Blind Date
A Vignette
By Maryanne Peters

I would like to be able to say that I had no hand in it, but that would not be true. We all knew what we were doing – it was a joke at Al’s expense. The problem was that we all seemed to have left Al behind. We were all fully developed as men by the time we graduated high school, but Al never seemed to have quite got there. I suppose that we might try to excuse what we did by saying that we teed him up with a blind date that might help him to “man up”, but how would a transwoman be able to do that?

The flames flickered in Sid’s dull eyes, as he listened to the harsh, dying screams of the stray cat. This alley never wanted for them, fortunately, and he had plied the old tomcat with a can of old tuna he had found in a nearby dumpster, his usual method. Then he threw it in a rusted metal garbage can, doused it with gasoline, and set it alight with one of his matches.

Eighteen-year-old Nicholas Hammerstein is at the cusp of finishing high school in his hometown of Los Alamos, NM. He has a seemingly ideal life and is blessed with loving parents, a cute baby sister, and great friends. Nicholas is a gifted student and martial artist who has dreams of leaving for college at the end of his senior year. But, living in a world of Emergent humans, he will soon find his life turned upside down as his life and the fate of a kingdom hang in the balance. His future and theirs will be determined by how he navigates the drastic changes in his body and the magical and superpowered Mergent population he joins.