blend of the male and female signs, I guess for the transitioning ones.
Of course, there were boy-boy, girl-girl, and apparent boy-girl couples. At this kind of dance I couldn’t be too sure about some of those. There was one “girl” there I recognized as a boy I knew in school, and a “boy” I knew was a girl; both were dancing with people who seemed to be boys. The boy who was dressed as a girl had what I now understood to be D-sized breasts; I wondered what he had stuffed them with, because they looked much more natural than the breasts did on deanimated Trixie.
Mostly, though, I was surprised how many people were there. There were only about 1200 kids in my school but there must have been over 100 here. I didn’t recognize a lot of them, though; some of them might have just been older kids I didn’t know, and some people probably brought dates who went to other schools.
We danced several dances. Kelly led, at first, but later she had me lead.
There were also a few people who had obviously been changed by their powers. One of them was a bird-girl, covered head to toe in white feathers. I guessed a girl, anyway, since she was wearing a dress. Later, when I was in the ladies’ room, waiting for Kelly to finish doing her business, the bird-girl came in, in a rush. She had some sort of plastic thing in her mouth she was inflating, but there weren’t any stalls open, so she grew more agitated and continued inflating the thing.
“Are you in line?” the bird-girl asked me.
“No. I’m just waiting for a friend. You’re first in line,” I replied.
“Oh, good. My egg can wait a few minutes, but not too long.”
“Oh, I noticed you seemed to be a bird, but I didn’t realize you would be that much of one. I have powers too. My name’s Trixie.”
“I’m Bella. What’s your power?”
“I can animate other bodies. Except this is an animated body; my original body is at home.” I didn’t tell her that the original body was a boy.
“Cool. Well I’m a bird, I can fly (though not in this dress; I actually have to be able to spread my wings). I don’t have much else for powers. I don’t have periods, but once a month I lay a big egg.”
“What’s the inflatable thing for?” It was now clear that the device was about the size and shape of a large cooking pot, with a thin ring protruding sideways two inches all the way around the top, and had inflated to be about an inch thick all over.
“It’s an egg-catcher. I always carry this with me in case I have to lay an egg when I’m away from home. It cushions the egg and keeps it out of the toilet water.”
“Oh, I guess it makes sense, if you’re out, that the toilet is the sensible place to do it. Just how big is this egg?”
“It’s about the size of a football, but egg-shaped instead of being pointy-ended.”
“Wow! Does it hurt?”
“It did the first time I laid an egg, but now it comes out pretty easily.”
“Does this egg-catcher mean that mean you’re saving the egg to take home to hatch?”
“Oh, goodness no. These eggs aren’t fertilized, but just like chickens, I lay eggs all the time anyway. Thankfully not every day like chickens. I save the egg so I can eat it.”
“You eat your own egg?”
“It’s my doctor’s recommendation. The egg has enough nutrients to make a baby about the size of a 5th or 6th month preemie, we think, and every month after laying, my body hoards nutrients to start building the next egg. Since that happens every month, the effect on my nutrition is like being permanently pregnant with quintuplets. He gave me three choices if I didn’t want to end up malnourished: Take some expensive supplements my family can’t afford, eat triple meals for a week each month, or eat my eggs. I could afford the triple meals, but it would mean basically doing nothing but cooking, eating, and pooping for that week. So instead I cook my egg, making seven large omelets, and I eat one for breakfast each day for a week. They refrigerate OK that way.”
While she was saying that, Bella squatted down, reached up under her dress, and removed her panties.
“Um, Bella, how soon will you lay your egg?”
“As soon as I can get into one of these stalls. It’s ready. Once I start, it only takes a minute or two and it’ll be out. You want to take a look?”
“Actually, my request is a little more personal than that, but I’m really curious. In addition to animating bodies, I can temporarily feel what another person is feeling, and since I think this is a rare chance to experience something different, I’m interested. Will you let me do that?”
“Go right ahead.”
“In order to do this, I have to kiss you.”
She puckered up, which I took as an invitation and kissed her, enough of a kiss to get 5 to 10 minutes of her feelings. About this time, Kelly came out of her stall, and Bella went in.
“I heard you talking with the bird-girl,” Kelly said while washing her hands.
“Yeah. Crazy power, huh?”
“Definitely. As much as I hate periods, I would rather keep my period than do what she’s doing. I’m surprised you want to feel that even without the benefit of not having a period.”
“I just wanted to know what it would feel like. Oh! She’s pushing it out now. It feels like there’s a basketball in... my vagina. Or in my ass. Like those two are split open and the basketball is moving down the combination of them both. I’m going to have to wait here until she’s done, because this is intense. Oh, oh, ohhh! And she says it doesn’t hurt! There, it’s out.”
About 30 seconds later, I went back to the dance with Kelly, but I was still experiencing Bella’s senses. She stood up, wiped the egg off with toilet paper, then removed the entire egg-basket from the toilet and set it on top of a large bundle of toilet paper she had spread on the floor. She now sat down on the toilet and wiped herself as well. Then she stayed there to use the toilet normally, which turned out to also be in the manner of a bird. She didn’t pee, but a whitish a pasty mess came out of her butt. After some more wiping, she finally went to wash up. She put the egg in an otherwise empty compartment in her oversized purse, and she was deflating the egg-catcher when my feelings of her faded.
There were no other such distractions, and soon the dance was over. We filed out, found Kelly’s mom’s car eventually among all the other cars arriving to pick people up, and we both went to our respective homes. At my house, Kelly accompanied me to the door, and I gave Kelly a good wet smooch just before we parted, one that would let me keep experiencing her senses until she was home and then some.
The Workshop
The week after the dance, the first week in May, the house expansion was finally finished and it was time for me to move in. With the three of me and Mom and Dad helping, it didn’t take long. My stuff went into my room, Trixie’s into hers, and my tools, experiments, and building supplies (many of them previously in the garage) went into the workshop. We set up Trixie’s mattress on my old bed frame, and I was going to have to keep sharing with Jack for a little while longer, while my parents were getting another bed delivered for me. Jack was going to keep the large bed, as he had the least other stuff in his room.
Seeing the bird-girl and others at the dance had reminded me of the fact that I could animate modified bodies, and made me wonder how far I could take it. It also reminded me of my neglected metal body project.
Although the workshop was attached to my room, I intended to have Jack working in there during the school day when he didn’t have other chores to do. The first task was to do something useful with that robot body. When I started filling up my room with stuff for three people, I had to leave this out in the garage, where there wasn’t enough space to work with it easily. Now there was finally space.
Jack removed the arms and legs. Instead of the fixed duct corners as shoulders and hips, he replaced them with short sections of the springy, flexible kind of ductwork. And instead of attaching them directly to the body, they were attached to plates, each of which was fastened to the body with a short but thick bolt, with large washers on each side and two in the middle, to make a sort of pivoting joint. The head was attached to the neck in a similar manner. For now, I didn’t supply the robot with any genitalia; it had come out male when animated before.
Jack was capable of animating bodies for hours at a time now, so once all the modifications were complete, he did so. But he found that the robot’s other joints - the elbows, wrists, knees, and ankles - were still stiff. More trips to the hardware store and days of work installed similar fixtures in all these joints, and soon I had a robot body that was capable of moving in all the ways a normal human body could. It seemed a little unnatural, though. Although I’d been calling it a robot, I was going for “walking suit of armor.” What I got actually ended up looking more like a robot. I needed to think about how I could make it look better. Were the joints still not made right? Or maybe it was the proportions. In the summer when I had more time, I would look at it.
More Animations
I also did more experiments to see if I could modify my own body, that is, Teddy’s body; I consider Jack’s and Trixie’s bodies also to be mine. Sticking parts on and trying to animate them didn’t work, no matter whether it was Teddy or one of the others animating. So instead, I tried wearing some of Trixie’s clothes. I stripped off all my other clothes, and put on one of Trixie’s loose, summer dresses, one that Teddy’s body fit into. I filled in the top with some spare breast forms. Then I tried it. I licked my hand a little, then pressed that down on top of one of the breasts.
And for the first time ever, it worked. I animated my own body, turning it into a duplicate of Trixie’s, turning those breasts real. I was all female down below, too. In order to run more tests, I immediately ran the deanimation test. I gave my finger the lightest tiny dab of a lick and pressed it against the dress where it was covering one of my new breasts. That worked; in a minute or two, the animation faded and I was back to just being a cross-dressing Teddy.
This was great. I experimented some more, and found that it needed to be a full set of clothes, either a dress or a top and a bottom of whatever sort. A bikini worked, though, so it wasn’t based on a portion of the body covered. And wearing my clothes didn’t work. Of course, I had been wearing my clothes before when I tried this, so I figured it wouldn’t. There was always the possibility, though, that I had developed or unlocked for myself a new ability.
It worked with the others, too. If Jack put on a set of my clothes, he could reanimate himself into a copy of me. Trixie could wear Jack’s clothes and become a copy of him. At one point all three of us existed as reanimated versions of others of us. At this point, before I forgot who was who, I decided to deanimate all the reanimations and go down to just single animations except for one experiment at a time. With that single experiment, by reanimating a body just before it was due to expire, I discovered that the reanimation actually extended the animation time. When the reanimation ran out, and the original animated body returned, it would have left the time which was left before that body got reanimated. I also discovered I could go more levels deeper, and those deeper levels could involve bodies already used. I mean that Trixie could reanimate into Jack, then re-reanimate into Trixie, who would become the first Trixie again after two animations ran out. This provided a sort of emergency time extension for my animated bodies, assuming they had practiced enough to have any real time of their own. And it was different from when I reanimated a body in its own clothes, or naked: That didn’t work at all if the body tried to reanimate itself, and it replaced, rather than extended, the time if another body did the deed.
I experimented more with different clothes, as well. When I first started animating Trixie and Jack, I discovered that both new and used-but-resold clothes generated Jack’s body for boy clothes, and Trixie’s for girl clothes. That still worked that way; I could make an army of Jacks and Trixies if I wanted. Borrowed clothes, on the other hand, generated a copy of the owner. Kelly “borrowed” clothes from her other family members for me, and I was able to create copies of them, and it also worked for a dress Mom borrowed from one of her friends one time. What about rented clothes? When I was getting ready to go to the year-end dance with Kelly, Dad rented me a tuxedo to wear. I tried animating it, wondering who I’d get when the owner was a store rather than a person, but I just got Jack.
Teddy’s Dance
May 31, 2008
I stopped fooling around with my power and, as Teddy, I went to a regular dance with Kelly. This was not the prom, which was reserved for juniors and seniors only, but the last dance of the year for the other classes before prom, and it had become unofficially the lower class prom, and most of the juniors and seniors who would attend the prom only two weeks later skipped this one.
Now that I had had more practice dancing, I enjoyed myself much more here. Kelly and Trixie had taken turns leading, so I got practice in both roles, and the practice leading was now proving useful.
At this dance, as I expected, there were few GLBTTQ members, and even fewer who came as same-sex couples. In fact, there were just two, one gay couple and one lesbian couple, who were somewhat hiding that fact by switching off. One dance same sex, the next guys with girls, and the third guys with girls but paired differently. In any case the four of them always stayed close.
I didn’t run into obviously powered people during the dance, and didn’t borrow the senses of anybody else at the dance besides Kelly. We just went and enjoyed ourselves. Kelly’s mom took us to the dance, and my mom picked us up and brought us home. Kelly did give me a special treat, though, in secret. I gave her an especially slobbery kiss as we dropped her off at her house, and she went into her bathroom and masturbated about 10 minutes later, just enough time for me to get home, but when she knew I’d still be picking up her feelings. Trixie and Jack shut her out, since this was meant for me, but I had to go into the bathroom myself, stripping out of my tux quickly. I came on the toilet twice with the intensity of the feelings I was getting from Kelly before the connection faded.
June 1, 2008
Kelly and I had a long phone call the next day. Naturally the subject of her little after-gift came up.
“I mean, I did enjoy it, but it was unexpected.”
“Teddy, I figured you were inviting that by giving me a kiss I knew would have you feeling my feelings for an hour or more.”
“Well, I hadn’t intended to. I was just trying to say goodbye properly after our first dance... the first with Teddy involved, anyway. A step forward in our relationship.”
“OK, maybe we should set up some signals, then.”
“Like a safeword?”
“Yes. If I understand that correctly, that’s supposed to be a code word that means really stop.”
“Yes. Kelly, I think that’s a good idea. I know we’ve both felt like we were going too far sometimes, so let’s set a safeword that means stop all things leading toward sex, pull away from each other, and take a moment to look at what we were doing. And if I give the safeword after a kiss, it means it was only supposed to be a kiss.”
“I agree. Do you have a good safeword?”
I thought for a moment, but when I chose it I knew it was right. “Basketball egg.”
Kelly burst out laughing. “Oh, God, yes that would make me stop. I didn’t experience that the way you did, but the description alone was priceless. I don’t know how you survived.”
“It didn’t actually hurt much. Remember, it didn’t actually stretch any part of me that wide, it just let me feel what Bella was feeling. And what she felt was this wide opening, really an absurdly wide opening, but only a tiny twinge of pain as the widest part of the egg passed through the narrowest part of her. Her body is no doubt modified in a way adapted to doing that.”
“I guess I can understand that. So it’s agreed, basketball egg is our safeword. Either of us says that and we stop what we’re doing, pull apart if we are touching in any way, and if you’ve just grabbed my feelings with a kiss I don’t do anything in response specifically to send you the feelings.”
Comments
Very original
This combines some powers I've read elsewhere but nothing quite like this. I'm interested in seeing if Teddy does more with their powers and also what other people in Normal are like. :)
There are cities named Normal in some states, most of them at some time the site of the state's Normal School/Teacher's College. Maybe the college is still there?
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Teddy, other people, Normals
I actually don't have any more written for Teddy yet, but I intend to some day. But you will see other characters!
I'm aware there are actual cities named Normal. Well, one city in Illinois and some small towns. But my Normal is not meant to be any of those.
Normal abnormality
Interesting new world. Reminds me of the world in Morpheus's Twisted stories a bit. You mention Teddy's relatives from out of town, some of whom have powers too, so they still work if you leave the meteor site. Although I assume they aren't covered by the disguise spell on the town.
Re: Normal abnormality
Yep, you picked up on something. The powers still work away from Normal; it's just that people only get powers in Normal. This point is made clearer in subsequent chapters. And yes, if they leave Normal, and their powers aren't innocuous, they need to take a disguise with them. Teddy's mother wouldn't have any problem, and Teddy would be OK if he was careful how he used his power. But that bird-girl would need help.
"Structure" note, to help out readers.
At 20,000+ words, this is pretty long to to read as one loo-oong page.
I think it would benefit us readers to break it up and post it as chapters. Your bold headings are obvious chapter break points.
To keep arcane chapter-sorting algorithms from scrambling chapters (way worse than one long chapter), the names can something like:
Kissing Bandit 01 Discovery
...
Kissing Bandit ww Testing
...
Kissing Bandit xx Dancing
...
Kissing Bandit yy Trixie Dates
...
Kissing Bandit zz Worksop
...
Where ww, xx, etc are the right 01, 02, 03 ... 10, 11 numbers. I know you have many more than I sketched out. That leading 'zero' is important to avoid weird and wrong sorting. Some short 'chapters' might be combined.
---
Kelly and 'all the Teddies' have been really good very about managing themselves and their n-way relationships.
Safe Words are a Totally Very Good To The Max idea. If more people (well everybody) had them and >used< them and >everybody< honored them, and >stopped< instantly ... we would avoid a >lot< of problems. But {sniff} what am I smoking ...
I had spent the night at a Lady friend's place, and the next morning we had 30 cm, one foot of snow. I did a lot of shoveling so we get our cars free in the parking lot. She asked repeatedly "you didn't hurt yourself, did you?" I kept saying I'm OK. We didn't have a safe-word set up, so I finally had to give a mangled version of the Boy Scout Oath to convince her!
In BDSM relationships, safe words are pretty much indispensable. In 'dungeons' where some vigorous play is going on, "RED" is the universal safe-word. It can even be 'called' by bystanders if they think a scene is going badly/too far/really unsafe.
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I'm looking forward to more chapters/stories