I, my good friend Paul, a couple passing acquaintances, and several other people who were complete strangers to me were convinced by various of our friends to help them run one of those interactive entertainment events. We didn’t know our friends were associated with such a thing, nor had we ever heard of this one. We were invited to a free run-through of the event so that we would know how it was supposed to work. My wife Susan was pretty accepting of my participation, despite being told that the rules that forbade anyone not invited explicitly to accompany us. I sometimes went to gaming events and the like and was away for an afternoon or sometimes a weekend, and she had no interest in these activities. I always tried to make it up to her later with some “us” time.
For the run-through, I drove to a hotel where they had booked rooms for us on Friday night, just arriving in time to check in and sleep. Paul had made it there sooner, and was in bed but not asleep yet when I got to the room we shared. We met in the hotel’s restaurant in the morning, where everybody ate breakfast first. While the wait staff was clearing the dishes away, one of the hosts, Ken, gave a brief intro that promised us a fun, magical time. Another host then led us into an icebreaker to let us have a chance to meet the people we didn’t know. Before we left, each of us was given a bundle of something, each one of us getting different things, but we were told not to worry about them now; we would use them later. Mine included a pack of purple-backed cards that had clearly been ripped apart along perforations without bothering to trim the edges. They had weird designs on the faces, maybe puzzles of a sort.
Once that was over, it was time to hit the road. We used an exit from the hotel near the restaurant, not the one I entered through, each of us carrying a small suitcase and a tote bag or large purse. A few of us, who had picked up larger items after the icebreaker, carried them in a department-store shopping bag. Our hotel stay tonight was going to be elsewhere, and we’d been instructed in advance to separate our changes of clothes and such from what we needed during the day. We loaded the bags with our clothes into an SUV which would take them ahead to tonight’s hotel. They didn’t have a bus to take us to the other locations we would go, though; the hosts drove us in several of their cars. I was glad they were driving, because I didn’t even recognize the roads we followed as we left from this side of the hotel.
After a couple other stops, with some fun, some jokes, and some revelations about the things some of us carried, we arrived at a building that seemed like it was from another era, with bright-orange decor and a motif of semicircular arches everywhere, including on the walls over the door to every room. We went into one of the rooms, which had a second room connected behind it, and we went there and sat down. I had thought this building was a hotel, but the room we went into wasn’t furnished like the kind of room you sleep in; there were couches and armchairs in the front room and rows of stackable chairs in the back room, where we all sat to watch whatever was going to happen there.
Before I really got to see the show, one of our host group told me that our next couple stops had no bathrooms, so if I didn’t want to go behind a tree, I’d better go now. I’m not sure how he knew I needed to pee, but I acknowledged that I needed to. There wasn’t a bathroom in the suite we were now in, either; it was elsewhere in the building.
I went back into the room with couches, and was surprised to find that the exit had vanished. I waved my hand across the space in front of where I thought the door should be, remembering it had been under an arch coming in, and seeing only one such arch now. Another of the host group who was sitting nearby said, “Open, sesame!” and segments of the wall started moving and the door reappeared.
That was weird, but I exited the room and was surprised to find my friend Paul waiting outside. How had he gotten there? But I ignored that and he accompanied me as we followed signs to a set of restrooms. When we got there, though, after passing a women’s restroom, we found that the men’s room at the end of the hall had a big out of order sign on it.
“No worries, Mike,” Paul told me. He handed me the bag of stuff he picked up at the start and I looked into it to find a full head mask, a dress, and a bra with fake breasts in it.
“Seriously? This is clearly a setup, but I’ll play along.”
He stood guard at the open end of the otherwise empty hallway leading to the restrooms while I stripped down to my underwear, putting on the women’s clothes and stuffing my removed clothing back into the bag. When I had the clothes on, Paul returned to help me get the mask on, and then he held up a hand mirror which had also been in the bag. I was surprised how much the mask looked like my real face, though changing it in ways that made it distinctly feminine. The mask blended with the skin at my neck perfectly and was realistic enough to fool me, staring at a mirror from a foot away, though knowing where it ended, I could locate the edge of it by feel. It was surely enough to fool other people.
Properly attired, I went into the women’s restroom. There were four stalls, with the second and fourth occupied, so I went into the first stall. Since women didn’t stand to pee and I clearly had a neighbor, I sat down to do my business, pulling down my briefs and raising the skirt of the dress. Immediately after I did so, the woman in the stall next to me started talking.
“I know you have a secret desire to be a woman, just for a little while.”
I was shocked to hear her say this, since this was a secret I believed only my wife knew. If I could have, somehow, magically changed into a woman for real for a day, I knew I’d jump at the chance, and it was why I’d been willing to go along with this skit this far.
I had played dress-up, in private, since college. Then, as the student in charge of the co-op dorm’s lost-and-found area, I had snatched some women’s clothes I thought would fit me from the pile that had been there too long and I assumed would not be missed. Later I shopped for myself, in the guise of shopping for a girlfriend, carrying a list labeled “Julie’s sizes” as part of that cover. Some years later I had one labeled “Susan’s sizes,” in both cases using the name of my actual girlfriend at the time, so I could claim I was shopping for her on the off chance I ran into her in the store. Of course, the list actually had the sizes that I had learned, in part from those garments from college, actually did fit me.
When my now wife, then girlfriend, and I were sharing secrets, I spilled this one to her, all of it, and she was understanding. She later actually helped me in such shopping, and the dress-up became one of our options in the bedroom. But I had made it clear to her that this secret didn’t go beyond our bedroom. My body was far too masculine to make really look like a woman without serious, permanent changes, changes I wasn’t willing to undergo because I didn’t want to be a woman to the world. This was part of the reason I was amazed how well the mask had worked.
After I didn’t respond, the woman continued, “You can make your current appearance real. Just say the word, and you’ll really be the woman you look like now, for as long as you want. You can get your original body back just by willing the effect to end.”
I didn’t believe her, but she had already been in there, and knew who I was, and knew a secret I didn’t think anybody here knew, so this was clearly more of the setup, part of the event, somehow. So I said, “OK, make it real.”
A strange feeling came over me, and when I put my hands to my breasts, I found they were real, as much a part of me as my hands. The bra I was wearing was now a normal one, not a container for breast forms. Nor could I feel the edge of the mask around my neck. Down below I was really a woman, too, so instead of sitting just to fit in here, I was now sitting out of necessity, and got started peeing, relieved (in more ways than one) to find that the same instinctive action to release the flow that worked when I was a man also worked in this woman’s body, though part of the feeling was definitely different.
As I peed, the woman spoke again. “Everyone else will now remember you as Michelle, or Shelly to friends, until the effect ends, and nobody will know you were Mike, nor remember you were Michelle after it is over, unless you tell them. And you can reactivate it later if you like.”
“Thank you,” I told my unknown helper, as I cleaned up. As I went to pull up my briefs, I realized they had changed into women’s panties, so my costume, such as it was, was complete. Once I got my clothing reassembled, I also noticed the tote bag I was carrying had turned into a large woman’s purse, the kind Susan called a bucket bag. Still a little wary of what was going on, I grabbed the bag, washed my hands, and checked myself in the mirror, seeing only a somewhat large but not fat woman staring back at me. I wasn’t going to win any beauty pageant prizes, but nobody would have looked at me and seen a man in drag. I looked like a woman. I didn’t understand how it was possible, but the woman in the other stall was right. I wanted this, and I was going to stick with it, and not just turn it off immediately.
I exited the restroom, and Paul was still standing outside with the bag containing my other clothes, which he handed to me, saying, “Let’s get back before we miss any more, Shelly.” He didn’t suggest having me change back, as if he had forgotten what we just did. I had no way to know whether he had been coached or if it was real that one of my best friends now only remembered me as a woman. Nor did I have any idea what he now remembered about our actions just minutes ago. I was afraid to ask him, afraid I’d break the magic, because I knew the change was real.
I walked with Paul back to where the room had been, only to find the door missing again. I was pretty sure where it was supposed to be, based on the pattern of other doors in some of the arch shapes along the wall and the location of a sign pointing toward the restrooms. I stepped up to that arch and said “Open, sesame.” As I had hoped, the door reappeared in the wall in front of me, with our group inside.
Paul and I went in, and we’d missed whatever happened in that room, but we got back just as it was ending. I went with the group to two other locations within this maybe-a-hotel before we got back into the various cars we came in and our hosts drove us to another site. As much as I had felt that whole thing I’d just been through had been set up, I felt it doubly so when the next site was in a park with a building for public restrooms. Half the group was going in to use them before we started our activity. The whole “no restrooms ahead” thing had been a complete lie designed to get me to that particular restroom where the men’s room probably hadn’t really been out of order, but was just marked so in order to get me into the women’s.
After a couple other stops, I ended up in a car with only three of the hosts. The man who shared the back seat with me asked me to pull out those purple puzzle cards I had received at the start.
“Take a look at the card on top of the deck. It has a small number 1 at the bottom, and it has a pattern of lines.”
While I looked at the card, he continued for a bit, explaining how the pattern translated into the word WHAT.
“Each of the other cards has a number and a pattern like this that translates into a word. You’re going to lead the next session, giving each other member of your group one of these cards at random, but keeping card number 1 for yourself and demonstrating how it works for the group. Do you think you can do that?”
I practiced by explaining the WHAT card back to him. When he was satisfied with my explanation, he said, “Now stick that number 1 card in your pocket while you shuffle the rest of the cards real good, and then put number 1 back on top.”
I searched myself and realized the dress I was now wearing now didn’t have any pockets. He looked embarrassed not to have realized I might not have pockets, but didn’t try to correct his instruction. I had plenty of other ways to set that card aside, including handing it to him, but I remembered something I’d seen women do before, and slid it between my breast and my bra. With that card secure, I shuffled the other cards, and he finished giving me my instructions for the group. I returned the number 1 card to the top of the deck and slid the entire deck back in the small envelope they originally came in as we arrived at the next location.
There was another room set up for us with rows of stackable chairs, and once most of the people were seated, I started handing out cards, flipping the deck over so that the number 1 card was on the bottom of the deck. There were exactly enough cards, so number 1 was the one left over at the end. While I was doing this, the man who had instructed me in the car said, “I’m the Puzzler, and I have made a puzzle for you to solve, but Michelle, who is now handing out one card to each of you, is going to show you how to solve it.”
I returned to the front of the room, where they had a white board on wheels set up in front of the group, copied the design from my card onto the board, and explained how the puzzle worked.
“Most letters of the alphabet can be written with a kind of symmetry. That could be a left-right, top-bottom, diagonal, or rotational symmetry. Half of each letter is missing and needs to be reflected across such an axis of symmetry, but to make it tricky, you may be given parts from both sides of the axis. For instance, these two left-leaning slashes are reflected over this line to make a W. When you do this for the other shapes shown here, you get an H, an A, and a T, spelling WHAT. Is there anybody who needs more explanation how this works?”
A couple did, and I drew in both the axes of symmetry and the reflections for the other three letters. They confirmed they understood.
“Now begin. Each of you solve your own card, keeping the answers to yourself for now.”
While they worked, I wrote the numbers starting from 1 in four rows on the other side of the two-sided whiteboard. When I was done, I asked for a show of hands who still hadn’t solved their cards. There were only a few.
“OK, those of you still working can ask a neighbor who’s done with their card for help. Keep a hand up until you’ve solved the card.”
Once all the hands went down, as the Puzzler helped me turn the board around, I continued, “Each of your cards has a small number at the bottom. I have card number 1 and I want everyone to call our their words in order so I can write them all up here under their corresponding numbers.”
I moved to position number one and said and wrote “WHAT.” The others cooperated and read out their words. There were a couple pauses to get correct spellings, and one moment where someone had clearly solved their card incorrectly and gotten a word which didn’t fit in the context of the riddle the words were spelling out. His neighbors helped him quickly get the correct word, and we continued. When it was finished, I asked anyone who could solve the riddle to shout out the answer, and after less than a minute, one woman did.
The Puzzler then congratulated the woman who had solved it, said she was going to be our new Seeress, and took her aside while another host told jokes for a bit.
And so it went on through several more locations. We stopped for the night at a hotel, neither the orange building with the arches nor the one where the event started. A set of two-bed rooms had been reserved for us, our overnight bags waiting there already in the rooms. This time I was paired with Jan, one of the members of the group who I’d met before, but I didn’t realize it until she introduced herself as trans during the icebreaker, because I’d known her as Jake. Jan wasn’t the first trans-woman I’d met, but was the only one I knew of at this event. It seemed ironic that I’d been given the gift of being able to live for a while as a woman, when there was someone here who wanted to be a woman forever. She would have appreciated this gift much more; why didn’t she get it?
After we were in our room, I told her, “Jan, I have to confess something to you. I didn’t start today as a woman.”
“Say what?”
“Jan, remember that they’re giving each of us a gift, supposedly in return for helping them run this show?”
Jan commented, “Supposedly, right. I have gotten the feeling that this is the show, and we’re the participants.”
“You’ll only feel more that way when I explain my gift.”
“Go ahead, then.”
“My gift was these clothes and mask.”
“That’s a mask, really? It looks like I remember you, Shelly.”
“I haven’t always been Shelly. When I met you as Jake, I was Mike, even if you don’t remember it that way now. Even at the start of the event I was Mike. This outfit is magical, though even without the magic it did a better job than I thought possible of making me look like a woman. When I activated it, it actually changed me, through and through, into a woman, and it’s making you think I’ve always been a woman. I can make the effect end just by willing it, at which point it should turn back into only a very good costume. And while I enjoyed being a woman today, I don’t really want to live my life as a woman and it seemed unfair that I got this gift while you got whatever.”
I could see Jan was confused. She probably remembered something of Mike at this point but my presence as Michelle was making it hard for her to understand.
I took off the dress to show her my breasts were real in my bra. Then I willed the effect to end, and felt the same strange feeling as I once again became a man wearing fake breasts.
“Wow!” Jan exclaimed.
“You can see these are fake breasts now, right?”
“Not just that. Your panties turned into men’s briefs. You have body hair where you didn’t before. And I remember you now as Mike. You introduced yourself that way at the icebreaker and I knew you as Mike back when I was Jake. When you first told me you were Mike, I had a faint glimmer of that, but your presence here as Michelle was making me doubt that. Now I understand.”
“Yes. You see how powerful this gift is. Not only did it make me really a woman, it made everyone who knew me before think they’d always known me as a woman.”
I turned it on again, and confirmed that Jan now remembered that I was both Mike and Michelle, and then turned it off again.
“I haven’t actually received my gift yet,” Jan commented.
“Well take this,” I said, handing her the dress.
“Hmm, I don’t know if I want to be that much a woman,” Jan said.
After I took off the bra and mask and added those on top of the dress in her hands, Jan added, “On second thought, although it would make some things weird, it would actually fix a lot of stuff. I accept.”
Jan removed her dress right in front of me, and then took off her bra, revealing that she actually had small breasts, maybe A cup, probably due to starting hormone treatments to make them grow. She’d seemed to have larger ones while clothed, probably due to a padded bra. Those breasts didn’t get in the way, though, when she put on the bra I’d given her with its fake breasts. She was smaller than me, but the bra band had several positions for different sizes, more than I had ever remembered seeing on a bra, and she was able to fit it snugly around her torso. Then she put the dress I had just given her over it.
“Should I put on the mask, too? I wouldn’t want to be confused for Michelle.”
“Nobody else will remember Michelle. Though Michelle did look a bit like me and they might think you’re my sister.”
I helped Jan put on the mask. When it was on, I realized how much magic was in the mask alone. Not only did she not look like Michelle, she looked mostly like the same old Jan, except with some details in her face changed so that she looked more naturally feminine, rather than the way she had done up her face to try and make it look feminine.
“Go look at yourself in the mirror. You don’t look like Michelle at all.”
“Wow! I still look like me, only better. The way Jan should have looked without Jake’s face under it all.”
She took off the dress, and put on the dress she had worn earlier in the day, and looked at herself in the mirror that way.
“Look at me now!”
“Better.”
“Your dress is actually too large for me. You can see this one fits better.”
“It makes sense. My frame is larger than yours. This dress was sized for me. The magic didn’t change my size any; it just made the fake things real and changed my organs.”
“Speaking of which, I’m still fake over here. How do you turn it on?”
“Just will it. Say you want it.”
“Oh, I want to be a real woman!”
And I could tell it happened. Nothing really looked different; Jan still looked like Jan, the slightly more womanly Jan that she became after putting on the mask, but I saw her reaction. She had just felt what I did when I turned it on earlier today. She felt her breasts, even reaching inside her bra to touch them directly. She reached up under the skirt of her dress, and while I couldn’t see the details, clearly she was feeling her changed organs.
“Oh, thank you, thank you, Mike! You have given me the most wonderful gift anyone ever could.”
She came up and kissed and hugged me, which she immediately realized was awkward because I was still standing in only my briefs, so she pulled away and instead did a little dance around the room. She eventually settled down and sat on the edge of the bed, and I sat on the edge of the other bed facing her. She seemed speechless, so I filled the void.
“And that, Jan, is why I gave it to you. For me, it was ‘hey, thanks, this is nice’ and for you it was what you just did. You can turn it off the same way, if you ever want to.”
“I can’t imagine why I would. Everything works, right? You ate, drank, and went to the bathroom as Michelle, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And I clearly don’t need the dress, since I wasn’t wearing it. Do you want it back?”
“No, you keep it. I don’t really do this crossdressing in public thing myself, except today. To the extent I do it at all, it’s in the privacy of my home and my wife is the only one who knows.”
“OK. I do like the dress, except that it’s a size or two too large. I have someone who helps me with some of my clothes who could tailor this down to my size.”
“We do need to get to sleep. We have more of whatever this is tomorrow.”
I climbed right into bed, and Jan grabbed a nightgown from her overnight bag. She started to go into the bathroom to change, then decided I’d seen enough of her already that it didn’t really matter, and just turned her back to me as she removed her dress, then the bra (which was just a regular bra now, of course), put on her nightgown over it, and got into her own bed.
When we were dressing in the morning, Jan commented how odd it was that they had put us together.
I replied, “No, not really. They put the trans-woman together with the person who had this gift that let them be male or female. Both of the gender-confused people together meant the least amount of gender awkwardness.”
“That makes sense... if they knew about this when making the room arrangements,” Jan said.
“Of course they did,” I responded. “They knew everything about us. Heck, I would have had trouble staying as Michelle a second day since I didn’t bring along a change of female clothes. Unless my stored clothes changed while I was female. But no, don’t give it back to me to let me look; it’s not important enough to know.”
We rejoined the group for breakfast at the hotel’s restaurant. Everybody recognized me as Mike again, forgetting I’d been Michelle, save for Jan, of course, but including Paul.
When we were finished with breakfast, but before we left to start the second day’s activities, I found a moment alone with Paul.
“How much do you remember?” I asked.
“About your gift? That it made you pretty convincingly look like a woman.”
“I gave it away.”
“What?”
“Last night, I roomed with the one who introduced herself as a trans-woman during our icebreaker.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Well, you won’t, because that’s also part of its effect. Do you remember me taking off the gift and changing back into my regular clothes after I came out of the restroom?”
“Come to think of it, no, I can’t.”
“That’s because I didn’t. I spent all the rest of the day wearing it.”
“Weird. I can’t remember seeing you that way except at the restroom. So was that gift really right for you at all? I was sworn not to tell anyone else.”
“I sometimes dress up as female, but only in front of my wife. It’s not very convincing, just play-acting. If the hosts knew, I have no idea how, unless Susan set it up.”
At that moment they were trying to get us going. We put our clothes bags back in the SUV to be reunited with us at the end, and everybody confirmed they had everything else, and various hosts gathered specific people to take with them on the journey to the next location, no doubt to help set up some of the activities ahead. Those activities were the same sorts of things, but different ones, highlighting different people and giving others their gifts.
Sunday evening, we met back where we started, and there was a buffet line to let us all grab as much dinner as we wanted. Once we had all had a chance to at least finish a first plate of dinner (some going back for seconds), the host who addressed the group at the start of it all, Ken, got up to speak.
“Congratulations on finishing the Experience. I hope you’ve all had a great time. You’re a pretty smart group, so most of you have probably figured out now that when we said a free run-through, we didn’t mean a practice run, but the actual event for free. All the gifts you received are yours to keep. And you’re probably wondering why we did this. It’s a long story, and how it got started has gotten lost in the retellings, but it is every bit as magical as some of you have already figured out through your gifts. We will give you more details before you leave, but you will indeed run this event again, for another set of guests, and it will cost you nothing but some of your time and maybe a tank of gas.”
He handed the microphone to a woman whose voice I immediately recognized as the one in the restroom stall who explained to me my gift, the gift I had passed on to Jan.
“I am Donna, the Giver. Each one of you has received a gift during this event, a tangible item that is yours to keep. Some of those are normal items you could buy in the normal world, but were exactly what you wanted and in some cases had never realized until you received it. Many of them are magical, and you’ve experienced some of that magic already. Some of you are experiencing it now. Each of you has also been granted an ability. Those abilities are temporary, and for us they will all cease to exist by the end of the night. Yours are the same abilities we possess, the abilities that allowed us to run the Experience for you, and one or two of you have already had a private talk with your predecessor about that ability. Over the next half-hour, we’re going to describe each of those abilities briefly, and you’ll have some time afterwards to speak with your predecessor or all of us together to understand these abilities as well as we can explain them. I will say that a lot of them happen automatically, and you simply need to be aware of what is going on. But first I am going to hand the mic back to Ken, and Fred, you should come up here and join him.”
I barely remembered seeing Fred all weekend, but he stepped up next to Ken, who held out his hand for a handshake.
“Fred, with this handshake I pass on to you the ability of the Organizer. None of the venues at which the events of this weekend took place exist for most people, or as far as we can tell, exist at all at most times. The people who run the venues and the bystanders you have seen in some of them likewise exist only to the extent that the venues themselves do, in the strange shard of reality that only participants in the Experience have any access to whatsoever. After you leave here tonight, all these places will cease to exist for anyone except Fred, who will not only still be able to access them but will be able to summon them to places of his choosing and invite the rest of you into them. We could have lined them all up in a row and had you walk from one to the next, but it would have spoiled too early that something was off about them, so instead they were spread out, miles apart, in places they seemed to fit. Fred, you will also have the ability to book these venues for the next Experience, and to visit them for the purposes of planning the Experience. Apart from emergencies, you won’t be allowed to simply use them to have an extended vacation for you and your friends. And you will also know how to contact all the members of your group.”
Another of the hosts was now standing beside Ken, and Ken said, “Kelly, please come on up now next to Patrick. You two have already spoken, but the rest of the group needs to understand your role.”
Kelly did so, and Ken handed the mic to Patrick.
“I was the Seer, and Kelly shall be the Seeress for the next Experience. Over the coming months, Kelly will have visions, identifying for her the guests for the next Experience. Each one of those people will be someone with a connection in some way to a member of your group, usually a different sort of connection from the one that got you here, and some of those connections may not exist yet. Kelly’s visions will also tell her which member of the group has the connection to speak with that person and invite them to the next Experience. Kelly, you will pass on that information to Organizer Fred, and to whichever member of the group needs to invite that person.”
Patrick passed the mic back to Donna, and called me to come up, so I went up next to her.
“Mike, you’re the next Giver. Over the coming months, but a little later than Kelly, you will receive a number of items. You may find them, have them given to you, get mailed them anonymously or have them just randomly show up on your doorstep. You’ll know these items aren’t meant for you, but instead as gifts for the guests at the next Experience, except one. That one will be obvious because it will be a duplicate of the gift you received at this Experience, which without any prompting or obligation to do so, you gave away to another guest who you thought deserved it more. It counted as that guest’s gift, and the duplicate will count as yours.”
Donna clearly knew in advance I was going to give that to Jan. She had to have known Jan was the only guest she didn’t receive a gift for, and that was the gift that she obviously would have wanted. Donna had more to say, though.
“All the gifts will be tangible items, but some of them may seem like mere tokens. You’ll still recognize that they are gifts for the Experience. You may not know which guest each item is for, but unless you feel some other notion of what to do with it, just contact Organizer Fred and he’ll make arrangements to pick them up. Between you, the Seer, and the Organizer, you’ll figure out who each gift belongs to. But you’ll have all these others as your support staff.”
Donna then passed the mic to the man who had explained the puzzle cards to me, and called Jan up. Jan had kept the power on all day, but she’d been introduced as Jan at the icebreaker, so everybody already knew her by that name. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them did not remember she was transgendered, though.
“I’m the Puzzler. Jan will be your group’s Puzzler. Puzzle ideas will come to her, sometimes after being prompted by the others that they need a particular kind of puzzle for the event, and sometimes without any such prompting. If something needs to be printed or physical items made for a puzzle, talk to the Organizer. He’ll find a way to use resources in one of these facilities to make it.”
This went on through the Comedian, Coach, and many other roles, one for every member of the group, but they only had short speeches like the one for the Puzzler, rather than the much longer ones for the first three roles. When it was done, Donna pulled me aside for a brief private conversation, and handed me a file folder about an inch thick with papers of various sorts which she said contained everything she knew about the Giver role.
We all got back together once more and the hosts said goodbye, pointed us to where all our overnight bags were waiting to be picked up, and left us alone, as the new hosts of the Experience. Fred gave his email address, phone number, and even his home and work addresses to everyone, though he told us he didn’t expect most of us to need to visit him that way or mail stuff to him.
I was part of a group who asked, “Huh? You came across the country for this?”
“Nope. That’s part of the trick with the venues. Remember how you had to walk down a long hallway from your Friday night hotel room to get to the restaurant?”
Everybody admitted to having had that experience.
“It’s because there are several different hotels. This restaurant area is actually a separate venue, though with the same name as everything else, and each hotel is connected here by a portal. You’ll go back through them and exit where you came in to go home, and I’ve got a map to help everybody find the right one. I want to show you the other facilities first, though.”
He led us all outside, back into the parking lot we had left from Saturday morning and arrived back at this evening. Across the street, where there had been only woods earlier, was now the building with the orange decor that was not actually a hotel. We crossed two parking lots and the empty street and walked inside the front door. There had been plenty of people when we were last here; during the closing, one of our hosts had called them bystanders. But now, the building seemed empty save for us.
“This is going to be our main resource center, and when we meet physically, it will sometimes be here. Only I’ll have to tell you where it is since I can put it just anywhere,” Fred told us.
I noted, “I missed what you actually did in the first room here because I got pulled away to receive my gift. It needed some explanation.”
Kelly explained how that session had featured an open-mic comedy club in which they picked the new Comedian.
Fred then said, “Mike, if you were away then, maybe you heard something about the open sesame, close sesame doors. Ken mentioned that but I didn’t fully understand.”
“Oh, sure. Let’s go to that hallway.”
I led the way to the orange-walled hallway with the rows of semicircular arches on both sides, went up to the first arch with no door, and said, “Open, sesame.” Sections of the wall moved aside and replaced themselves elsewhere and after a few moments there was a door within the arch.
Paul stepped up and said, “Close, sesame.” The changes reversed themselves so there was a seemingly solid wall inside the arch.
Paul said “Open, sesame” again and opened the door. It was dark, but he found a light switch inside and illuminated the space, and we followed him in. It was a big empty room. It clearly extended beyond the neighboring arches in the hallway on either side, but there was only the one arch on the inside, and no amount of “Open, sesame” anywhere else in the room produced a door.
After we went back out into the hall, Paul went down the hall and started open-sesameing every arch along that wall without a door, opening each door including the ones already there, and I did the same on the opposite wall of the corridor. There were thirty-five arches, each leading to a separate room. About half the rooms should have overlapped one of the neighboring rooms, and some of us walked to these overlapping spaces and tried to shout to each other through the walls, but we couldn’t hear the others this way.
Several of the rooms were empty, but the furnished ones were all different. One was a file room with a row of file cabinets along one wall and bookshelves filling the opposite one. One was something like an office space with several computers, printers, all manner of office supplies, and some other weird machines. Somebody identified one as a 3-D printer. Another was a costume shop, with hundreds of costumes hanging on racks with labels on them, all in alphabetical order.
There was a door not under an arch just past the last arch on one side, just before the hallway with the restrooms. This door was labeled Control Room, and it was exactly that. There was a computer there with a program running which allowed configuring what was in each of the thirty-five rooms. There were several sizes of empty rooms possible, and a ton of preconfigured rooms of various types, hundreds of possible choices. The room was small and there wasn’t enough room to let everybody see, so we cycled through with Fred demonstrating.
One of the rooms we had seen had a big round table with an opening to allow someone to walk into the center, and exactly enough seats for us to all sit around it, and we went there to continue talking about our experiences. Paul took the floor first, and said, “One of the hosts took me aside before I even entered the room where you did the comedy, explaining that the contents of the bag I had picked up at the opening was Mike’s gift, and explaining what was going to happen. I was sworn to secrecy not to tell Mike any more than I did then, and I’m still sworn to secrecy against telling the rest of you. The host close-sesamed the door with the two of us out there, and I think the idea was to make sure none of the other participants could wander away from the comedy club and eavesdrop on what happened with Mike’s gift. And I think that is literally as far as I can go talking about the gift in front of anyone but Mike and who he gave the gift away to.”
Several other people talked about their experiences and various other secrets they had learned which seemed appropriate to share among our whole group. Fred eventually ended this discussion by saying, “It’s getting late. How about we all get home before anyone gets too tired to drive safely? We have plenty of time to plan the next Experience, and we don’t even know any of the participants yet.”
After making sure everybody had all their stuff, he led back across the street into the restaurant’s hotel, then to the corridors connecting us to the other hotels, directing groups of people down each one so they could get back to where they needed to be. Paul and Jan and I went with just two other people to one of them. We walked out into the parking lot we’d all arrived at Friday, and said our goodbyes before heading to our cars. Jan lingered a bit to thank me again for the gift, even though she now understood it was part of the show, a planned thing that I would pass this gift on to her.
When I got home, Susan was already asleep, so I crept into bed quietly beside her. In the morning, Susan asked how my event went, and I told her, “It was magical, literally. I think I’m sworn to secrecy about parts of it, as in I am physically unable to speak the words to describe them to you. But I can tell you my literally magical gift will show up here at some point, as will other gifts meant for the attendees at the one we’re going to run. I can’t say whether they’ll be addressed packages or just literally dropped off in front of the door, but if you see something strange, don’t throw it out.”
“All right. I’ll watch for them.”
I was a little distracted at work, but I made it through my day, and when I got home, Susan told me a package arrived for me. I opened the package and told her, “This is it. My magical gift.”
I laid out the pieces on the table.
“A costume to dress up as a woman?” Susan asked. “Have you talked with other people about this thing you do? I thought you said I was the only one you had shared the secret with.”
“I had another set of these during the event. I did, during the event, tell two other participants, both of whom saw this was my gift and saw me wearing it. Some of the event hosts know too, though I am not sure how many, but I think those people are all magically sworn not to talk about it. It’s more of the magic of this thing that one of the hosts learned my secret, and got this thing for me. One of the other participants was a friend of mine who I found out was trans. She’s out about it and told the whole group. And I gave her the clothes I received during the event. This is a replacement set for me, to reward my generosity.”
“You said they’re magical. How are the clothes magical? Wait! They donnnnnnnnnn’t...”
“They do,” I told her, and started stripping right there. After a few minutes, I was dressed as Michelle again.
“It’s a very realistic costume,” Susan said. “But it’s just a costume.”
She stepped up next to me and touched me in the relevant places as she continued.
“It’s hard to spot the seam of your mask, but when I know what I am looking for I can see it here. These are still fake, and down here you’re still a man.”
“Wait,” I told her, then, “Make it real.”
She noticed the change come over me, and touched me in all those same places, determining I was fully female in all of them.
“OK, I believe you now. Either you’re really female, or that thing messed with my mind to make me believe it.”
“It didn’t mess with your mind because I told you about it. If I hadn’t told you about it, it would have messed with your mind to make you think I’d always been a woman. But everybody else in the world who knows me, with a couple exceptions, thinks I’ve always been female.”
“So they think we’re a lesbian couple? I guess that’s OK as long as they stop believing that before we see any of them.”
“I didn’t test it extensively. But a room full of people recognized me as Michelle as if I’d always been Michelle from the moment we met. And they promptly forgot that and knew me only as Mike after I turned it off.”
“Seems like a pretty good test. But I’ve got another test,” Susan said, leading me to our bedroom.
As she was undressing me, she stopped, exclaiming, “Wait, panties!? It turned your briefs into panties?”
“Yeah, that happened during the event, too.”
“How far does it go?”
“I didn’t actually look,” I replied.
Susan marched over to my closet, pulled it open, and saw skirts, dresses, and blouses hanging inside, along with some women’s pants. I went to my dresser and found panties and bras inside, and held some up to show Susan.
She replied, “OK, it’s really strong magic. That should mean that what I planned will work.”
So I learned what it was like to be a lesbian. Susan had already given me lessons in how to properly excite a woman, and some of those lessons were reinforced tonight by letting me experience them from the other side. We fell asleep after quite a bit of that and I only changed back in the morning.
All our dress-up sessions after that were a lot more real than before, but Susan didn’t want to be a lesbian all the time, nor did I always want to be a woman, so it remained something we only did occasionally. We didn’t have to go shopping for women’s clothes anymore, though, because when I was Michelle I had a full wardrobe of them.
I experimented, confirming that the bra and its fake breasts and the mask were needed to activate the effect. While the effect was active, the bra was just a normal bra, rather than one designed to help hold fake breasts in place, and I could take it off and put on one of the other ones from Michelle’s wardrobe if I wanted. If I ended the effect with the bra off, my breasts would just turn into two pieces of rubber that fell to the floor, and any other bra of Michelle’s I was wearing would also disappear, as it simply didn’t have a counterpart in Mike’s wardrobe.
“Be careful borrowing any of Michelle’s clothes,” I pointed out to Susan.
“Uh, yeah, that would be bad,” she replied.
It was over a month before the next package showed up, but after that they appeared more frequently. By three months after the Experience, I was getting about three gifts a week for a while. Most of them came via conventional shipping services, even though they came without return addresses or with clearly fictional ones. And, as the Giver, I knew which ones were magical and usually what they did. There were no magical gender-change charms in this set, but there were several that magically satisfied other desires. Most of them were passed off to Fred by means of him causing one of the venues to temporarily appear between two buildings near me that shouldn’t have had any space between them.
By the time the packages were arriving frequently, I was regularly having sessions together with Kelly and Fred, and usually one or two others for whatever events we were working on that day. It was easy for me to drop off any gifts during these sessions. Usually Fred would bring the diner where we ate lunch during the Saturday of our Experience to each of our houses to pick us up, and then park it next to the orange building. They were happy to serve us whatever we wanted to eat or drink while we planned the next Experience, though it was just one waitress and one cook on duty instead of a whole staff like during the Experience.
During one of these sessions while Ray, the Coach, was with us, he felt that he needed Michelle’s presence during his event, and he asked, “But who’s Michelle?”
Fred was also confused. “Hmm, I don’t remember a Michelle in our group.”
I knew that Kelly knew; as the Seeress, no nugget of info escaped her if it was needed for planning. But she also protected my secret, so I told them, “It’s me. I am Michelle sometimes.”
“What? How?” the two men exclaimed.
“Fred, take me back to my house and I’ll make it clear.”
So he moved the diner next door to my house, I got the Michelle getup and changed into the bra and dress, and carried the mask as I walked back to the diner. The two men laughed a little seeing me that way, but were amazed when they saw what the mask did for my face. Then they were stunned when I turned on the power.
“Now you know. This was my gift; what I wanted more than anything else in the world was to be able to be a woman, sometimes. Not all the time, and not even most of the time. That’s why you don’t usually see me this way.”
Fred asked, “And this was your gift? So you gave this ability to one of our other members, too?”
“Yes, there was one who introduced herself as a trans-woman during our icebreaker, but she now has the power on all the time, so you will not remember that.”
Ray and Fred both confirmed that they did not remember any such person. But Kelly winked at me, confirming that she knew.
“Well, it’s her secret now, but you do know this is true for one of the women in our group. That is literally as much as I can say about it. And you should keep my secret as well, though you can acknowledge for others that there is a Michelle available among our group when needed.”
“Certainly,” Fred confirmed.
“Will do,” said Ray.
“You will remember after I turn the power off, though it may sometimes be fuzzy in your mind.”
And I turned it off briefly to test while I left the table to visit the restroom (not really needing to go). When I returned, Kelly confirmed they did remember Michelle while I was away. I spent the rest of the session as Michelle, though, because she was a participant in the event Ray was planning, and it was just easier that way. To keep things simple, I attended most of our remaining meetings as Michelle, too. That kept me from needing to reveal the secret to anyone else.
The event was an athletic activity for which our costume shop was going to provide workout gear for all the participants. When it was over and people were all showering and changing back into their usual clothes, one woman, Lisa, was going to find her clothes missing and I was going to show up and give her her gift, which was a magical outfit that could turn into whatever clothing she wanted. Kelly explained to me privately that Jan and I were the only ones from our group who had first-hand knowledge of the kind of “willing” action that was needed to transform us using our gifts, and a very similar thing was needed for Lisa’s gift except that instead of making it real or making the effect end, the will was accompanied by a mental image of what the outfit should look like. Jan would be busy at that particular moment, setting up some kind of puzzle at the next site after the one where the athletic activity occurred, so she couldn’t do it. Since this was going to happen in the women’s locker room, it was Michelle who was needed, and not Mike.
Only once was I asked to invite someone to the next Experience, and to my surprise, it was my neighborhood “crazy lady,” Edna. Inviting her got us talking more than we ever had, and I learned she was actually probably the smartest person on the block. She was a bit eccentric in her behavior, but we became good friends. Her gift ended up being a man who understands her. Not me, but another man named Lloyd with a similar problem as her. They were each others’ gifts, along with a real wedding for them as part of the Experience.
This was the part of our planning a lot of us were worried about, that we were going to get two people who were complete strangers before meeting there to actually get married that quickly. The Seeress said they would do it, but we were ready to replace the wedding with a generic party segment if they didn’t.
For three weekends before the event, we set up all the activities at all the venues. Since literally nobody else used them, the stuff we arranged would remain there until we needed it. A room in the orange building was configured to be the wedding chapel, and a second room was set up as the alternate in case they chose not to get married. That was part of the idea of that place, to have lots of options.
The weekend before the event, Fred set up all the hotels. We had a more diversely situated group, so between us and the guests, there were actually ten hotels in different places. Friday evening we drove in to whichever one was closest to our homes, as did our guests, but we drove our cars around to the side where the restaurant was to make them ready for Saturday morning. After Fred set things up, the parking lot around the combined hotel was just as much connected as the interior, though each portal was on a driveway labeled “staff only.”
Since I had to appear as Michelle to guests, to keep it simple, I arrived Friday as Michelle and stayed female during the entire two days we ran the Experience. I was surprised how comfortable I was with it, though maybe I shouldn’t have been. After all, I had been Michelle for almost a full day when I first got the gift and several times during planning sessions, sometimes for hours at a time.
My scene with Lisa went fine. More than fine; she was overjoyed with the gift, and transformed it into a different spectacular outfit each time we moved to a new location. At the end, I apologized for having stolen her clothes and gave her the original set back, but she told me no apology was necessary.
The next group’s Comedian would have been obvious from the start to anyone knowing about the existence of the role. Without prompting, he wore a full Joker costume in the style of the 60s Batman TV show during the entire Experience. He played the role to the fullest, even introducing himself as Joker during the icebreaker, so everybody called him that throughout the event. Kelly had known he would do that and we planned an entire skit where some of us wore costumes as Batman, Robin, Batgirl, and Commissioner Gordon. The costume shop in the orange building naturally had all the outfits we needed. I’m pretty sure that room was also magical, and then whenever we entered it, it had everything we needed inside. Lisa spontaneously joined into this skit for a moment, changing her magic outfit into a Catwoman costume, before going back to watch the rest of the show, still dressed as Catwoman.
The Giver among our guests had been given a trick deck of cards. It wasn’t like my puzzle cards; if you fanned the deck out, they looked like normal playing cards, but if you wanted some specific card, you could cut the deck and it would be there. When we had Joker in a fake jail cell at one point, the Giver handed him the deck of cards through the bars, figuring he could find some way to escape using it. He pulled a Get Out of Jail Free card out of the deck, inserted it into a slot near the lock, and the door opened for him. That Giver told Joker to keep the cards, completing the foretold role.
Not only did Edna and Lloyd propose during the Experience, but they accepted our offer to let them marry right then, both of them being a bit estranged from their families and feeling that they were never going to have a bigger group of friends together than at that moment. So the finale Sunday evening was the wedding, with the reception taking the place of the usual dinner in the hotel restaurant where we started. That meant we revealed that the orange building was next door to the hotel, but the revelation of everything followed just afterward, and by then everybody had their gifts and jig was mostly up anyway.
We made it through that Experience with everything miraculously working as planned. It seemed like that was another part of the magic. Once it was planned, nothing could interfere with it actually happening or everybody managing to be there.
Right after it was over, Edna moved out to live with her new husband, but we kept in touch. It turned out Lloyd was an inventor and Edna had the knowhow to market his ideas, so they were perfect for each other in another way.
Now that Experience was over and my obligation was complete, I allowed Susan to get me out of the house as Michelle for things other than running the Experience. I still didn’t want to be Michelle full time, nor did she want that, but we were both ready for me to be Michelle beyond our bedroom, and I no longer had the excuse I couldn't pass as female. It allowed me to share some women-only experiences with her that I never could have as Mike, including a spa visit and a baby shower. Susan had been invited to the shower, but that invitation magically turned into an invitation for us both while I was Michelle. And I really did enjoy doing those things, but I never would have actually done them without both her encouragement, and the ability to be really female during them.
Naturally, I kept in touch with Jan, too. Six months after we ran the Experience, she invited us, as “Mike and Susan,” to her wedding. Susan knew Jan was one of my friends from the Experience but never knew she was seeing the magically transformed woman getting married. She found out, though, when Jan invited “Michelle and Susan” to her baby shower a year later and the card arrived while I wasn’t Michelle. Or rather, Susan guessed due to the difference from the way the earlier baby shower invitation behaved, and I found I was able to confirm it for her. By sending the invitation, Jan had implicitly told Susan her secret.
At Jan’s baby shower, Susan and I had a private moment with Jan in which I informed Jan how she’d let the secret slip.
“Oops,” Jan said. “But no big deal, really. You just keep it a secret, Susan.”
“I will. Who else knows?”
“Apart from you and people at the Experience, nobody.”
“Nobody? Your parents? Your husband?” Susan asked.
“Nope. None of them know. Everyone else thinks I was born a woman. But I’m keeping the power on forever, so none of them need to know.”
We all laughed and went back to join the rest of the guests.