Michael’s Arrival

I was Peggy Previn before I volunteered to become an ethertraveler.

My earliest memory is discovering I was in an egg, and having to fight my way out of it. My giant mother breast-fed me. I didn’t understand what I really was at this point, only that my mother was a giantess compared to me, far larger than a mother is to a newborn child on Earth.

I was also soon introduced to my father. He was larger than me, but only by the degree I would expect, or even less than that. He had a normal-sized house inside the huge house where my mother lived. I spent most of my time with him, with my mother mainly just feeding me. I learned how to speak, to walk, and even to fly! That’s right, my father and I both have wings. The wings were my first clue that my mother isn’t really giant-sized, but rather that my father and I are tiny. The wings look like dragonfly wings, each wing as long as my body is tall, and they curl up when I’m not using them. The first flying lesson was about learning to uncurl them and spread them flat, and the second to flap them, which is also in the manner of a dragonfly, a very fast vibratory kind of flapping. After that, I learned to hover, and then fly, within his miniature house, though the flying space was limited there.

My father flew out into the big house to be with my mother at times, but at first I only flew very short distances within the smaller house. Only when my father felt I had good control of my flight did he let me fly in the big house. Once I got the hang of it, flying in all that open space was wonderful.

Interestingly, we speak English. And despite the wings and the weird disparity in sizes, we are basically human. I was a boy named Michael, with the same parts as any human male between my legs.

But I grew fast, and I didn’t stay there long. Just after they celebrated my first birthday, at which point I was the same size as my father and I was eating normal food rather than breast milk, my new father took me to another place that he called a school. It was only the third time I’d been allowed outside the big house, all three times connected to my father via a tether. For these outings, we wore a pair of harnesses that strapped around our torsos, under the wings. The harnesses were connected down at the waist by a tether slightly longer than one of his wings, where it didn’t get in the way of the wings.

The school is a single building no taller than other houses, but even at first sight, the tiny doors at the bottom and several rows of windows above told me the entire thing was set up for small people like me and my father rather than my giant mother. It’s a boarding school. At the age of 1, I left my parents behind and learned to live among hundreds of other miniature boys and men. I learned quickly that all males were this size and all females were roughly the size of my mother.

We landed, then walked into the ground floor of the building. While it is nominally a school, the ground floor is more like a shopping mall, with dozens of stores sized for the men of this world, with wide aisles between stores. My father led me to an office somewhere among the stores where he enrolled me in the school. Once that was done, we walked to a particular intersection of aisles, where we flew again, up into a vertical shaft. There were several ledges that ran all the way around the shaft, but we just went up one level.

The ledge was a walkway that ran all the way around the shaft, with several doors. He knocked on one of them, and a man opened it and let us into a room which was pretty large but only as high as the other rooms I’d seen in spaces made for men. We took off the harness, and my father said goodbye. It was not our final goodbye; he came back to visit. But most of the time after this I was apart from him and raised by the regulars here.

Each of us had a tiny room which could be reached via the walkway around one of the shafts, but at first we mainly used it only to sleep and use the individual attached bathroom. Speaking of which, we had potty training. My mother had put a diaper on me when I was a baby but here we were expected to use a toilet which was in our private bathroom. By the time we turned 2, we were expected to be able to go to the bathroom entirely on our own. That wasn’t really a problem for me, but I tried not to show my extra knowledge from my first life and “learned” this only as fast as the other boys.

Although this was “school,” it was more like day care at first. Each morning an adult came into our room to wake, bathe and dress us. After that, he would take us into the large common room and we would spend most of the day together there. The adults brought us meals, led activities, and generally supervised the group. At any given time while we were there, there was one adult watching over the group and one or two others around. They came and left on different shifts. Eventually we learned there were four of them on duty at most times except overnight, and they had four offices they shared with the men on other shifts, each with its own bathroom.

Sometimes we would play in small groups, in one of our individual rooms. A couple rooms had windows, and those were popular for getting glimpses of the outside world, where we sometimes saw giant women walking by. But we could get together, often for games, in any of the rooms, in groups of two to four of us and sometimes one of the adults to help teach us game rules. Four of us and one adult was pretty much the limit in one of those small rooms.

We had access to the shafts, but we were told not to use them alone. I think that, once we got a little older and more confident, all of us occasionally flew down at night when we were supposed to be sleeping and explored the mall area below, but everything was closed then. Well, most of it. There was cleaning of the common rooms and the mall area during that time, and somewhere in the building, food was being packaged into small bundles that were used to restock our kitchens with food for both the men and us for the next day. Few even attempted go outside, where we would be in the world of the big women, afraid we’d get stepped on without them even seeing us, but those who did try reported to the rest of us that the doors are locked at night, even from the inside.

I think they knew we would explore, and we were told to memorize our shaft number so we could get back if we got lost. One thing I got from this was an understanding of the size of the whole building. The space we normally lived in wasn’t the whole building, nor even the whole floor; it was merely a small fraction of the floor. Eventually I figured out the layout of one section of one floor was like this:

At some point, I figured out that our full adult size was about 8 inches tall. All the rooms were about 2 feet tall, and our individual rooms were about 2 by 2 feet with 1 by 1 foot bathrooms just barely big enough for a tub, toilet, and sink. The offices were about 2 by 3 feet, with larger bathrooms and similarly sized kitchens. In the center of this grouping was a large 6 by 6 foot common room. The entire group of rooms was about 12 by 16 feet, the size of a single room in a normal house, and there were five floors above the level with the stores. At this time, I didn’t know what the upper floors looked like, but there was apparently a 5 by 3 array of sections like this, making the entire building 60 by 48 feet and 12 feet tall.

Occasionally my father showed up, and he and I would go back to my private room and talk. Eventually I figured out these visits were always happening on weekends, either Saturday or Sunday and usually once every weekend. My schedule here was the same, 7 days a week, so at first I didn’t notice, but other kids got visits too and I eventually realized most were visiting on the same two days each week.

As we got older, they started teaching us some simple things, but there were no grades or assignments or anything like that at this point. We stayed here with the same rooms and the same group of adults until we were all 5 or 6. At that point, we moved to another set of rooms one floor above, which was set up the same way. Some of the same kids were there but there were also many different ones who had come from other parts of the building, out of groups set up identically to the one I was in.

This was actually school. After breakfast in the common room, we’d have actual classes six days a week, with a break for lunch. At the end of classes we went back to our rooms to do homework or study until dinner. After dinner was often play time, though sometimes we’d have more studying to do. My past life helped, and I did not have to study as much, but I used the time to take note of my observations about the world and the similarities and differences from the Earth I grew up in.

By this time, we were expected to bathe and dress ourselves. The adults still prepared meals for us and dealt with any problems we had, but they were teachers more than caretakers. The seventh day we just played games or had free play with toys and games, and very often my father and many of the other kids’ fathers visited then. We also got official access to the mall level at this time. We had cards that would let us buy things from the stores, though it was mostly only clothes to replace ones that wore out. Men’s clothes are uniform in style; we wear pants similar to ones men work on the Earth I grew up on, and shirts which were rather different. The shirts fasten in the back, with buttons above and below where the wings attach to our backs, and are tightly fitted to ensure they do not interfere with flight.

A lot of the classes were similar to those I had experienced in my prior life. But we were in class longer, and our extra classes included a bunch about pollution: What it is, and how we use our special power to clean it up. We also had flying lessons in PE, for which we went to a larger room in another part of the building, occupying an entire section of the building.

We did four years with these teachers and then moved up a floor again to the next group. I used the seasons to track time. We never actually went outside and we had classes year round, but the rooms with windows helped. At age 11, we got an explicit class about how reproduction works here, which is crazy. We are going to go completely inside one of the big women. We had something like a large beanbag with a hole in it that we used to practice going in and out and making a breathing tube out of our wings.

In another class, we went to some other part of the school where they handle all the trash and such, and stood in for the usual paid workers who used their power to clean up pollution, practicing for the first time using that ourselves. It is totally magic. There is no sane scientific explanation for how that power works.

After another four years, we moved again. This time, the layout was far different. We were in high school now. Instead of staying in our section with the same small group of kids we’d been with for eight years (some of them twelve years), we switched rooms for classes like in high schools on Earth.

By this point I understood that the whole building is divided into 15 sections on each floor, 12 of which are like the ones I had always previously lived in, which each housed up to 16 students and was served by up to four teachers or caretakers at one time. In each section, there is one floor each for pre-school, primary school, and middle school, though different sections are in different grades within each of these types of school. One of the other sections has the large spaces we’d practiced flying in, on three floors. The remaining two have other types of facilities, including where they prepare our food and manage wastes.

The floor above the middle school has horizontal corridors connecting all the vertical shafts, like the ground floor does, but it is full of various classrooms rather than stores. The top floor has all the living spaces for the students as well as offices for high school teachers. We were all together at this point, mixed with the groups we had been isolated from, and sometimes in classes with students from other grades, though our living groups were all from the same grade. Instead of one teacher bringing all the meals to an entire group, now we all go to a big cafeteria typical of any school on Earth.

While there are classes typical of high school on Earth, there are also things like advanced flying and pollution theory. The former explained to us that we spent our entire lives to this point in this building to keep us safe from the outside world, where there were dangers like giant women and predatory animals. We mostly avoid those by flying while we are outside, but there’s a way we can repel any birds that want to make a meal out of us.

The pollution theory class acknowledged that we are performing magic when we clean up pollution, but nevertheless magic that follows a set of rules, and we learned those rules, as well as the people here understand them. Assuming it is possible for us to contact the Earth I lived my first life on, this could be potentially incredibly important to send back to Earth, since magic isn’t even known to be a thing there. We only learned the rules as they understand them, though; the people here don’t understand the actual principles behind it. Sadly, I think the people here don’t really understand any principles of magic. They only understand how to use the limited bits of magic that have been made available to them as part of the Wish. I think it’s very likely that this magic only applies here, since people on other worlds who reported back weren’t transformed in this way.

When cleaning up pollution, we aim our power at pollutants, any chemicals deemed unnatural. Even naturally occurring chemicals can be deemed unnatural if mankind’s activities have made them appear out of proportion with their naturally occurring rates. We have to be careful to aim precisely, because many useful things we make can also be affected by the power. Because of this, there was more chemistry in high school than I remembered, organic and inorganic chemistry.

In high school, they let us more and more go visit locations outside the school. We were supervised, but not tethered the way I was as a little kid when first arriving at the school. There were some fun outings, and some working ones where we applied our pollution-cleaning power to different sorts of things. It also kept us aware of the dangers of the outdoors; a couple of the kids got the opportunity to drive off hawks looking for a meal.

When I graduated from high school, one of the flight rooms was repurposed to hold the graduation ceremony. Most kids’ dads were there, and we were allowed to meet and talk for a while. This was his time to really say goodbye. I was about to go out into the world and I would be too far away for him to visit often.

The graduating class was divided into four groups. Each group boarded a truck, something like an SUV, sized to be driven by a woman. But rather than bench seats behind the driver’s and passenger’s seats, there were cages. No, not really cages; they were open to the aisle down the middle, but they had dividing walls made of bars that made them resemble cages. There were two layers of three cages each on each side of the aisle. Each cage contained a harness like the ones fathers and sons wore when they arrived at school, but it was tethered to the walls rather than to a harness for another person.  There were eleven in my group, so one cage was left empty.

They had told us we were going into pollution service after finishing school, but only at this time did someone explain to us that we were going about a hundred miles away, too far for us to fly under our own power, and the harnesses were designed to keep us safe during the journey. They would keep us from hitting any of the walls and cushion the jolts we might otherwise suffer.

Indeed, the journey wasn’t gentle, but the harness kept me from getting bruised. Only the truck I was on went to an electronics plant, but there were other high-school graduates from other schools, over a hundred of us in all. We worked there for pay for six months, cleaning up by-products of their production processes, though the pay was all put into a bank account, and we didn’t need any of it now, as our housing and food was provided by the company we were working for.

After that, we went to a chemical plant, a facility processing household trash, and another plant where they made other goods, each for six months. At the end of all this time, we stayed for a short while in one of the schools, eating with the high-school students but just taking a bunch of skill-assessment tests. They treated these somewhat casually, but they were incredibly important because they determined what we were going to do in our lives. I did well on the tests, and I ended up going to college.

Meeting

Myra

Fortunately, a male ethertraveler spotted my advertising and tracked me down.

“Hi, I’m Michael. I was a woman named Peggy on the Earth we came from.”

“Myra. And I was a man named Jack.”

We went pretty quickly from weekly dates to getting married, but that was common around here and nobody thought it strange. These was still a ceremony for it, but people didn’t usually travel long distances to it. It was especially difficult for men. So the in-person attendees were mostly other students we had met in college. The ceremony was streamed live over the internet for our families and distant friends.

Amazingly, both men and women still wore the same kind of formal clothes for weddings as had been traditional on old Earth, only the men wore much smaller ones which were cut out in the back to fit around the wings. We applied for married student housing before the actual ceremony, and both of us moved our stuff over there the morning of the ceremony so we could have the traditional wedding night activity.

“Guess it’s time to try that scary thing called sex,” Michael told me after he rode on my shoulder to enter our new home.

That was the thing. That was why nobody had sex out of wedlock here. Sex was scary for men, to have your entire body inserted into another person. They almost universally enjoyed it, but most men suffered from the fear of getting stuck. It was pretty rare, but everybody heard the stories. If a man got stuck inside his wife, he could get help in a hospital getting out. But if a man got stuck in a woman he wasn’t married to? Embarrassing!

“Dinner first,” I told him. We didn’t have a reception after the wedding because most of the guests were online.

“But just your dinner, right? I’ll eat your lining,” Michael replied.

“Yes.”

There is a second level of contraception here beyond simply not incubating any fertilized eggs. It consists of the man eating the uterine lining when he goes inside the woman. No lining means the egg cell cannot attach, even if it is fertilized, and it washes out of the body and never develops into an actual egg. If the egg cell does manage to implant on the partial lining, he’ll eat it before it has a chance to do anything, and the result will be the same; it’ll be digested inside his body along with the lining. And I knew I was at the point in my cycle on our wedding day where I would have the beginnings of a lining, so we had planned for it.

It didn’t matter that it wasn’t all there yet. It was too big for him to eat all at once, anyway. The whole lining only weighs an ounce, but he’s tiny. In comparison to a human, eating a whole lining at once was like trying to eat 30 pounds of raw, bloody steak at once, far more than the stomach could process at once, though men’s tiny bodies process food faster than mine or those of humans on my Earth. I would send him in there several times a day for a week to get it all. And we’d have sex every time, too.

I stripped off my wedding dress and prepared a quick meal for myself wearing just my bra and panties. Michael stripped as well, and while I ate, tried to psych himself up for going inside me. While I cleaned up after eating and took off my panties, Michael was making the breathing tube.

Normally, when men aren’t using their wings to fly, they roll the wings up along the long dimension of the wing into a tube that sits on top of their head, big enough for me to insert a finger into and have the section between the knuckles inside the roll. But it is possible to roll them the other way, making a long, narrow tube. A notch on the wings makes a small hole close to the attachment point of the wings. When the tube is pointed above the man’s head, this hole is exactly where it needs to be for the man to turn his head around and breathe through the tube sort of like a snorkel. So when men go inside a woman, they make this tube and leave it running through the vagina into the outside world to ensure the vagina never closes up completely and they can still breathe.

“Ready?” I asked.

“Ready!”

I picked him up and carried him with me to my bed. Then I lay down on the bed with my back slightly raised so that I could easily reach between my legs to insert him into me, feet first. I relaxed my vaginal muscles and pushed him in further. When just his head and the breathing tube remained outside my body, I felt his feet reach my cervix. That was the point where he had to take over.

Men have glands on the soles of their feet that can emit a substance that causes the cervix to dilate, but they have to rub the soles together to activate the gland. It takes a couple minutes, and then they can hook their feet inside and pull themselves in deeper. The uterus isn’t big enough for a man to fit inside lying straight, so he bends his legs to pull his body fully inside in a squatting position. Eventually, just the breathing tube is in the vagina, and the cervix surrounds the point where the wings attach to his back. He can rotate his body around and use his hands to grab chunks of the uterine lining and eat them.

But the eating is actually the second act. Once the man gets into that position, the first thing he does, which he has an overwhelming urge to do, is to find my fallopian tubes. Either tube will do. He rotates his body so his penis can reach the tube. Only in the presence of pheromones which exude from the tubes can the man get an erection, and only near the tube are the pheromones concentrated enough to do so. Then he inserts the erection into the tube, and after a bit he reaches climax and ejaculates a tiny ball of semen that plugs the tube. If I ovulate from that tube within the next day or so, the egg cell will be forced to pass through this ball and will almost certainly be fertilized. This act is also what gives both of us sexual pleasure. Only once he is done with this does he start eating, and eats until he is full. Then he releases the secretion from his feet again to dilate the cervix long enough to poke his head and shoulders out, and pushes the rest of his body out using his arms and legs.

This is how a guy gets stuck. If he can’t make enough of the secretion to dilate the cervix, he’ll be trapped in my uterus. Fortunately, that did not happen, and everything went the way they taught us in school. And OH! MY! GOD! The orgasm! I was not a woman before so I don’t know what a woman’s orgasms on my Earth felt like, but from about 1 minute after he got his dick into my tube until he came and finally stopped, I was feeling something more intense than the climax a man feels at ejaculation, continuously!

When I felt him starting to work his way out of me, I relaxed my vagina again, the opposite of laying an egg, in order to let him come out his own way. It’s not like giving birth; our vaginal muscles are adapted for pushing eggs out and wouldn’t work well on the long, narrow shape of a man.

Once he was out, Michael kissed me and then went off for his first shower in the tiny bathroom in his new house, and I went to my full sized one.

Before bed, we did it again, and then it was before my breakfast, mid-morning, mid-afternoon, after my dinner, and before bed every night for the next 7 days, sex and a meal for Michael each time. Finally, before breakfast on the 8th day Michael reported it seemed the lining had stopped growing and he had eaten the last of it. By this point, we were pros at the insertion, and it took us less than 30 seconds from Michael’s feet entering my vagina to him being fully inside my uterus.

We still had sex twice a day for a while, before breakfast and after dinner, and each session was a lot shorter since there was no eating. When I had the lining to eat, it took longer, but on class days we worked out times we could meet when neither of us had classes to let him eat the lining.

I thought I’d miss eating the me-egg omelettes once a month, but I didn’t, really. I definitely didn’t miss laying the eggs, and the feelings I got having Michael inside me far surpassed everything I wasn’t doing since the marriage.

We kept this up until we finished college, and we steered ourselves into useful careers. I would be making electronics that would get me practice for building the circuits for an ether communicator, and Michael would be an astronomer, poring through data from telescopes and helping to find the real Earth, if it was out there somewhere. He had already noted that, despite all the similarities to Earth, the sky was wrong. The stars were different from those seen on Earth and people had invented different constellations. The other planets were different, too, though the moon was the same. So we assumed we were not on a parallel-universe Earth but on some sort of artificially constructed copy of Earth somewhere else, and it might be possible to call home.

It wasn’t easy. The circuitry for an ether communicator was nothing like the stuff I built for work, and it took Michael years to find Earth. We decided to take it slow. Five years past college, we discussed having children. We were already behind the curve most couples followed, so it would look normal for me to have one then, and there was a standard one-year maternity leave for breast-feeding after your egg hatched. They didn’t use formula or use day-care for infants in their first year; every mother breast-feeds.

So we agreed to have one child. During one fertile period we had sex just twice a day, once in each tube, and Michael didn’t eat the lining. Like they’d taught us, our reproduction method is very fertile. I indeed laid a fertilized egg that very first try, and we went back to the contraceptive form of sex while it developed and hatched into a boy. During my year off work, I worked out how to build the circuits.

Timmy celebrated his first birthday and then went off to little boy “school”. Michael showed me where the building was, though of course I could not fit inside. And I knew that was likely the last I would ever see of him. Little kids didn’t remember their first year of life once they grew up, and as a result Timmy was never going to remember his mother, not other than as a vague concept. I did, here, because I had a fully developed mind from before birth, but people who had not ethertraveled did not.

The year away from work did wonders, and I was already well on my way to building an ether communicator the following year when Michael found Earth. So we wrote up our reports, separate ones before we met to include the different experiences men and women have, and sent them off.