“Cool. So do you want me to turn you into something today?”

 

“Yeah, Sophia and I talked it over and we thought: dragon sisters!”

The new school year began. In place of some of the teachers Nathan had told me about, and teachers I’d had before (I told you it was a really small school), there were several new teachers, and I eventually heard that almost a quarter of the teachers, including most of the older ones, had quit over the summer due to the school’s draconian Venn policy. The older teachers wanted to rejuvenate, and some of the younger ones wanted to make themselves more attractive, but the school wouldn’t let any staff come to work venned except for making minimal changes to fix a serious illness.

I pushed through my classes, decreased hours at Subway, and increasingly minimal interaction with my parents at home, thinking of how I’d go off to college and live as a girl, maybe even a dragon-girl if the college were tolerant enough, and thinking especially of my next visit with Meredith and Sophia. Nathan was off at college, three hours away — too far for Mom and Dad to drop in on him spontaneously, he’d told me privately. I was keeping that in mind as I researched colleges. The problem was that most of the colleges Mom and Dad would be willing to help with the tuition for were... well on the conservative side. Most of them had no posted Venn policy yet, as far as I could tell, but the ones that did were pretty restrictive: no venning except for medical reasons, or even none at all for any reason. And I suspected they wouldn’t consider gender dysphoria a “real” medical reason.

My other option was a state school; the tuition would be within reach of loans and grants I could manage on my own, and there was a decent chance, with my current grades, that I could get a scholarship that would pay for a lot. The state university system had a fairly liberal Venn policy, though they didn’t publicize it much and I couldn’t find it on my own — I had to find out from Meredith’s friend, Carmen, who had started at UNC Greensboro around the same time as Nathan went off to Mars Hill. And they had a reasonably trans-friendly policy, though how well it was enforced seemed to vary from one state school to another. Ideally, I’d go to a school where I could venn into a girl body, come out as trans, and get the university to move me into a girls’ (or co-ed) dorm before the first semester was well underway. Maybe between freshman orientation and the day classes started? And Mom and Dad would hate it, but I’d be over eighteen so they couldn’t stop me except by cutting me off from financial support. Then I’d have to be prepared to live on my own and find some sort of housing for the summers.

The more I thought about it, and did budget calculations, the more depressed I got. It was starting to look like I wouldn’t have enough savings to make a go of it on my own until the end of freshman year, in the best case scenario; more likely later. It would depend on how long it took me to get a job near the university, how much it paid, how many hours I could work while keeping my grades up, and other factors I couldn’t be sure of yet.

Of course, even if I couldn’t come out as trans and live as a girl full-time, I might have much more frequent opportunities to venn into a girl body for a few hours or even a weekend. It would depend on how far the university was from the nearest Venn machine and whether I had close friends at the university, people I could trust to turn me into what I wanted and not what they thought it would be funny to turn me into. I hadn’t made any more close friends at the Everett Academy since my falling out with Tim, though I’d gotten slightly closer to some casual acquaintances I’d started eating lunch with. And I wasn’t confident about my ability to make friends at college, either. But there was a chance I could end up going to the same school as Meredith, which would be great.

After weeks of brooding over all that, I was glad when Meredith and I were finally able to schedule a few hours together on a Saturday. But then Dad scotched it by telling me on the Friday before we were supposed to meet, “We’re going to see Nathan this weekend. We’ll leave early Saturday, hang out with him for a few hours, and stay at a hotel that night, then come home after going to church with him on Sunday.”

“Oh,” I said, “cool.”

I didn’t get a chance to use the computer privately and send Meredith an email canceling our hangout. She told me later she and Sophia were kind of worried when I didn’t show up, but they figured it was probably some family thing that came up at the last minute.

Going to church with Nathan was a bit awkward. He tried to convince Mom and Dad that he’d just started visiting this church we went to after trying some others in his first few weeks at school, which was why he didn’t know anybody and didn’t know his way around, but I could tell this was the first time he’d been to church since he left home. I was pretty sure Mom and Dad figured it out too, but they didn’t say anything right away. Later on, on the way home, I got an earful about it: they had figured it out and they weren’t happy with it.

It was another three weeks before Meredith, Sophia and I got together again. By then, just over a year had passed since a Venn machine had appeared on our library’s lawn and since Meredith had come out and transformed. Sophia looked different than the last time I’d seen her, and I soon learned that it wasn’t just a year’s growth; she’d gotten Meredith to venn her to clear up her complexion and make her a couple of inches taller. While we stood in line waiting for the Venn machine at the mall, Meredith told me all about the traniversary party her parents had thrown for her, and how, after the party was over and her friends had gone home, they’d told Meredith and Sophia that they were allowed to use the Venn machines now, under certain conditions.

“What, you mean you weren’t supposed to be venning me, either, these last few months?”

“Yeah... I figured it was okay because you weren’t venning me. And you needed a Venn partner so badly and I was the only person you had... But anyway, now that they’ve been around a year and we know more about them, Mom and Dad decided it was okay for us to use them, and they’re thinking about rejuvenating each other, too.”

“Cool. So do you want me to turn you into something today?”

“Yeah, Sophia and I talked it over and we thought: dragon sisters!”

“Dragon sisters...?”

“Yeah!” Sophia put in. “We’ll both be dragon-girls, not exactly like you — we all want to look unique — but similar enough we could be sisters. Is that okay with you?”

I couldn’t speak for a moment, and when I got out the words, I realized I was crying. “That would be great, yeah.”

“By the way, what name should we call you today?”

“Isabella.”

We talked about the designs of our dragon bodies until we reached the head of the line. Then Meredith and I venned each other, and then Meredith venned Sophia. After some discussion on how to coordinate our colors, we’d gone with magenta scales with a green dress for me, yellow scales with a blue dress for Meredith, and cyan scales with a red dress for Sophia. We had crests on our heads like a dimetrodon’s sail, rather than the spines I’d had last time — that was Sophia’s idea. Our wingspans were smaller than mine had been last time, so we didn’t have any trouble fitting through doors, but when we ate lunch, we still had to sit so that we had room for our folded wings, and couldn’t comfortably lean back against our chairs.

After we’d venned each other, we went shopping for a little while and ate lunch, talking about our plans for college. “I’m leaning toward East Carolina University,” I said. “It’s three hours away from home, and six hours from Mars Hill where Nathan went, so they aren’t gonna drop in on me unannounced. And it’s only fifteen minutes from the Venn machine in Winterville. My backup plan’s Appalachian State — also three hours from Mom and Dad, but an hour and a half from Nathan, which means they could see both of us on one trip. If they still want to see me after I come out. They’ll probably come at least once to try to browbeat me into changing back once they find out.”

“Do you think there’s any chance that Nathan might accept you at some point?” Meredith asked. “Or do you think he might try to talk you out of it, too?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s said some pretty disparaging things about trans people,” (and Meredith in particular, I didn’t say) “but he might have just been trying to stay on Dad’s good side when he was ranting about it. I don’t think I’ve heard him bring it up when Mom or Dad hadn’t already done so. And... he’s not going to church anymore since he left home, so maybe someday? He’s not likely to hear balanced views on trans people at a conservative religious school like Mars Hill, though. Anyway, the worst he’s likely to do is quit talking to me. I don’t think he’d try to talk me into changing back.”

Meredith sighed. “I’ve mainly been looking at UNC Greensboro and UNC Chapel Hill. The main advantage of Greensboro is how close it is to home — I mean, it’s an advantage for me, anyway, now that I’m getting on okay with my parents. And Caleb and Carmen are both going there, though they’ll graduate two years after I start, so it’s not a big factor. Chapel Hill has actually had a Venn machine for months now, and there’s an unofficial Venn club on campus. I don’t know how long it’ll take me to make friends I trust enough to venn with, though, if I’m not going somewhere I already know people.” She thought for a few moments. “I’ll put in an application at East Carolina, too.”

“Does Hunter know where he’s going yet?” Her boyfriend was a senior now, so he’d have to make up his mind pretty soon if he hadn’t yet.

“He’s going to Mynatt Community College for the first two years and then transferring to NC State, probably. Or maybe another state school, but he’s leaning toward NC State. If I go to Chapel Hill, we’d be pretty close.”

“I’m going to UNC Chapel Hill,” Sophia said. “Not just because they’ve got a Venn machine on campus, but because they’ve got the best genetics program in the state. One of the best in the country, and probably the only one of the top-ranked ones I can afford.”

“Do you have a backup plan?”

“NC State. As far as I can tell it’s the only other school in the state with a genetics program.”

After that, Sophia started telling me about her science fair project. She’d mentioned her hopes to do a project on the Venn machines back when we first talked about them, a week or two after Meredith came out, but at the time she was grounded and for a while after that her parents wouldn’t let her venn. Now that she was allowed to use the Venn machines, though, she’d been talking to her teacher and coming up with a plan.

“I’ve read about people who’ve venned their friends into semi-animate things,” she said. “Like a living doll or statue. They aren’t organic, or at least they seem to be mostly inorganic, but they can move around and some of them can see, hear and speak. It sounds like it can be hard to get the same results again, unless you use someone’s history, and that won’t work for other subjects. Anyway, I’m going to try to come up with a reproducible way of making animate dolls, and figure out what materials work best for reproducibility and the ability of the venned person to move, hear, see, talk and so on. Some of the things I read say they don’t need to eat or breathe; if so, can I figure out where they get their energy from?”

“She venned me into three different dolls last weekend,” Meredith said. “I could see sort of okay and hear pretty well in a couple of those shapes, but I couldn’t speak or move in any of them. I told her I’d let her use me as a subject for her science experiments last year when we used the Venn machine for the first time.”

“Oh,” I said. “Cool, I guess?” Being inanimate didn’t sound like fun, but at least it sounded like she’d only been inanimate for a few minutes at a time.

“She’s been a good sport about it,” Sophia said. “I’m going to use some friends from school for subjects too, if I can talk them into it and the Venn machine thinks they’re mature enough to use it. If I can’t figure out how to consistently turn people into animate dolls, I’ll go with my backup plan: bring a genetic sample of an animal into the machine with me, and see if I can consistently venn different people into genetically but not phenotypically identical clones of the animal the sample came from.”

“How can you tell?”

“The school has a DNA sequencer.”

“Neat. Have you heard of other people doing that?”

“No. People have turned their venn partners into twins or clones of themselves, though, and this should work by the same principle. I did a proof of concept last weekend and it seemed to work, but I need more tests.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“She turned me into a copy of her friend Julianna’s cat,” Meredith explained.

“I took a cheek swab from her cat last time I saw her,” Sophia added, “and brought it into the booth, and said ‘A genetic copy of the cat this swab came from.’ And she looked right, but I haven’t had a chance to sequence her cat-form DNA yet.”

I’ve written our conversation about college plans and Sophia’s science fair project as one continuous thing, but in fact there were several interruptions, especially during lunch. We paused to talk about merchandise we were looking at, and several people came up to us to ask us about our dragon bodies and venning. Or to flirt. Meredith and Sophia fielded most of the questions and gracefully fended off the flirtation, but I found that I wasn’t as anxious about talking with strangers as usual. Still to some degree, but the dragon-girl body gave me some confidence. I’m fearsome, not fearful, I repeated to myself once or twice when the anxiety got a little worse.

After lunch, we went to the bookstore. The manager was a little concerned at first.

“You don’t breathe fire, do you? Books are highly flammable.”

“We would never!” I said, shocked, and Sophia added “I don’t think we even can.”

“We’re bookwyrms,” Meredith punned. From his expression, I don’t think the manager got it. “We wish to add treasures of literature to our hoard.”

He smiled; he did get that one. “I suppose books wouldn’t be any more uncomfortable to sleep on than gold coins. Take a look around, and let me know if you have trouble finding anything.”

So we browsed and read for a while, sharing funny or interesting bits of what we were reading with the others, and all of us bought at least one book — I think Meredith got four, three of them from the remainder tables. I got a book about recent dinosaur discoveries that Sophia had recommended; maybe it would give me some ideas for features to use in my dragon-girl bodies.

After an hour or so of that, we went back to the Venn machine. Sophia restored Meredith to her usual girl body using the history feature, and Meredith did the same for her, and then I went in by myself and pressed the red button to change to my baseline body. Then Meredith and I started working on changing me as we’d planned to do last time.

Again, I’m not going to go into details, because it was a little squicky and embarrassing, but Meredith managed to change me so I had a feminine secret hidden under my boy clothes and general boy appearance, something to drive away the dysphoria whenever I felt my thighs touch with nothing between them. Then we all hugged, said goodbye and went home.

My 335,000-word short fiction collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)

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