Ryan comes to the realization that he has lost not only his gender- but also fifteen years of his life. While this painful epiphany begins to break down the carefully formed walls of his masculinity and ego, he is forced into an uneasy alliance with Ashley, understanding that the two share common goals- escape. Meanwhile, the girls meet other victims, and the reason behind their transformation is revealed.

Excerpt:

My hands explored my face, feeling the delicate bone structure, the cherubic cheeks and the smooth hairless skin. Next, I peered down at my hands, as if seeing them for the first time. This was not some drug-induced nightmare. I couldn’t believe how tiny they looked, like the hands of a living doll. I flexed my fingers, wiggling them and then stared at the nails, which were adorned by a bright purple polish. My dainty toes were painted the same colour. I felt around the side of my head to my ear lobes, noticing little studs protruding from them.

The Imprint

What happens when you choose wrong? You slowly go mad.

After determining that the vaccine was the cause of the drastic changes to his body, Ryan was rushed to a hospital. During the journey, Ryan descends into the ether, a nightmarish world of sound but one devoid of sight. When he awakes, however, he isn’t greeted by the sterile white of a hospital room nor the smell of antiseptic, but something else entirely.

While Ryan’s fever breaks, his body still feels off. However, with the rent due and no payment from the television show yet, he is forced to drag himself into work. While he masks any concern over his health with his usual bravado, his illness impacts his ability to do his job. Ultimately, this bravado, along with an unwillingness to see a doctor initially, could be his downfall.

Hailey knocked on the store's door, “Anyone awake in there?” she teased. “7-11 is supposed to always be open you know.”

“Sorry, we don’t serve crabs,” Vanessa said from the other side of the locked door. Ella gave a small twitch of her arm, causing her gauntlet to spark. To her surprise, the crab spread one pincer and gave a little spark right back at her. Then started to wander back to the beach with its friend.

I can’t remember a time when Adam and I weren’t friends.

Our mothers met in hospital shortly after giving birth. They swapped numbers and babysat for each other; because of them Adam and I shared the same milestones, whether it was swimming lessons, birthdays, or joining the scouts. We spent so much time together that growing close was inevitable.

From pre-k to high school we were joined at the hip, and always watching each other’s back. Even when Adam started getting in trouble, smoking weed and getting into fights, we were there for each other.

Kevin wasn’t a tall boy, by any means. Nobody really picked on him because he was fast, agile, and the rumor had it he was a ninja. Of course ignoring the fact that his mother was Chinese and not Japanese aside, like the true Ninja of old he did nothing to dissuade those rumors. He had no idea that that was about to get him into more trouble though.

Atlantis-Minor literally becomes a ‘House of Fun’ as Alex repeals the ‘no gifts’ order for her sisters as she hopes to draw out Clemson’s multiple personalities. The deadly cat and mouse game continues and Alex faces her worst nightmare as she and Andie experience, first-hand, the extinction of the sisters of Kili. Can the Empress of Time and Space succeed in convincing time to return what it has forgotten? If so, will it return more than she bargained for?

A successful woman is convinced a female lead marriage is the best path forward and as her career is taking off, her unemployed husband is expected to fill traditional female roles like homemaker and nursing mother. In this chapter... Samantha has a surprise and Julia struggles with a huge decision.

“Is this light?”

“Yes… This is light.”

Brian Donovan glanced at the array of telemetry that offered a vast variety of colorfully lit dials and information. The machine sat quietly in its metal chair, arms and legs restrained. It glanced as far around the laboratory as its range of neck motion would allow.

“Am I dreaming?” The machine asked in its slightly higher pitched androgynous voice.

“No machine… You are not dreaming.” Doctor Donovan glanced at the machine and smiled. “You are in real time.”

There's drunk, there's passed-out drunk and then there's so drunk that even a cold shower won't keep you awake....

It's been a few days since Julia declared her marriage to be a FLM. Eric, struggling in his new role, reaches out to his sister for advise and discovers some startling truths. In this chapter... It's been a few days since Julia declared her marriage to be a FLM. Eric, struggling in his new role, reaches out to his sister for advise and discovers some startling truths.

Danger, heart wrenching loss, catastrophe, and unforeseen temporal chaos challenge Alex and her away team as they set out to repair some revolutionary glitches perpetrated by Clemson’s ignorant and callous ‘corrections’ to history.

How many times have we heard some one say “If I only had my life over it would be different” but if we could force our lives to be ‘reset’ without losing any of the memories we had, how would we handle it and what changes would we select before pressing the button.

A successful woman is convinced a female lead marriage is the best path forward and as her career is taking off, her unemployed husband is expected to fill traditional female roles like homemaker and nursing mother. In this chapter...It's a new day and Julia wants to have an open and honest discussion with Eric about where they're going. Is it too late to go back?

My week as a mermaid continues: My young human friend and I surfaced and sat on a rock, where we could talk without having to use her underwater message pad. I was hoping she might start making sense now, but Valerie's strange stories were growing progressively stranger: Reagan and Kennedy on Mount Rushmore... A transsexual woman giving birth... Peace in Iraq but a war in Antarctica...

I might have decided that she just had a wild imagination, except she also had all this impossible hardware---like the artificial gill she'd been breathing underwater with---which had me wondering if I'd somehow wandered into an alternate universe. Given the kind of week I'd been having this didn't seem like such a crazy notion, but these mysteries had a different explanation that I would eventually discover. It was just a matter of time...

The first thing every mermaid learns is that if you see a human you're supposed to swim away as fast as you can. But the girl in the pink wetsuit was right here in front of me, and there was no way she would think she'd been mistaken about seeing me. My best recourse seemed to be to convince her not to tell anyone about meeting me, and as we talked (or rather I talked, while she typed her words on her neat little electronic message pad) this seemed to be working. But there were things Valerie was telling me here that made absolutely no sense. Either this girl was crazy or the whole universe was. Given the kind of week I'd had, my money was on it being the universe that had gone...

Today my sister decided to take me landlubbing, which the mermaid equivalent of the human sport of snorkeling- a low tech way to see all the pretty sights of a world that isn't your own. Except that instead of gliding almost effortlessly along through the water, our version has the tortoise-like pace of crawling + squirming over the ground + through the brush, and in some places you're basically rock climbing without feet. It isn't easy. But the little island Anemone had brought me to was so breathtakingly gorgeous it made it all worth it. It had everything you'd hope to find on a tropical isle- from coconut palms to waterfalls. And being uninhabited we could explore it all without running into any humans...

Or so we thought. Until that big white boat pulled into our perfect island's perfect bay, and things got super intense as our pleasant outing turned into a desperate game of hide and seek.

Our pleasant dinner had degenerated into a loud fight between my mermaid sister & our mom; Anee yelling, “How can you keep harping about how awful land people are if you never even met one?!”

Mom stated flatly: “I know all I need to about them.”

“You think you do, but Daddy liked humans. And he had experiences with them, not just a bunch of ignorant bigotry!”

“I've had dealings with humans before.”

“When? When was this?! I've heard all your stories and you never mentioned-”

“I prefer not to discuss it.”

"Now there's a surprise! 'Ewww, it's unpleasant! Let's not discuss it!'" mocked Anemone. She kept goading Mom, relentlessly, stopping just short of calling her a goddamn liar: “No Mom, I wanna hear this! Tell us! Tell us about your encounter with the horrible evil hewwww-mons-”

“I FELL IN LOVE WITH ONE!” roared the Queen, slamming her fists down on the table.

She froze there, stunned; like she'd just blurted out a secret she'd intended to take to the grave with her. Then she sighed, composed herself + told us her story...