Near the end of a busy shift at the diner, she was approached by a person who wanted to know how to become a woman. She thought she would give her a bit of advice after she got off work, and that would be it, but it was an encounter that would change her life.
“I would like to learn how to become a woman, please,” she said with an eager smile.
It was a busy shift, but it was at least nearer the end than the beginning. Two hours and eighteen minutes to go, I calculated after a glance at the clock on my phone on my way back from the restroom. I picked up an order for table five and took it to their table, and was heading back to the kitchen when I was accosted by what looked like a gender non-conforming guy or a trans girl who was just starting to experiment with clothes. The knee-length blue skirt and long braided hair could fit with either, but I thought a trans girl would probably have shaved more closely, and they were wearing a tight red shirt that made it clear they had no breasts. I couldn’t quite place their ethnicity; they were light-skinned, but their facial features didn’t quite look like people Europe.
“I would like to learn how to become a woman, please,” she said with an eager smile.
Okay, a trans girl, and a strangely naive one for her age (about my age, maybe thirtyish?). Someone who’d latched onto the trans waitress and decided to ask me for advice about transitioning. Which, under other circumstances, I’d be glad to give, but there were customers waiting and I couldn’t rightly stand there explaining whatever aspects of transition she wanted to know about with six tables waiting for their food and two others waiting for me to take their orders.
“I’d like to help, but I don’t have time to talk about that right now,” I said. “I can answer some questions after the end of my shift. Point you toward resources for learning how to transition. But for now, you need to order something and then wait for me to get off work in a couple of hours.”
“I would not dare give orders, I can only humbly beg.” She had a slight accent I couldn’t place, and that weird mistake about “order” showed she wasn’t a native speaker. But she spoke really fluidly, if not quite fluently. “I will come back in two hours.”
She turned and left the diner. Hadn’t she come in to eat? Weird.
Just before my shift ended, she returned and seemed to hesitate before she sat down at a free table, not in my section. I was busy taking orders and didn’t have a lot of spare attention to pay her, but I noticed her taking out a book and starting to read. Once I clocked out, I walked over to her table and sat down.
“At least one of us needs to order something if we’re going to sit here talking about trans stuff for an hour or so. That’s all I can spare at the moment. My name’s Jenny, by the way.”
“My name is Edmonard Martford, although when I become a woman I would like my forename to be Permelia. If you can answer my questions now, maybe what is ‘trans stuff’?”
“‘Trans’ is short for transgender,” I said, reminding myself that I was dealing with a non-native speaker. “Where are you from, by the way?”
“Martford is my home village, but I have lived in Gannerton for some years, in Wurland. But what does ‘transgender’ means?”
“I don’t know where that is. What country?”
“Wurland is the country. But it is far away. My ghostly guides led me by strange ways to get here, and showed me the way to you, pointing you out as one who can tell me how to become a woman.”
That was a lot to process, but I couldn’t think or ask about it right away because Kathy came over and said, “What can I get y’all?” She didn’t bat an eye at Permelia, God bless her.
“Just unsweet tea for me,” I said. I’d put on ten pounds since going back to waitressing, just from the employee meals, even though I was on my feet all day. I’d eat something healthy once I got home. Kathy looked expectantly at Permelia.
“Would you please counsel me something good to eat? I do not know your folk’s cookery.”
Definitely a foreigner, and probably hadn’t been in the country long if she wasn’t familiar with American food. Something about the way she’d phrased that nagged at me.
“Are you hungry for a full meal or do you just want a snack?” I asked. “Any allergies?”
“I am hungry. But I have not yet changed my money for your country’s money. Will you take this?” She took a small drawstring bag out of her backpack and took out a few copper coins, larger than a penny, and a silver coin about the diameter of a quarter, but thicker.
“Sorry, American money only,” Kathy said, giving me a strange look. I shrugged at her.
“I’ll get her a loaded burger with a Coke,” I said.
“Coming right up,” she said.
I thought about what Permelia had said about her “ghostly guides.” “So… uh, voices in your head told you to ask me how to become a woman?” The most charitable interpretation I could put on it was that she’d clocked me, and had experienced the sensation as a voice in her head telling her “She can tell you how to transition!”… although obviously not in those words. Or maybe she was plural, and one of her headmates had pointed out I was trans. And then those place-names – I’d never heard of them. They sounded vaguely English, but she wasn’t from England, not with her not quite right command of the language and that unidentifiable accent.
“They don’t speak in human voices,” she said. “At least, only a few of them do so, and only rarely. Most of them simply lead the way and point out lost or hidden things, or a person who knows a thing I wish to learn. Now and then they speak by signs. It is a happy day when one of them speaks in a clear voice.”
So she mostly saw visual hallucinations, and only rarely heard voices. Good to know. She went on:
“They did not tell me how you would help me, only that you could. I don’t know whether you are a leech who can change my body, or a woman who was once a man and can tell me how you did it, or perhaps your friend or sister has changed so. But I beg you again, please help me. Ever since I knew how boys and girls are unlike, I have felt the pain of not being a girl, or a woman.”
That sounded painfully familiar. I wanted to help her, at least to point her toward where she could get help, despite the potential danger of hanging out with someone who was mentally unwell. My gut said she was a nice person, however delusional… and maybe those hallucinations weren’t really that dysfunctional if they had led her to me?
Wait, she’d said she didn’t know if I was trans or a doctor or just knew somebody who was trans. Why did she latch onto me, then?
“Well,” I said, “basically, being transgender is when your sense of your own gender doesn’t fit what other people tell you it should be based on what your body looks like. If you feel like you should be a woman, but other people think you’re a man because you have the type of body men usually have, or if someone who was born with a feminine body thinks of themselves as a man, or if someone feels like they’re neither a man nor a woman – all those are transgender. People like you and me are called ‘trans women,’ and people who go the other way around are ‘trans men.’ With me so far?”
She nodded. “‘Trans women.’ I see. And how did you change your body?”
“I’ll get to that,” I said, wondering how naive she could be. “But that’s the first thing – if you’re determined to be a woman, you already are, on the inside. Changing what you don’t like about your body starts with accepting who you really are.”
“You mean… I’m already a woman?”
“By the definitions decent people use, anyway. Start by realizing that, and you can move forward from there.”
She touched her finger to her cheek and smiled. “Is it that simple? Am I going to start changing now?”
I laughed. “No, I wish it were that easy. No, it takes years, and unfortunately a fair bit of money just for the basics, and a lot of money if you go for the full package – I don’t know what your financial situation is like, what the health care situation is in your home country or how long you’re staying here… I don’t suppose you have health insurance if you’ve only just arrived.”
“I brought money, all I have. When you told me to come back after you had done working for the day, I asked my guides where to find a money-changer, but they warned me that it was too late in the day to go deal with them and come back in time before you finished work for the day.”
So she had just arrived in the U.S., and made a beeline for this suburban diner and asked me how to transition? A lot of this didn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t she have changed her money at the airport, which wasn’t anywhere near here? How did she even get here without changing her money? How did she travel internationally while being so naive and delusional?
She picked up one of the menus on the rack, looked at it briefly and grimaced. “I wish I had asked my guides to lead me to a place where I could read the tongue, as well as speak it,” she said.
“What?”
“There are an unbounded number of places I could have gone, but nearly all of them speak strange tongues I don’t know. I asked the guides to lead me to a place where the folk spoke a tongue like mine, at least nine-tenths the same, and where I could find someone who could teach me how to become a woman. But I forgot to ask for a place that should use the same writing as my country.”
Now this was getting weird. Did she have some weird delusion that explained her illiteracy? Or… was the passing insane thought I’d had earlier actually true? “So you can’t read English?”
“No. This is how Wurlian is written.” She took the book she’d been reading when I clocked out, which I hadn’t paid any attention to, and turned it around and slid it across to me. It was a small hardback, a bit smaller than our standard paperback sizes. I didn’t give the text on the open pages more than a glance, just enough to see it wasn’t in the Latin alphabet.
“It is the same speech, or very nearly, but different writing.”
Now I was starting to suspect a hoax, if she’d had a book printed in a made-up writing system, but a more charitable explanation was that it was in a foreign language I didn’t know and her idea that her native language was just like English was another aspect of her delusions. She needed a lot more help than I could give her. But just to help figure things out, I took out my phone and took a picture of the open pages, and sent it to my friend Victoria.
you recognize this language?
Kathy brought us our food and drink, and Permelia looked at her burger for a moment as though she’d never seen one before she picked it up and took a bite. What rock had she been living under where you could learn English that fluently but couldn’t get a hamburger?
“Can you show me a little of your money, just to see what it looks like? Like one of each type of coin. Be careful not to let anyone at the other tables see how much you’ve got.”
She nodded and took a smaller bag out of her backpack, then, glancing around, dipped a couple of fingers into it and drew out four coins, one at a time, and slid them across the table toward me. One, I was pretty sure, was gold, another silver, and the last two copper. All had unfamiliar people’s heads embossed on them and an unfamiliar kind of writing, probably the same as in the book. And they looked worn with use – the copper and silver were a bit tarnished, and the gold was particularly worn, with the surface markings barely recognizable as a face. I took a photo of them, and sent that to Victoria too.
I slid the coins back to her and she put them away. Thoughts were racing in my head. “Okay,” I said. “I don’t know how much those are worth in our money, offhand. It would probably depend on the weight of precious metals in them. You should probably go to a jeweler or pawn shop or something, rather than a bank – I feel like the bank wouldn’t know what to do with currency from Wurland.”
She nodded. “I can ask my guides to show me to a place where I will get fair exchange for my money.”
“That’s a useful trick.” Was I really starting to take her claims seriously? The coins weren’t hard proof that she came a country called Wurland in another world. Several micronations had printed or minted their own fake currency, and I wasn’t expert enough to tell real gold at a glance. But there might be a way I could figure it out.
“So,” I said, wrenching us back on subject. “You were asking about transition.” I started telling her about the basics of transition; counseling or therapy, HRT, various methods of hair removal, voice training and vocal shaving, facial feminization surgery, top surgery, bottom surgery. “All of those are optional,” I said. “You’re still a real woman if you can’t afford all of them, or you aren’t in good enough health for some of them, or just don’t want all of them.”
“I want all of them,” she said. “If I run out of money, my guides can show me how to earn more here.”
“You should learn more about all your options before you decide,” I said. “There’s a lot more pros and cons to those things than I’ve had time to tell you about. But yeah, I wanted all of them too. I wasn’t quite there yet when I got laid off from my last job that had decent insurance.”
“I weep,” she said. Weird. She seemed to use it to mean “I’m sorry”?
“Anyway, another issue is that even if you have the money, you might have trouble getting someone to take your money and give you the medicine or do the surgery if don’t have any proof of ID.”
“ID?”
“Identity papers? Documents that prove who you are?”
“Oh. I brought my proof of owning property and my competence as a diviner, but I don’t know if your authorities will accept them.”
“Somehow I doubt it, if they’re issued by the government of a country nobody’s heard of, and in a kind of writing that nobody can read.” What kind of country issued certificates of competence in divination?
She looked unhappy and I wanted to console her even though I still wasn’t 100% convinced she was really what she said. “Could you show me some divination? Tell me something you learned from your, uh, ghostly guides that you couldn’t have learned another way?” Either I’d see some proof of what I’d faintly begun to suspect, or she’d be confronted with the limits of her delusions. Win-win either way.
She thought about it for a few moments and took another bite of her food. “All right. It would be easier to show you if we were walking about, but I will speak with the guides and watch to see what they show me.”
After a little more thought, she whispered something I couldn’t hear, and then looked around the diner. Seeming disappointed, she whispered something else, looked around, and repeated a couple more times. Finally, she smiled and said, “You see the man in the black shirt there? He did not bring enough money to pay for his food. When he is done eating, I think he will either try to sneak out without paying, or beg to pay by his sweat instead.”
“Okay,” I said. “This will be interesting.”
I continued answering her follow-up questions about medical and social transition, and the transgender rights movement in the U.S. and other Western countries, for another half hour while she finished her burger. The man at the other table was eating a lot; he’d ordered two large entrees to start with, and when he finished them off, he ordered dessert. When he finally finished that, Permelia’s prediction came true. He waited until Kathy was busy with another table, with her back to him, and tried to slip out.
I debated for a moment whether I should rat him out. Probably not, I decided; he was probably doing that because he was broke and hungry, not because he was a selfish asshole, and I wasn’t on the clock. But my silence didn’t help him, because Kathy turned around in time to see him heading for the door, and yelled at him. He bolted for it, and Lee put down the tub of dishes and silverware he was carrying and chased him out the door.
“All right,” I said to Permelia after gaping slack-jawed for a few moments. “That was…”
On second thought, it was possible, even likely, that the guy was her accomplice and this was all some super-elaborate hoax. I’d ask for another demonstration of her magic to be sure.
We were pretty much done eating by then, and Kathy brought me the check. We got up from the table and I paid at the register; I was thinking about other ways to test her magic, and other questions to ask her about where she came from. “So,” I said, “you said it would be easier to show me if we were walking around?”
“Yes,” she said as we walked out the front door. “My guides are good at finding lost and hidden things, or finding a safe route from one place to another.”
“All right,” I said after a few moments’ thought. “People lose their keys pretty often. In a city this size, it’s pretty likely that somebody within a few miles of us has lost their keys. Can your guides find the keys and the person who lost them without you telling them in advance what the keys look like or who the person is, or is that too vague?”
She nodded and whispered like she’d done before. After looking around for a moment, she said, “This way,” and turned toward the big box stores in the adjacent parking lot. She was walking a little slowly, I noticed, like she was tired.
“How far are we going to go? Should we drive or walk?” I asked.
“Drive?”
“In a car?”
She shrugged, and I gestured toward the cars going by on the road. “I’ve got one of those. It’s parked right over there.” I pointed in the other direction from where she was about to walk. She must have seen them since her arrival here, but hadn’t asked me about them, being apparently laser-focused on transition, with a brief detour to talk about money and language.
She whispered to her ghosts again and then said, “The keys aren’t far away. A few hundred yards. And the person who lost them is nearby, in the same direction.”
I followed her across the diner parking lot and the margin of grass separating it from the neighboring furniture store, which was still open, and then inside. She zeroed in without hesitation on an easy chair about halfway toward the back of the store and paused a moment, then dug around in the cushions on the left side and pulled out a ring of keys. Then she looked up and walked a short distance to where a middle-aged black couple were looking at some other chairs, and said, “Excuse me, are these your keys?”
“Oh, thanks!” the man said, patting down his pocket. “I didn’t notice they’d fallen out.” He and his wife were both giving Permelia strange looks, and me too, which was pretty uncomfortable; but they were at least grateful enough for getting their keys back that they didn’t say anything mean or nosy.
“They were in the chair over there,” Permelia said, pointing back the way we came.
“Thank you so much,” the woman said. “God bless you.”
“It was no trouble,” Permelia said, and she turned to go. I stood there, stunned, for a moment before following her.
I tried to think of a way Permelia could have colluded with them to fake a demonstration of magic, and couldn’t do it. The guy who’d run out on his tab just might have been an accomplice, since he’d come into the restaurant around the same time as Permelia, and she might have given him some pre-arranged signal. But this time I’d suggested the test, and though she might be wearing a mic so her hypothetical accomplices could hear our conversation, her hair was braided back in such a way that I could see clearly she wasn’t wearing anything in her ears that the couple could use to tell her where they were and where they’d hide the keys. So magic was real, and I’d met a baby trans girl from another universe, and I had no idea yet how that was going to change my life, but I had no intention of sending Permelia off with an hour of advice and a free meal and never talking to her again.
“So where were you planning to stay tonight?” I asked as we left the furniture store.
“Well, at first, I was going to change my money and use some of it to pay for a night at an inn. But I arrived later in the day than I expected. If the best places to change my money are already closed, as the guides seem to say, then I will ask them to show me a safe place to sleep.”
I made another impulsive decision. “Come with me,” I said. “I’ve got a sofa you can sleep on.”
“I thank you!” she said, beaming at me, and we walked back to my car.
I knew I was taking a risk. Just because she was a diviner from another universe didn’t mean she wasn’t also going to rob me blind or cut my throat while I was asleep. But I’d spent over an hour with her by now, and I felt like that was pretty unlikely. And… magic! What red-blooded geek wouldn’t want in on that?
Magic that couldn’t fix her body, at least not directly. How many stories had I read where cis guys got turned into girls by magic, or trans girls got their bodies fixed all at once by magic? Way more than was good for me, especially before I figured out I was trans but even after I’d started transitioning. And now a mage was coming to me for help, because for all her world’s magic – which I’d barely scratched the surface of – it apparently couldn’t give her the body she needed.
Well, there were things I could do right away to help her pass more easily, besides making her feel better while we figured out how to get her hormones.
“When we get to my apartment, if you’re not too tired, I’ll show you how to get a closer shave,” I said. “Would you like that?”
“Yes, please.”
“And then tomorrow, after we change your money, we’re going shopping. You might want blouses that’ll conceal your Adam’s apple.”
“Adam’s apple?” she asked.
“Your larynx,” I said, touching mine. “I had surgery to reduce the size of mine, but until then I would sometimes wear blouses with high collars, or scarves, or things like that.”
“Oh, that’s a good idea,” she said, and repeated the words “larynx” and “Adam’s apple” under her breath a few times.
We continued talking about ways to help her improve her presentation as we walked back to my car, when that conversation got derailed by showing her how to fasten a seat belt and then talking about our world’s cars – which she’d already noticed, of course, but had set aside as relatively unimportant next to asking me how to transition.
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“Really. You’re asking me to believe that somewhere in the multiverse, a language almost exactly like English independently evolved? And not in an alternate England, but somewhere that sounds completely unrelated to England?”
“If the multiverse is infinite, that’s not a far-fetched claim, is it?” I said.
My phone pinged a couple of times on the way back to my apartment, and I took it out to check for messages when I’d let Permelia in and sat down.
“What are you looking at with your clockmaker’s glass?” she asked.
“What?” I asked.
“The tool you’re holding – I saw you using it to look more closely at the book and coins. I don’t understand what you’re looking at now, though.”
“Oh,” I said. “This is my cell phone. It does a lot of different things, but earlier I was using it as a camera – or as a magnifying glass, I guess. And it looks like my friend replied to the message I sent her earlier with photos of the book and coins.”
Victoria had texted:
Not any writing system I’ve seen before, no. There are a lot of languages in the world, but most of the ones used in printed books or on coinage use writing systems I’d recognize. I’ll ask some colleagues to be sure I’m not missing something. I’d guess some conlanger had them printed and minted as a vanity project, although they could be from some real-world nation I’m less familiar with. Where’d you find them?
“Photo?” Permelia asked.
“That’s a photo,” I said, pointing to the framed photo of me with Victoria and some other friends hanging on the wall. “It’s an exact image made by a machine called a camera. Here,” I said, and showed her the photo of the coins I’d taken earlier.
“Amazing,” she said. “This place is full of such wonders.”
“Let me show you another wonder,” I said. “The safety razor.”
Well, first I showed her hot running water. They didn’t have that where she came from, either. While she bathed, I called Victoria.
“Hey, Jenny, what’s up?”
“A hell of a lot,” I said. “I’m not even sure where to start.”
“Is this about those coins?”
“Yeah. I met this baby trans, she didn’t even know the first thing about where to start with transition, but somehow she’d decided I was the person to ask…”
Victoria interrupted a lot, with increasingly incredulous questions. She tried to find a hole in the logic of my test of Permelia’s magic, but couldn’t figure out how she and the couple who’d lost their keys could have colluded on such short notice. “I still think you should test her some more, next time you see her. I assume you arranged to meet her again?”
“You could say that,” I said. “She’s soaking in my bathtub right now. Later on, I’m going to show her how to shave better.”
“You what.”
“Yeah, she doesn’t have money a hotel would accept, and I didn’t want her to sleep on a park bench or something –”
“I’ll be right over. You need a keeper.”
“The more the merrier.”
By the time Victoria arrived, Permelia had finished bathing and put on the spare bathrobe I’d loaned her, and I’d shown her some tips on shaving her legs, arms and face. In the course of the following conversation, I realized I’d made some provincial assumptions about how similar Wurland’s gender presentation rules were to American ones. For one thing, that skirt (or perhaps I should say kilt?) she’d been wearing was considered male attire where she came from; both men and women could wear either pants and skirts, but the differences were in how loose or tight the trousers were and how long or short the skirts were allowed to be. Women would wear longer skirts – the one she’d been wearing was as long as a “man” could get away with – and were supposed to wear secondary colors, while men wore primary colors. Adult men braided their hair in certain ways, adult women in other ways, and children wore their hair loose; also, people of certain professions (only open to men) shaved their heads or trimmed it short, and women in religious office wore their hair loose like children.
In other words, however determined Permelia was to “become a woman,” she hadn’t dared start presenting female until now. She was eager to learn about our society’s rules and patterns for gender presentation, given that she’d be living here for at least a few years with the fastest possible transition – and going as fast as theoretically possible seemed unlikely with the legal hurdles she’d need to jump through to begin with.
Permelia was nearly done shaving when the doorbell rang. “That must be Victoria,” I said. “I’ll get it.”
I went and let her in. “Oh, good, she hasn’t murdered you in your bed yet,” she said.
“She’s a sweet bebi,” I said. “I’m more convinced of that after spending a few hours with her than I am that she’s a mage from another universe.”
“Jenny, this isn’t like you,” she said. “You’re more hard-headed than this. Bringing home a crazy homeless woman, however nice she seems, is just…” She threw up her hands.
“Judge for yourself,” I said. I went back to check on Permelia, who was pretty much done by now, and came back to the living room with her.
“Hi, I’m Permelia Martford. You must be Victoria.”
“Yes, hi.”
“Jenny said you had a lot of questions.”
“I do. Do you mind if I take a close look at some of the coins you brought? Or that book?”
Permelia nodded. “I brought a couple of books to read while traveling.” She bent down and dug through her backpack, pulling out two smallish hardbound books, which she handed to Victoria, as well as her purse, from which she took out the same four types of coins she’d shown me. Victoria sat down on the sofa with the books and slowly turned the pages of one of them, pausing on the first page past the front matter.
Victoria muttered something technical-sounding under her breath, then looked up at us and said: “I hope you understand why I’m skeptical. Why Jenny was skeptical at first. We haven’t ever heard of dimensional travelers except in fiction, and seeing one for the first time seems less likely than an elaborate hoax, even if it’s not obvious what the motive of the hoax would be.”
“I don’t have enough money to be worth scamming,” I reminded Victoria. “And by your hypothesis that she and the guy in the restaurant and the couple in the furniture store were all working together to scam me, they would have been better off pocketing the money they used to print those books and mint those coins and buy whatever electronic equipment they needed to secretly communicate… all that would cost more than whatever blood they could squeeze out of this turnip.”
Victoria shook her head. “A scam would be more believable. A hoax like this would for the lulz, just to see if they can get you to believe it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
“Okay, and you don’t think the lost keys were extraordinary enough. Fair enough. Feel free to propose another test of her magic, but if it involves going somewhere, let’s save it for tomorrow.” I turned to Permelia and asked, “How much does it tire you out to talk with your, uh, ghostly guides? Are you worn out from doing it a lot today?”
She shook her head. “No, it’s not any more tiring than talking with living folk. I am tired from walking so far in the ways between worlds, but I’m not quite ready to sleep yet.”
“Tell me more about what your ‘guides’ can do,” Victoria said. “Did they teach you how to speak our language, or are they interpreting for us without us noticing or something?”
“No. We speak tongues that are like enough for understanding, at least mostly. I asked the guides to lead me to a place where it was possible to change into a woman and where the folk spoke a tongue I could mostly understand. I’m sure there are many other places where changing into a woman is possible; perhaps in some of them it’s possible to do it faster or less painfully, but nearly all of those places would speak tongues completely unlike ours, or maybe they were too far away to go on foot.”
“Really. You’re asking me to believe that somewhere in the multiverse, a language almost exactly like English independently evolved? And not in an alternate England, but somewhere that sounds completely unrelated to England?”
“If the multiverse is infinite, that’s not a far-fetched claim, is it?” I said.
“It would require not just English to independently evolve in that universe, but all the languages that English borrowed large chunks of vocabulary from or were influenced by the grammar of. Old Norse, Latin, Greek, Norman French, and some sort of Celtic language… I guess that’s possible in an infinite multiverse, but it’s a lot less likely than, say, Hawaiian independently evolving. Which is already astronomically unlikely.”
“If it’s possible, set that aside. What you’re really skeptical about is the magic, right?”
“I’m skeptical about almost every aspect of her story. But that’s the big one. The dimensional travel and the… ghosts she’s supposedly getting information from.”
“All right. Do you have any other ideas we can try tonight?”
“Maybe.” She turned to Permelia, who was looking nervous. “Can your ghosts do sortilegy?”
“I… don’t know that word.”
“Like guide you to open a book to a random page and plunk your finger down on a random word or sentence, and have that be a meaningful answer to a specific question.”
“Oh, yes. I’m not sure it will work with books in your writing, though, and if I did it with one of my own books,” gesturing toward the books in Victoria’s lap, “you might not trust me to tell you what the word I’m pointing at says.”
“Well, let’s give it a try, and if it doesn’t work, we won’t hold it against you,” I said. “Hmm… let’s see…”
“What is my youngest paternal aunt’s favorite book?” Victoria said. “Your ghosts should be able to point it out on one of Jenny’s bookshelves without even pointing to a specific page and word. And,” she added, turning to me, “if she and her accomplices researched you and your friends while planning all this, they’re not likely to have researched my extended family and every detail about them.”
While she was talking, Permelia had been whispering again. She looked around the room and then got up and walked over to the larger of my two bookshelves, the one across from the sofa where most people would put a TV. She hesitated a moment before bending down and taking Anne of Green Gables off the bottom shelf.
“I can’t read what it says, but is this right?” she said, bringing it over to Victoria. My friend didn’t answer right away, just stared at her open-mouthed.
“Okay,” she said. “I have a lot of questions.”
We spent a couple more hours that night answering each other’s questions about our worlds. I wanted to know more about her magic and whether there were other kinds of magic in her world (no), while Victoria wanted to start with the big picture of world history – which Permelia didn’t have much of a global perspective on, unfortunately, though she knew about the last thousand-odd years in her own country and its neighbors, which mostly spoke mutually comprehensible dialects of what she called “Wurlian.” Some of this fit with Victoria’s complaints about how improbable it was for a language so much like English to evolve independently; about eight hundred years ago, Wurland and what are now its neighboring countries had been invaded and conquered by a group of people from the south, who had imposed their own language for administrative use for as long as they remained the ruling class, about two hundred years. And of course Wurlian had borrowed a lot of words from this alternate-Norman French – though not as many, Victoria noted, as our world’s English had. Then a bit later, after that empire had broken up into smaller countries again, about two-thirds of the region’s people had converted to a religion originating further west, and Wurlian borrowed a lot of words from the holy language of that religion, as well as basing new coinages on “Latin” roots.
Permelia had her own questions about the big picture of our world, but she still focused most of her curiosity on the transition process and the place of trans people in our world. She was dismayed to learn how badly trans people were often treated, but that didn’t change her mind about transitioning as soon and as thoroughly as possible.
When I noticed Permelia yawning, I hustled Victoria out the door, promising to call her in the morning once Permelia and I were done with breakfast and ready to go shopping. “And maybe she can show us some of the other things she talked about, afterward,” I added.
“Yeah, that wouldn’t hurt,” Victoria said. “Good night, you two.”
I got out the spare sheets and blanket from the closet, and took one of the extra pillows from my bed and put a clean pillowcase on it. Soon Permelia was snoring lightly on my sofa, while I was lying in bed, buzzing with wonder and excitement. It took me a long time to get to sleep; it was a good thing I had the next day off.
My other free stories can be found at:
Scribblehub is the best place to follow me these days; most things get posted there first and when I finish a story, I schedule all its chapters to appear on Scribblehub in their turn, so if something happens to me, updates on BC and TGS will stop but Scribblehub will still continue posting chapters until they're done.
My ebooks, previously for sale, are now free on Smashwords and itch.io, although Amazon would not let me reduce the prices below $0.99. My non-writing income is sufficient for my needs, and if you have the money to buy ebooks, I hope you will support other authors who depend primarily or largely on ebook sales, Patreon, etc. for their income.
“I’ll have to look things up to see if they’re worth more than the precious metals in them,” she said. “I don’t recognize them. The minting techniques seem to be relatively modern, like eighteenth or nineteenth century, but I thought I’d recognize all the historic coins of that period, and I don’t.”
I slept until almost ten the next morning; when I got up and stumbled into the kitchen to make coffee, I found Permelia eating a banana and reading one of the books she’d brought. She was still wearing my bathrobe, and she’d braided her hair differently, presumably in one of the styles that were considered feminine back home.
“Good morrow, Jenny,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind…” She gestured with the banana. “My guides marked it out as the food you would miss least.”
“Uh, yeah. Those bananas were gonna go bad before I could finish them all. But you’re welcome to almost anything in my cabinets or refrigerator… except the wine. It’s kind of expensive and I save it for special occasions.” I was touched by her thoughtfulness in not wanting to eat something I would miss, and wondered what it implied about her experiences. Was food more expensive where she came from? Did people regularly go hungry there?
“I will keep that in mind,” she said, and then repeated the word “bananas” under her breath a couple of times. Apparently they called them something else back in Wurland, if they had bananas there at all. Then she asked: “What is a ‘refrigerator’?”
I showed her, and explained. It seemed they were still using ice-boxes in Wurland, cutting up lake-ice and storing it with sawdust insulation as long as possible, then delivering chunks to the better-off people’s houses every few days during the warm months. Once I’d gotten her a more varied and filling breakfast, I went to take my shower and get dressed, then helped her figure out what to wear. We went through the two other changes of clothes in her backpack, which consisted of two more tight shirts, a skirt about as long and pants about as loose as as she could get away with back home, plus underwear, long socks, and a winter coat.
“These tight shirts are going to make it hard to look feminine,” I said. “Do you want to try on a couple of my blouses? We could fix up a temporary solution to make it look like you have breasts, until we get your money changed and you can buy proper breast forms.”
“Yes, I thank you.”
She was a little more slender than I was, lucky girl, and didn’t have any trouble fitting into one of my blouses. Under it, she wore an old bra I could spare and wouldn’t want back, stuffed with rolled-up socks. She wore her other skirt with it, and looked… pretty good. A lot more feminine than I would have expected after just a closer shave and a change of clothes.
Once were were all dressed and ready, I said, “So… last night you said your ghosts could guide you to someone that would give you fair value for your coins. How would they do that? Could they maybe point the place out on a map of the city, or do we need to drive around with you telling me whether the ghosts say to turn left or go straight or whatever?”
“We can use a map.”
So I brought up Google Maps on my laptop (which raised a ton of new questions, most of which I deferred till later) and got it to display a map of the city and most of its inner suburbs. Permelia pointed out an area, and I zoomed in on it (to her further amazement), and we repeated that until she was pointing to a specific shopping center containing a Publix, a Papa John’s, and a few other stores that weren’t identified in Google’s database.
“Okay,” I said, entering the address into my phone. “That’s going to be a half-hour drive. I’ll call Victoria and let her know where to meet us after we’re done there.”
Soon we were on the road, and I wound up spending most of the drive answering her questions about computers, smartphones, map apps and other software, electricity, the Internet, and on and on. I had questions, too, but they could wait.
The place we were looking for turned out to be Shorthouse Jewelers, a small place run by a sweet older couple, maybe in their fifties. Given their age, I was afraid they would be transphobic, but I needn’t have worried. Probably Permelia’s guides wouldn’t have brought us here if they weren’t accepting as well as fair.
“What can we do for you today?” the man asked.
I’d asked Permelia to let me do the talking. “My friend has some gold and silver coins to sell,” I said. “We don’t know where they came from originally. She inherited them from an uncle who used to travel around a lot, so who knows.”
“Let’s see,” he said, and Permelia dumped out the bag of coins onto the counter in front of him. He picked one up and looked at it, then put on his loupe and took a closer look. “Sue, take a look at this; you’re the coin expert.”
His wife came over and put on a jeweler’s loupe of her own, then took the coin he handed her and examined it. Then she looked through the coins on the table and picked up one of the silver ones, then a copper one.
“I’ll have to look things up to see if they’re worth more than the precious metals in them,” she said. “I don’t recognize them. The minting techniques seem to be relatively modern, like eighteenth or nineteenth century, but I thought I’d recognize all the historic coins of that period, and I don’t.”
“My friend who’s a linguist thought they were just some rich conlanger’s vanity project,” I put in. “And if you don’t recognize them either, they’re probably just worth the value of the gold and silver… and the copper, if that’s copper and not zinc or something. Copper’s worth more than it used to be, isn’t it?” I’d looked up the current market values of all three metals while Permelia was in the bathtub last night.
“Yes… well, if that’s the case, we’ll just start assaying them and let you know how much they’re worth.”
That took a while, but we walked out there with enough money to pay for a pretty large chunk of her transition – maybe all of it, if we could get her some ID that would hold up to scrutiny and a job with decent insurance. I felt nervous, carrying around a check for that much made out in my name, but a check made out to “Permelia Martford” wouldn’t be usable until we got her some ID, and the jewelers didn’t have anywhere near that much cash on hand.
“Breasts and clothes next,” I said. “I’ll pay for them today, and you can pay me back once we deposit this check. And sometime soon, we’ll need to get you an ID; I have no idea how to start doing that, but maybe your guides can tell us?”
“I will ask them.”
Our next stop was the little store near downtown where I’d bought my breast forms seven years earlier. They were able to set Permelia up with a nicely-fitting pair of tits that matched her skin tone. We also bought a few bras and panties there.
Then we met up with Victoria at a mall not far from the university where she taught – she didn’t have any afternoon classes that day – and spent a few hours before and after lunch fleshing out Permelia’s wardrobe. She favored ankle-length or mid-calf skirts and dresses, things that were feminine both by her culture’s standards and ours. She kind of went wild trying on patterned things – her culture only produced solid-color garments on any large scale, partly because of technological limitations, and partly because of outdated sumptuary laws that limited clothes with complex patterns or images (historically embroidery, but now including machine-woven fabric) to the nobility. Her joy and euphoria at getting to wear feminine clothes did my heart good.
We also helped her buy some makeup suited for her skin tone, and a couple of new pairs of shoes.
At lunch, we talked more about her magic and how it could maybe show us how to get her an ID that would let her get above-board medical treatment and (once she’d acclimated enough) a job, hopefully with great insurance.
“I think if I ask my guides to lead me to a person who can help me get an ‘ID’, I can simply ask them what to do next,” Permelia said.
“See, the thing is, whoever your guides are going to lead you to is going to be a criminal,” I said. “Hopefully a fairly honest criminal, who’s breaking the law and resisting the police state out of principle instead of just for the money. But a lot of people who deal in fake IDs also deal in much worse things, or at least that’s my impression. You need to be careful.”
“Do your guides automatically look out for your safety?” Victoria asked. “Or would you need to specify in your request that they lead you to someone who will be safe to deal with?”
Permelia frowned. “When I am dealing with a guide I have known for a long time, yes. If I am asking advice of a new one, I will be more specific. But doesn’t your country have a ministry for welcoming newcomers from other lands?”
Victoria sighed. “Yes, it does. But they’re selective about the number of people per year from each other country that they let in. They’ll want proof that you’ve already been offered a job by someone here, or that you have skills that are in high demand… and most importantly, they’ll want to know where you’re from. And either they won’t believe you’re from Wurland, and they’ll try to deport you to whatever country they guess you’re really from – or you’ll use your magic to prove you’re from another world, and they’ll take you seriously and we’ll really be in trouble.”
“Movies have taught me that nothing good ever comes of the government finding out about a lone visitor from another world,” I said solemnly. “Once in a while a large or powerful group of visitors gets decent treatment, but a lone visitor is always abducted and experimented on until the plucky heroes can rescue them and help them get home. Add in the fact that you’re trans, and it would get even worse.”
“Oh,” Permelia said, looking horrified and puzzled. In retrospect, she probably hadn’t understood a lot of that, but she clearly got the gist. “Then dealing with criminals would be safer than dealing with your government?”
“Yes, at least if your guides can point us toward a relatively honest criminal. Who’s very good at making fake IDs that will stand up to scrutiny. And won’t cheat you or refuse to help just because you’re trans.”
“I think they can,” she said. “If they can’t, they will give me signs that they can only partly answer my request.”
“All right,” I said. “Today isn’t the day for it, but tonight back at my apartment, we can zoom in on the map like we did before, and then the next time I have a day off work – which will be Wednesday – I can drive you to wherever you need to go and help you deal with… whoever we’re going to see.”
“You should see if you can get somebody formidable-looking to go with you,” Victoria said. “Somebody like Chris or Marc, maybe. Even if the person you’re going to see is perfectly safe to deal with, they’re likely to be in a dangerous neighborhood and you might run into danger on the way.”
“Yeah, I’ll see if they’re busy that day.”
We went back to shopping when we finished eating, and a few hours later, parted ways.
“Hey, Permelia,” Victoria said as we finished loading my trunk with Permelia’s purchases. “If you want to spent one or two of the next few nights with me, instead of the whole time with Jenny, that would be fine. I’d like a chance to talk with you more about Wurlian. Figure out more about the differences between Wurlian and English, that kind of thing – Jenny would probably be bored by that, and we’ve had more important things to talk about, so I haven’t gone into it much so far…”
“That would be interesting,” Permelia said. “I thank you.”
My other free stories can be found at:
Scribblehub is the best place to follow me these days; most things get posted there first and when I finish a story, I schedule all its chapters to appear on Scribblehub in their turn, so if something happens to me, updates on BC and TGS will stop but Scribblehub will still continue posting chapters until they're done.
My ebooks, previously for sale, are now free on Smashwords and itch.io, although Amazon would not let me reduce the prices below $0.99. My non-writing income is sufficient for my needs, and if you have the money to buy ebooks, I hope you will support other authors who depend primarily or largely on ebook sales, Patreon, etc. for their income.
“Please tell me more about Chris,” Permelia said as she followed me down the stairs to the parking lot.
“He’s like us,” I said, “except that he was assigned female at birth. And he was lucky enough to have understanding parents who helped him get HRT in his early teens, before he finished growing… and I understand both the men and women in his family tend to be tall. Anyway, he’s a big guy, and can be scary-looking if you don’t know him. I don’t think anybody will bother us with him escorting us.”
I had to work the next four days. After I showed Permelia how to use the television that night, she apparently spent a good chunk of the next few days in my apartment watching TV and getting a bizarrely biased view of our world, as well as going for walks around my neighborhood, with her guides leading her to interesting sights and away from muggers and violent transphobes. I was so jealous. She also started learning the basics of the English writing system, after seeing Sesame Street and some other children’s public television. We spent the evenings after I got home from work talking about the differences between our worlds.
Victoria came over to pick her up after she taught her last class on Tuesday, and picked her brains about Wurlian vocabulary (which was apparently about 10% less “Latinate” than English, and had no “Greek” loanwords at all) all evening and most of the next morning.
When I went over to Victoria’s apartment (which was in the faculty housing near the university) on Wednesday morning, I found them talking about the word “ghost,” which we’d gone several days apparently misunderstanding. In Wurlian, “ghost” had a much broader meaning than in English – not just the souls of dead people, but nonhuman spirits of various sorts, including what some cultures would call gods.
“It used to have a broader meaning in English, too,” Victoria told me. “Like ‘Holy Ghost’ in the King James Bible, compared to ‘Holy Spirit’ in modern translations.”
“Huh,” I said. “Are you about ready to go, Permelia?”
“I think so, yes.” She looked pretty in one of the nicer dresses we’d bought during our shopping spree, a short-sleeved, ankle-length gown with red roses on a pale yellow background. A lot prettier than I’d looked just a few days into my transition, before hormones or FFS or anything.
I had a fleeting thought that she might be nice to snuggle with, but immediately suppressed it. She was too vulnerable, too dependent on me. It would be horribly wrong to express any romantic interest in her.
“All right, let’s go. I talked to Chris last night; I’ll swing by his house and pick him up on the way.”
“Please tell me more about Chris,” Permelia said as she followed me down the stairs to the parking lot.
“He’s like us,” I said, “except that he was assigned female at birth. And he was lucky enough to have understanding parents who helped him get HRT in his early teens, before he finished growing… and I understand both the men and women in his family tend to be tall. Anyway, he’s a big guy, and can be scary-looking if you don’t know him. I don’t think anybody will bother us with him escorting us.”
“How much did you tell him about me?”
“Just a little. I figured I’d let you tell him more if you want to.”
We drove by the house where Chris lived with his boyfriend Marc and another gay couple I didn’t know as well, and I texted him to say we were out front. He came out and got in the back seat.
“Hi, Jenny,” he said. “Who’s your friend? And where exactly are we going?”
“This is Permelia,” I said. “She’s a baby trans who just started going full-time, like, five minutes after I helped her figure out she was a girl.”
“Whoa!” Chris said with a laugh. “Good for you, girl.”
Permelia smiled and blushed. It was pretty cute.
“Unfortunately, she kind of entered this country unofficially – transitioning back home wasn’t an option – and for various reasons, it’s probably going to be easier to fake permission than to ask forgiveness. We’ve got a lead on someone that does fake IDs and should be fairly safe to deal with, but he’s in kind of a bad neighborhood and I figured we could use a bodyguard.”
I could see Chris flexing in the rear-view mirror as I stopped at a red light. “Everyone always wants me for my muscles and has no use for my scintillating banter,” he lamented.
“I didn’t say we couldn’t use your banter,” I said. “Just that I wouldn’t have asked you to go somewhere this early on your day off if we didn’t need a bodyguard.”
“Good,” he said. “So, Permelia, tell me about yourself. How’d you meet Jenny?”
“My – spirit guides led me to her,” Permelia said, apparently adjusting her terminology after her discussion with Victoria that morning. “I asked them to lead me to a place where I could change into a woman, and a person who could tell me how. They led me to her, but she was busy with work, and I came back after she was done working for the day, and she explained things to me while I ate supper.”
“Huh,” Chris said. I was too busy looking at the road to look at his expression in the mirror, but though he paused to process that for a few seconds, he didn’t cavil at “spirit guides.” “Where are you from?”
“Gannerton in Wurland. It’s a long way from here, in another world. My guides showed me how to get here, but I can’t explain how.”
Chris was silent for another long moment. “Jenny,” he said, “do you believe her?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And how did she prove she’s from another world?”
“Well, she mainly proved that her guides can tell her things she couldn’t otherwise know, and from there I inferred that she’s telling the truth about where she came from.” I told him about the various things I’d seen her find out with the help of her guides. “You’re about to see another piece of evidence,” I said. “A few nights ago, we looked at a map and her guides zoomed in on the address we’re going to today. And then they showed us the name of the guy we’re looking for by leading her to my bookshelf and pointing out a book, a page, and a specific name.”
“I’m… going to have to think about this.”
“No scintillating banter?” I teased.
“The scintillating banter is stunned, but recovers quickly and comes out swinging,” he replied after too long a pause.
“I understand it is hard to believe,” Permelia said. “I did not expect my guides to lead me to another world; I thought they might lead me to a far country in my world, or tell me what I wanted was not possible. And there are many things I have seen here which folk at home would hardly believe if I told them.”
“Like what?”
“Mostly your machines. This car, the phones and laptops and televisions and refrigerators and microwaves… Also some of your customs, although I’ve barely begun to learn about them. And the vast numbers of folk and houses. We’ve traveled so far, so fast, and yet stayed within this huge city and never seen a field or pasture.”
“So what are things like back home?”
Permelia told him about her home, and I learned a few new things that I’d somehow missed in our previous several days of conversation. For instance, with the advice of various spirits, they’d apparently been selectively breeding their livestock and crops for higher yield for a lot longer than we had, and had already learned their lesson about not depending on monoculture crops centuries earlier (relative to when various mechanical inventions came along) than we did. But they didn’t have refrigeration or fast transport, so regional famines and shortages due to bad harvests were still an occasional thing.
We got off the expressway and went just a couple of miles south before we arrived in the neighborhood Permelia’s spirits had pointed out on the map. Things started looking run-down, with a lot of boarded-up windows and graffiti, and more litter than usual (not that any part of the city was completely free of that). We were still a mile or so from our destination when Permelia sat up straighter, straining against her seatbelt, and said, “Turn left here.”
“What?” I put on my signal. “The place your spirits pointed out is straight ahead and a little to the right…”
“There’s trouble ahead. We need to go around.”
I did as she said, turning left at the next side street, and then going a few blocks east before turning right when Permelia’s spirits said to do so. The GPS app kept complaining about “Recalculating route” and I passed my phone to Chris, asking him to turn it off. About that time, we heard loud sounds that Chris thought might be gunshots from the west, probably on the street we’d have been going down if Permelia hadn’t warned me to take a detour.
We wound up taking a long loop around and approaching our destination from the south. “That building there,” Permelia said as we approached a three-story office building with a faded sign out front listing several small businesses.
It didn’t have a parking lot of its own. “Can your spirits tell us where is a safe place to park where my car won’t get vandalized and we won’t get mugged on the way to visit our guaranteed-honest criminal named Mike?”
Permelia nodded and whispered a question. “A little further ahead, and turn left… Stop here.”
I pulled over in one of the marked parking spaces, and we got out, put coins in the meter, and started walking back toward the office building. Permelia’s spirits led us up the stairs to the second floor and an office whose sign read “Millennium Enterprises,” a nicely vague name that told you absolutely nothing about what the business did.
I knocked on the door and a man’s voice said, “Come on in.” I opened and went in. A scruffy-looking guy in a suit with patches at the elbows sat behind a large desk cluttered with papers.
“Ladies and gentleman,” he said, “what can I do for you today?”
“We heard,” I said carefully, “that you could help our friend here.” I gestured at Permelia. “She needs documents to prove her identity, and for certain reasons, can’t get them from the authorities.”
He narrowed his eyes. “What kind of documents are we talking about?”
“Let’s say… proof of legal immigration. And naturalization, if that doesn’t cost too much more. And a state photo ID; she doesn’t drive.”
“And how much examination will they need to hold up under? I’m guessing you don’t just need this to get into bars,” he said to Permelia.
“As much as possible,” I said. “She’s hoping to get a job and healthcare with them.”
“A job, hmm. You want a high school diploma equivalent, or a trade school or university degree, from whatever country she’s from? Or an American degree? How long are we going to say she’s been in this country?”
“Probably not much longer than we need to make the immigration documents plausible.”
“All right…” He made some notes on his computer, then asked Permelia: “Name?”
“Permelia Martford.”
“Can you spell that for me?”
Permelia wasn’t sure, so I spelled it out the way I’d been transliterating it in my head.
“Gender?”
“Female,” she said, and I thought of something. Shit.
“Wait,” I said. I turned to Permelia. “I don’t want to have to misgender you on your documents, but… you want to use these to get treatment. If your name and gender marker are already correct on your immigration documents, but you tell your therapist you couldn’t start transitioning until you came to the U.S., that’s going to raise some red flags.”
“Ah,” Mike said. “I wondered if that might be it. My niece is the same way.” (Thank you, Permelia’s spirits. Not only an honest crook but one with a trans loved one.) “Should I put a different name on the docs?”
Permelia frowned, then said: “…Edmonard.”
“Same last name as before…? Martford, right?”
“Yes, please.”
When Mike asked for her height and weight, we ran into a problem.
“Fifty-four inches. And twenty-four stones, fifteen pebbles.”
“Um, what is that in pounds…?” Mike asked absentmindedly, tapping at his keyboard, before looking up at her in consternation. “Wait a minute. Far be it from me to tell a lady what I think she weighs, but the numbers we put on these documents need to be believable, if not precisely accurate… and there’s no way you’re fifty-four inches tall. That’s… uh…” He tapped at his keyboard. “Four feet six inches tall? Yeah, you’ve got to be at least five-six, probably taller.”
“You’re a couple of inches shorter than me, and I’m five-nine,” I said.
Permelia looked embarrassed. “Uh… maybe an inch back home is different from an inch here?”
Later on, talking it over and comparing things at leisure with Victoria, we found out that some but not all of Wurlian’s words for units of measure were the same as the traditional English units, but the actual values of those units were different, by at least a little, in every case that we thought to check. A Wurlian inch is roughly one and a quarter Imperial inches, and a Wurlian stone is between five and six pounds, compared to fourteen pounds for an English stone. (Until Victoria told me about it, I didn’t realize there was a unit of measure called a “stone.”)
We wound up measuring Permelia’s height with a ruler Mike pulled out of his desk drawer, and using my best guess at her weight, which turned out to be reasonably accurate when we weighed her on my my bathroom scale at home. The rest of the physical description went more smoothly, and then Mike took a series of photos of Permelia for the documents. I advised her to unbraid her hair for the photos, since they were supposed to show a pre-transition “Edmonard.”
“Okay,” Mike said, “what country do we want to say she immigrated from?”
Victoria had said that her accent sounded a bit like certain rural UK dialects, though her vocabulary and grammar were a little closer to American English than any UK dialect. But claiming she was from the UK wouldn’t be plausible, given her blatant ignorance of… basically everything. We’d done some brainstorming over the past few days and decided on a cover story.
“Albanica, if you please,” Permelia said, pausing for a moment while re-braiding her hair.
“Albania,” I corrected. “Or another country in that region?”
He shrugged. “A guy I know can get your data into the ICE computers, no matter what country you’re from. Getting your data into the computers in Albania – that might be trickier. I don’t know offhand if he can do it; haven’t ever tried before. Mostly we deal with people from Latin American countries, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Well, is there another country in that region where you do know you can backstop an ID?”
“I know we’ve done Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania, and I think maybe Ukraine… I’ll have to check with him to get a list of countries he can manage.” He started typing.
“Let me do some checking, too.”
Victoria and I had looked things up and found that nearly all the Albanian immigrants in the U.S. were up north, mostly in New York and Michigan. So the odds of Permelia running into someone who was really from there would be really low, especially if she didn’t tell people where she was “from” if she could help it. I did a similar quick check on my phone to see where in the U.S. immigrants from the countries Mike had mentioned tended to settle, and asked Chris to check some of them. I was pretty satisfied that she wouldn’t be super likely to run into people from Bulgaria around here, but there were a decent number of Romanian-Americans, Chris said, and I couldn’t quickly find an estimate for the number of Serbians, so by the time Mike gave us a more complete list of countries into whose government databases his hacker contacts could insert data, I’d conferred with Permelia and decided on Bulgaria.
Then Mike gave us an estimate for how much the documents Permelia needed would cost. It was over a quarter of the money she’d gotten for her coins, but oh well. Hopefully her spirits would help us find a job she was capable of doing that would have decent insurance. (And then maybe they could help me find something better.) We paid a quarter of it then and agreed to pay the rest when we returned for the finished documents, which Mike said should be finished in less than a week.
“I might not be able to drive her here the day they’re ready,” I said. “It depends on my work schedule. How late are you open?”
“I’m here as late or early as I need to be to meet clients on a given day,” he said. “Just let me know when you’re coming.”
My other free stories can be found at:
Scribblehub is the best place to follow me these days; most things get posted there first and when I finish a story, I schedule all its chapters to appear on Scribblehub in their turn, so if something happens to me, updates on BC and TGS will stop but Scribblehub will still continue posting chapters until they're done.
My ebooks, previously for sale, are now free on Smashwords and itch.io, although Amazon would not let me reduce the prices below $0.99. My non-writing income is sufficient for my needs, and if you have the money to buy ebooks, I hope you will support other authors who depend primarily or largely on ebook sales, Patreon, etc. for their income.
“Good evening, Jenny,” she said. “I swept the floor in the kitchen, but I can’t tell how you take up the carpet to shake it out. Do you move all your furniture every time?”
I suppressed a laugh. “No, we have a machine for that – let me show you.”
I spent the next few days teaching Permelia to read English writing, when I wasn’t at work. She continued to watch television and go for walks when I was at work, and spent Saturday and part of Sunday at Victoria’s apartment. Since Permelia had already mastered another way of writing “English” – according to Victoria, one that was just as weird and irregular as ours, but in different ways – she picked up the basics pretty quickly, faster than children or adults learning to read for the first time. She was also starting to pick up more American English vocabulary.
Permelia also wanted to pitch in with the chores around the apartment. I’d shown her how to load and run the dishwasher, and how to refill the soap dispenser when it was getting low, and one day I came home to find her kneeling in a corner of the living room.
“Good evening, Jenny,” she said. “I swept the floor in the kitchen, but I can’t tell how you take up the carpet to shake it out. Do you move all your furniture every time?”
I suppressed a laugh. “No, we have a machine for that – let me show you.”
So I showed her the vacuum cleaner, and it didn’t take her long to get the hang of it. I think she might have had a little help from her spirits. After that, I also showed her the things I used for cleaning the tub, the toilet and so on, and warned her never to mix the chemicals.
She was a great roommate, and I wished I had more to offer her besides a sofa to sleep on. I couldn’t really afford a bigger apartment on my waitressing wages, though, and didn’t want to use up Permelia’s transition money by asking her to help with rent.
Victoria’s last class on Mondays was over by two o’clock, and Permelia and I spent the afternoon with her. We hung out at her apartment for a while, doing another reading lesson – Victoria had checked some children’s books out of the library to use – and then went out, showing Permelia more of the city and picking up ingredients for the next few days’ meals at the farmer’s market.
We were walking back to Victoria’s car when I got a text from Mike. It was disguised, as he’d said it would be, as insurance sales spam, but I recognized the keywords he’d said he’d put into it.
“Permelia,” I said, “your papers are ready.”
“Yay!” (I would have assumed she’d picked that up from TV, but when I’d asked about it, she said it was something they said back home, too.) “When can we pick them up?”
“Hey, Victoria,” I said, “you want to go with us when we pick up Permelia’s papers?”
She sighed. “I guess it’s safe enough, with her spirits showing us where to park and all.”
“Is forty-five minutes from now a good time?” I texted back.
“okay,” Mike replied a couple of minutes later.
So, after a short trip back to the bank to withdraw enough cash, we drove to Millennium Enterprises. We didn’t need to detour around a crime scene this time, and Permelia’s spirits found us a parking space a little further from the building than last time, but still in easy walking distance.
Mike had the documents ready: a Bulgarian birth certificate, high school diploma and ID card, immigration papers, and a state photo ID. We inspected them and gave him the money, and walked out of there with Permelia, to all appearances, a legal resident of the U.S.
“Now I can start transitioning?” she asked eagerly as soon as we were out of the office.
“Pretty soon,” I said with a laugh. “I think we can start by opening you a bank account and transferring your money from my account to yours.”
It was too late to go to the bank that day, but since I had to work all during bank hours the following day, Victoria told me she’d take Permelia there after her last class of the day. I went by her apartment after I got off work and found Permelia poring over her checkbook and debit card like… like magic talismans, while Victoria explained how they worked.
“So yeah, the checkbook won’t be much use use until you learn to write better, but you’ll mostly be using the debit card anyway. Jenny or I can show you how to scan it next time we’re at a store or restaurant or something.”
“Hi, Jenny,” Permelia said. “I got a bank account! And a debit card and checkbook,” she said carefully.
“Cool,” I said. “So I guess the next step is finding you a therapist. And then as soon as you know our writing system well enough, we should find you a job, because that money’s not going to last as long as I thought before you had to pay for your ID.”
Permelia nodded. “I would also like to help you with your costs, if you don’t mind my going on sleeping on your sofa. Or else I can find another place to live.”
“No hurry about that,” I said, not thinking too hard about the multiple reasons I wanted her to keep living with me. “I think you probably need some more time to acclimate to the way things are done here before you get your own apartment. At a minimum, you need to be literate enough to read the rental contract.”
“Nobody understands those things but lawyers,” Victoria said. “Speaking of which, how about another reading lesson?”
Victoria had had the brilliant idea of showing Permelia movies with English subtitles turned on. Unfortunately, Permelia’s world hadn’t invented cinema, which meant that a lot of modern movies were too jumpy and confusing for her to make sense of at first. We’d been working our way up to the present from silent movies through early talkies, things filmed for an audience that grew up on stage plays and didn’t have our cinematographic vocabulary. Tonight’s showing was The Maltese Falcon.
After the movie, we talked about next steps. “I can refer you to my therapist, now that you’ve got ID, but I’m not sure she’s taking new patients right now. If she’s not available, I’ll ask around for other recommendations.”
“Thank you,” Permelia said. “I’ll tell her that I am transgender, and she’ll tell the other doctors what I need?” (We’d finally gotten Permelia to start saying “doctor” instead of “leech.”) “That’s how it works, right?”
“It depends,” I said. “If Dr. Ramirez is taking new patients, yeah, pretty much. It’s just a formality in that case. But if you don’t have the right kind of therapist to start with, you might struggle to convince someone that you’re really trans, or go through several therapists before you find one that believes being transgender is a real thing and doesn’t define it super-narrowly. I’m pretty sure between my contacts and your spirits, we can find you a good therapist before long even if Dr. Ramirez is booked up.”
I left a message with Dr. Ramirez’s assistant the next morning before work, and got a call back a couple of hours later saying yes, she was booked up. But she recommended a couple of other therapists in the same practice who had room for new patients, so I copied down their information. During my lunch break, I called and made an appointment for Permelia with one of them for a Wednesday three weeks later. Then I asked my manager not to schedule me for that Wednesday afternoon.
With three weeks to wait before she could make progress on her transition, Permelia focused on learning written English and American culture. She was able to make sense of recent movies and television by now, and read middle-grade children’s books. On a couple of my off days, I took her to the history museum and to a meeting of a local trans group. I used to go more often early in my transition, but I hadn’t gone in over a year at that point, and there were several new faces I didn’t know. And one Saturday we went over to Chris and Marc’s house for Chris’s thirtieth birthday party.
Only once during those weeks did I find time to get out the mostly-written article about new developments in battery technology I had been working on before Permelia walked into the diner, and try to get it ready to submit. In doing some more research, though, I realized that a lot of what I’d written a month earlier was now outdated, and I’d have to rewrite a big chunk of it. Discouraged, I set that aside in favor of teaching Permelia to play chess. (Her people had a similar game, though many of the pieces had different names and/or moved differently. Later on she taught me and Victoria to play it.)
By the time Permelia’s appointment rolled around, she’d learned to read and write well enough that I decided it was time to get her a phone and show her how to use it. I entered mine and Victoria’s numbers into her contacts, showing her how I was doing it, and then showed her how to call us. “If I’m not there waiting for you when you get done with your appointment, call me,” I said. “And if I don’t show up or answer after a while, call Victoria. I should be able to call back and tell you how long I’ll be if I can’t get there quickly, but you never know what might happen.” Or did she? I wasn’t sure how much her spirits could tell her about the future. But if they were telling her anything, she didn’t seem to be worried.
This would be the first time Permelia was away from both me and Victoria and not at one of our apartments since she’d arrived, though only for an hour or so. I was planning to run a couple of errands near the clinic while she was at her appointment.
The next day, after I worked a few hours in the morning, I went back to the apartment and ate lunch with Permelia. (She’d started doing her share of the cooking once she’d learned how to use my stove and microwave, and was pretty decent at it, though she was still learning her way around my spice cabinet and sometimes overdid things. She wasn’t used to having such a wide range of spices available.) Then we left for the clinic.
“You can use your judgment about whether to tell her where you’re really from,” I said, “but be careful. The more people find out, the more danger. And normally a therapist is supposed to keep everything you say to her confidential, but there are some exceptions where they think you’re a danger to yourself – or someone else, though that wouldn’t apply here. And if she thinks you’re so delusional you’re incompetent to take care of yourself, she might report what you say to somebody in authority, and who knows where that could lead.”
“Then I won’t tell her during this first session,” Permelia said. “I’ll wait until I know her better. And I’ll see what my spirits think about her.”
“Just talk about how you’ve wanted to be a girl since long before you ever heard of the concept of being transgender,” I said, “and you’ll probably be fine. I trust Dr. Ramirez not to recommend someone who won’t listen or has too many preconceived notions.”
I went in with her and helped her check in, then made sure she had her phone (and it had a good charge) and left to run my errands.
When I got done at the bookstore and the gas station, Permelia hadn’t called me yet to say she was done, so I returned to the clinic and hung out in the waiting room, reading. Permelia emerged from the back hall about ten minutes later.
“Hi, Jenny,” she said, coming over to me. “I need to pay the woman at the desk, and then we can go.”
“Sure. Do you need help?”
“Yes, please.”
So I went over to the reception desk with her. She started to put her debit card in the reader backwards, and I had to tell her to put it in chip-side first, but other than that she didn’t really need help.
“We need to get you a job pretty soon,” I said as we walked out to the car, wincing at the amount of money she’d just spent on one therapy appointment.
“Yes,” she said. “I want to do my part.”
“But first, tell me about your appointment! Not anything you don’t feel comfortable talking about, of course, but… you know. Whatever you want to say.”
“My therapist,” she said, pronouncing the word carefully, “is named Holly. She started by asking me to tell her about myself. I was vague about where I came from, as you suggested, but I told her I had wanted to be a woman for a long time, but only learned what ‘transgender’ meant after I came to this country, and that my friend – I mean you – had recommended Dr. Ramirez, who was busy, but recommended her. And then we talked about my feelings about my gender for a long time, about how I first thought about being a girl when I was a child, and so on.”
I nodded encouragingly as I started the engine. “Do you think you might be able to talk to Holly about where you came from, and your spirits, once you’ve gotten to know her better?”
“I hope so. After we had talked about me for a while, I asked her more about herself, too, but we didn’t have a lot more time to talk before we had to part.”
“What did she say?”
“She said her sister is transgender, and came out when she was in college and Holly was in high school. Holly already wanted to be a doctor, but that made her decide what kind of doctor she wanted to be. Also, she is married and has one daughter.”
“She sounds like she’ll be good for you.”
My other free stories can be found at:
Scribblehub is the best place to follow me these days; most things get posted there first and when I finish a story, I schedule all its chapters to appear on Scribblehub in their turn, so if something happens to me, updates on BC and TGS will stop but Scribblehub will still continue posting chapters until they're done.
My ebooks, previously for sale, are now free on Smashwords and itch.io, although Amazon would not let me reduce the prices below $0.99. My non-writing income is sufficient for my needs, and if you have the money to buy ebooks, I hope you will support other authors who depend primarily or largely on ebook sales, Patreon, etc. for their income.
I wondered if she was asking the impossible. She had no work experience she could talk about, no references, and was a rank beginner at English writing and modern technology. Maybe there weren’t any jobs around here for someone like that that would also pay for transition care – insurance policies that covered it were rare enough as it was.
A couple of weeks later, Victoria and I decided that Permelia was probably as ready as she’d be any time soon to get a job. She was literate enough that we’d started teaching her to use the Internet, and one evening, she started browsing through a job listings site. She asked her spirits to point at listings for places that would be likely to hire her and would have insurance that paid for transition care as she scrolled through the listings, and I left her to it while I fixed supper.
She still hadn’t found anything by the time supper was ready. I was a little concerned; it was the first time I’d seen her spirits not give her an answer pretty quickly, but she didn’t seem to be worried.
“Sometimes it takes a while,” she said, “if it isn’t the sort of thing where the answer is within reach and the spirits can simply point it out. This phone shows only a couple of jobs at a time, and I have to scroll many times to see all of them.”
I wondered if she was asking the impossible. She had no work experience she could talk about, no references, and was a rank beginner at English writing and modern technology. Maybe there weren’t any jobs around here for someone like that that would also pay for transition care – insurance policies that covered it were rare enough as it was.
“Once you get the hang of web browsing, maybe you can teach your spirits about it and work with them to do a meta search?” I suggested. “Like search for job sites, and then let the spirits point out which one to visit, and then narrow it down from there. Or do a sortilegy with the books on my shelves to have them suggest the right search terms to use. I don’t know if they can do that.”
“I will think about it,” she said. “Perhaps we can look at the map again, and see if they can point out the location of a business that will hire me?”
“Sure, we can do that. You can do it on your phone, but it might be easier on a laptop-sized screen.”
So after supper, I got out my laptop and brought up Google Maps, focusing on the area within a few miles of my apartment at first. Permelia looked at the screen and murmured a question to her guides, then said, “Can we look over there, to the west?”
“Sure,” I said. “Here, use the touchpad to drag the map to the right so you can see what’s to the west – yeah, I know it seems counterintuitive, but it’s like you’re dragging a large map around while the frame you’re looking at it through stays still.” She’d used my laptop a little, but wasn’t used to the touchpad yet, though she’d mostly gotten the hang of her phone’s touchscreen.
She dragged the map until it showed an area a good twenty miles west and a little north, on the other side of the city, and finally zoomed in on what looked like an industrial park. My heart was already sinking once she got past downtown, thinking about how she could get to work – would public transit take her there, and if so, how long would it take? I couldn’t drive her that far to work every time and pick her up afterward, not with my irregular work schedule. And the traffic would be awful whether we went through downtown or around it.
She zoomed in further, but Google Maps didn’t have any further information on what business or businesses were headquartered in the building her spirits pointed out.
“I guess we’ll have to drive out there to see what’s up,” I said. “We can do that on my next off day.”
So we did. Once we reached the industrial park and found the right building, we found a sign out front that listed the businesses renting space there, and the spirits pointed out which one would potentially hire Permelia: Transcendent Technologies.
“Really?” I said doubtfully. “I doubt a tech firm would be hiring unskilled workers…” But I dutifully typed “transcendent technologies jobs” in my phone’s DuckDuckGo app and looked through the results, with Permelia slowly reading over my shoulder.
“Here you go,” I said. “Your spirits came through again. They’re hiring cleaning staff… And a technical writer. You know, I think I might apply here too.”
We didn’t go in and ask for jobs just then. I drove us to a nearby restaurant for lunch, and Permelia called the number on the website about the cleaning staff job. Within minutes, she had an appointment to come in for an interview later that day. I was planning to send them my resume and samples of my writing when I got home, but I didn’t have any of that on my phone.
So after lunch, we killed some time at a thrift store not far away, and then returned to Transcendent Technologies to drop off Permelia for her interview.
“Do you want me to come in with you?” I asked.
She looked uncertain for a moment, looking somewhere to her right, then shook her head. “I thank you, but no. I will call you when I have finished.”
“All right, see you soon.”
I couldn’t help worrying about her, even though her spirits had pointed this place out as a good place for her to apply. Even if she didn’t get the job, she should be safe here. But that logic didn’t help, not enough. I drove to a coffee shop and slowly sipped on a cup of green tea to help calm my nerves on her behalf. But I needn’t have worried; a little later she texted me saying “I got the job!” I went and picked her up, and asked her how it went as we drove home.
“The woman who hired me is like us,” she said. “Trans.”
“Awesome,” I said. “No wonder they have insurance that pays for trans healthcare… Or at least your spirits said it does. Did you ask about that?”
“I was going to, but she told me about it first.”
“Wow,” I said. “I have got to get a resume in to them.”
We talked about how she was going to get to and from work.
“I think you can get most of the way there by public transportation,” I said. “You’d take the bus from the stop nearest to my apartment, about a block away, to the train station, then the train across town, and then another bus or two should probably get you within walking distance of the office. But we’ll need to look at the transit website to figure out the exact bus routes. I can drive you on my days off, or on days when I get off early enough, but as long as I’m still working irregular hours at the diner, I’ll often be at work when you need to leave here, or need to be picked up.” Her initial work schedule would be in the evenings, arriving when most of the office workers were leaving and leaving after cleaning the place, though on her first day she would have to arrive earlier and meet with HR to sign a pile of paperwork. “Come to think of it, even if I get the technical writer job there, we’d still have different work schedules and couldn’t commute together. And I’m a little worried about you walking to the bus stop and waiting there after dark… Promise me you’ll always check with your spirits about a safe route?”
She nodded seriously. “Always.”
As soon as we got home, I updated my resume with the last freelance copywriting job I’d done and the last article I’d gotten published (I hadn’t found much time for writing or job-hunting since Permelia had shown up) and sent it to Transcendent Technologies with samples of my writing. Then I got Permelia to sit down with me and went through the transit website with her, figuring out the buses and train line she’d take to her new job. She’d have kind of a long walk from the nearest bus stop to Transcendent Technologies. She wrote down all the information and put it in her bag, and we ate supper.
The next day, I had to be at work before she would be leaving. I made her promise to text me when she left the house and again when she got to the office. I wasn’t too worried about her, with her spirits to guide her, but it would be the first trip she made on her own in this world, which she still had such a superficial acquaintance with. Any number of things could trip her up along the way. Had I explained about how the ticket machines worked clearly enough? About avoiding the handicap seats on the bus and train? Fortunately, it was a busy shift and those worries were mostly driven from my mind by work until I took a bathroom break and checked my texts, seeing Permelia had left home but hadn’t arrived at the office yet.
Then my worries started up again, and despite how busy I was, they didn’t let up until I got a text from Permelia saying she’d arrived.
Permelia got home a couple of hours after I did, while I was loading my supper dishes into the dishwasher. “How’d it go?” I asked.
“Well, I think,” she said. “I had a little trouble with the vacuum cleaner; it was not like yours. But it didn’t take me long to learn how to use it.”
“Good. I expect they gave you a lot of papers to sign?”
“Yes. My spirits didn’t see any danger in signing them. I brought them home, along with a few books.”
“Books?”
She showed me; they were the member guide and drug formulary for her health insurance and the employee handbook, which was more of a pamphlet. “It’s too late at night for me to go over this with you,” I said, “but maybe tomorrow before work we can figure out what your next step is for using this health insurance to transition. You might have to work there for a while before you’re eligible to use it for that – it might depend on the policy.”
As it turned out, her insurance didn’t have a waiting period, and we scheduled her first endocrinologist appointment for a couple of months later.
Meanwhile, I waited to hear back from Transcendent Technologies about the technical writer job. It was a tense few days, but I got an email early in the following week asking me to come in for an interview, and I replied telling them when I’d be free over the next few days; we arranged for me to come in two days later at ten in the morning.
When I came in for the interview, I was met by Keisha Halmi, the CEO and head developer. As Permelia had told me, she was trans; taller than me, with glorious long black hair. “We’re looking to hire a technical writer to write software specs and, later on, help text and user manuals. Also, you might be called on to write advertising copy at some point – we don’t exactly have a product ready to sell yet, and when the time comes we might hire someone else to write that, but maybe not. Would you be comfortable with all that?”
“Of course,” I said. “My last job involved writing specs and user manuals, and I’ve done some freelance copywriting since leaving there.”
The interview went much like other interviews, with questions about how I would resolve various hypothetical workplace conflicts, and a test problem where I had to take an email printout from one of her developers, describing a feature they were working on, and rewrite it in a customer-readable way. The only hard part was when she asked about the gap in my resume, when I’d been unemployed or working at the diner and only managing to find occasional freelance writing jobs, but I got over that by vaguely gesturing at “the economy,” at which she nodded sympathetically.
I went home not knowing if I’d get the job, but two days later, Keisha called me back and told me I was hired. I gave notice at the diner, and reported to work the following Monday.
With my new work schedule, I barely saw Permelia during the week. I was leaving the house at eight and getting home a little before six, and Permelia was leaving the house at three and not getting home until around the time I went to bed. We still spent a lot of time together on the weekends, though. Victoria and I were gradually introducing her to more and more Earth culture, showing her classic movies and games and talking about them with her; she usually had a lot of questions, though gradually fewer as she got used to life in America.
We did our grocery shopping together on the weekends for a while, but once Permelia got used to things, she started doing some shopping trips on her own while I was at work, and then branching out and doing some more exploration on her own in the mornings before work. So by the time her appointment with the endocrinologist came around, after we’d both been working at Transcendent for a couple of months, she was easily comfortable getting there on her own, and to the drugstore afterward. I missed watching her take her first dose of estradiol, but after she got home from work that day we celebrated, staying up late and baking brownies.
The long commute was getting to us, though, and I figured Permelia was getting tired of sleeping on my sofa, though she didn’t complain. So as the lease on my apartment was up for renewal soon, I suggested we get a place closer to Transcendent. Permelia readily agreed, and we spent the next few weekends apartment-hunting, with some help from her spirits to narrow down our choices. (They pointed out some mold under the sink in one apartment that I don’t think we’d have found by ourselves.) We found a good two-bedroom place a few miles from Transcendent just in time to move before my lease ended.
After I’d deposited a few paychecks and built up my depleted savings a bit, I started working on scheduling bottom surgery, which I’d had to postpone indefinitely after I lost my last job with good insurance. Permelia, meanwhile, started getting laser hair removal.
Living on the other side of the city, we weren’t seeing Victoria or Chris or my other friends as often. It wasn’t as long a drive on the weekend as it was during rush hour, but still long enough to discourage casual visiting back and forth like we’d done when we lived ten minutes from Victoria’s apartment. I was making a few casual friends at work, but Permelia, starting work just before everyone else at Transcendent went home for the day, barely knew anyone there. So we turned more and more to each other for company on the weekends.
One Saturday afternoon, we were sitting in the living room between lunch and supper, browsing the web on our laptops (she’d gotten one of her own after saving up a few paychecks) and sharing funny things we’d come across. Then Permelia turned her screen toward me and said, “What does this mean? I have seen it said often enough that I begin to think it is an idiom, with more layers of meaning than I thought.”
I leaned over and looked at the phrase she had her finger on.
“They were roommates!”
I felt my face get hot, and stammered a little as I explained.
“Oh!” Permelia said. “That makes a great deal of sense. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” I said.
Then about a minute later, when I thought I was safe, she said, “Would you like to date, like the women in that comic?”
I’d thought more than once about doing exactly that, as I mentioned before. But I’d always suppressed the thought because Permelia was new to this world and so dependent on me. Was that still true, though? She was paying half our rent and utilities out of her income, and she could get around the city on her own, and manage her own money. If dating went badly and we broke up, she wouldn’t have any trouble moving out and getting her own place.
And it didn’t hurt that she was getting prettier every day.
“I think so, if you’re sure you want to,” I said after too long a pause for thought.
“Oh!” Her smile was the cutest thing I’d seen all day, and as I’d been watching baby otter videos for the last half hour, that was saying something. “Would you like to kiss?”
It had been a long time since I’d dated, and I was out of practice at kissing, but I think I did a halfway decent job.
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My other free stories can be found at:
Scribblehub is the best place to follow me these days; most things get posted there first and when I finish a story, I schedule all its chapters to appear on Scribblehub in their turn, so if something happens to me, updates on BC and TGS will stop but Scribblehub will still continue posting chapters until they're done.
My ebooks, previously for sale, are now free on Smashwords and itch.io, although Amazon would not let me reduce the prices below $0.99. My non-writing income is sufficient for my needs, and if you have the money to buy ebooks, I hope you will support other authors who depend primarily or largely on ebook sales, Patreon, etc. for their income.