Mom and Dad had tried to raise me and Taylor without gender stereotypes. They’d given both of us gender-neutral names, and had me wearing her hand-me-downs, skirts as well as pants and shirts, until I was old enough to rebel against them.

---

The Family that Plays Together

Part 1 of 10

by Trismegistus Shandy

This story is set, with Morpheus' permission, in his Travel Agency universe. Thanks to Morpheus for his feedback on the first draft.

I'll be serializing it here over the next few weeks, but if you don't want to wait, the whole novella is available as part of The Weight of Silence and Other Stories, along with thirteen other stories, including several that haven't previously appeared online.

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“Won’t you give us just a little hint?” Taylor pleaded. “We have to know what to pack!”

“At least tell us if we’re flying or driving,” I asked, reasonably enough. “Should we bring our neck pillows?”

“We’re driving for the first stage,” Mom said. “And maybe we’re flying later on, but — not on an airplane, I think. You can leave the neck pillows at home.”

“What about swimsuits?” Taylor asked. “Or other clothes?”

“If I told you we wouldn’t need clothes where we’re going, that would seem like too big a hint. But you still wouldn’t guess.”

“So it’s a naturist resort?”

“I won’t say it’s not,” Mom said with a smile. “But it’s not one we’ve been to before.”

“Stop teasing the kids, Stephanie,” Dad said. “Taylor, Leslie, I wanted to tell you, but your mom convinced me it’s best if you wait and see where we’re going. It’s going to be the biggest surprise of your lives. The one and only hint you’ll get is that it’s nowhere you’ve ever been before.”

“Nowhere we’ve been,” Taylor said, pouncing on the crucial detail. “So you and Mom have been there?”

“Possibly.”

“Are we going to be out of contact?” I asked. “I need to warn my friends if I’m going to drop off the net for a week, like if we’re going wilderness camping.”

“You’d better assume so,” Dad said. “Tell them you might be out of touch, and if you find out later that you can contact them, it will be a pleasant surprise.”

“We’ll tell you as we’re walking out the door whether you’re allowed to bring your tablets and phones,” Mom said. “How’s that?”

“That’s fair, I guess. So I guess I’ll need my sleeping bag and — if we’re not going on an airplane, I’ll bring my hunting knife just in case.”

“I don’t want to make you waste time packing things you won’t need,” Mom said; “but I don’t want to give you any more hints about where we’re going, either. Pack whatever you like. I don’t think you’ll be sorry if you pack light, though.”

---

Despite that, my sister and I kept fishing for hints about where we were going all through the next week. Taylor spent a lot of time with her boyfriend Jarrod, and I spent a lot of time over at my friend Daniel’s house, as much as his parents would stand for, since I wasn’t going to see him for over a week.

“And your parents won’t tell you where you’re going?” he asked me.

“Not the slightest hint, except we’ve never been there before. It’s not like it’s the first surprise vacation we’ve ever been on, but the last one was when we were too little to do our own packing, so it wasn’t an issue — Mom and Dad packed our swimsuits and sand shovels and stuff for us in a secret suitcase and took them out when we got to the beach house.”

“Man,” he sighed, “your parents are so cool.”

I sighed for a completely different reason. “Tell me about it.” It wasn’t always fun having parents who were so much cooler than their kids.

“I wish my mom and dad’d let me come over to your house.”

“You’ve got a better gaming system than I do,” I pointed out. “And the games we’ve got that you don’t, I can bring over.”

“Yeah, but it was more fun playing them with your folks.”

I couldn’t argue with that. Dad was great at getting into the spirit of any game, and being just competitive enough to make it fun and no more. Mom could be a little too competitive sometimes, but not as bad as she used to be, to hear Dad talk. They had a big collection of card games and board games most of my friends at school had never heard of, and before Daniel’s parents had forbidden him to go over to my house, we’d played a lot of them. Daniel’s parents weren’t into games, and most of the best games at my house were for four or more players, so when I went over we mostly played two-player video games on his PlayStation or Xbox.

I’d been worried that his parents would forbid me to come over either, but they apparently hoped Daniel would be a good influence on me if my parents weren’t being a bad influence on him. And he was, sort of; at least, he was my main source for what normal boys were supposed to act like.

Mom and Dad had tried to raise me and Taylor without gender stereotypes. They’d given both of us gender-neutral names, and had me wearing her hand-me-downs, skirts as well as pants and shirts, until I was old enough to rebel against them. And they’d given us all kinds of toys — they gave both of us dolls and both of us toy swords and armor. At home, or anywhere except work, Dad was as likely to wear skirts as Mom was to wear pants, and Dad did more than his share of the dishwashing and vacuuming. They home-schooled us until I was eight, and then they put us into this Montessori school where several of the other kids had parents who were raising them the same gender-neutral way. It wasn’t until Mom got laid off and they couldn’t afford that anymore that we started going to public school. And all the books we were allowed to read and the movies we were allowed to watch until we were about ten or eleven were things that had been edited by the people in Mom and Dad’s Gender-Neutral Parenting support group, with the characters renamed and given different clothes and hair to make them less stereotypical.

Needless to say, although we’d learned enough from the kids in our neighborhood and the Montessori school to figure out that outside our family it mattered a lot more whether you were a boy or a girl, we were still pretty vague about a lot of the details when we were plunked without warning into public school, and we got picked on a lot. Me more than Taylor, because girls can get away with being a “tomboy” easier than boys with being a “sissy,” but she suffered plenty as well.

Basically I learned to imitate the boys at school as closely as possible, and to keep my mouth shut about my family and my home life. I didn’t make any friends for my first year or so in school; it wasn’t until Daniel moved to town, and didn’t know the reputation for being a weirdo and a sissy I’d gotten the year before, that I made a real friend among the kids at school. And things were going really well until the day Daniel’s mom gave me a ride home from a chess club meeting and found my dad clipping the hedges in an old skirt.

---

I did my packing Friday evening; Taylor, across the hall in her room, was packing too, and we kept wandering into each other’s rooms to talk about where we might be going, to try to deconstruct Mom’s hints about it. We never got anywhere close to the truth.

I decided to pack stuff for a camping trip in one bag, and stuff for a hotel trip in another; I’d wait until morning and see what Mom and Dad were putting in the car before I decided which bag to bring. Saturday morning, I saw that Mom and Dad just had one small bag each, and no tents or sleeping bags, so I left the camping stuff and just brought the hotel suitcase and my satchel. Taylor had a bigger suitcase, but still everything fit into the trunk with room to spare; we didn’t need the car-top carrier, and Taylor and I didn’t have a pile of stuff on the seat and in the floorboard between us. It was nice not being crowded, but I was worried that I’d forgotten something important, something that would be obvious if I just knew where we were going. But Mom and Dad still wouldn’t tell us, even after we were on the road.

Taylor and I started narrowing down our guesses as we saw where Dad was driving. He got on the expressway going north, which eliminated half the places we’d talked about last night right off the bat. And he went past the airport exit — which we hadn’t seriously expected — and past downtown and into the northern suburbs; not too surprising, after the initial turn north. We figured we were probably going to some naturist resort in the mountains north of the city, or maybe to one of the big cities further up the coast.

When Dad pulled off in Turnerville, we didn’t think anything of it at first — it was about time for a bathroom break, though nobody’d said they needed to go. But he went past the gas stations and restaurants near the exit, fending off our questions with a “Wait and see,” and turned into an office park three or four miles down the road. Then he parked in front of an office with a sign reading TRAVEL AGENCY.

“You’re picking up our keys to the condo or cabin or whatever?” Taylor guessed.

“Watch and see. Everybody out.”

“This is going to be great,” Mom said.

We followed them in to the office. It looked like your usual travel agency, with a bunch of posters advertising exotic places, and moderately comfortable chairs, and a desk in front of a door to one or more back rooms. There was a black guy at the desk, probably ten years younger than Mom and Dad, wearing a light gray sweatshirt with darker gray slacks. He seemed to recognize them; he stood up and smiled as we walked in.

“Ray! Stephanie! I’ve been expecting you. And these are your children?”

“This is Taylor, and that’s Leslie,” Mom said. “Kids, this is Mr. G.”

“Your parents and I go way back,” Mr. G. said. (What kind of name was that? And he didn’t look old enough to go way back with my parents, unless maybe Mom babysat him when she was in high school.) Turning back to Mom, he asked: “Have you explained to them yet?”

“No, we thought we’d save the explanations until you could demonstrate,” Dad said.

“Perhaps that was wisest. Well, go ahead and explain your side of it — I’ll pitch in whenever you like, and I can give you a very good demonstration” (he glanced at his watch — an actual wristwatch, like old people wear, not a cell phone like everyone else uses) “at noon. Another forty-five minutes.”

“A demonstration of what?” I asked.

“We’ll get to that,” Dad said. “Stephanie, you want to start?”

“All right,” Mom said. “Sit down and get comfortable.” She and Dad took seats, and Taylor and I did the same, giving each other puzzled glances. “Not long after I met your dad, but before we’d really started dating, my friend Melanie told me a fantastic story about this travel agency she’d been working at. I thought she was pulling my leg, but she convinced me to come and meet Mr. G and see a demonstration, and it convinced me to give it a try.”

“How old was he then?” Taylor asked. “If that was before you and Dad started dating...” I did the math too; unless he was a lot older than he looked, he must have been just a kid.

Mr. G. got a thoughtful look and said: “I think I was sixty-two that year, but it all runs together. Go on.”

There was no way he could be sixty-two now, much less twenty years ago. But I let that pass for the moment. “Give what a try?”

“Melanie said Mr. G. could send people to another world,” Mom said. “A world with a different history from ours, not just what if Napoleon refused to sell us Louisiana, but millions or billions of years' difference, and different laws of nature. She’d been there herself, several times, and seen amazing things —”

“No way,” I said.

“Just listen,” Dad insisted. “I didn’t believe it at first when she told me, but then I saw it for myself... Go on, Stephanie.”

“You couldn’t go to this other world as yourself,” Mom continued. “You have to leave your body behind, and temporarily swap places with someone in the other world. You’d be in their body and they’d be in yours for a few days, and then you’d swap back.”

“You’re going to demonstrate that?” Taylor asked. “You demonstrated that for Mom? Like, swapped her body with Melanie’s?”

“No,” Mr. G. said. “In those days I was demonstrating my magic by levitating things — usually a piece of gold, which won’t magnetize but is very sensitive to magic. Impressive, but not too much of a strain, leaving me plenty of energy for the soul transference spells.”

“Spells,” I repeated in a disbelieving, if not outright sarcastic, tone.

“Listen to your mother,” he said.

“Well, to make a long story short, I convinced several friends from school to try it with me during Spring break. I wanted Melanie to come with us, but she’d just taken a lot of vacation and couldn’t get any time off.” She gave Mr. G. a little glare, and he smiled. “We went in to the office — it wasn’t here, he’s moved a couple of times since then —”

“More than a couple.”

“Okay, a lot. He can explain why later, maybe. Anyway, we went in and she cast the spell, and the next thing we know, we’re all in another place, in different bodies!”

“Really,” Taylor said.

“What kinds of bodies?” I asked, curious even though I was sure they were pulling some elaborate hoax.

“Well, we were all guys, to begin with. And only three of us were human. Rae Nan — you don’t know her, I lost touch with her after college — was a kind of centaur, but her lower half was like a camel, not a horse. And Natalie... she was an ifrit.”

“Like an Arabian demon?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t know about demon per se, but she wasn’t human. At first she was shaped like Rae Nan, a kind of camel-centaur, but she was a shapeshifter, and after she got the hang of it she tried on all kinds of different bodies — she looked like her old self, and like each of us, and a bunch of famous actors, and a dozen different kinds of animal... she had a lot of fun with that. We spent a week in those bodies, in that world, and then went home. I’ll tell you more about that trip sometime, but it’s your dad’s turn now.”

“After we’d been dating a few months, your mom told me about her trip back in the spring. And I thought sure she was joking, but she was so serious, and seemed so sad and discouraged when she said she couldn’t really expect me to believe her, because she hadn’t believed Melanie at first. And she didn’t mention it again for a few weeks, but then she asked me if I’d thought about what she’d said. I hadn’t, much, but I saw how serious she was, and I knew she had to be either crazy or telling the truth — I knew by then she couldn’t keep a straight face when she was joking. So I agreed to go with her to Mr. G.'s office and see if he could do what she said. It was a Friday afternoon and we had the weekend free — well, mostly; we wound up studying less than we should have and getting a B- and a C on a couple of exams, but it was worth it.

“Mr. G. said he had a couple of hosts ready if we wanted to go right then, and if I was skeptical I didn’t have to pay for the trip until I got back. So I said sure, and he worked his magic, and a moment later we were there.

“And I was female, but that wasn’t the first thing I noticed. No, the first thing I noticed was this additional sense, and all the things I was sensing through it — it was my link to my tree, a three hundred-year-old oak. I was a dryad.

“Stephanie was there too; she’d wound up in the body of an elf, and there was another elf there, who said she was our guide. She worked for Mr. G. — they call him the Gray One over there — and showed visitors around and helped them out if they got into trouble. Of course, she couldn’t show me much, because as a dryad I couldn’t get far from my tree — barely more than a mile. But we were only going to be there for the weekend, and within a mile radius of my tree there was an elf village and a pixie village, and an amazing waterfall... it was the best thing ever, once I got over the shock.”

“So,” Taylor said, “if you aren’t just making all this up for some reason, and we go over there, we might be anything? Boy or girl, elf or dryad or camel-centaur or whatever?”

“Or whatever,” Mom said. “How many kinds of people are there in your world, Mr. G.? I know I’ve been eight different kinds, and I think Ray’s been nine or ten...”

“Even I don’t know,” Mr. G. said. “My firm has done business with members of more than forty intelligent races, who have visited your world in the bodies of local humans; but there are others who live only in certain regions where my magic doesn’t work well.”

“So you’ve been there lots of times?” I asked Mom and Dad. They nodded, and Dad said:

“After that, we went as often as we could afford it until Taylor came along. And then we made it a tradition to go on our anniversary... I think we’ve been there twenty-five or twenty-six times.”

Every year they’d go somewhere on their anniversary and leave us with relatives. When I was eight or nine I remember thinking it was strange that they were always so vague about where they’d gone and what they’d done — they were always more interested in hearing about how Grandma and Grandpa had taken us horseback riding, or whether Uncle Dave had shown us scary movies that would give us nightmares — or worse, icky gender stereotypes — but by the time I was twelve, I thought I’d figured it out: they probably spent the whole time in a hotel room having sex. Well, apparently not.

Not in a hotel room in our world, anyway.

“Is it completely random?” I asked. “Or can you ask to swap places with a particular kind of person? Like if I wanted to be an ifrit or — do you have kitsune over there?”

“It’s not random,” Mr. G. said, “but I can’t often fulfill specific requests, especially for group packages like this —”

Just then the outside door burst open and a man a little older than Dad came in, puffing for breath. “Am I late?” he asked. “Sorry, there was an accident on Landon Avenue and traffic got backed up, I had to go around...”

“You’ve still got eleven minutes to spare,” Mr. G. said with a glance at his watch. “Chad, this is Ray and Stephanie Kendricks, and their children Taylor and Leslie.”

“Chad Nellis?” Dad asked, just as Chad said: “Ray Kendricks? I know you from the forum —”

Of course there was an Internet forum for people who’d been to this other world. There was a forum for everything else.

So then it was old home week, and three or four of the eleven minutes we had until some mysterious deadline were used up with introductions and reminiscences. Chad said Mom looked familiar, but she said she never put photos of herself online, and she didn’t remember meeting him. Then Mr. G. got us back on topic, and said to me and Taylor:

“As I was saying, I usually can’t fulfill requests unless you’re traveling by yourself, and even then it’s iffy. I have to match you four with the group of four people in my world who have been waiting the longest for hosts, and to be sure of swapping each of you with a specific member of that group, I’d have to cast my transference spell four times... so I’d have to charge you four times as much.” He looked inquiringly at Mom and Dad and they shook their heads.

“Don’t tell them, or us, who’s waiting for hosts,” Dad said. “We want it to be a surprise.”

“Well,” Mr. G. said, rising from his seat behind the desk, “I promised your children a demonstration — though it sounds as though they’re taking it seriously already.”

“Let’s see,” I said. We all followed him through the door behind his desk, down a corridor and into a smaller room; it was crowded with all six of us. Mr. G. picked up a wooden staff — I’d seen wizards carrying staffs just like that in movies I watched at Daniel’s house, but it looked out of place with his sweatshirt and slacks — and warned us to stay at the edges of the room, outside the chalk circle that filled most of the open space between the cabinets and shelves.

He looked at his watch again, and said: “Just a bit more.” Mom and Dad looked curious; Taylor and I were looking all around to see if we could see any wires or mirrors or other gimmickry. Chad looked excited and nervous; he was tugging at his beard and staring at the center of the circle as though it was a centerfold.

And a moment later, it might as well have been. Mr. G. rammed his staff into the floor with a sharp crack, and a tiny naked woman with green skin and hair appeared in the center of the circle. What with Mom and Dad being naturists, I’d seen plenty of naked women — Mom and Taylor at home, when the weather was hot and we didn’t have company over, and other people at the naturist resorts we’d occasionally gone to on vacation. So I didn’t react quite as you might expect a fourteen-year-old boy to react. She was pretty, but mostly I was just astonished at her being so tiny and green and — holy shit she’s flying right at me!

No, actually, she was flying toward Chad, who was standing next to me. He cupped his hands and she landed in them, saying “Chad!” in a tiny high-pitched voice. He bent his head and kissed her gently.

“It’s good to see you again, Maella.”

With her sitting in Chad’s hands, right next to me, I could see that she had a lock of white hair that hung over her left eye, and wings like a dragonfly’s which I hadn’t been able to see when they were buzzing so fast while she was in flight. Mom was staring openmouthed, and Dad was looking pretty astonished too.

“You can bring people over physically now?” Dad asked, and Mom said:

“Maella? Is that you?”

“Not full-sized people,” Mr. G. said. “And even to bring over a pixie is possible only when the magic levels here are at their highest. I won’t be able to send Maella back until two weeks from now at midnight, and the next window after that will be... well, you won’t want to miss this window, Maella.”

“Are you going to introduce me?” Maella said, and then: “Oh! I’ve been you before!”

“And I was you,” Mom said, “seventeen or eighteen years ago for six or seven days.”

“That’s where I know you from,” Chad exclaimed, and blushed crimson. “Um, you look different now...” I could figure out what he and Maella-in-Mom’s-body had probably gotten up to that week, and I blushed too.

“And Trikka was you!” Maella said, flying over and hovering in front of Dad. “I didn’t recognize you at first without the beard.”

“It was a brief experiment,” Dad said. “Stephanie didn’t like it and I shaved it off a few weeks later. And none of us look as young as we used to — except you, Maella.”

She turned a darker green. Was she blushing? “I’m older too, but your human eyes aren’t sharp enough to see the wrinkles.”

Mr. G. cleared his throat. “Chad and Maella will be the local guides for the people inhabiting your bodies, while you’re gone.”

“Oh,” Taylor said. “What are they going to do while they’re in our bodies?”

“I was thinking of taking them to Muir Woods, and various places in San Francisco and Berkeley,” Chad said. “There’s nobody there that would recognize you, is there?”

“Hardly anybody,” Dad said. “Stay away from Mountain View, where my college roommate Wendell lives, and you should be fine.”

“We used to allow visitors to stay in their hosts' homes, and their guide would show them around to local tourist attractions, to save money,” Mr. G. said, “but some years ago we had an incident that made us change our policy. Now we send them to a nearby city to stay in a hotel.”

Mom nodded grimly, and I saw that she knew something about that incident. But she didn’t explain until much later, and this isn’t the place for that very long story.

“I suppose we’re ready whenever you are,” Dad said. He took his keys out of his pocket and handed them to Chad. “Our suitcases are in the trunk of our car, that silver Corolla parked right outside — there should be plenty of clothes and toiletries for a week.”

“Right, then. I’ll keep your bodies safe. Have a great trip!”

“Step into the circle, please,” Mr. G. said, and Mom and Dad did. Taylor and I followed them a moment later.

“Oh,” Mr. G. said, “I forgot to answer your question, Leslie. Yes, there are kitsune in my world.”

“What are kitsune?” Maella asked, but I didn’t hear what Chad or Mr. G. said in reply. Mr. G. touched his staff to the edge of the chalk circle, there was a flash of blue light, and I lost consciousness.