Chapter 4: The Rest of the Show

When we were finished with breakfast, but before we left to start the second day’s activities, I found a moment alone with Paul.

“How much do you remember?” I asked.

“About your gift? That it made you pretty convincingly look like a woman.”

“I gave it away.”

“What?”

“Last night, I roomed with the one who introduced herself as a trans-woman during our icebreaker.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Well, you won’t, because that’s also part of its effect. Do you remember me taking off the gift and changing back into my regular clothes after I came out of the restroom?”

“Come to think of it, no, I can’t.”

“That’s because I didn’t. I spent all the rest of the day wearing it.”

“Weird. I can’t remember seeing you that way except at the restroom. So was that gift really right for you at all? I was sworn not to tell anyone else.”

“I sometimes dress up as female, but only in front of my wife. It’s not very convincing, just play-acting. If the hosts knew, I have no idea how, unless Susan set it up.”

At that moment they were trying to get us going. We put our clothes bags back in the SUV to be reunited with us at the end, and everybody confirmed they had everything else, and various hosts gathered specific people to take with them on the journey to the next location, no doubt to help set up some of the activities ahead. Those activities were the same sorts of things, but different ones, highlighting different people and giving others their gifts.

Sunday evening, we met back where we started, and there was a buffet line to let us all grab as much dinner as we wanted. Once we had all had a chance to at least finish a first plate of dinner (some going back for seconds), the host who addressed the group at the start of it all, Ken, got up to speak.

“Congratulations on finishing the Experience. I hope you’ve all had a great time. You’re a pretty smart group, so most of you have probably figured out now that when we said a free run-through, we didn’t mean a practice run, but the actual event for free. All the gifts you received are yours to keep. And you’re probably wondering why we did this. It’s a long story, and how it got started has gotten lost in the retellings, but it is every bit as magical as some of you have already figured out through your gifts. We will give you more details before you leave, but you will indeed run this event again, for another set of guests, and it will cost you nothing but some of your time and maybe a tank of gas.”

He handed the microphone to a woman whose voice I immediately recognized as the one in the restroom stall who explained to me my gift, the gift I had passed on to Jan.

“I am Donna, the Giver. Each one of you has received a gift during this event, a tangible item that is yours to keep. Some of those are normal items you could buy in the normal world, but were exactly what you wanted and in some cases had never realized until you received it. Many of them are magical, and you’ve experienced some of that magic already. Some of you are experiencing it now. Each of you has also been granted an ability. Those abilities are temporary, and for us they will all cease to exist by the end of the night. Yours are the same abilities we possess, the abilities that allowed us to run the Experience for you, and one or two of you have already had a private talk with your predecessor about that ability. Over the next half-hour, we’re going to describe each of those abilities briefly, and you’ll have some time afterwards to speak with your predecessor or all of us together to understand these abilities as well as we can explain them. I will say that a lot of them happen automatically, and you simply need to be aware of what is going on. But first I am going to hand the mic back to Ken, and Fred, you should come up here and join him.”

I barely remembered seeing Fred all weekend, but he stepped up next to Ken, who held out his hand for a handshake.

“Fred, with this handshake I pass on to you the ability of the Organizer. None of the venues at which the events of this weekend took place exist for most people, or as far as we can tell, exist at all at most times. The people who run the venues and the bystanders you have seen in some of them likewise exist only to the extent that the venues themselves do, in the strange shard of reality that only participants in the Experience have any access to whatsoever. After you leave here tonight, all these places will cease to exist for anyone except Fred, who will not only still be able to access them but will be able to summon them to places of his choosing and invite the rest of you into them. We could have lined them all up in a row and had you walk from one to the next, but it would have spoiled too early that something was off about them, so instead they were spread out, miles apart, in places they seemed to fit. Fred, you will also have the ability to book these venues for the next Experience, and to visit them for the purposes of planning the Experience. Apart from emergencies, you won’t be allowed to simply use them to have an extended vacation for you and your friends. And you will also know how to contact all the members of your group.”

Another of the hosts was now standing beside Ken, and Ken said, “Kelly, please come on up now next to Patrick. You two have already spoken, but the rest of the group needs to understand your role.”

Kelly did so, and Ken handed the mic to Patrick.

“I was the Seer, and Kelly shall be the Seeress for the next Experience. Over the coming months, Kelly will have visions, identifying for her the guests for the next Experience. Each one of those people will be someone with a connection in some way to a member of your group, usually a different sort of connection from the one that got you here, and some of those connections may not exist yet. Kelly’s visions will also tell her which member of the group has the connection to speak with that person and invite them to the next Experience. Kelly, you will pass on that information to Organizer Fred, and to whichever member of the group needs to invite that person.”

Patrick passed the mic back to Donna, and called me to come up, so I went up next to her.

“Mike, you’re the next Giver. Over the coming months, but a little later than Kelly, you will receive a number of items. You may find them, have them given to you, get mailed them anonymously or have them just randomly show up on your doorstep. You’ll know these items aren’t meant for you, but instead as gifts for the guests at the next Experience, except one. That one will be obvious because it will be a duplicate of the gift you received at this Experience, which without any prompting or obligation to do so, you gave away to another guest who you thought deserved it more. It counted as that guest’s gift, and the duplicate will count as yours.”

Donna clearly knew in advance I was going to give that to Jan. She had to have known Jan was the only guest she didn’t receive a gift for, and that was the gift that she obviously would have wanted. Donna had more to say, though.

“All the gifts will be tangible items, but some of them may seem like mere tokens. You’ll still recognize that they are gifts for the Experience. You may not know which guest each item is for, but unless you feel some other notion of what to do with it, just contact Organizer Fred and he’ll make arrangements to pick them up. Between you, the Seer, and the Organizer, you’ll figure out who each gift belongs to. But you’ll have all these others as your support staff.”

Donna then passed the mic to the man who had explained the puzzle cards to me, and called Jan up. Jan had kept the power on all day, but she’d been introduced as Jan at the icebreaker, so everybody already knew her by that name. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them did not remember she was transgendered, though.

“I’m the Puzzler. Jan will be your group’s Puzzler. Puzzle ideas will come to her, sometimes after being prompted by the others that they need a particular kind of puzzle for the event, and sometimes without any such prompting. If something needs to be printed or physical items made for a puzzle, talk to the Organizer. He’ll find a way to use resources in one of these facilities to make it.”

This went on through the Comedian, Coach, and many other roles, one for every member of the group, but they only had short speeches like the one for the Puzzler, rather than the much longer ones for the first three roles. When it was done, Donna pulled me aside for a brief private conversation, and handed me a file folder about an inch thick with papers of various sorts which she said contained everything she knew about the Giver role.

Chapter 5: After the Show

We all got back together once more and the hosts said goodbye, pointed us to where all our overnight bags were waiting to be picked up, and left us alone, as the new hosts of the Experience. Fred gave his email address, phone number, and even his home and work addresses to everyone, though he told us he didn’t expect most of us to need to visit him that way or mail stuff to him.

I was part of a group who asked, “Huh? You came across the country for this?”

“Nope. That’s part of the trick with the venues. Remember how you had to walk down a long hallway from your Friday night hotel room to get to the restaurant?”

Everybody admitted to having had that experience.

“It’s because there are several different hotels. This restaurant area is actually a separate venue, though with the same name as everything else, and each hotel is connected here by a portal. You’ll go back through them and exit where you came in to go home, and I’ve got a map to help everybody find the right one. I want to show you the other facilities first, though.”

He led us all outside, back into the parking lot we had left from Saturday morning and arrived back at this evening. Across the street, where there had been only woods earlier, was now the building with the orange decor that was not actually a hotel. We crossed two parking lots and the empty street and walked inside the front door. There had been plenty of people when we were last here; during the closing, one of our hosts had called them bystanders. But now, the building seemed empty save for us.

“This is going to be our main resource center, and when we meet physically, it will sometimes be here. Only I’ll have to tell you where it is since I can put it just anywhere,” Fred told us.

I noted, “I missed what you actually did in the first room here because I got pulled away to receive my gift. It needed some explanation.”

Kelly explained how that session had featured an open-mic comedy club in which they picked the new Comedian.

Fred then said, “Mike, if you were away then, maybe you heard something about the open sesame, close sesame doors. Ken mentioned that but I didn’t fully understand.”

“Oh, sure. Let’s go to that hallway.”

I led the way to the orange-walled hallway with the rows of semicircular arches on both sides, went up to the first arch with no door, and said, “Open, sesame.” Sections of the wall moved aside and replaced themselves elsewhere and after a few moments there was a door within the arch.

Paul stepped up and said, “Close, sesame.” The changes reversed themselves so there was a seemingly solid wall inside the arch.

Paul said “Open, sesame” again and opened the door. It was dark, but he found a light switch inside and illuminated the space, and we followed him in. It was a big empty room. It clearly extended beyond the neighboring arches in the hallway on either side, but there was only the one arch on the inside, and no amount of “Open, sesame” anywhere else in the room produced a door.

After we went back out into the hall, Paul went down the hall and started open-sesameing every arch along that wall without a door, opening each door including the ones already there, and I did the same on the opposite wall of the corridor. There were thirty-five arches, each leading to a separate room. About half the rooms should have overlapped one of the neighboring rooms, and some of us walked to these overlapping spaces and tried to shout to each other through the walls, but we couldn’t hear the others this way.

Several of the rooms were empty, but the furnished ones were all different. One was a file room with a row of file cabinets along one wall and bookshelves filling the opposite one. One was something like an office space with several computers, printers, all manner of office supplies, and some other weird machines. Somebody identified one as a 3-D printer. Another was a costume shop, with hundreds of costumes hanging on racks with labels on them, all in alphabetical order.

There was a door not under an arch just past the last arch on one side, just before the hallway with the restrooms. This door was labeled Control Room, and it was exactly that. There was a computer there with a program running which allowed configuring what was in each of the thirty-five rooms. There were several sizes of empty rooms possible, and a ton of preconfigured rooms of various types, hundreds of possible choices. The room was small and there wasn’t enough room to let everybody see, so we cycled through with Fred demonstrating.

One of the rooms we had seen had a big round table with an opening to allow someone to walk into the center, and exactly enough seats for us to all sit around it, and we went there to continue talking about our experiences. Paul took the floor first, and said, “One of the hosts took me aside before I even entered the room where you did the comedy, explaining that the contents of the bag I had picked up at the opening was Mike’s gift, and explaining what was going to happen. I was sworn to secrecy not to tell Mike any more than I did then, and I’m still sworn to secrecy against telling the rest of you. The host close-sesamed the door with the two of us out there, and I think the idea was to make sure none of the other participants could wander away from the comedy club and eavesdrop on what happened with Mike’s gift. And I think that is literally as far as I can go talking about the gift in front of anyone but Mike and who he gave the gift away to.”

Several other people talked about their experiences and various other secrets they had learned which seemed appropriate to share among our whole group. Fred eventually ended this discussion by saying, “It’s getting late. How about we all get home before anyone gets too tired to drive safely? We have plenty of time to plan the next Experience, and we don’t even know any of the participants yet.”

After making sure everybody had all their stuff, he led back across the street into the restaurant’s hotel, then to the corridors connecting us to the other hotels, directing groups of people down each one so they could get back to where they needed to be. Paul and Jan and I went with just two other people to one of them. We walked out into the parking lot we’d all arrived at Friday, and said our goodbyes before heading to our cars. Jan lingered a bit to thank me again for the gift, even though she now understood it was part of the show, a planned thing that I would pass this gift on to her.

When I got home, Susan was already asleep, so I crept into bed quietly beside her. In the morning, Susan asked how my event went, and I told her, “It was magical, literally. I think I’m sworn to secrecy about parts of it, as in I am physically unable to speak the words to describe them to you. But I can tell you my literally magical gift will show up here at some point, as will other gifts meant for the attendees at the one we’re going to run. I can’t say whether they’ll be addressed packages or just literally dropped off in front of the door, but if you see something strange, don’t throw it out.”

“All right. I’ll watch for them.”

I was a little distracted at work, but I made it through my day, and when I got home, Susan told me a package arrived for me. I opened the package and told her, “This is it. My magical gift.”

I laid out the pieces on the table.

“A costume to dress up as a woman?” Susan asked. “Have you talked with other people about this thing you do? I thought you said I was the only one you had shared the secret with.”

“I had another set of these during the event. I did, during the event, tell two other participants, both of whom saw this was my gift and saw me wearing it. Some of the event hosts know too, though I am not sure how many, but I think those people are all magically sworn not to talk about it. It’s more of the magic of this thing that one of the hosts learned my secret, and got this thing for me. One of the other participants was a friend of mine who I found out was trans. She’s out about it and told the whole group. And I gave her the clothes I received during the event. This is a replacement set for me, to reward my generosity.”

“You said they’re magical. How are the clothes magical? Wait! They donnnnnnnnnn’t...”

“They do,” I told her, and started stripping right there. After a few minutes, I was dressed as Michelle again.

“It’s a very realistic costume,” Susan said. “But it’s just a costume.”

She stepped up next to me and touched me in the relevant places as she continued.

“It’s hard to spot the seam of your mask, but when I know what I am looking for I can see it here. These are still fake, and down here you’re still a man.”

“Wait,” I told her, then, “Make it real.”

She noticed the change come over me, and touched me in all those same places, determining I was fully female in all of them.

“OK, I believe you now. Either you’re really female, or that thing messed with my mind to make me believe it.”

“It didn’t mess with your mind because I told you about it. If I hadn’t told you about it, it would have messed with your mind to make you think I’d always been a woman. But everybody else in the world who knows me, with a couple exceptions, thinks I’ve always been female.”

“So they think we’re a lesbian couple? I guess that’s OK as long as they stop believing that before we see any of them.”

“I didn’t test it extensively. But a room full of people recognized me as Michelle as if I’d always been Michelle from the moment we met. And they promptly forgot that and knew me only as Mike after I turned it off.”

“Seems like a pretty good test. But I’ve got another test,” Susan said, leading me to our bedroom.

As she was undressing me, she stopped, exclaiming, “Wait, panties!? It turned your briefs into panties?”

“Yeah, that happened during the event, too.”

“How far does it go?”

“I didn’t actually look,” I replied.

Susan marched over to my closet, pulled it open, and saw skirts, dresses, and blouses hanging inside, along with some women’s pants. I went to my dresser and found panties and bras inside, and held some up to show Susan.

She replied, “OK, it’s really strong magic. That should mean that what I planned will work.”

So I learned what it was like to be a lesbian. Susan had already given me lessons in how to properly excite a woman, and some of those lessons were reinforced tonight by letting me experience them from the other side. We fell asleep after quite a bit of that and I only changed back in the morning.

All our dress-up sessions after that were a lot more real than before, but Susan didn’t want to be a lesbian all the time, nor did I always want to be a woman, so it remained something we only did occasionally. We didn’t have to go shopping for women’s clothes anymore, though, because when I was Michelle I had a full wardrobe of them.

I experimented, confirming that the bra and its fake breasts and the mask were needed to activate the effect. While the effect was active, the bra was just a normal bra, rather than one designed to help hold fake breasts in place, and I could take it off and put on one of the other ones from Michelle’s wardrobe if I wanted. If I ended the effect with the bra off, my breasts would just turn into two pieces of rubber that fell to the floor, and any other bra of Michelle’s I was wearing would also disappear, as it simply didn’t have a counterpart in Mike’s wardrobe.

“Be careful borrowing any of Michelle’s clothes,” I pointed out to Susan.

“Uh, yeah, that would be bad,” she replied.

Chapter 6: Our Show

It was over a month before the next package showed up, but after that they appeared more frequently. By three months after the Experience, I was getting about three gifts a week for a while. Most of them came via conventional shipping services, even though they came without return addresses or with clearly fictional ones. And, as the Giver, I knew which ones were magical and usually what they did. There were no magical gender-change charms in this set, but there were several that magically satisfied other desires. Most of them were passed off to Fred by means of him causing one of the venues to temporarily appear between two buildings near me that shouldn’t have had any space between them.

By the time the packages were arriving frequently, I was regularly having sessions together with Kelly and Fred, and usually one or two others for whatever events we were working on that day. It was easy for me to drop off any gifts during these sessions. Usually Fred would bring the diner where we ate lunch during the Saturday of our Experience to each of our houses to pick us up, and then park it next to the orange building. They were happy to serve us whatever we wanted to eat or drink while we planned the next Experience, though it was just one waitress and one cook on duty instead of a whole staff like during the Experience.

During one of these sessions while Ray, the Coach, was with us, he felt that he needed Michelle’s presence during his event, and he asked, “But who’s Michelle?”

Fred was also confused. “Hmm, I don’t remember a Michelle in our group.”

I knew that Kelly knew; as the Seeress, no nugget of info escaped her if it was needed for planning. But she also protected my secret, so I told them, “It’s me. I am Michelle sometimes.”

“What? How?” the two men exclaimed.

“Fred, take me back to my house and I’ll make it clear.”

So he moved the diner next door to my house, I got the Michelle getup and changed into the bra and dress, and carried the mask as I walked back to the diner. The two men laughed a little seeing me that way, but were amazed when they saw what the mask did for my face. Then they were stunned when I turned on the power.

“Now you know. This was my gift; what I wanted more than anything else in the world was to be able to be a woman, sometimes. Not all the time, and not even most of the time. That’s why you don’t usually see me this way.”

Fred asked, “And this was your gift? So you gave this ability to one of our other members, too?”

“Yes, there was one who introduced herself as a trans-woman during our icebreaker, but she now has the power on all the time, so you will not remember that.”

Ray and Fred both confirmed that they did not remember any such person. But Kelly winked at me, confirming that she knew.

“Well, it’s her secret now, but you do know this is true for one of the women in our group. That is literally as much as I can say about it. And you should keep my secret as well, though you can acknowledge for others that there is a Michelle available among our group when needed.”

“Certainly,” Fred confirmed.

“Will do,” said Ray.

“You will remember after I turn the power off, though it may sometimes be fuzzy in your mind.”

And I turned it off briefly to test while I left the table to visit the restroom (not really needing to go). When I returned, Kelly confirmed they did remember Michelle while I was away. I spent the rest of the session as Michelle, though, because she was a participant in the event Ray was planning, and it was just easier that way. To keep things simple, I attended most of our remaining meetings as Michelle, too. That kept me from needing to reveal the secret to anyone else.

The event was an athletic activity for which our costume shop was going to provide workout gear for all the participants. When it was over and people were all showering and changing back into their usual clothes, one woman, Lisa, was going to find her clothes missing and I was going to show up and give her her gift, which was a magical outfit that could turn into whatever clothing she wanted. Kelly explained to me privately that Jan and I were the only ones from our group who had first-hand knowledge of the kind of “willing” action that was needed to transform us using our gifts, and a very similar thing was needed for Lisa’s gift except that instead of making it real or making the effect end, the will was accompanied by a mental image of what the outfit should look like. Jan would be busy at that particular moment, setting up some kind of puzzle at the next site after the one where the athletic activity occurred, so she couldn’t do it. Since this was going to happen in the women’s locker room, it was Michelle who was needed, and not Mike.

Only once was I asked to invite someone to the next Experience, and to my surprise, it was my neighborhood “crazy lady,” Edna. Inviting her got us talking more than we ever had, and I learned she was actually probably the smartest person on the block. She was a bit eccentric in her behavior, but we became good friends. Her gift ended up being a man who understands her. Not me, but another man named Lloyd with a similar problem as her. They were each others’ gifts, along with a real wedding for them as part of the Experience.

This was the part of our planning a lot of us were worried about, that we were going to get two people who were complete strangers before meeting there to actually get married that quickly. The Seeress said they would do it, but we were ready to replace the wedding with a generic party segment if they didn’t.

For three weekends before the event, we set up all the activities at all the venues. Since literally nobody else used them, the stuff we arranged would remain there until we needed it. A room in the orange building was configured to be the wedding chapel, and a second room was set up as the alternate in case they chose not to get married. That was part of the idea of that place, to have lots of options.

The weekend before the event, Fred set up all the hotels. We had a more diversely situated group, so between us and the guests, there were actually ten hotels in different places. Friday evening we drove in to whichever one was closest to our homes, as did our guests, but we drove our cars around to the side where the restaurant was to make them ready for Saturday morning. After Fred set things up, the parking lot around the combined hotel was just as much connected as the interior, though each portal was on a driveway labeled “staff only.”

Since I had to appear as Michelle to guests, to keep it simple, I arrived Friday as Michelle and stayed female during the entire two days we ran the Experience. I was surprised how comfortable I was with it, though maybe I shouldn’t have been. After all, I had been Michelle for almost a full day when I first got the gift and several times during planning sessions, sometimes for hours at a time.

My scene with Lisa went fine. More than fine; she was overjoyed with the gift, and transformed it into a different spectacular outfit each time we moved to a new location. At the end, I apologized for having stolen her clothes and gave her the original set back, but she told me no apology was necessary.

The next group’s Comedian would have been obvious from the start to anyone knowing about the existence of the role. Without prompting, he wore a full Joker costume in the style of the 60s Batman TV show during the entire Experience. He played the role to the fullest, even introducing himself as Joker during the icebreaker, so everybody called him that throughout the event. Kelly had known he would do that and we planned an entire skit where some of us wore costumes as Batman, Robin, Batgirl, and Commissioner Gordon. The costume shop in the orange building naturally had all the outfits we needed. I’m pretty sure that room was also magical, and then whenever we entered it, it had everything we needed inside. Lisa spontaneously joined into this skit for a moment, changing her magic outfit into a Catwoman costume, before going back to watch the rest of the show, still dressed as Catwoman.

The Giver among our guests had been given a trick deck of cards. It wasn’t like my puzzle cards; if you fanned the deck out, they looked like normal playing cards, but if you wanted some specific card, you could cut the deck and it would be there. When we had Joker in a fake jail cell at one point, the Giver handed him the deck of cards through the bars, figuring he could find some way to escape using it. He pulled a Get Out of Jail Free card out of the deck, inserted it into a slot near the lock, and the door opened for him. That Giver told Joker to keep the cards, completing the foretold role.

Not only did Edna and Lloyd propose during the Experience, but they accepted our offer to let them marry right then, both of them being a bit estranged from their families and feeling that they were never going to have a bigger group of friends together than at that moment. So the finale Sunday evening was the wedding, with the reception taking the place of the usual dinner in the hotel restaurant where we started. That meant we revealed that the orange building was next door to the hotel, but the revelation of everything followed just afterward, and by then everybody had their gifts and jig was mostly up anyway.

We made it through that Experience with everything miraculously working as planned. It seemed like that was another part of the magic. Once it was planned, nothing could interfere with it actually happening or everybody managing to be there.

Chapter 7: Epilogue

Right after it was over, Edna moved out to live with her new husband, but we kept in touch. It turned out Lloyd was an inventor and Edna had the knowhow to market his ideas, so they were perfect for each other in another way.

Now that Experience was over and my obligation was complete, I allowed Susan to get me out of the house as Michelle for things other than running the Experience. I still didn’t want to be Michelle full time, nor did she want that, but we were both ready for me to be Michelle beyond our bedroom, and I no longer had the excuse I couldn't pass as female. It allowed me to share some women-only experiences with her that I never could have as Mike, including a spa visit and a baby shower. Susan had been invited to the shower, but that invitation magically turned into an invitation for us both while I was Michelle. And I really did enjoy doing those things, but I never would have actually done them without both her encouragement, and the ability to be really female during them.

Naturally, I kept in touch with Jan, too. Six months after we ran the Experience, she invited us, as “Mike and Susan,” to her wedding. Susan knew Jan was one of my friends from the Experience but never knew she was seeing the magically transformed woman getting married. She found out, though, when Jan invited “Michelle and Susan” to her baby shower a year later and the card arrived while I wasn’t Michelle. Or rather, Susan guessed due to the difference from the way the earlier baby shower invitation behaved, and I found I was able to confirm it for her. By sending the invitation, Jan had implicitly told Susan her secret.

At Jan’s baby shower, Susan and I had a private moment with Jan in which I informed Jan how she’d let the secret slip.

“Oops,” Jan said. “But no big deal, really. You just keep it a secret, Susan.”

“I will. Who else knows?”

“Apart from you and people at the Experience, nobody.”

“Nobody? Your parents? Your husband?” Susan asked.

“Nope. None of them know. Everyone else thinks I was born a woman. But I’m keeping the power on forever, so none of them need to know.”

We all laughed and went back to join the rest of the guests.