It was then, with bits of miscellaneous orange gunk dripping out of my mouth, that I realised how much my mind had changed. I’d SEEN broken bones before, and not felt like this. I’d actually seen a suicide jump, and while emotionally scarring, I didn’t feel nauseous, even seeing the pile of crumpled gore on the ground. But now? Even THINKING of that set me off again, but I had nothing left to throw up, so I was just retching. And I’d tried to help Leeroy. That is enough to creep me out.

Netherworlds
Chapter 5
By Taveena

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Author's Note: And here we go. I found the story - duh duh DUH duh duh duh DUH duh... dramatic chords!
 
 
I sighed. Because me and Mike were contagious again, we couldn’t actually see our parents (and my sister) one last time before we go, which was pretty sad - but I promised to keep in touch with the webcam. It should’ve been a really teary moment, but it was just too surreal.
We were waiting on the roof of the children’s hospital, where a helicopter would be picking us up and taking us to Melbourne Airport, where we’d be taking a small plane (along the with other people we’d infected, oops…) to the Queensland Quarantine - Mike and I both thought it was hilarious that that abbreviated to “QQ”. QQ is the gamery way to write crying eyes, but it’s come to just mean complaints. It was surprisingly apt (turning into a regular Jane Austen here…)
It was pretty windy up on the roof, and neither of us were wearing anywhere near enough clothes - there were goosebumps all over my arms. I just mean the tank tops and stuff weren’t enough… not anything more, okay? Our stuff was already headed to the airport, but we got the special treatment because we were infected. There were other kids on the roof - I suppose they were infected too. I didn’t really want to look at them… I figured they’d be pretty angry at me. So when the helicopter arrived and the guy in a full biohazard suit read out our names (I was surprised to be referred to as Lara), I was seriously surprised when one of the… uh… guys hugged me. He was born a he, and he was only about 30% through the transformation, but he told me he’d been a closet cross dresser. I said it was alright, but… it’s weird, okay?
He’d been to my school - he was a year younger than me, so we didn’t have any classes together. He told me his name used to be Christopher Miles (he didn’t like it being shortened to Chris). He’d told me he had been sure he was in the wrong body since he was about 5, but he couldn’t tell his parents.
He said he didn’t mind that he might have to spend the rest of his life in isolation, because his parents had found out about his habits about a year ago and had been mistreating him since then. He said a friend from school - he indicated a sheepish but kinda angry looking androgynous teenager, who used to be called Steve.
“Used to be?” I asked.
“Well, he hasn’t chosen a new name. But I’m gonna be Brittany - and there’s no way I’m keeping my family name. They were never nice to me, but after last year it all got so much worse…” Brittany nee Christopher replied.
“Um.”
Seriously, how the hell do you talk to someone after that? S/he’s just admitted to being… mistreated. I paused at this - I seriously had NO idea how to respond, so I stayed in silence the rest of the time we were flying. Mike was chatting to a couple of the other guys there - I couldn’t really tell which ones were originally which…
After it’d been confirmed that Sarah had GDD, they’d sent off to QQ for this drug they’d found. It wasn’t a cure - there wasn’t one, because the possible nanobots hijacked anything nearby and turned them into oestrogen making, fat eating machines. Uhhh. Ew. What the drug DID do is it stopped the spasms - and were replaced with a constant dull ache. It arrived about an hour after I’d gotten the final shock. Damn it.
There were only two born girls there - Mike was one, and he really didn’t look like Sarah at all. The other was a girl I’d seen at school occasionally - she’d barely started to transform, she might’ve been in the dormant stage. She was sobbing uncontrollably - fair enough, I was doing the same thing the night before.
I sat down next to her.
“Hey…”
She looked up at me with tear-stained eyes, and then turned away and kept crying.
“Look…” I began.
“Why the hell aren’t YOU crying?” she blubbered.
“Well, mostly I think it’s the antidepressants I’m under, but partly because this isn’t as bad as I expected.”
“How can you SAY that? You haven’t even started transforming! You have no idea what life will be like as a boy!” she… screeched, I suppose.
“I can hazard a guess. See, I’m DONE with the transformation. A few days ago I was Aaron - now I’m Lara.”
She looked up again in disbelief.
“No… no way. There’s no way you can be a guy,” she stammered.
“I’m not. I used to be…”
“Christ, seriously?”
“Yeah, up until a couple days ago, I was Aaron. It’s not as bad as it might seem, but this might be the antidepressants talking…”
And with that, she burst into tears again.
The steady noise of the helicopter - which was actually pretty big - was getting a bit annoying, so I wondered about other things. In the end I wound up weighing the pros and cons of being a girl, and decided, in the end, it’d be better as a guy.
So the bacteria kept pumping oestrogen into my body and limiting my normal testosterone supply.
I looked down at myself. It was… weird… to see myself like this. But not uncomfortable, I suppose.
I mean, it should be uncomfortable. I had these fucking big boobs. At least, I think they were big - I hadn’t really had a chance to compare them to anything. That’d be pretty retarded.
So, the helicopter lands on the concrete, or whatever the landing strips are made of, and biohazard man gets out and shows us to the plane. He really didn’t need to wear a biohazard suit - BS had one major flaw. Maybe it was a good thing.
BS didn’t affect anyone older than about 18. Lucky bastards…
I started talking to Mike again, mostly about Netherworlds. He thought I’d make a better healer now that I was a girl, but I disagreed. Catch was, I currently had about 4 hours experience being a girl and none of them had been on Netherworlds, so I supposed he might’ve been right, but… eh.
After we’d been flying in the helicopter for maybe half an hour, we came down on a landing strip at Melbourne Airport, and we saw the plane.
It was a pretty small one, with propellers instead of jet engines - but it was kinda bizarrely shaped. I can’t really describe it, but… it was sleeker than a normal propeller plane. We got on with one of those stepladders, but it didn’t look like a normal plane once we were inside.
The plane we were meant to catch had this whole special quarantine bit that all of us with BS were loaded into. It was relatively comfy, but it wasn’t much of a plane, really, just a glorified transport vessel. This would be how they’d carry chickens that had bird flu, and for all I know, they already had. This was a little creepy…
The quarantine compartment was… strange. It didn’t look like it was ever used for transporting people, but in spite of that, it had a toilet through a door. The walls, ceiling and floor were covered in porous foam. No seats, but there were some seatbelts attached to the walls… it’s like they did a half-arsed job. That or they didn’t know who they’d be transporting. I found out that we were fortunately limited to 8 people, so it was no-where near the scale of the Queensland epidemic. There was me, Mike, Brittany, Steven, two guys from my school who I didn’t really know, but introduced themselves as Tom and Sam, one girl from Sarah’s netball (Mike didn’t go to it, so I think it’s reasonable to say this) who I’d been talking to earlier. And Leeroy.
Fucking… Leeroy.
Leeroy was the jerk in my class. He knew how to wind me up so that he wasn’t technically doing anything wrong, but drove me insane - and when the teachers WEREN’T there, he got even worse. He was a snitch and a general tightass, and was probably the only person disliked more than I was. He didn’t really do that much, I suppose, but there was this one time… it was where I got my nickname.
After that incident, I’d be called a “sissy” through the whole school. No-one in the guild said anything, or left, so I guessed no-one in the guild also went to the school. But by getting GDD, I’d proved them right.
At least I wasn’t going through it alone. My face slowly turned into a grin.
He was going to pay for this.
“What the hell’re you grinning at, bitch?” he said, snarling at me, “You’re gonna be looking like this in a couple days time.”
I turned the self-satisfied grin into a sweet smile.
“I wouldn’t be so cocky if I was you, Leeroy. I think you’ll make a very pretty girl,” I said, with a LOT more confidence than I felt. I could already see the changes starting to manifest themselves, and even with the virus, he was ugly as hell.
“So? I’m gonna be stealing your pussy in a couple days. What you gonna do about that?”
I sighed. I got the feeling he would be even worse as a girl - images of cheerleader bitches from Kara’s movies flashed through my mind. Then images of Kara, and my parents. I guess the fact I’d never see them again sunk in… and I started crying.
Leeroy started laughing, but it stopped suddenly. His eyes clouded over a bit, and then…
“Shit. I know what happens next…” I said.
“Let him suffer. He deserves it,” said Brittany.
“No. I went through this - and no-one deserves this. Maybe the end result, yeah, but he doesn’t deserve to get his hip broken,” I said.
“He’s going to go through with this, and he’ll suffer as much as you did!” said Mike.
“NO!”
Mike held me back, and for the first time ever… I saw what I’d been going through.
It didn’t start well. He just collapsed, and then his body went stiff and straight… and then it looked like his skin was boiling, and stretching…
I could SEE his hip stretching as his stomach shrunk, and so did the sparse muscles on his thighs and shoulders. His chest was swelling like crazy - it was like female puberty made a couple hundred times faster.
I had to look away, and just after I did, I heard a crack come from his arm, and I was really glad I couldn’t see it.
When I looked back, I saw what looked like a tomboy lying on the floor with his arm bending in the wrong direction. It looked like he’d jumped from about 10% to 60% in one go, and bloody hell, it looked painful.
I say tomboy, because of the clothes he was wearing. His boobs… HER boobs… were already bigger than mine. He was going to look like a porn star when the nanobots were done with him.
I would have grinned again (maybe even a smirk), but the sight of his… her… arm made me feel sick.
Mike WAS grinning.
“Bloody hell, I could’ve done with some’ve those a couple years ago…” said Mike. A couple of the other guys looked at him a bit oddly, then started grinning. I guess they thought he meant on a girlfriend, but I figured he meant on himself - or herself, as it was.
The netball girl looked like she was going to throw up. So she did.
“Ewww… can we get a towel or something?” I said.
The girl pulled herself off to the bathroom - I was kinda surprised we had one - and conversation sort of resumed.
“Shouldn’t we do something for Leeroy?” I said. Why the hell was I saying this? It’s LEEROY.
“Who cares? The fucking virus will fix him up next spasm,” spat Tom.
I spent the rest of the flight throwing up into the aeroplane toilet, except for a brief stint where I let Rachel (the netball girl) take my place.
So, yeah, I’m not good on planes, and seeing an arm poking 90 degrees in the wrong direction didn’t help. And the flight was hardly short, so I spent a good couple hours in that bathroom. I seriously got to know that toilet well. I guess I was pretty lucky no-one needed to go.
It was then, with bits of miscellaneous orange gunk dripping out of my mouth, that I realised how much my mind had changed. I’d SEEN broken bones before, and not felt like this. I’d actually seen a suicide jump, and while emotionally scarring, I didn’t feel nauseous, even seeing the pile of crumpled gore on the ground. But now? Even THINKING of that set me off again, but I had nothing left to throw up, so I was just retching. And I’d tried to help Leeroy. That is enough to creep me out.
The bathroom was a normal one, unlike the rest of the quarantined area, and the little mirror over the sink showed a very sick - but pretty - girl repeatedly retching. Her brown, curly, shoulder length hair had no resemblance to my previous whatever-shape-its-in-after-the-shower-vaguely-emo-ish styling. She had a still developing hourglass figure, whereas my slightly overweight gut looked like the beginnings of a beer belly. She looked like a cheerleader, not an antisocial computer nerd.
Pity, cuz that’s what she was going to be. My life wasn’t going to change - beyond certain feminine hygiene issues… at least, that’s what I thought.
I was sooooo wrong.

It was about 4 PM when we landed in a small airport a few kilometres out of Brisbane. It was seriously humid, even though this was autumn, fall to yall’s over in the USA. Course, it was spring in the US right now, so… uh, yeah. Anyway, we were in Brisbane airport and they had another freaking helicopter ready to take us to QQ.
And I was way too calm about what seemed to be the end of my freedom. I didn’t CARE that I’d be spending the rest of my life in an unknown quarantine facility.
THAT was when the antidepressants started wearing off.
So it sunk in. Again. Not just that I’d lost Kara, but I’d also lost Aaron and Sarah. I’d lost my parents. I’d lost 15 years of my life. I’d lost the ability to go anywhere. I could never get a job, I could never do anything I had wanted to do when I was older. I had no idea where I was going, for all I knew they were gonna kill us to stop it spreading, or they were going to experiment on us, or whether they were going to dissect us, or whether they were going to do something much worse.
We eventually came into sight of QQ, landing on a helipad outside the huge, white dome that was QQ from the outside. Clambering awkwardly out of the helicopter, I scanned QQ. I’d never seen it before, but as we got out… it looked slightly see-through.
There was a bit of a checkpoint, but after the receptionist - who was in a full biohazard suit - saw Leeroy and her broken arm. She was rushed through, while the rest of us had to hang around for a while before getting a form to fill in about pretty much everything. I caught a few glimpses of other people’s forms, and I saw a few interesting things. First was that Mike wanted his new middle name to begin with “X”. Second, Sam was changing to Sammy. I stifled a laugh at that. Third, Leeroy's middle name was Jenkins. Ah, that classic video...
After we filled the forms in, we handed them to the receptionist, who clumsily typed the details into a computer.
I almost lol’d (no, seriously, I nearly did laugh out loud) with relief when I actually saw what was inside - it looked like a small slice of inner-city Melbourne dunked into the middle of Queensland. Another surprising bit was that from the inside, the dome was see through, so anyone inside could see out but not the other way round. It was just… weirdly normal. It was a small chunk, yeah, but I even saw shops I knew here. As we were led through the city by the receptionist I looked around and then… then I stopped.
It was an EB Games, just like how I knew in Melbourne. What impressed me, though - and Mike too, by the way his jaw had dropped - was the poster with the fucking awesome screenshots next to it.
It didn’t say much. Just enough to attract your interest.

Netherworlds II for VBox
Available for testing now.