Monday

I got dressed in a more conservative outfit the next morning, knowing I was not dressing to date Kelly, and called her and asked her to meet me in the cafeteria. We each had a normal-sized breakfast at what were actually breakfast hours here, and remained talking awhile afterward.

“So what’s your job, Kelly, when you’re not helping orient me? Do you bring new vampires in all the time, or do you do something else?”

“I’m actually a librarian. Along with several other people, I maintain the library here, which you can find on the fourth floor at the opposite end of the main hall from the cafeteria. That entails reshelving books, tracking down delinquent books, and making copies for people who need books for the long term, as well as trying to acquire books from the human world that we don’t have here. But a temp is taking my shifts there for about a month so that I can help you.”

“I have you for a month?”

“Only a week, really, but there was also planning time for me going to get you as well. Half of the month is to allow for the fact that I’m spending more time out of my day on this than I would spend on my regular job, so I sort of get a vacation afterward.”

“How did you get picked for this?”

“They thought I had the right looks to catch your eye, at least, when I was properly attired. The researchers have developed some pretty sophisticated models, not only finding the people most likely to appreciate the forced sex change imposed on new vampires with the least interruption to history, but also finding the one of us here most likely to be found attractive to each target and able to find an opportunity to convert them. We can refuse that duty, but if we accept, they’ll get a temp from their staff of temp workers to fill in for us for approximately the amount of working time we spend retrieving and mentoring the target.”

“There’s a staff of regular temp workers?”

“Yeah. If you want to try out a variety of different kinds of jobs, you can join the temp staff. They’ll train you for each job and then you’ll work anywhere from a week to a few months as needed in place of someone else. It’s not unheard of for new people to get started there.”

“I could certainly try that.”

Kelly helped me get signed up as a temp worker after that, and they gave me quite a lot of info about it, including a brief summary of the kinds of jobs I was most likely to be called to temp for, just because they were the jobs that the most people did and so they were most likely to need substitutes for. A lot of them were ones I’d already heard about, but there were plenty more. Much of the rest of the day, Kelly spent showing me around some facilities that were located on various floors, most of them, like the library, placed opposite the cafeterias that were on every floor. There was a catalog of them in the material about the temp job, because some jobs required working in these places. As Kelly pointed out to me, this also let me learn the places, so I could portal to them later. This, I realized, was why people rarely used the stairs.

Kelly and I ate lunch together as well, and after that, when I felt the need to pee, she showed me how to remake my body during the day so I could skip visiting a toilet. I let her be on her own for the evening. I had hoped for another date with Anna, but she told me she was working. She was a waitress in the Anything Goes club, and it emboldened me to go check out that club, though while using one of the nonparticipant buttons, since I wasn’t sure yet I was really up for “anything.” Now that I had the organ designed for it, I thought it was possible I might have sex with a man someday, but I knew “anything” could go well beyond that. It was worth a visit to get ideas about that. I did put on another date-style outfit, just in case I met someone interesting, this time in green.

But when I got there, instead of just the nonparticipant buttons, there were several other types, and everybody was wearing buttons. A man explained them to me when I asked. They basically helped other people know what you were looking for, and also made it clear most of the people were here looking to have sex tonight. There were buttons with a single male symbol or a single female symbol; wearing one of those implied you wanted to have sex with a person of that gender, though because it was Anything Goes, it was possible you might be asked to be part of a group encounter in which you personally would only have sex with one such person. There were also buttons that had a single combined male/female symbol, which simply meant you were open to sex with a person of either gender. Those were the most common buttons I saw in the club.

There were also buttons with two male, two female, or a male and a female symbol, indicating you were looking for group sex with multiple people of one or both genders. A button with a question mark meant you hadn’t decided; it was basically an “ask me” button to potentially be invited to anything. A button with a stop sign on it meant you weren’t here to have sex tonight, but were interested in meeting people and possibly going on a date that did not involve sex. A yellow triangle button meant you had some sort of unusual fetish; this could be worn with one of the other buttons to indicate who you wanted to participate in that fetish with. Wearing the triangle with the stop sign meant the fetish didn’t involve what people would usually consider sex. And with a nonparticipant button, I could still talk with people and maybe even eat dinner with them, but nobody was going to ask me to get involved in anything unless I asked first.

He also mentioned the green star buttons. They didn’t give these out at the door; they were permanently owned by people with intersex or otherwise sexually irregular bodies. Those people might wear a second button to indicate what they were looking for, but the absence of one, which was the usual case for them, was the equivalent of an “ask me” button, though it meant you’d also be asking them about the meaning of their particular green star button. There were only a handful of these people, but they frequented this club, and he claimed no two of them had exactly the same sort of sexual organs.

I did encounter one of the green star people, who at least superficially looked female. I summoned the courage to ask her about it. She said her name was Dina, and she had normal female parts except that she also had a retractable and normally retracted penis inside her vagina. She could, with the right foreplay, project it out of her vagina and have sex in the way of a man. I found that interesting, and maybe she’d be an alternative for me if I wanted the dick but couldn’t stand the man, but I wanted to at least try a normal man first.

I ended up eating dinner with one of the male fetishists named Jason. He admitted he rarely found someone interested in his fetish and was fine just eating with me and telling about it. His fetish was basically the equivalent of edible panties. It was possible to change your clothes while you were wearing them, and he wanted to date someone, male or female, who would change their underwear into a frosting or whipped cream version of the same, which he would then lick off of them. That could lead to oral sex, but that was as far as he went; he wasn’t interested in any sort of sex with the organs between his legs.

“Hmm, that sounds fun. I know I’m wearing a nonparticipant button, but I could take it off for that. I might have to practice that change, though. I’m new. I’ve only had lesbian sex here so far, and I’m sure I’ll try a dick at some point, but the kind of thing you suggest might be good to let me try being around a man.”

“I hope you enjoy the experience. Most of the people I find who are willing to do this like it and come back to try it again occasionally, though it’s not something that they want to do every day.”

Jason skipped dessert, since he was going to get his afterward, but I had a slice of apple pie before we left and went to his room.

“OK, Jason, I want to practice this conversion into frosting or whipped cream before I try to do it for real with the panties I’m wearing.”

“Go get a glob of hand soap from the bathroom and convert that.”

That seemed like a good idea, and my first try actually worked. I turned the white soap into white frosting that Jason and I shared licking off my fingers.

“OK, where do you want me to be for this? On the edge of the bed, or somewhere else?”

“Just stand with your legs spread apart. That allows me to go around and lick it all off.”

“OK,” I said, and took off my dress so I was standing there in my underwear. “Here goes!”

I barely felt it when it changed, but Jason noticed it and started nibbling at the green frosting that used to be one of the side strings. That didn’t make the rest fall off, though, because it was now frosting stuck to me rather than fabric being held up by that piece. He went around the back to the other side string and then started working his way down my ass, almost to my asshole before he switched to doing the same thing in the front, leaving the important bits for last. When he continued licking me down there after all the frosting was gone, I found the feeling wonderful, and reminiscent of some of what I’d done with Anna the previous night, and I mashed his head into my pussy to encourage him to keep going, until he brought me to orgasm. It was charming, and I could easily imagine a man doing that to me as a form of elaborate foreplay before actual sex, but I knew that wasn’t Jason’s way. I would have been up for a second round, also, but Jason was done.

“Hmm, now do I just go back to my place commando?” I asked.

“You don’t have to. Grab more hand soap and make yourself new panties.”

That worked, and I recreated the garment I’d been wearing at the start of the evening. Then I kissed him goodbye and portaled back to my room.

It was a somewhat earlier evening for me, as well as a less tiring day overall, so I had some time to think before simply plopping into bed. I didn’t need a shower this time, but I washed myself down there. Afterward, still wearing only my bra, I went through some of my other possessions from my life as Brad. I kept a few mementos of my first life, but I made an area of junk to be converted when I needed something, and put most of the stuff there. There was a lot more of Brad’s life that I wanted to forget than what I wanted to remember.

When I checked my phone, I saw that I’d missed a message while I was having fun with Jason. 9 AM appointment tomorrow to get oriented for a job for the temp service. Would have been nice to know sooner, but I’m sure they sometimes don’t get much advance notice.

Eventually I crawled into bed naked again and struggled to get to sleep. I wasn’t completely worn out like the first night, so rather than fall asleep quickly, I noticed how uncomfortable some of the positions I’d slept in as Brad were with this body. I ended up sleeping lying flat on my back.

Tuesday

I ate breakfast alone, then returned to my room to prepare for my orientation session. It was at a gym, of all things. I was curious about that. From what Kelly had explained to me, vampires don’t need a gym for the reasons humans do; we automatically form our ideal bodies every night. If we want to weigh less or have more muscles, we simply do it without even trying. But I supposed that some enjoy getting a workout.

The appointment just said to wear athletic gear. I remembered having seen women wear athletic clothes, but it wasn’t something I had ever thought about before for myself, largely because they were form-fitting and really only something that worked at all if you had the body. Well, now I have the body. To get some ideas, I went to the site Kelly had left me a link for and from there to a page about clothes. After following a couple more links, I arrived at a page showing just what I was looking for, lots of different women’s athletic wear options. Based on the pictures I saw, I decided on a top that was basically a sports bra, and skin-tight shorts coming down to mid-thigh. This was worn with cotton briefs, the closest thing women typically wore to the kind of underwear I used to wear as Brad, though the waistband is a narrow thing instead of a full inch of elastic, and it was a single solid layer across the front with no fly.

For my feet, I wore sneakers with women’s socks, which are made of the same fabric as men’s athletic socks but only come up to the top of the sneakers so they are completely hidden. That was something that made no sense to me. Why do men wear athletic socks that come up past their ankles or even past their shins, while women wear athletic socks that are completely hidden inside the shoes, when they wear the same shoes? Just to show off more of their legs? Though I enjoyed being a woman since my change a couple days ago, I can’t say I understand all the things women do.

I put all the clothes on. The sports bra seemed almost too tight, but once I got it on, I realized it hugged my body well and kept my D-cups firmly in place. Then I looked at myself in the selfiecam-mirror thing in the bathroom. The smooth profile around my crotch was amazing; I’d admired that on athletic women before, and now I had my own. This was more revealing than anything I’d worn in public since I’d been here, but I found that it didn’t bother me. It wasn’t slutty. It just looked like I was ready for a workout. And while I expected to be supervising the workouts rather than getting one myself, it seemed likely I was going to be trying out some of the equipment and so I was going to get that workout today.

I headed down for my orientation. The gym wasn’t one of the places I’d visited with Kelly, and it was down on the 7th floor, so I had to take the stairs down for the first time. I took good note of the environment after I arrived. There was a hallway that people no doubted portaled into like the other facilities, but unlike the very busy club area, this one was empty.

It wasn’t a huge gym, but there was a woman working there in what had to be a uniform, a leotard in broad, black-and-white referee stripes. Her name was Lynn, and she was expecting me. Lynn explained how it all worked. There were no showers or locker rooms; people were expected to change in their own rooms and portal in and out. So there was just the equipment. It would be my job to help new people learn to use the equipment, and to clean it, which basically just meant remaking the bits people touched regularly. So most of my orientation consisted of Lynn showing me how all the equipment worked.

There was a running track, and that didn’t need much care at all, except there was a daily check for damage. She showed me how the track was made of sections about 5 feet square, or curved in the corners, and these pieces could be remade individually. Responsibility for this check rotated among the shifts, so I’d have to check a duty roster to see if it was mine on the days I worked. The job was like the restaurant ones, in that people normally worked two 4-hour shifts per week, so while filling in for one person, that was what I would be expected to do for however long I was needed.

Free weights were also easy. You put weights on a bar, and then a piece on each end clamps on the bar and holds them in place. Then you could lift it from different positions, such as a squat or lying on a bench that was nearby. As a sign there indicated, you were always supposed to have a spotter, someone to help if you got in trouble trying to lift too much, and it was possible someone would ask me to spot for them, but usually free weight people came in pairs or groups to spot one another. This equipment was pretty durable but I could remake individual pieces that were dirty or damaged. She showed me how they were supposed to be put away. There were storage areas for the bars, the end clamps, and each different size of weight, which went up to 22 pound (10 kilogram) weights at the heaviest.

And there were lots of machines that were effectively weight-lifting devices but in different orientations, to exercise different groups of muscles. Some of these were more complicated but Lynn showed me how each one was meant to be used, which muscles it exercised, and how to adjust the weight settings. Even though I used most of the equipment minimally, I got quite a workout trying out all of it. It wasn’t the amount of weight lifted, which was on the lightest or near-lightest settings, but just the number of different things I was doing. Lynn cleaned up most of it herself but showed me how the padded benches people sat on could be remade to clean them, and this was recommended because it also kept them from ever wearing out. Most people didn’t try to learn everything at once, so when I had to help people with individual machines it would only be 10 minutes or so, rather than spending half my shift doing it, like Lynn was doing today.

It took even more than 2 hours, because Lynn had to stop to help other people sometimes, though when that was on equipment I hadn’t used yet, she could show me at the same time. Before we finished, she showed me the duty roster including my shifts for the week, and explained that indeed the leotard was a uniform. It didn’t have to be a leotard, but I had to wear a top with broad vertical black-and-white stripes when I was on duty.

When I finally got back to my room, I immediately stripped and showered. I knew I didn’t need to, that I could just use that trick to remake my body, but I wanted to. After I dried off, I also sat on the toilet to pee. It was my third day as a woman, and I hadn’t done this before. The first day, my body was seemingly still too busy finishing making itself, and yesterday, Kelly showed me that trick of remaking my body and I did that each time I needed it. But it seemed to me that this was something I should experience, even though the result, predictably, was that I needed to wipe a little of the pee off me with paper afterward. It was a very ordinary thing and yet reminded me of how I was now really a woman, much more of one than I ever thought possible. I had only dreamed of someday having a mere facsimile of these parts!

After that, I just relaxed on the bed for a bit before I put on new clothes. Once I did dress, in a frilly blouse and pleated skirt, it was time for lunch. I didn’t feel the need to bother Kelly anymore, and went on my own, sitting with some other people who I got to know briefly. It was a bit overwhelming, though. I was a 19-year-old who had been here for three days and each of my companions had lived more than a century as a vampire, one of them over three centuries. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at them. They were glad to meet someone new; they admitted it sometimes got old seeing the same people all the time. Even though there were tens of thousands of people here, over that length of time you got to meet them all.

Also, they appreciate getting new people in here because we understand modern technology. Trans-Sylvanian society uses technology for some things, augmenting what vampiric powers can do, but it was hard for those who grew up in an era without electricity, and for some, without indoor plumbing, to go several stages beyond that to computers and AI. I realized this provided another area of jobs I could look into here. Unfortunately, my life learning those skills was cut short before I had time to really master them. Kelly seemed aware that vampires use technology for certain things but hadn’t really shown me those things. I probably need to find someone else to ask.

But I didn’t need to rush that; doing temp jobs, I’d probably find someone I could ask. Instead, I spent some time in the library, looking to see if I could find more information about the history of Trans-Sylvania. They had a computerized catalog system, showing that they were not completely behind the times. Entering queries for books on Trans-Sylvania showed me that there were in fact books written by vampires and stored in the library here. They even had books written more than a millennium ago!

That made me think about how this interface was probably all being translated for me. Clearly a vampire from 900 AD didn’t write in modern English. Kelly had said the signs were all in Latin and that was probably true here, too. There was a switch on the keyboard above the top row of keys that had several positions with labels such as Chinese, which I found changed the symbols on the keys. It was for people to enter queries in languages that didn’t use the same letters as English. When I typed something in Chinese, it came out in English words on the screen, though it was a meaningless jumble of words since I didn’t know what I was typing. So, yes, my internal translator was doing this, including doing the best it could when presented with gibberish.

Kelly had mentioned Vlad the Impaler to me, so I looked him up. There were lots of books on him, so I read descriptions until I found one that looked like a general history, and noted its call number. All the books were numbered, like in Dewey decimal, but they had expanded on the system to make numbers for fiction, and with extra dots and more digits than I had remembered ever seeing. I figured this was probably because the translator might misinterpret sequences of letters as words and change them into other words. Numbers were universal. So all the call numbers were purely numeric.

There was a lot to read, so I skimmed around to find the highlights.

In the 15th century, some vampires lived openly in the human world. Most of humans’ beliefs about vampires, though treated as legend today, were taken as fact in that era, though even then they did not have all the facts right.

Vlad managed to conquer and subsequently rule a small domain in the human world, which he called Trans-Sylvania after the name of our own dimension, though humans called it Transylvania with only one S. Since Vlad was a common name in that part of the world at the time, one that he had taken for living among the humans there, and there had already been two rulers named Vlad there, he took the name Vlad III.

Vlad accomplished this through murderous brutality and by converting his foes to vampires. While it might not seem smart to give your foes more powers, converting them caused them to go unconscious for one to two days, during which time they could be restrained. As is well known to vampires but seemed to never be learned by humans, this also changed their sex. Since in those days only men fought in wars, the human fighters were all converted to female vampires. This didn’t always make them unable to fight, but it certainly put them off of their training.

Vlad gave these convertees a choice to cooperate or die. One who had a family was expected to lead vampires faithful to Vlad’s forces back to his home, kill any remaining men, and convert and bring back to Vlad all the women, to serve as soldiers after conversion. Bringing back even one woman who agreed to serve as a male vampire fighter relieved her of further responsibility, though she could choose to stay with Vlad either as a combatant, a spy/infiltrator to convert more humans to vampires or assassinate them, or as support staff, such as in preparing meals or making weapons. Those who did not want to continue were sent back to the dimension of Trans-Sylvania. A convertee who didn’t have any women to bring back, or whose women refused to fight for Vlad, was expected to serve in one of the aforementioned roles, or in a few others, such as the army’s harem.

Those who refused this duty were killed by impaling them on tall wooden stakes at night. These stakes were inserted at their vaginas and pierced through their organs until the heart was reached. Humans also knew of the method of killing a vampire by a wooden stake through the heart, but since they generally performed such a feat on those who had been vampires for a while, they did not know that when a new convertee is killed in this way less than 5 days after conversion, the conversion is incomplete, and the vampiric tissue quickly rots away, leaving behind grotesque human forms. Vlad displayed these apparent male corpses along the walls of his fortresses, earning him the moniker Vlad the Impaler.

On the human side of the war, captured fighters suspected of being vampires were bound and placed into the sunlight. This was the one way they knew of killing a vampire that was not also generally fatal to humans. Those who survived this treatment were brought back in and offered deals to fight alongside the humans, or in various other support roles.

Warfare between the humans and vampires was dictated by the strategies of the vampires. Due to their weakness to sunlight, the vampires could not fight openly during the daytime, though they are known to have employed large mobile tents to sometimes move during the day, and they fought using arrows and other projectiles launched from protected positions inside castles and other buildings. They also dug tunnels underground both to connect their own positions and to infiltrate buildings controlled by humans. In the most common pattern, humans attacked vampire holdings by day, and vampires killed or captured any humans left in areas they controlled at nightfall.

Vlad’s reign ended in the battle of 1476. The humans had identified a particular castle as the one Vlad was then occupying, and attacked it by day, while Vlad slept, with what is believed to have been the largest trebuchet constructed to date. This enormous catapult flung huge masses of rock and steel against the castle to break open its heavily fortified walls. Once the castle was breached, a force of approximately 2000 men rushed in, the vanguard serving as shields for those behind them. While a vampire was fighting or attempting to convert one human, another would come up behind the first human and attack the vampire with spears or polearm weapons with silver blades. Most of the humans died or were converted during the assault, but it is believed about 100 of them made it to Vlad’s sleeping chamber. He was no longer asleep by this time, but the sheer numbers overwhelmed Vlad, and though he himself converted many of this final batch of attackers, they succeeded in subduing him with silver-bladed weapons. They impaled his body and left it to stand next to his impaled victims outside the castle.

By the time they brought Vlad’s body outside, it was nearly nightfall. While the vampires in that castle were destroyed, and his other forces had been reduced by similar attacks elsewhere in the preceding months, there were other loyal forces left alive, and they killed most of the remaining force of humans, though a few escaped to tell the story of Vlad’s death to the other humans. But this was the last fighting of the war. With Vlad dead and his forces greatly diminished, the surviving vampires retreated into the dimension of Trans-Sylvania, bringing with them all those still undergoing conversion who had not died due to exposure to the sun.

The battlefield reeked of death. Thousands of humans and vampires alike were dead within a small area, which created such a stench within days that the remaining humans fled miles away. The vampires closed all the portals to the human world to keep the smell out of the dimension of Trans-Sylvania.

The governors held a council to decide on a plan of action. They decreed that vampires shall no longer live permanently within the human world. About a hundred vampires then doing so in other places were recalled. Also, they sent out vampires in the guises of known humans in the lands near Vlad’s realm, carrying with them reports about the human success being even greater than the first returning humans reported. They claimed that they had killed every last vampire. By recalling all the vampires from the human world, this appeared true to the humans, and the altered stories were taken as the truth.

There was a second issue. Vlad had been sending back hundreds of newly converted vampires per month for years, and the retreat, the recall, and the converted vampires from the final battle exacerbated that. There was a housing crisis within Trans-Sylvania. Thousands of vampires were forced to double up until enough additional homes could be dug out. All newly converted vampires were either assigned to the digging teams, or replaced elder vampires in their jobs so that those vampires could dig.

Once the digging was completed, the current size of Trans-Sylvania was declared permanent. The rule that additional conversions of vampires would only be performed to replace vampires who died was established. In addition, those conversions were to be performed in the least intrusive way possible, taking humans on the fringes of their culture, with limited ties to other humans, and where possible ones who would find the sex change less unwelcome. The top candidates in those days were people who dressed as the opposite sex, which were by and large women who dressed as men to gain access to the greater freedoms afforded to men in many parts of the world. In addition to getting candidates who better appreciated the change, this helped over time to restore the gender ratio, which had been greatly swayed by the influx of female vampires from conversion of human fighting men.

A longer-term plan was put into place to try to turn the humans’ memories of vampires into legends. Records and artifacts that could confirm the existence of vampires were bought or stolen and brought back to Trans-Sylvania. The brightest human thinkers of the day were assisted and encouraged to develop a realm of science that ignores the fundamental force that vampires alone wield to perform feats humans have always been unable to accomplish.

Another book told this anecdote:

Humans’ belief that vampires drink blood came only in part from the bite delivered to initiate conversion of humans to vampires. The more specific source of this legend is a story that Vlad’s forces themselves spread to make vampires seem more threatening and literally bloodthirsty. They would install newly impaled victims on the walls of the fortresses they inhabited shortly before dawn, and in the pre-dawn light that signaled to the vampires that they needed to finish their operations and seek shelter from the sun, but visible in the eyes of any humans awake at that hour, they would collect blood dripping from those newly installed corpses in drinking glasses of whatever kind they had available.

The implication was that they drank the blood so collected, though that was not true. Blood of humans and vampires alike tastes foul to most vampires, and they avoid it. The collected blood would be brought through portals into Trans-Sylvania where their powers could convert it to other beverages, usually beer, and then brought back to Vlad’s forces to be consumed. This was part of the duties of Vlad’s many noncombatant support staff to supply the fighting forces with food and drink.

The intent was seemingly to scare the humans into fleeing from vampires, and letting the vampires take territory they abandoned. “Disobey me, and I’ll impale you on a stake and drink your blood” was perceived to be a greater threat than simply “Disobey me, and I’ll kill you.” However, this plan backfired. It made humans see vampiric cannibalism as such a threat that it had to be eliminated even at the cost of many thousands of human lives.

Interestingly, this time period was also the origin of the word vampire, in the languages spoken in eastern Europe, before the word spread to other languages. While vampires had lived among humans at times before that, they always stayed hidden, and Vlad’s era was believed to be the only time vampires revealed themselves to humans. They had never needed a word to describe vampires before, and before that it seemed that vampires used a word that translated as free men to describe themselves. The influx of hundreds of new vampires after Vlad’s war brought the word vampire with them, and it superseded the old word. Vampires have called themselves that ever since.