“I would like to learn how to become a woman, please,” she said with an eager smile.

It was a busy shift, but it was at least nearer the end than the beginning. Two hours and eighteen minutes to go, I calculated after a glance at the clock on my phone on my way back from the restroom. I picked up an order for table five and took it to their table, and was heading back to the kitchen when I was accosted by what looked like a gender non-conforming guy or a trans girl who was just starting to experiment with clothes. The knee-length blue skirt and long braided hair could fit with either, but I thought a trans girl would probably have shaved more closely, and they were wearing a tight red shirt that made it clear they had no breasts. I couldn’t quite place their ethnicity; they were light-skinned, but their facial features didn’t quite look like people Europe.

“I would like to learn how to become a woman, please,” she said with an eager smile.

Okay, a trans girl, and a strangely naive one for her age (about my age, maybe thirtyish?). Someone who’d latched onto the trans waitress and decided to ask me for advice about transitioning. Which, under other circumstances, I’d be glad to give, but there were customers waiting and I couldn’t rightly stand there explaining whatever aspects of transition she wanted to know about with six tables waiting for their food and two others waiting for me to take their orders.

“I’d like to help, but I don’t have time to talk about that right now,” I said. “I can answer some questions after the end of my shift. Point you toward resources for learning how to transition. But for now, you need to order something and then wait for me to get off work in a couple of hours.”

“I would not dare give orders, I can only humbly beg.” She had a slight accent I couldn’t place, and that weird mistake about “order” showed she wasn’t a native speaker. But she spoke really fluidly, if not quite fluently. “I will come back in two hours.”

She turned and left the diner. Hadn’t she come in to eat? Weird.

Just before my shift ended, she returned and seemed to hesitate before she sat down at a free table, not in my section. I was busy taking orders and didn’t have a lot of spare attention to pay her, but I noticed her taking out a book and starting to read. Once I clocked out, I walked over to her table and sat down.

“At least one of us needs to order something if we’re going to sit here talking about trans stuff for an hour or so. That’s all I can spare at the moment. My name’s Jenny, by the way.”

“My name is Edmonard Martford, although when I become a woman I would like my forename to be Permelia. If you can answer my questions now, maybe what is ‘trans stuff’?”

“‘Trans’ is short for transgender,” I said, reminding myself that I was dealing with a non-native speaker. “Where are you from, by the way?”

“Martford is my home village, but I have lived in Gannerton for some years, in Wurland. But what does ‘transgender’ means?”

“I don’t know where that is. What country?”

“Wurland is the country. But it is far away. My ghostly guides led me by strange ways to get here, and showed me the way to you, pointing you out as one who can tell me how to become a woman.”

That was a lot to process, but I couldn’t think or ask about it right away because Kathy came over and said, “What can I get y’all?” She didn’t bat an eye at Permelia, God bless her.

“Just unsweet tea for me,” I said. I’d put on ten pounds since going back to waitressing, just from the employee meals, even though I was on my feet all day. I’d eat something healthy once I got home. Kathy looked expectantly at Permelia.

“Would you please counsel me something good to eat? I do not know your folk’s cookery.”

Definitely a foreigner, and probably hadn’t been in the country long if she wasn’t familiar with American food. Something about the way she’d phrased that nagged at me.

“Are you hungry for a full meal or do you just want a snack?” I asked. “Any allergies?”

“I am hungry. But I have not yet changed my money for your country’s money. Will you take this?” She took a small drawstring bag out of her backpack and took out a few copper coins, larger than a penny, and a silver coin about the diameter of a quarter, but thicker.

“Sorry, American money only,” Kathy said, giving me a strange look. I shrugged at her.

“I’ll get her a loaded burger with a Coke,” I said.

“Coming right up,” she said.

I thought about what Permelia had said about her “ghostly guides.” “So… uh, voices in your head told you to ask me how to become a woman?” The most charitable interpretation I could put on it was that she’d clocked me, and had experienced the sensation as a voice in her head telling her “She can tell you how to transition!”… although obviously not in those words. Or maybe she was plural, and one of her headmates had pointed out I was trans. And then those place-names – I’d never heard of them. They sounded vaguely English, but she wasn’t from England, not with her not quite right command of the language and that unidentifiable accent.

“They don’t speak in human voices,” she said. “At least, only a few of them do so, and only rarely. Most of them simply lead the way and point out lost or hidden things, or a person who knows a thing I wish to learn. Now and then they speak by signs. It is a happy day when one of them speaks in a clear voice.”

So she mostly saw visual hallucinations, and only rarely heard voices. Good to know. She went on:

“They did not tell me how you would help me, only that you could. I don’t know whether you are a leech who can change my body, or a woman who was once a man and can tell me how you did it, or perhaps your friend or sister has changed so. But I beg you again, please help me. Ever since I knew how boys and girls are unlike, I have felt the pain of not being a girl, or a woman.”

That sounded painfully familiar. I wanted to help her, at least to point her toward where she could get help, despite the potential danger of hanging out with someone who was mentally unwell. My gut said she was a nice person, however delusional… and maybe those hallucinations weren’t really that dysfunctional if they had led her to me?

Wait, she’d said she didn’t know if I was trans or a doctor or just knew somebody who was trans. Why did she latch onto me, then?

“Well,” I said, “basically, being transgender is when your sense of your own gender doesn’t fit what other people tell you it should be based on what your body looks like. If you feel like you should be a woman, but other people think you’re a man because you have the type of body men usually have, or if someone who was born with a feminine body thinks of themselves as a man, or if someone feels like they’re neither a man nor a woman – all those are transgender. People like you and me are called ‘trans women,’ and people who go the other way around are ‘trans men.’ With me so far?”

She nodded. “‘Trans women.’ I see. And how did you change your body?”

“I’ll get to that,” I said, wondering how naive she could be. “But that’s the first thing – if you’re determined to be a woman, you already are, on the inside. Changing what you don’t like about your body starts with accepting who you really are.”

“You mean… I’m already a woman?”

“By the definitions decent people use, anyway. Start by realizing that, and you can move forward from there.”

She touched her finger to her cheek and smiled. “Is it that simple? Am I going to start changing now?”

I laughed. “No, I wish it were that easy. No, it takes years, and unfortunately a fair bit of money just for the basics, and a lot of money if you go for the full package – I don’t know what your financial situation is like, what the health care situation is in your home country or how long you’re staying here… I don’t suppose you have health insurance if you’ve only just arrived.”

“I brought money, all I have. When you told me to come back after you had done working for the day, I asked my guides where to find a money-changer, but they warned me that it was too late in the day to go deal with them and come back in time before you finished work for the day.”

So she had just arrived in the U.S., and made a beeline for this suburban diner and asked me how to transition? A lot of this didn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t she have changed her money at the airport, which wasn’t anywhere near here? How did she even get here without changing her money? How did she travel internationally while being so naive and delusional?

She picked up one of the menus on the rack, looked at it briefly and grimaced. “I wish I had asked my guides to lead me to a place where I could read the tongue, as well as speak it,” she said.

“What?”

“There are an unbounded number of places I could have gone, but nearly all of them speak strange tongues I don’t know. I asked the guides to lead me to a place where the folk spoke a tongue like mine, at least nine-tenths the same, and where I could find someone who could teach me how to become a woman. But I forgot to ask for a place that should use the same writing as my country.”

Now this was getting weird. Did she have some weird delusion that explained her illiteracy? Or… was the passing insane thought I’d had earlier actually true? “So you can’t read English?”

“No. This is how Wurlian is written.” She took the book she’d been reading when I clocked out, which I hadn’t paid any attention to, and turned it around and slid it across to me. It was a small hardback, a bit smaller than our standard paperback sizes. I didn’t give the text on the open pages more than a glance, just enough to see it wasn’t in the Latin alphabet.

“It is the same speech, or very nearly, but different writing.”

Now I was starting to suspect a hoax, if she’d had a book printed in a made-up writing system, but a more charitable explanation was that it was in a foreign language I didn’t know and her idea that her native language was just like English was another aspect of her delusions. She needed a lot more help than I could give her. But just to help figure things out, I took out my phone and took a picture of the open pages, and sent it to my friend Victoria.

you recognize this language?

Kathy brought us our food and drink, and Permelia looked at her burger for a moment as though she’d never seen one before she picked it up and took a bite. What rock had she been living under where you could learn English that fluently but couldn’t get a hamburger?

“Can you show me a little of your money, just to see what it looks like? Like one of each type of coin. Be careful not to let anyone at the other tables see how much you’ve got.”

She nodded and took a smaller bag out of her backpack, then, glancing around, dipped a couple of fingers into it and drew out four coins, one at a time, and slid them across the table toward me. One, I was pretty sure, was gold, another silver, and the last two copper. All had unfamiliar people’s heads embossed on them and an unfamiliar kind of writing, probably the same as in the book. And they looked worn with use – the copper and silver were a bit tarnished, and the gold was particularly worn, with the surface markings barely recognizable as a face. I took a photo of them, and sent that to Victoria too.

I slid the coins back to her and she put them away. Thoughts were racing in my head. “Okay,” I said. “I don’t know how much those are worth in our money, offhand. It would probably depend on the weight of precious metals in them. You should probably go to a jeweler or pawn shop or something, rather than a bank – I feel like the bank wouldn’t know what to do with currency from Wurland.”

She nodded. “I can ask my guides to show me to a place where I will get fair exchange for my money.”

“That’s a useful trick.” Was I really starting to take her claims seriously? The coins weren’t hard proof that she came a country called Wurland in another world. Several micronations had printed or minted their own fake currency, and I wasn’t expert enough to tell real gold at a glance. But there might be a way I could figure it out.

“So,” I said, wrenching us back on subject. “You were asking about transition.” I started telling her about the basics of transition; counseling or therapy, HRT, various methods of hair removal, voice training and vocal shaving, facial feminization surgery, top surgery, bottom surgery. “All of those are optional,” I said. “You’re still a real woman if you can’t afford all of them, or you aren’t in good enough health for some of them, or just don’t want all of them.”

“I want all of them,” she said. “If I run out of money, my guides can show me how to earn more here.”

“You should learn more about all your options before you decide,” I said. “There’s a lot more pros and cons to those things than I’ve had time to tell you about. But yeah, I wanted all of them too. I wasn’t quite there yet when I got laid off from my last job that had decent insurance.”

“I weep,” she said. Weird. She seemed to use it to mean “I’m sorry”?

“Anyway, another issue is that even if you have the money, you might have trouble getting someone to take your money and give you the medicine or do the surgery if don’t have any proof of ID.”

“ID?”

“Identity papers? Documents that prove who you are?”

“Oh. I brought my proof of owning property and my competence as a diviner, but I don’t know if your authorities will accept them.”

“Somehow I doubt it, if they’re issued by the government of a country nobody’s heard of, and in a kind of writing that nobody can read.” What kind of country issued certificates of competence in divination?

She looked unhappy and I wanted to console her even though I still wasn’t 100% convinced she was really what she said. “Could you show me some divination? Tell me something you learned from your, uh, ghostly guides that you couldn’t have learned another way?” Either I’d see some proof of what I’d faintly begun to suspect, or she’d be confronted with the limits of her delusions. Win-win either way.

She thought about it for a few moments and took another bite of her food. “All right. It would be easier to show you if we were walking about, but I will speak with the guides and watch to see what they show me.”

After a little more thought, she whispered something I couldn’t hear, and then looked around the diner. Seeming disappointed, she whispered something else, looked around, and repeated a couple more times. Finally, she smiled and said, “You see the man in the black shirt there? He did not bring enough money to pay for his food. When he is done eating, I think he will either try to sneak out without paying, or beg to pay by his sweat instead.”

“Okay,” I said. “This will be interesting.”

I continued answering her follow-up questions about medical and social transition, and the transgender rights movement in the U.S. and other Western countries, for another half hour while she finished her burger. The man at the other table was eating a lot; he’d ordered two large entrees to start with, and when he finished them off, he ordered dessert. When he finally finished that, Permelia’s prediction came true. He waited until Kathy was busy with another table, with her back to him, and tried to slip out.

I debated for a moment whether I should rat him out. Probably not, I decided; he was probably doing that because he was broke and hungry, not because he was a selfish asshole, and I wasn’t on the clock. But my silence didn’t help him, because Kathy turned around in time to see him heading for the door, and yelled at him. He bolted for it, and Lee put down the tub of dishes and silverware he was carrying and chased him out the door.

“All right,” I said to Permelia after gaping slack-jawed for a few moments. “That was…”

On second thought, it was possible, even likely, that the guy was her accomplice and this was all some super-elaborate hoax. I’d ask for another demonstration of her magic to be sure.

We were pretty much done eating by then, and Kathy brought me the check. We got up from the table and I paid at the register; I was thinking about other ways to test her magic, and other questions to ask her about where she came from. “So,” I said, “you said it would be easier to show me if we were walking around?”

“Yes,” she said as we walked out the front door. “My guides are good at finding lost and hidden things, or finding a safe route from one place to another.”

“All right,” I said after a few moments’ thought. “People lose their keys pretty often. In a city this size, it’s pretty likely that somebody within a few miles of us has lost their keys. Can your guides find the keys and the person who lost them without you telling them in advance what the keys look like or who the person is, or is that too vague?”

She nodded and whispered like she’d done before. After looking around for a moment, she said, “This way,” and turned toward the big box stores in the adjacent parking lot. She was walking a little slowly, I noticed, like she was tired.

“How far are we going to go? Should we drive or walk?” I asked.

“Drive?”

“In a car?”

She shrugged, and I gestured toward the cars going by on the road. “I’ve got one of those. It’s parked right over there.” I pointed in the other direction from where she was about to walk. She must have seen them since her arrival here, but hadn’t asked me about them, being apparently laser-focused on transition, with a brief detour to talk about money and language.

She whispered to her ghosts again and then said, “The keys aren’t far away. A few hundred yards. And the person who lost them is nearby, in the same direction.”

I followed her across the diner parking lot and the margin of grass separating it from the neighboring furniture store, which was still open, and then inside. She zeroed in without hesitation on an easy chair about halfway toward the back of the store and paused a moment, then dug around in the cushions on the left side and pulled out a ring of keys. Then she looked up and walked a short distance to where a middle-aged black couple were looking at some other chairs, and said, “Excuse me, are these your keys?”

“Oh, thanks!” the man said, patting down his pocket. “I didn’t notice they’d fallen out.” He and his wife were both giving Permelia strange looks, and me too, which was pretty uncomfortable; but they were at least grateful enough for getting their keys back that they didn’t say anything mean or nosy.

“They were in the chair over there,” Permelia said, pointing back the way we came.

“Thank you so much,” the woman said. “God bless you.”

“It was no trouble,” Permelia said, and she turned to go. I stood there, stunned, for a moment before following her.

I tried to think of a way Permelia could have colluded with them to fake a demonstration of magic, and couldn’t do it. The guy who’d run out on his tab just might have been an accomplice, since he’d come into the restaurant around the same time as Permelia, and she might have given him some pre-arranged signal. But this time I’d suggested the test, and though she might be wearing a mic so her hypothetical accomplices could hear our conversation, her hair was braided back in such a way that I could see clearly she wasn’t wearing anything in her ears that the couple could use to tell her where they were and where they’d hide the keys. So magic was real, and I’d met a baby trans girl from another universe, and I had no idea yet how that was going to change my life, but I had no intention of sending Permelia off with an hour of advice and a free meal and never talking to her again.

“So where were you planning to stay tonight?” I asked as we left the furniture store.

“Well, at first, I was going to change my money and use some of it to pay for a night at an inn. But I arrived later in the day than I expected. If the best places to change my money are already closed, as the guides seem to say, then I will ask them to show me a safe place to sleep.”

I made another impulsive decision. “Come with me,” I said. “I’ve got a sofa you can sleep on.”

“I thank you!” she said, beaming at me, and we walked back to my car.

I knew I was taking a risk. Just because she was a diviner from another universe didn’t mean she wasn’t also going to rob me blind or cut my throat while I was asleep. But I’d spent over an hour with her by now, and I felt like that was pretty unlikely. And… magic! What red-blooded geek wouldn’t want in on that?

Magic that couldn’t fix her body, at least not directly. How many stories had I read where cis guys got turned into girls by magic, or trans girls got their bodies fixed all at once by magic? Way more than was good for me, especially before I figured out I was trans but even after I’d started transitioning. And now a mage was coming to me for help, because for all her world’s magic – which I’d barely scratched the surface of – it apparently couldn’t give her the body she needed.

Well, there were things I could do right away to help her pass more easily, besides making her feel better while we figured out how to get her hormones.

“When we get to my apartment, if you’re not too tired, I’ll show you how to get a closer shave,” I said. “Would you like that?”

“Yes, please.”

“And then tomorrow, after we change your money, we’re going shopping. You might want blouses that’ll conceal your Adam’s apple.”

“Adam’s apple?” she asked.

“Your larynx,” I said, touching mine. “I had surgery to reduce the size of mine, but until then I would sometimes wear blouses with high collars, or scarves, or things like that.”

“Oh, that’s a good idea,” she said, and repeated the words “larynx” and “Adam’s apple” under her breath a few times.

We continued talking about ways to help her improve her presentation as we walked back to my car, when that conversation got derailed by showing her how to fasten a seat belt and then talking about our world’s cars – which she’d already noticed, of course, but had set aside as relatively unimportant next to asking me how to transition.

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