The Beginning

January 3, 2007, early morning

“Time to get up, Teddy! Now, so you won’t be late for school,” I heard my mother yell from the doorway.

I groaned, “Uh, I don’t feel so well.”

She came up to the side of the bed. “Let’s have a look at you.” She pulled the covers off my face. “You look OK.” She put her hand on my forehead. “Not running a fever. You just have the back-to-school blues. I know, it’s tough going back to school after the Christmas break, but it’s something you have to do. Get up, now.”

The last word was said firmly without actually yelling it, so I started moving. By the time I was done with my morning routine upstairs, my breakfast was ready and waiting for me, and Dad was already gone to work. I scarfed down my food, and after another time reminder from Mom, found my schoolbag and got ready to head out to meet the bus.

As usual, Mom met me at the door and kissed me goodbye. What wasn’t usual was that I suddenly felt very disoriented, so much so that I fell down.

“Teddy, when people say I’m a real knockout they don’t mean it literally!” Mom said with a laugh. Then, with a more serious tone, “Are you alright?”

“Yeah, I think so. But everything was very confusing for a moment there. It seemed like I was seeing two different things at once - seeing you and also seeing myself, somehow. But it’s back to normal now.”

“OK, then, hurry to catch the bus!”

And I left. Mom walked out to the street and watched me all the way to the end of the block, but nothing else happened on the way to the bus.

My day at school was ordinary enough. I got homework from almost every class. I think it was the teachers’ way of trying to make us remember what school is like after the long break. Half a year of eighth grade to go and then I’ll be in high school.

---

January 3, 2007, afternoon

On the way out to the buses after school, I saw my girlfriend Kelly just ahead of me, headed to her own bus, so I took a small detour to go visit with her. I knew I had a good ten minutes before my bus left, and I intended on using most of it.

“Hey, Kelly!”

“Hey, Teddy.”

“I didn’t see you all day. Good to know you’re not sick or something.”

“It seemed like I was having to rush everywhere today just to get places on time.”

“Yeah, I know how that is, sometimes. But the school day’s over!” I punched my fist in the air, then pulled her toward me to kiss her. Just a quick, simple kiss was all I intended.

That is when it happened again. This time, I was holding Kelly for the kiss and used her to keep balance when I started seeing double. I also noticed there was more to it. For about ten seconds after I kissed her, I was simultaneously seeing what I should be seeing, and what Kelly was seeing. At the same time, I felt what Kelly should have been feeling, too - at least, feeling what had to be Teddy leaning against “me” and with his arm on “my” back. The fact that I was using her to support myself had to be obvious to her.

“Teddy, are you alright?”

“Yeah. Something weird happened, though.”

“Weird how?”

“For a moment I was seeing myself, as if from your perspective.”

“That’s weird, all right,” Kelly said with a chuckle. “Are you back to normal now?”

“Yeah. I’m not sure how that happened,” I lied. Well, not totally a lie. I didn’t know how it worked, but I figured it had something to do with the kissing, since when the same thing happened this morning it was right after Mom’s kiss. “But I’ll try to be careful in case it happens again.”

“All right. You do that. I gotta go get on the bus,” Kelly said, and waved as she walked off.

I headed to my own bus, trying to think about how this could be possible. How could it be that I could steal a glimpse from another person’s vision as well as their sense of touch after kissing them? I continued thinking about this during the bus ride, and I was so absorbed in this thought that I almost missed my stop. I came to realize where I was just in time, as the other neighborhood kids were standing to get off the bus at my stop.

“Hi, Mom, I’m home!” I shouted as I entered the house.

“Hi, Teddy. How was your day at school today?”

“Boring. A lot of homework. A pretty normal day, until I met Kelly going out to the buses after school. Then it happened again.”

“What happened?”

“The thing that happened here in the doorway this morning. I kissed Kelly and then for a moment I was seeing what she was seeing, and I think feeling what she was feeling, too. I didn’t fall down this time, but only because I leaned against her.”

“Really? When you kissed her? Do you think it has something to do with kissing?”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. But she had to go catch her bus, so I didn’t get a chance to test it.”

“Let’s go sit on the couch and test it,” Mom said. “If you aren’t struggling to keep your balance, maybe you can learn more about what is going on.”

We sat down on the couch, turned to face each other, and kissed like we often did when she wanted to kiss me goodbye.

“Is it happening?” Mom asked.

“Yes. I am definitely seeing you at the same time that I am seeing my face from your perspective.”

“Close your eyes.

I did so. “Oh, that’s better. Now I am just seeing me. With my eyes closed.”

“Like in the They Might Be Giants song? How does that one go?”

Before I could think of it, the effect ended, and I opened my eyes so I could see normally again. But shortly after that I remembered.

“It’s from ‘Dead,’ the song where they die and come back to life as a bag of expired groceries. ‘I’ll never see myself in the mirror with my eyes closed,’ they sing. But I don’t need a mirror and I did see myself with my eyes closed.”

“Yes, that’s the song I was thinking of. Is the effect over now?”

“Yeah. Back to normal.”

“You said you felt what Kelly was feeling, too? Did you feel anything special this time?”

“No, but maybe there wasn’t anything special to feel.”

“All right, let’s try it again. We’ll kiss, both close our eyes, and I will do something you should be able to feel.”

I puckered up, closed my eyes, and Mom kissed me. She pulled away, and I could see her vision of the television as she turned that way before she closed her eyes.

A few seconds passed. “Mom!” I shouted when I realized what she was doing.

“What was I doing?”

“You were playing with your boobs!”

“Yes. I put one hand inside my bra, held my breast, and played with the nipple. What did that feel like for you?”

“It felt like I had boobs and was playing with them.”

“Even though you, quite clearly, do not have boobs.”

I put my hand to my chest - my real one - and there were definitely no boobs there. “Yes. No boobs.”

“Teddy, I can only think of one reasonable explanation for this. You have a special power.”

“Power? Powers like that are real? I thought that kind of thing was only fantasy.”

“We try to let the world believe that. But in Normal, things aren’t always so normal. A long time ago, a meteor landed in Normal, and ever since then, every so often somebody here develops some kind of special power.”

“Really? How many people in Normal have special powers?”

“I don’t know the exact number. Hundreds. NANA keeps a registry, and after you get to know more about how your power works, I’ll take you there.”

“Which Nana? Yours or Dad’s?”

“Neither. It’s the Normal Always Normal Association, NANA for short. They sponsor various kinds of events in the town, normal things. But they also help keep track of people with special powers who they can call on in an emergency, or when somebody decides to use their powers for evil.”

“Oh, right. That NANA. Pretty sneaky. How many people know they do this?”

“Most of the adults in the town do. I would have told you within a few years even if you didn’t get powers. But it’s hush-hush. We don’t talk about it, don’t say anything where outsiders could find out.”

“Do you know any of these people with special powers?”

“Well, I have one.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. It’s pretty minor. I can make fire, but it’s pretty small. I’m registered with NANA as Sparky, but I don’t expect them to ever call on me for anything, since anybody can carry a lighter in their pocket to do this.”

Mom demonstrated for me that she could make a flame about like a cigarette light come out of her fingertip.

“How did you find out you could do that?”

“I... had some trouble setting some stuff on fire when I was a teenager. Not too much trouble, because even uncontrolled, I only made little flames like the one I just showed you, but I set my clothes and my bed on fire a few times. Eventually I learned to control the fire and only make it when I wanted to.”

“And how did you learn to control it?”

“Practice. First, I had to figure out how to make it happen intentionally, since when it first started happening, it just happened when I was excited or angry about something. Once I did that, I could sort of feel where the power was coming from, and I could avoid activating it just as well as I could activate it when I wanted. It became just another thing I can do, like talking or riding a bike. With your ability, you already figured out how to activate it, though you may need to explore the limits of that activation. You need to learn what you can do with the power and its limits. Can you make it last longer? How much of a person’s sensations can you receive while the power is active? Can you control the body of a person you have used it on? Can you read their thoughts? Can you let another person see and feel what you do? Can you use it on more than one person at a time? Can you use it on animals or inanimate objects?”

“Yuck! Kissing animals?”

“You might kiss a pet, if you really loved it.”

“I guess so. Do you think my power might actually do all those things?”

“It’s always hard to tell with powers. You can only test them, experiment with them, and try different things to see what works. NANA can also help you test them further.”

“Does Dad have powers too?”

“No, but he knows about my power.”

Soon, Dad was home, and Mom told him about what happened to me today.

“Well, that’s an interesting power, son. I guess we’ll have to call you the Kissing Bandit.”

“Ugh, Dad, no. Even though that might be a good description of my power, I don’t think I want to be called that.”

“Well, you’re going to need a code name when you register. I know there was some actual Kissing Bandit historically. Maybe you can research that and take a nickname from whoever that was.”

“Maybe. I’ll look into it.”

When I did look into it, I discovered that there were several people referred to as the Kissing Bandit. The earliest (apart from general usage of the term to describe people who “stole kisses”) was an actual thief, a woman named Edna Murray who was also nicknamed Rabbit. There was also Morganna, a woman who ran onto the field during baseball games to kiss players. And Richard Dawson, the host of Family Feud for many years, was also called a Kissing Bandit. There were a few other kissing bandits as well, male and female, real and fictional, but none of them seemed to provide good code names.

Mom stopped by, and when I suggested the code name Rabbit, she said, “That name’s probably taken.”

“Are there people who get powers that let them hop around?”

“Yes. There are also people who develop an odd appearance, like having rabbit ears.”

“How come I’ve never seen any of these people?”

“That’s actually what I came to talk to you about. One of the founders of NANA cast a spell over the town, which is still maintained today by residents with magical powers. The spell hides any unusual appearance of residents with powers from anybody who hasn’t been told about the secret of NANA and the powers people have in Normal. So you might start seeing some of your schoolmates look odd.”

“Oh, well that’s probably important to know.”

“If you do, act normally around them. Remember that most of your classmates at this age will not know. But if you have the chance to speak to one of them privately, you can let them know you can see whatever it is and tell them about your power.”

And the next day I did see one with blue skin. I didn’t get to talk to him, though.

Testing

Over the next week, each evening Mom had me spend an hour testing my ability in different ways, with a bunch of testing over the weekend as well.

By making extra-long kisses, extra-sloppy kisses, and dry-mouth kisses, I learned that my power seemed to be connected to making contact with another person with saliva present at the point of contact. Completely dry kisses didn’t work. Spitting on someone from a distance didn’t work, but spitting and then touching the spit, even with another body part like my hand, would activate the power. Licking my hand and then touching with the wet hand also worked. And the more saliva, the longer and more intense the power. My first kisses were practically dry and that is why the power lasted for such a short time.

With a big, wet, slobbery kiss, the power could last for a good chunk of an hour, I got all of their normal senses, and I could control that person’s body to a limited degree. I could not read their thoughts, nor project thoughts to them. It was difficult, but with some practice I learned to manage multiple bodies while my power was in use. It was like learning how to walk all over again. I still couldn’t do much, but I could stand both bodies and walk with one without either falling over.

The power worked on men as well as women, but not on dogs or plants. It needed to be something humanoid, I guessed. This explained why my power didn’t activate on every bit of food I ate (which would have been super-creepy).

At the mall, I kissed a mannequin in a store, and the mannequin turned into a living person. I had full control of the body even with a minimal amount of saliva. I could move her, but I tried not to so as to avoid making it obvious to anybody who didn’t know. Would the spell hide it from them? I did move her a little to test it. I didn’t have the full movement of a normal body, only the movements the mannequin would otherwise make. The arms swiveled, but didn’t swing outward like a person’s arms. Which was fine, because I didn’t want the mannequin to end up in some different position where it would be obvious I’d moved it with powers. So I basically had her “play statue” until the effect wore off, at which point she turned back into a normal mannequin.

The concept of a statue gave me an idea. I knew where there was a statue in the park, so I tried the same thing there. And it worked. Interestingly, the clothes on the statue did NOT change. So I was standing there in what was basically bronze armor. With no other clothes under it. Cold and hard, and basically immobile. Fortunately, with my small kiss, the effect did not last long.

The next step was to make my own. How realistic did it need to be? I would find out. I laid out some of my clothes on my bed, and stuffed them with pillows, towels, sheets, socks, etc. A volleyball inside a shirt served as the head, with the rest of the shirt stuffed down inside the other shirt which covered the mannequin’s torso. The head-shirt was one which had Benjamin Franklin’s face on it from a $100 bill. It was the shirt I owned which had the closest to life-sized face printed on it. Life-sized for a person, not a C-note, of course.

When I finally had a whole body formed, I kissed it. And it came to life, briefly. So then I gave it a good, long, wet kiss, spitting as much saliva onto it as I could. Even after the body came to life, I kept adding more until my own mouth was dry.

The new body did not look like Ben Franklin. It actually looked like me. I stood up with the new body, came over to my old body, and carefully got both bodies lined up to look in the mirror. And yes, we were spitting images. Ha, ha, “spitting.” I bet whoever invented that phrase never thought it could be this literal. The clothes I had put on the body, which basically served as its skin to hold in all the stuffings, now actually were skin - the new body was naked. So after I clothed it, I took both bodies out to show my family.

My folks are pretty bright, so they figured out what I had done after only a moment, but it was still a surprise that the other body came out looking so much like me. That definitely wasn’t true of the mannequin and statue, which stayed looking like the people they represented. In particular, the mannequin had definitely been a girl, with boobs. Maybe this constructed body didn’t really represent anybody, and so by default it took my form.

After a while, the second me turned back into a pile of clothes, and I brought it back to life again just long enough to let it walk back to my room. Or to let me walk it back there. Whatever. It was a successful test and I would do more later, but I was done for the day.

On other days I experimented with fuller kisses, and I got a longer lasting effect and a stronger feel for the other body’s senses when I gave it a big, slobbery kiss instead of just a little peck. The more saliva in contact with me and the target, the longer and stronger the effect. There seemed to be a limit, though. An amount of saliva roughly equivalent to what I got by licking my hand from wrist to fingertip with a wet tongue and applying that to the person or mannequin was what I needed to get the maximum ability.

Telling

January 12, 2007

I didn’t intentionally kiss Kelly during that week, but when she wanted to kiss I did. And my practice allowed me to do it without losing my balance.

Friday evening my parents invited Kelly’s family over for dinner, so it was one of those occasions where we put the leaf in the dining room table and set up extra chairs so there was room for everybody.

After Mom served all the food, but before we started eating, she spoke.

“I want to explain why I invited everybody over today. Who can see what I am doing that’s unusual right now? Raise your hands.”

Mom was holding up her finger with the flame above it, and as people saw the flame, everybody but Kelly raised their hands.

“What am I missing?” Kelly asked.

“That’s what we are here to rectify tonight,” Mom explained.

She went on to talk about the deal with NANA and the meteor and powers like she had with me, ending with, “And the reason we are doing this now, Kelly, is that Teddy has used his power on you unintentionally and is likely to do it again, and we think in all fairness that you should know.”

“What’s your power, Teddy?”

“Remember when I got dizzy after I kissed you last week out by the buses?”

“Yeah.”

“That was only the second time I had ever activated my power. It activates on kissing.”

“And your power is to make yourself dizzy?”

“No. It lets me see what another person is seeing, and feel what they are feeling. I get their other senses, too. But I am still getting sensations from my own body, too, and the same time, so when I first did it, it was very confusing. I’ve been practicing with it on my family, though, and I can use it now without making myself dizzy.”

“Wow! How weird!” Then after a pause, Kelly added, “Just how much of their senses do you get?”

“Everything. Some of the senses can be pretty dim though.”

“And how long does it last?”

“For the kiss we had, it was only the 5 or 10 seconds until I was in control of myself again. But it varies. It seems to be dependent on saliva. The more saliva, the longer and stronger the effect. In the stronger versions I can also control the body, to a limited extent. So I’m not going to kiss you again unless you’re OK with it.”

After a long pause, she said, “It’s a little creepy, but I’m OK with it. Just don’t try to get all slobbery with me.”

“OK, that’s reasonable. Thanks, Kelly.”

And I did kiss her, a simple peck that got me a few seconds of her sight. With that done, we all went about eating dinner.

Other Bodies

After my success with constructing a body, Mom encouraged me to try to construct other bodies that wouldn’t come out as a duplicate of mine. If I tried to make the body taller, shorter, fatter, etc., it had the same effect, but to a much lesser degree, in the resulting person, which was still basically me. And this worked up to a point, after which it seemed that the body was too nonhuman and I couldn’t animate it at all. It seemed that below about 2 feet tall (which led to a 3-foot person) it didn’t work. Did that mean I couldn’t animate babies? Or was it because it was trying to come out as me and was too different? Some of my toys were humanoid figures, but none of them that tall, and kissing them didn’t seem to do anything.

So I stuck with the stuffed clothes body. As another way of making a person who was not me, Mom suggested making it female, and gave me one of her bras, and I stuffed some rolled-up shirts inside the torso-shirt to fill it. That worked a little. The animated body was still me, still fully male down below, but with breasts. So I tried some other things. I made a body with 3 arms. With no arms. Two heads. A tail. All of these cases worked and produced bodies with the appropriate features, except the armless one which still had two arms, and when I tried one without arms and legs, torso-boy was apparently not human enough to animate.

So Mom next suggested I make the body have a vagina. With the jeans fly open, a paper towel tube stuck inside, and a thing on the end, the vulva, that Mom helped me construct, I animated this new body. It still had my face, but was now fully female. This was actually the first time I was looking at live female genitals, as opposed to pictures, and they were on “my” body. Mom did a brief examination and said that the parts looked correct to the extent she could tell, and that it would take a doctor to tell whether they were right all the way inside. But this still wasn’t what I wanted to do, which was to make a body that wasn’t just an altered version of me.

Mom suggested, “Maybe it is coming out as you because you used your clothes as the body’s skin.”

“Could be. That could explain why it didn’t happen for the mannequin or the statue.”

So I took the whole thing apart and rebuilt it using Mom’s clothes she loaned me for this purpose, and this let me make a copy of Mom. I could make a copy of Dad this way too. If I mixed and matched clothing, then it seemed to pick one person - maybe whoever had the “most” clothes serving as skin, though it was difficult to measure that in some close cases. It was certainly true if I just swapped in one sock from a different person. And when it came out as Mom, I didn’t need to put in my makeshift vagina to make it come out with girl parts. What I saw led me to conclude that any body part not well defined in the mannequin came out in the standard form for whatever person it was.

So the next thought was what would happen if we used nobody’s clothes. Or nobody I knew, anyway. Mom went out and bought several outfits worth of clothes: a set of new, never-worn girl clothes; another set of girl clothes from Goodwill that were worn, probably by different girls, but we did not know who; a set of boy clothes from Goodwill in my size, and a set of boy clothes from Goodwill that were too small for me.

I used the new girl clothes first, and this time, a body formed of a girl none of us knew. I got the same body with the thrift store clothes, so this was not likely a girl who had touched something in the store, but another sort of default character. The boy clothes in my size gave my body, but the small ones gave some other boy. We concluded that the boy clothes that fit me were the only ones that could be considered my clothes for the purposes of my power.

Mom also bought several pillows for me to use for stuffing, instead of the various things I had been using, so that we could have our towels back for drying ourselves off after showers, etc. She cut open some of them lengthwise and sewed the edges shut to make two narrow pillows out of each one, for use in stuffing arms and legs. She got enough stuff for me to make two bodies, with the intent that I would eventually practice animating both of them at the same time, and if I ever reached the point where I could do that well, she might get more.

“Really, Mom? You think I’ll be able to control three bodies well at the same time? I’m having enough trouble controlling myself and one animated body.”

“Some people improve their skills with practice. So I want you to practice. The ability to control multiple bodies is a rare and powerful one, and I think it is the most valuable skill you have shown.”

“All right. I do find the idea interesting, though it feels weird when I’m animating a body that isn’t mine.”

“Definitely practice that. Being comfortable in bodies that are not just a copy of yours will help when you are controlling another live person’s body, as well as when you want to use an animated body as a disguise.”

I protested that I didn’t want to be a girl, but Mom said if I ever wanted to go possess a girl’s body for some reason, I’d want to know how to walk and act like a girl. So I went along with it. It was, after all, fun kissing her.

So I did. I started animating a body after school each day, and keeping it going for as long as a single large sloppy kiss could last. At first this was about 15 minutes. After about a week of this, the short sessions were frustrating, and I started recharging a second or third time each day. I quickly learned the signs of impending deanimation, and usually tried to kiss my other self before he or she deanimated. Kissing Trixie and even kissing Jack (the names I came up with for the unknown girl and boy) was nicer than kissing the deanimated cloth body, and it worked just as well. On weekends I would do extended practice, two to three hours a day when the weekday sessions were less than an hour.

---

February 10, 2007

An interesting thing we discovered was that the animated bodies got hungry and thirsty. It seemed that each character (the other me, the other Mom, the other Dad, Jack, and Trixie) had a body clock that only advanced while that character was animated. If I’d used the same one all the time, I probably would have noticed it in a week, but as it was, it was more like a month before, on one Saturday, I started noticing how thirsty Trixie was. She had probably been used the most because of Mom’s encouragement for me to try using female bodies, since I kinda felt like her body belonged to me. It was a little weird walking around in Mom’s body, so I did that less.

Mom suggested that Trixie should drink some water, like any normal person would. She figured that the worst that would happen would be that the water would get her stuffing wet when she de-animated, and the best was nothing would happen besides Trixie quenching her thirst. The latter was what happened. Eventually my characters got hungry and so they ate food, too.

Mom guessed that the fact that my characters were drinking and eating meant that they would also have to go to the restroom and have ... other bodily functions, though naturally it was a while before that happened. So, later the same day that Trixie drank for the first time, Mom sat down with Trixie for a “private” talk. Of course, Trixie was me, but Mom said it wouldn’t feel right to have this particular talk with anybody but a girl. Mom explained Trixie’s girl anatomy, and made me really examine it. For the first time, I was touching girl parts. She showed me the correct way to wipe Trixie’s body in the bathroom, and she also explained about periods and sex. Of course, Dad had already had the sex talk with me, but it was different being a girl and having the potential to get pregnant. (How would that work, I wondered? Would I have to keep Trixie animated for nine whole months? And would the baby be flesh and blood, or would I have to animate that too? I didn’t plan on figuring this out for a good long while, if ever, but it was something to consider.) Mom also talked about things like the proper way for a girl to sit in a skirt, how to apply makeup, and some other stuff about clothes. Basically it was like having to learn how to be a human being all over again.

It was during her session the next day that Trixie had to pee. The pressure associated with that need felt much the same as it did in my (Teddy’s) male body. And after Trixie sat down on the toilet, the way I had to release the pee was almost the same. The biggest difference, of course, was that Trixie had no penis, and some of the pee splashed against her body. Gross. Trixie had peed on herself. But Mom had explained this is normal. Girls pee on themselves all the time. Fortunately, most of the pee went down in the bowl, and with a couple wipes with toilet paper, Trixie’s girl parts were dry.

After this event, I started focusing mainly on animating Trixie and Jack, since it was clear that they had ongoing lives for which time only elapsed while they were animated, and it would probably be better if they got to live a little more often. I was not comfortable yet keeping multiple characters animated, so doing that meant eliminating the other characters who were copies of my family. With this change, I had each character animated about 5-6 hours a week, so about once a week each character would eat a meal with the family.

Kelly Visits

February 17, 2007

It had been normal for me, before I found my power, to invite Kelly over to the house on weekends sometimes. After discussing it with my parents, in mid-February was the first time I invited her over since I developed my power. Shortly after she arrived, I introduced her to Trixie. “You can think of me as Teddy’s sister if that’s easier for you, but I’m really Teddy,” I had Trixie say.

“You took control of your sister?”

“No, I created my ‘sister’,” I explained, with air quotes. “Before I kiss her, she’s more like my ‘brother’ is now,” which I explained by retrieving and showing her Jack’s un-animated body, then kissing it to make him briefly be alive.

“So when you kiss a person, you take control of their body for a little while, but when you kiss one of these life-sized dolls, it comes to life?”

“Yes. It comes to life, as a part of me. Trixie and Jack don’t have any minds or personalities apart from me. Everything they do is something I am doing with their bodies.”

Then, as Trixie, I continued, “And Mom wants me to learn to be more comfortable using other bodies. Part of that includes learning how to be a girl. So please comment on anything I do that looks too much like what a guy would do. If I don’t just completely ignore my powers, I will have bodies out in the world at some time, and if I do, I need to be able to act like a completely believable girl.”

“That’s OK, I guess,” Kelly responded. “I can help you learn to be a girl, as long as you are also the Teddy I love.”

And she hugged Trixie. This was my first girl-girl hug. “It feels interesting having boobs pressing on boobs,” Trixie said, “Even though we are both still quite small compared to most adult women. I can only imagine what that’s like for two women like my mom.”

Three times during that visit I took Trixie aside and privately had a big slobbery kiss with her to keep her active, before I let her drop. Kelly was a little jealous of this at first, but when I reminded her that this was keeping Trixie alive, and promised her that I didn’t look at Trixie as a girlfriend the way I did for Kelly, she seemed to get over it.

Trixie and Kelly managed to talk about a lot of girl stuff for the two hours that lasted, and I was exhausted (both of keeping Trixie alive as well as of the girl talk).

Continued Practice

As time went on, the length of an animation extended. By the start of March, the long sloppy kiss that got me only 15 minutes animation when I started was giving me about 40 minutes. Each weekday I was doing three sessions for about 2 hours of animation of one character, and several hours on weekends. By the start of April, I got an hour a charge, and by the start of May, an hour and a half.

Since my characters peed, it was natural to expect that they would poop also. With them each only around a few hours a week, it took more than a month of regular summonings before they did. But both Jack and Trixie did, and the urge to do so felt pretty much the same as it did for Teddy. The actual act was the same also. The down side of having two extra bodies was that I now had to poop and clean up butts for 3 bodies. At least the others did so rarely.

It was in March when I realized my characters needed to be washed. It was the same as any person, really; you accumulate sweat and dirt and whatever even doing normal things. They had been alive a few days each at this point without being washed, and that is what it took for us to notice the smell. I tried this in two ways: by having the animated character shower and by washing the clothes and such that held together the deanimated figure. Both ways seemed to work, but it was less work for me to have the character shower. You might think that it was easier to just throw some things in the washing machine, but it was actually more work disassembling and reassembling my creations. It felt weird at first, showering a body that wasn’t my own, especially a female body, but I got used to it. This also helped me to learn more about the sensitivity of a female body, since I had to touch all parts of it.

I also started animating one character in the morning before school. This character would stay behind and do things at the house, but mainly it was a test of how well I could control a body from a distance. The feelings and vision were no problem at all, but the actual control was harder at first. Once I had that working well, I mostly used this time to have Jack or Trixie do chores for me, cleaning my room, taking my laundry (and theirs; they each had multiple outfits now) down to the laundry room, and late in the school year, when they lasted longer, actually running a wash load and folding the dried clothes and putting them away. Before the charge lasted long enough for Jack or Trixie to finish these tasks, this had always been an evening or weekend chore for me.

By the start of May, this meant that my two characters were collectively animated for 6 hours each weekday and typically 9 hours each weekend day, or 48 hours a week. So Trixie and Jack each lived one full day each week. This time continued to increase.

In the first week of June was the first time that I still had a character animated (it was Jack) when my bedtime came. He had been up from 4 to 10.

“Bedtime, Teddy,” Mom reminded me as she passed where I was sitting.

“But Jack’s still up.”

“Wow, you are really improving your charge times. You just charged him three times tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I guess you and Jack can both go to bed.”

About that time, Jack fell over and became a lump of clothes and stuffing, which ended that discussion. I took him to my room and went to bed. But the next night it happened with Trixie again, and she didn’t deanimate, so I walked both bodies to bed.

I wasn’t really sure how to put Trixie to bed. I only had one twin-sized bed. Normally the deanimated bodies just lay on the floor beside my bed, one on top of the other. I tried having Trixie lie down on top of Jack’s deanimated body, but it wasn’t very comfortable. Finally, I just decided to share the bed. Trixie did not have any pajamas, and anyway it was warm in June, so I just had her strip to her bra and panties, and we crawled into bed next to each other. She was only there a few minutes, and deanimated before I fell asleep, but it was a plan.

This became a regular ritual the rest of the school year, and eventually I did fall asleep before the other body lost animation. Even in bed, though, I never really felt comfortable going to sleep as Trixie, though. When I commented to Mom about that, she said it was probably because girls shouldn’t wear their bras to bed. Another girl lesson learned.

She bought Trixie a nightgown the next day, and I changed her into it each time before she went to bed. Some people would have thought it was weird to have her change while I was in the room, and I wouldn’t have had Trixie strip in front of other boys, but she is me and it felt perfectly normal to me to have her changing clothes in front of me. I see what she sees. I would see her naked anyway while she was changing, even if she was in another room. Although I kissed her with big wet kisses all the time, I didn’t lust after her. She wasn’t the object of my sexual desire; she was just me. For the same reason, though it felt a little odd to be in bed with her, it didn’t feel weird in the way a brother and sister would feel weird sharing a bed.

I kept inviting Kelly every 2nd or 3rd Saturday after her first visit, and later on, every Saturday that Kelly was available, and soon I was able to keep Trixie around for the full time of her visit. After a point, though, Kelly pointed out to me how training Trixie was getting in the way of our own relationship, so we agreed on a compromise. Half of each visit Kelly spent with Trixie, and half just with me. So every visit, Trixie got more lessons in being a girl. By June, I felt confident Trixie could interact with society and be seen as a normal girl. At the same time, I was practicing only doing those girl things with Trixie’s body, so as not to give away my dual nature when using Jack or my own body.

Summer

Over the summer, while school was out, every day was like a weekend. I did extensive training with both Trixie and Jack, including starting to animate both at the same time and control all three bodies independently and simultaneously. It was not as hard as I thought it would be, so I quickly started keeping them both going full time, except I dropped one of them at the last recharge of the day to avoid having to go to bed with all three of them. There really wasn’t room for three in my bed.

Dad helped me solve the bed problem in July by buying a full size bed and a bunk bed frame to suspend the existing twin bed above the new bed. Then Trixie slept in the bunk while Jack and I slept below. I could have arranged my three bodies in any combination but this provided Trixie with the partial privacy that would have seemed right for a sister forced to share a room with her brothers. If I had to put my bodies to bed with anybody present who didn’t know they were all me, it would seem right. It also meant that she could have a permanently girly bed, a small bit of the room that was just hers. I was still a boy, but the part of me that was Trixie wanted to be a little girly, I think, because of the training I’d been doing to make her act like a girl.

This made my room pretty crowded. As I started using Trixie and Jack more, Mom had bought them more clothes, still not what a normal boy or girl had, but it was enough that they had bought a wardrobe, a three-drawer dresser with a closet for hanging clothes above the drawers, just for Trixie and Jack’s clothes. This sat alongside my existing dresser, between a small built-in closet for my clothes on one side, and my computer desk on the other. Just past the computer desk was a cabinet where toys and games were kept. Practically every inch of wall space was occupied.

Mom encouraged me to start trying to do more, different things with Trixie and Jack, and in particular, social things with other people who didn’t know their special nature. It was no problem for Jack; I knew how to be a boy. I worried about acting as a girl in public, though. I asked Kelly to help Trixie meet other girls and do the things girls did socially. Because Kelly knew my secret, she was able to help steer activities in a way that wouldn’t take Trixie away from me for too long a time between charges. Although I had called her my sister when introducing her to Kelly, we now decided to call Trixie my cousin. This would be easier than trying to explain why I suddenly had a sister who was my age when I had never had one before.

Meanwhile, I (Teddy) took Jack out to meet my friends, also calling him a cousin. I knew how to act as a boy, so he fit in quickly. Secretly, I used Jack as an ally in games to give me an unfair advantage. Not too much of an advantage, because I couldn’t give away the secret, but a little, wherever I could reasonably pass it off as skill or good luck. It depended on the particular game what kind of an advantage I could get from him. But we had a lot of fun figuring out ways to make use of my ability in secret.

Trixie’s First Period

July 13, 2007

Trixie lived for a total of about 8 days in January through April, 4 days in May, and 6 days in June, but with me having no school and keeping her animated all day, she was going to live for about 20 days in July. It was around mid-July that Trixie started her first period. Mom had explained this in her talks with Trixie months ago, so when I saw the small blood spot in Trixie’s panties one day, after momentarily being afraid that Trixie was hurt, I quickly realized what it was. Trixie carried a small purse with makeup and some other things, and this included one of what I’d learned was called a panty liner, a very thin absorbent pad with a peel-off backing that allowed it to stick to the inside of her panties. This was a short-term solution to the problem. Trixie was at another girl’s house when she discovered this, so she just used the pad for the time being, but when she went home for her next recharge, she talked to Mom about it.

Mom was proud that I’d been so calm about it; apparently most girls really freak out about this. Maybe my multiple nature had helped the other parts of me calm her down; I did recall a scared feeling when I first saw the blood. Mom showed me her supply of thicker pads and also tampons. Mom and Trixie had talked about tampons before, which was a really weird thing to me, sticking this thing inside Trixie’s body in a spot I didn’t even have. But now Mom helped Trixie insert her first tampon, gave her a couple to keep with her, and told her that these things were free to take as needed.

Experimenting with Bodies

When I wasn’t out doing those things, I was experimenting with bodies. I wondered what it would be like to build bodies out of other substances. What would it take, for instance, to build a wooden or metal body? Dad showed me how to use his tools, and I caught on pretty quickly. After some experimentation, I decided it would take too long to make a good wooden body. But I could get flat pieces of metal and coil them into body, arm, and leg shapes, and a few holes drilled through the overlap would let me use nuts and bolts to hold them together.

Those coils alone were not enough to make a whole body, though. There were pre-made corners for ducts which, in small sizes, made good shoulder joints, and in the next size larger, hip joints. The top of the shoulders was a carefully cut flat plate, with little projecting bits that folded over to bolt onto the torso. I got a spherical enclosure meant for a light fixture to use as the head, and devised a way to attach it to the torso. It took me about a month to get all this together, and it turned out to be too stiff for me to put any clothes on other than pants, and mine were too small, so I left it “naked”. But I confirmed I could animate it. It was a different character when I did so, though; neither me nor Trixie nor Jack. He had an all-metallic body, including metal face parts, metal fingers and toes, and metal male genitals (he was, in fact, naked). All my clumsy bolt-joints either vanished or turned into nice, solid-looking ones when he was animated. I called him Tony, after another metal man, but mine was a far cry from his fancy metal suit. My guy could barely walk; I had not provided him with much mobility in his joints. It was a start, though. The mannequin in the store could move a little, in the way mannequin limbs moved. I supposed that I needed to figure out how to attach the parts with movable joints, which was a whole other level of construction.

Formal Testing

At one point that summer, Mom and Dad took me and a deanimated Trixie to a secret testing center where someone from NANA evaluated my abilities. They ran me through all kinds of tests, but I did not have most of the abilities these tests looked for. After I animated Trixie, they ran her through some of the same tests, including running the two of us through the same test and different tests at the same time. Then they performed some tests on the two of us together. We had also brought my animated metal man, but he wasn’t even able to do what a regular person could, so we didn’t spend long on that. Finally, they had me take control of a volunteer from the center, and they tested my level of control, they tested what I could see and hear and feel through the volunteer, and they tested control across a long distance (by driving me about a mile away from the center).

But except for regenerating from cuts faster than a normal person, and what they considered a pseudo-telepathic link between my different bodies, they didn’t really find that I had much in the way of powers beyond the obvious ones. If they called on me for something, it was either going to be to animate someone, to take control of a person who had been knocked out, or to be in two or more places at once to relay information where ordinary methods wouldn’t work.

And I did get the code name Dawson.

Ninth Grade

Keeping two characters animated seemed to make the duration of animations increase even faster. At the start of July an animation was lasting three hours and 10 minutes, but by the start of August, it was lasting almost five hours, and by the time school started in late August, it was six and a half hours. Mom had talked about sending Trixie and Jack to school if they were going to be around so much, but she didn’t, because I would have had to recharge them during school. But pretty soon I knew that would not be a problem.

While I was at school, Trixie and Jack stuck around the house and helped Mom with all kinds of chores, and even some cleanup of old junk that she just never seemed to find the time to work at. The time was easier to find when you had two helpers most of the day. But before long she ran out for things for them to do, and so they ended up just doing my regular chores.

By the end of September, Trixie and Jack’s animations were lasting 9 hours each, and if I charged them right before I left for the bus, they were still going when I got home, so now Mom started talking seriously about sending them to school.

“Mom, they’re all just me. They’re not going to learn anything more than I will. We’re going to end up with basically the same grades, and worse, they’ll probably think we’re cheating off each other because our work will be too similar.”

“You have shown the ability to learn things independently with each body at the same time, so I think you will be able to learn more things, and learn the things all of them study better. You can take different elective classes, so you can learn more things.”

“If you do try to enter them into school, they are going to ask for their previous records, and they won’t have any.”

“Friends in NANA can set up histories for them. It will look like they went to school elsewhere, and I’ll give them grades comparable to yours.”

Eventually we compromised and she decided to send Trixie to school, while Jack would remain at home with her. It took a couple weeks to set up all the records and get her enrolled, and by that time Trixie was lasting 10 hours on a charge. I would wake her up with a kind of normal kiss, then before we walked together to the bus, we would both go to our room to pick up our school things and I would give her and Jack each a full charge. This lasted until we got home, with a safe margin, at which time a second charge lasted well into sleeping time.

I was already taking the intro shop class, and they managed to get Trixie into an art class. The two of these together, along with higher-level classes I could take later, would help me learn more about modeling the human body and about using various kinds of tools to construct those models.

There was also a required gym class. Teddy and Trixie had gym at the same time, though the boys and girls in the class split into two separate groups supervised by different coaches. Having Trixie in this class wasn’t a bad thing - she was in good shape and reasonably athletic. But it did mean getting used to the girls’ locker room. Teddy had been around Trixie’s naked body plenty of times, but not around other naked girls. Due to their mental connection, Teddy could now see a room full of naked, showering girls after gym class every day. The problem with that was that Teddy was naked with a bunch of boys at the same time, and viewing those girls even a little gave Teddy an erection. So I avoided this by avoiding having either body look at any naked people as much as possible. This was every teenage boy’s dream, but I had to ignore it.

School also meant Trixie got more clothes. Since she was going to be out where she would meet lots of other kids, she needed to have enough clothes that she wasn’t wearing the same five outfits every week. This meant that she needed her own separate wardrobe. I had to move my computer desk out into the middle of the room, with both wardrobes back-to-back behind it. I barely had room to get around in my room now. I had had the metal body project in my room, though I hadn’t really been working on it lately, but now this had to go out into the garage.

By Thanksgiving, I got 12 hours out of a full charge, so two charges a day kept them going round the clock. I didn’t ever have them drop out of animation unless I wanted them to. Fortunately, I had learned another trick: If I wanted to drop them out, all I had to do was give them a dry kiss. This reset their animation time to the minimum, and within a minute or two they would collapse into the stuffed clothes that they started as. This was handy if I just needed to get rid of one of them for a while, or wanted to animate a different body. Our Thanksgiving dinner was just the five of us, but even at that it was two more people than we would have had in past years, if nobody was traveling. All three of me helped a little preparing some of the food.

Jack did all my chores. He washed laundry for the three of us, helped Mom with the dishes and cooking, mowed, swept, vacuumed, whatever. I had gotten very good now with doing different things with each of my bodies independently, and this led to the result that I had a good amount of free time. Jack also had an identity, though he was supposedly being homeschooled. With two of me in actual school, he was easily able to pass the occasional tests required by the state for all homeschooled students.

Christmas Break

We had a big Christmas, and for the first time invited some of our out-of-town family to come and meet my new selves. I didn’t know until we were discussing plans for Christmas, but it turned out that several of my other relatives had minor powers, which they shared. We told them the truth about Trixie and Jack. The list of people who knew my secret now was Kelly, Mom’s NANA friends who set up our identities, the people at the testing center, and several aunts, uncles, cousins, and one grandmother.

I got a bunch of Christmas presents including some tools of my own, and all three of me got new clothes, but the biggest present was that Mom and Dad were going to add on to the house. They were going to put a new row of three rooms behind the house. Jack would get my old room, I would get a new room directly behind that which connected to a workshop that ran behind the garage, and Trixie would get the room across the hall from mine. This was going to be built over a period of three months, and there would be some disruption but it was for the best in the long run.

I suggested adding a bathroom, and they were able to get the plans modified to squeeze it in between my bedroom and Jack’s. Each of my boy bodies would get a little less space, but it was so much more than I had now that I didn’t care.

Testing Round 2

After the family left, but still during Christmas break, all three of me went back to the testing center. This time, they wanted to test how I was thinking, specifically whether my brain did all the thinking and Trixie’s and Jack’s just controlled basic motor functions, or if I actually thought with all three brains. So all three of us got skullcaps fitted with a variety of sensors roughly equivalent to an EEG, and they separated us and had us do different kinds of activities. They knew what normal brainwaves looked like for the particular kinds of activities they were having us do, and the activities were chosen specifically to make the patterns distinct. So at one point one of me was reading while another was playing a video game and the third was chopping wood. There were other activities as well (including “nothing” - just sitting in a plain white room with a chair and no other features) and we switched around, so two or all three of my bodies did some of the tasks at different times.

What they saw was that each brain primarily focused on the activity that body was doing, but there was also a constant background pattern associated with my telepathy, each of my bodies telling the others what it was experiencing, and there was also a sort of “playback” of the other bodies’ activities. They explained it as each brain was devoting a small amount of time to watching what the others were doing, and sometimes contributing brainpower to the others’ activities. I was using all three brains equally, with about 90% of each brain’s focus being on what that body was doing at the time. If one of them was doing nothing, that one contributed more to the other bodies’ activities. They also noted that all three brains were telepathic, and even when they sealed me in a telepath-proof room apart from the others, Jack and Trixie could communicate information telepathically while Teddy’s brain didn’t get it.

Finally, they did one more test, one I am surprised I hadn’t thought of: They had Jack and Trixie kiss other mannequins and people. It turned out that they had a very limited version of my power, equivalent in strength and duration to what I had during the first week I discovered it. The limitation here was blamed on not practicing it. I was never going to practice it on them to the extent that I used it myself - this would just lead to an ever-growing mob of too many mouths to feed - but I did resolve to have them practice it more. The people they animated were fully in the network; I could access them as much the one activating the person did. Because of this, there was not the disorientation that I experienced in my first week of power, because the whole network took charge of reading, and when appropriate, controlling the new person, and the network was very experienced in doing that. The practice consisted of letting Jack and Trixie animate each other once in a while. This was slow at first, but by the end of the first week, with them doing 2 or 3 sessions a day right before I was due to recharge them, they were giving half-hour animations. They indeed seemed to be gaining skill much like I did.

If my other selves had been more active socially, I might have already discovered this aspect of the power already, but Jack mostly stayed at home or around Mom, and I wasn’t ready for Trixie to be dating other boys. Or at least, I hadn’t been.

Dating Talk

That fall, a couple boys had asked Trixie out on dates, but I declined. I was conflicted on this. I knew that it was normal for a girl Trixie’s age to be dating, even if only in casual, innocent, dates that didn’t go beyond kissing. But I wasn’t sure I wanted any of me to be dating boys at all. I hadn’t originally wanted to be a girl at all. I only did so at first because Mom told me it would be good experience, and only later did I decide it was fun to have part of me be a girl. Over break, Trixie had a good long mother-daughter talk with Mom about this.

“Mom, some guys at school have asked me to go out on dates.”

“Well, I’m not surprised. You’re a nice looking young woman.”

“Yeah, but I’m not sure I want to be dating guys.”

“Do you want to be dating girls instead?”

“No! Well, maybe. It’s complicated. First off, although as Trixie I’m pretty comfortable being a girl, there is still a part of me that is Teddy, and that part of me has no interest whatsoever in dating guys. So maybe I should be dating girls.”

“Well on that count, you’re lucky. It’s more acceptable today for girls to date other girls, as well as for guys to date guys, than it has probably ever been. Gays and lesbians are still rejected by a certain part of society, but the part that accepts them is bigger than it has ever been, their right to not be discriminated against is being affirmed in more and more contexts, and we don’t tolerate abuse or hate speech against gays and lesbians in Normal. There are even some places that now allow people to marry other people of the same sex, though Normal is not one of those places.”

“Well, I’m a long way from that, but I’ll keep it in mind. Second, as Teddy I’m already dating Kelly. What will Kelly think when she finds out that another body I’ve created is dating somebody else? And will this be worse for her if that someone else is a guy or a girl?”

“Trixie, I know Kelly was acting as your being-a-girl coach, so you and Teddy should just talk it over with her. She might actually think that dating is the right next step for you, and she might even help you decide who you should date, or find someone who’s looking who she thinks is a good first date for you. But what I recommend is taking it slow, finding somebody you like who also likes you, and also someone you feel you can trust before you go out on a date with anybody. And feel free to give somebody a ‘maybe’ answer, and talk it over with your friends, but just don’t leave them hanging too long. If you can’t decide, just tell them that you’re not ready yet.”

“Hmm, maybe you’re right.”

“There’s a club at your school that you should be aware of. It’s called GLBTTQ which stands for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, transgendered, and queer.”

“I understand gay and lesbian, though it’s complicated in my case, but what about all the rest of that stuff? What does it all mean?”

“Bisexual is easy. It means a person who dates and/or is sexually attracted to both men and women. A transsexual is a person who changed their body from male to female or female to male to some degree, or who wants to change the gender of their body like this. A transgendered person doesn’t necessarily want to change their body, but they dress or act as the opposite gender. Queer used to be a mean name people called gays, but as I understand it, in the name of an organization like this it’s used to describe any person with gender or sexuality issues not described by one of these other categories.”

“What kind of person would that be?”

“In most of the world it probably means people who some combination of the terms applies to, or who haven’t made up their mind, or who change regularly. There are also asexual people, who just don’t have any sexual attraction to anybody, and genderless people, who don’t really consider themselves male or female.”

“OK, that all makes sense.”

“But I told you that powers sometimes change a person’s appearance. We have within Normal people with both male and female sexual organs, ones who change genders back and forth on a daily basis, and people who are really neither male nor female, not having any of the organs. What do gay, lesbian, transsexual, and transgendered mean for such a person? If the gender switcher likes women when he’s a man and likes men when she’s a woman, does that make that person bisexual or straight? I don’t know if there are any people like that in your school, but if there are, they would fall within this category. Other than you, that is; since you have male and female bodies, you are at least potentially in this category. It would be up to you to decide.”

“Thanks. I was wondering when I asked the question if I fell into the category.”

“There are even more words I have seen used to describe some of these people. One, which also applies to you right now, is questioning, which is generally for people who have been living as heterosexuals but are wondering whether that’s not really what they want to be. The club is for all these people, partly to help them defend one another against anybody who might want to harm them (though I told you that’s not tolerated in Normal), and partly because the nature of some of these people puts their potential mates in the same group.”

“OK, I see. But it is a lot to think about. So assuming Kelly is OK with it, what is the guy who I date going to think when he find out Teddy has to give me a big sloppy kiss twice a day to keep me alive? How could Trixie ever marry someone other than one of me? Maybe I should be dating my other selves; it would avoid that complication, even if it feels weird to basically be dating myself. But so far, the whole thing about any of my selves besides Teddy dating at all still feels weird to me. I’ll definitely ask Kelly, and see what she thinks about it, before I do anything else.”

“I agree. It’s complicated,” Mom replied. “You just figure out what feels right to you. There’s one more thing. How far have you and Kelly gone?”

“You mean like, what we do in private? We kiss and hug and cuddle. We touch some, but not private parts. We haven’t seen each other naked yet. We haven’t been doing anything you don’t see couples do in public sometimes.”

“You might talk to Kelly about some of that; she may be more interested in going farther in that direction than you realize, but take it slow and don’t do anything you don’t feel like you’re ready for. But I bring it up because you’re possibly going to have Trixie dating a high school boy, and some high school boys are kind of aggressive with that sort of behavior. They might touch you in ways you aren’t comfortable being touched, or try to get you to do things you don’t want to do, including sex.”

“Oh. I think you’ve got a point. I’ve been focusing so much on my power, even in my time with Kelly, that she and I haven’t really been dating much in the last year, unless you call what we do when she is hanging around the house dating.”

Matchmaking

January 12, 2008

After break, when I did explain the situation to Kelly, she was almost as conflicted about it as I was.

“You’re right, Trixie, that this is a complicated issue. I’ll tell you right off that it doesn’t feel weird that my boyfriend wants to date somebody else. Every girl thinks their boyfriend wants to date someone else, and many of them think that they are dating someone else, and some of those are right! For most people that’s just being unfaithful, but for you it’s a special case. You have other bodies and I understand that you might want to be able to have these experiences of being close to a person with your other bodies. It is also something society expects of girls Trixie’s age. Everybody at our school besides us doesn’t know that Teddy and Trixie are really one person, and those boys don’t know they are asking Teddy out when they are asking Trixie out. So no, I will not stand in your way if you want Trixie or even Jack to go dating other people, whether they are guys or girls. And I will help you find a date for Trixie if that is what you really want.”

“Thanks, Kelly. I am still not sure I want that, but I do trust you to help Trixie find the right guy, if that is what I decide to do. Of course, it doesn’t necessarily work that way, because guys usually expect to ask girls out.”

“But it can work. Let’s say I know a guy who I really like and trust, but I don’t want to date him only because I want to stay faithful to you, Teddy. If that guy asks me out, or if we’re together in some other social situation where the subject of dating comes up, I can drop the guy a hint that Trixie really likes him and that he should ask her out, and then I tell you to watch for that guy to invite you out on a date and to say ‘yes’ if he does.”

Using Teddy, I responded, “Oh, yeah, thinking about my experience as a guy, I can say that that might work. Maybe not right away, but it would make me look at the girl, anyway.”

Then as Trixie, “I’m going to give you a solid maybe.” She laughed. “Don’t actually do the hinting yet, but at least try to find a guy that you would recommend, and tell me about him first.”

“All right, I’ll do that. One more thing, though. I want another date with Teddy, first. Not because I’m jealous, but because we haven’t been out on a date in more than a year, since you got your power. We’ve grown, and high school kids have different expectations of dates than we did when we were in seventh grade and a ‘date’ was burgers and fries, with one of our parents as chaperone watching us from the next table.”

“Yeah, Mom mentioned something like that to me.”

“What? She’s been spying on us?”

“No, she asked me about how far we’ve gone, as part of a warning that any guy Trixie dates might want to go further. And I realized that, except for revealing my power to you, we haven’t really moved our relationship along since seventh grade.”

“I have a confession to make, Teddy. When you first asked me out, I accepted mostly out of peer pressure. All the other girls seemed to be going out on dates and getting boyfriends and I was worried I was going to be left out, so I jumped at the chance. I came to like you afterward, but I would have accepted a first date from just about any guy at that point.”

“Kelly, that’s actually kind of how it was for me, too. I had actually asked three other girls before you but they were all dating other guys. But I’m glad now that we started dating, because I really like you.”

We kissed, though I kept it simple and dry to avoid taking control of Kelly’s body. And I made the kind of move I thought Mom was suggesting. With one arm around her back, I put the other hand between us, turned so the palm was on her breast. She didn’t stop me, and only seemed to push against me more. When she later pulled my hand off her breast, I thought it was going to be over for now, but she put my hand under her blouse and directly on her bra.

I don’t actually remember how we got there, but at some point her blouse came off, and she was sitting in my lap, back to me, while both my hands were cupping her breasts outside of her bra, and she had her head turned to kiss me. She reached around like she was going to unhook her bra, when she stopped.

“Wait,” she said. “Is this too far, too fast?”

“Maybe. We have some ground to make up, but it’s all right with me if you don’t want to make it all up at once.”

“All right. Let’s stop. But I will need to leave because I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop right now.”

She put her blouse back on, and went to the bathroom to fix her makeup. When she came back, I invited her to an actual date the next Saturday, and she accepted. Then Kelly said goodbye to me and left.

I talked with Dad the next day about how our talk turned into a sort-of date with Kelly. He agreed that we were old enough to go out on a date by ourselves, suggested that I move up to a slightly better grade of restaurant, and go see a movie with her afterward, and come right home after the movie. He also mentioned that boys and girls start doing more touching at my age, but to take it slow. “If she says ‘stop,’ you stop.”

He also suggested I needed some nicer clothes than what I wore all the time, and we went on a short shopping trip to get those. The date was going to be close to Valentine’s Day, so I also got Kelly a card and a small box of fancy chocolates.

---

February 2, 2008

There were several restaurants near where we lived which were in the right price range, so I picked one and we went there. It was nice getting to eat a special meal with Kelly, but apart from holding hands from the time we ordered until the food came, we didn’t do any more touching in the restaurant than we did on any other date. In the theater it was different, though. She leaned over in her seat and put one arm around my back in a kind of hug, which suggested I should do something similar with my arm, so I did. When the couple was kissing on screen, we kissed, too, and briefly I got to watch the movie twice over because of my power.

When the movie credits were running, Kelly whispered to me to stay behind a moment while other people were leaving. Once everybody was past our row on their way out of the theater, she continued, “You didn’t do this during the movie, but Trixie’s dates might.” She grabbed my arm, and put my hand inside the top of her blouse, inside her bra, directly on one breast.

“Now kiss me good,” she requested. So I gave her a kiss just short of what I needed to briefly take control of her. Once we broke the kiss, she continued, “Play with my nipples so you learn what that feels like.”

Trixie had touched her own nipples, so I knew they were sensitive, but Kelly’s somehow seemed twice as sensitive as Trixie’s. I wasn’t sure why. Since I was feeling the results, I could experiment to get it just right. There were two just-right touches that seemed to give equally powerful results. One was a gentle squeeze, just enough to press the sides of the nipple in slightly, and the other was a gliding motion that barely touched the nipple at all.

“Good. That’s about the level of touching I’m ready for now. We can do some more at your house some time. We were almost there last weekend but I got scared, never having had a guy touch my boobs directly.”

This also gave me more ideas about what I could try with Trixie.

---

February 22, 2008

It was three weeks after I set Kelly on the matchmaking task when she told me about Ben Franks. “He’s a really nice guy, kinda shy though. He somehow managed to get up the nerve to ask me out recently, and I told him that I was already seeing Teddy, but if that it wasn’t for that then I would’ve dated him.”

“And did you mean it?”

“Yeah, and he was so broken up over it I thought he would die.”

“Wow. So you think this is going to help him as much as it’s helping me?”

“Probably. And because of his shyness and his emotional state right now, he might not come forward so easily and ask you out. You might need to encourage him a little. You know him, right?”

“Yeah, Teddy has met Ben before, though I’ve barely spoken a word to him.”

“Make sure he sees you, smile at him, maybe even wink at him when you see him looking at you.”

“All right, I will. You go do your part.”

Trixie Has Dates

March 6, 2008

It took another two weeks before he did, but Ben asked Trixie out and she accepted. It was to be dinner and a movie Saturday. That afternoon, when Mom picked us up from school, Trixie told Mom about it.

“That’s great, dear. I hope your date goes well. Do you know what you are going to wear?”

“I thought I might wear my blue dress.”

“I should get you something nicer. Right now you basically only have your casual around-the-house clothes and your school clothes. What did Kelly wear on your last date?”

“Um, I guess it was something nicer.”

“Come on, the stores are still open. We can get you something tonight.”

Mom took Trixie into stores I had never been into. In the third such store she finally found something she was satisfied with. It was a striking yet simple red dress, basically a tube with thin straps at the top, but made of some shiny fabric that reflected the light in interesting ways. This was, however, the kind of thing Kelly wore on our last date, and to the extent we’d had any as opposed to training for Trixie in the last year, those other dates as well. Before we were done, I had new shoes and also a coat, since it was too cold to wear this dress outside without something to cover it. At our next to last stop, Mom put in a pizza order, and we picked it up on the way home. This shopping trip had consumed the time she would have normally spent making dinner.

Mom brought the two large pizzas to the dining room table as Trixie ran upstairs to store her new clothes away in her ever-tighter wardrobe.

As Dad came over to the table, he commented, “I remember when one large pizza was enough to feed our family. I hoped that Teddy would expand the family someday, but I never expected it to happen so soon.” He finished with a chuckle.

“The reason we’re having pizza today,” Mom explained, “is that I had to help Trixie buy some stuff for her date.”

At that moment Trixie was returning to the table, Dad spoke to her in exaggeratedly extended syllables for humorous effect. “Oooooh. A daaaate! Who’s the lucky boy? Or girl, if that’s what you’re into.”

“It’s a boy. Ben Franks.”

“Franks? Too bad, he almost has a name that means money.” Everybody got the joke and laughed.

“I guess it would be even funnier if he really was named Ben Franklin,” Trixie added. “Can you imagine going through life with everybody singing ‘It’s All About the Benjamins’ around you every day?” More laughter ensued.

After that everybody got down to the serious business of eating pizza.

The next day when Trixie met Kelly at school, she told her about the date, and also about the dress Mom had bought her.

“Oh, that’s great, Trixie. I was going to ask you about that since I know it’s your first date.”

“Well, I think Mom’s taking care of me.”

“I still want to be over there Saturday afternoon to help you get ready for the date. What time is he picking you up?”

“At 5:30.”

“OK, I’ll see you at 2 then.”

“OK,” Trixie replied, but what I was thinking was “At 2? What sort of getting ready required three and a half hours? Shower, put on the dress, shoes, makeup, perfume. How could that take more than an hour?”

---

March 8, 2008

She showed me. Saturday I discovered I had my first hair salon appointment. I didn’t really know what I wanted my hair to look like, so I let Kelly and Mom and the stylist pick something they thought looked good on me. That, and the travel to and from the place, took an hour and a half. And even though the dress and shoes were already chosen, Kelly had to pick out my underwear. This was the first time anybody but Mom and my selves had ever gone through any of my selves’ underwear drawers, and since I’d gotten old enough to do my own laundry, Mom didn’t even do that any more. I told her that this was a first date and the dress was definitely not coming off, but she insisted. And after doing makeup and redoing parts of it and touching it up several times, and some role-play with Kelly acting as Ben to ensure I knew exactly how to behave around Ben, I was ready to go just as he rang the doorbell at precisely 5:30.

Neither of us had a car, but it was only a half-mile walk to an Italian restaurant which was near the theater we would visit afterward. We shared antipasto and I chose a risotto entree while he had a beefy rigatoni. We shared a little of each others’ entrees, and then he had a tiramisu dessert while I had a gelato.

We had two choices for a movie that was neither a kids’ movie, nor one that one of us had already seen, and started within a reasonable time. The choices were a romantic comedy and an action film, and Ben somewhat sheepishly suggested the comedy while I could tell he really wanted to see the action movie. I, however, was not sure I was really ready to see a romantic movie, even a comedy, as a girl, with a boy. When I suggested the other movie I could see Ben was happy for that choice.

Ben was a perfect gentleman during the entire date. We kissed, not for too long (so I only got some of Ben’s feelings and not control of his body), and hugged, without him trying to get too grabby, and he walked me back to my house a little after 10. I actually would have preferred if he had been a little more grabby; he seemed cold, and not very interesting to be with. He seemed to have a hard time speaking to me. I had to keep the conversation going during our travel and dinner, which was really ironic for me, the girl who had only been alive for a year and was having a date for the first time, but it was probably his first date too. During the movie, it was fine that we weren’t talking, but he didn’t try to hold hands with me, he didn’t look at me, and it felt like I was watching the movie alone.

So when Dad asked me how it went, I had to tell him it was actually a little boring. It was, however, a success in that I was never afraid or uncomfortable to be out on a date with a boy, but it was possible that was only true because so much of the time it didn’t even feel like I was out on a date. After I described it to him, he agreed with me, and thought maybe Ben was just too afraid to be more forward. Maybe Ben needed a little more encouragement - though of course, I had to be careful not to encourage him too much. So for instance, in response to him ignoring me during the movie, I should have grabbed his arm from where it was crossed in front of him and pulled it down to the armrest between us.

In the end, I resolved to give Ben another chance, but I’d talk to him first and tell him why I thought it wasn’t a good date. I guess I’d try to be his date coach, a little, in the way that Kelly was for me.

---

March 29, 2008

Three weeks later, Ben and Trixie had a second date. Mom got me a second nice dress and matching shoes, and I went through much of the same hours of prep.

Though he got me a rose this time, the date itself was still very sterile. Ben and I did see a romantic movie this time, which I hoped would get him to interact with me more. It didn’t work. Ben actually fell asleep during the movie, and when I noticed that, I gave him a solid elbow to his shoulder.

“Huh, what?” he said upon waking.

“Pay attention,” I whispered sharply to him.

“To you, or the movie?” he whispered back.

“Either one!”

This worked for a little bit. He put his arm around my shoulders at that point and the next time the couple on screen kissed, he kissed me, but after he did so he pulled his arm back and went back to watching the movie alone.

So that was our last date.

---

April 19, 2008

I didn’t ask Kelly to set me up again immediately, and I didn’t have to. Two other guys asked me out, but based on what I had observed of their behavior at school, I thought both were jerks, and I declined. But when Matt Freeman asked me out, I agreed to go on a date with him.

Matt’s date started out pretty well. He at least was paying attention to me. He had flowers and he hugged and kissed me at the door, and was chatty during dinner and also played footsie with me. Hooray for slip-on shoes! But he got way too grabby during the movie. The first time he tried to put his hand inside the top of my dress, maybe 5 minutes after the movie started, I pulled it out gently. Kelly and I had done that, but we’d been dating for years. This was a first date!

It was only a few minutes later and his hand was back there. I tried to give him a hint by pulling his hand out and putting it on my breast on the outside of my dress. I also, through Teddy, asked Mom what I should do. She told me that I was being very reasonable in trying to draw the line on how intimate I wanted to be with him, and that I should tell him directly.

So the third time his hand was partially on my bra and partially in my cleavage, I pulled his face toward me and told him, “Matt, this is a first date. I know you want to touch me, but keep your hands outside my clothes for now.” He pulled his hand back, but returned it only minutes later. I removed it again and told him, “Last warning.” The fifth time, I walked out of the theater, into the lobby, and through Teddy I asked my parents to come pick me up. Matt followed and apologized, realizing what he had done wrong, but I had had it with him, and went home when Dad showed up.

“Sorry your date didn’t go so well,” Dad said during the ride home.

“Yeah. It’s just weird, going from the guy who won’t pay any attention to me to the guy who keeps trying to get inside my clothes.”

“Yeah, it’s tough sometimes. Teddy was really lucky to get along with Kelly so well. You see that it is not always as easy as it was for them.”

“Yes, I do see, now.”

“I also want to reassure you that the kind of thing Matt was doing is pretty common behavior after a couple gets to know each other better, but what you did was fine for a first date. The kind of guy who can’t respect your limit on a first date is likely to have the same problem later on.”

“Yes, that is exactly what I was afraid of. Exactly why I was hesitant to date guys at all at first. Just the way a lot of guys talk made me worry about going out on a date with one.”

The Dance

April 26, 2008

The next time Kelly came to visit, I had Trixie tell her all about the date, and all three of me were crying by the end. While Kelly was consoling Trixie, as Teddy I asked her, “Do you think it’s normal for my guy selves to cry just as much as Trixie when she’s telling this story?”

After a moment, Kelly replied, “Maybe? I don’t know. Like most girls, I have never been a guy, and I have never shared my mind with a guy the way your group does, Teddy. But you really feel like Trixie is a part of you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Then it’s fine. I know I might cry thinking about something like that, like a guy touching me in ways that I didn’t want. And imagine if the guy had touched one of your guy selves that way. I would totally understand if you had been crying while telling that story.”

“Ew! OK. Thanks for the confirmation. I’m still confused by some of this stuff.”

With a sly glance, Kelly added, “I wouldn’t cry if you touched me that way.”

“Yes, I think you made that clear the other day.”

As Teddy, I took the invitation, stepped behind Kelly, put my arms around her and slipped both of them inside the neckline of her loose blouse and put one hand over each breast.

Kelly asked, “Why did it take so long for us to get beyond kissing and hugging?”

“I don’t know. I think we were both unsure of the whole thing when we started. I know last time we talked about how we dated at first, both of us, just to keep from feeling left out.”

“Yeah. We were both as shy as Ben during that first date, with my dad there as chaperone.”

“But we stuck with it, initially because of the peer pressure and later because we grew into each other. But we got comfortable in this kissing-and-hugging stage, and just stuck with it. And then, of course, my powers came, and we both got involved with exploring those rather than exploring each other,” I said while I played with Kelly’s nipples.

“That feels nice, Teddy. Put your hands inside my bra and actually touch my nipples.”

As I did that, Kelly turned her head as far to the right as she could, so I could kiss her. I accepted the invitation, giving her a kiss just wet enough that I would get to feel what she felt for a bit, so I could feel what she was feeling and touch her just right. After a few minutes, I had her moaning softly and when she got to the point that she was gasping, she pulled my hands off her.

When she got her breath back, Kelly said, “Teddy, that was amazing. We have really been missing something by not doing this. But I don’t think I can take any more of that now.”

“We were talking about Trixie,” I reminded her.

“Oh, yeah. Her date.”

I had Teddy’s body step away and sat Trixie next to Kelly. “I’m wondering if I’d like it better with another girl. Teddy likes girls, after all.”

Kelly surprised me by asking, “Trixie, would you like to go to a dance with me?”

“Um, sure, I guess. Yes.”

“GLBTTQ is having a dance the Saturday after next. I’d like to go with you.”

As Teddy, I replied, “How come you know about GLBTTQ’s schedule?”

“I was always a little curious how it would be to be with another girl. And I was not getting from you what I had started to think I should be getting from a guy, so I was considering my options. I think you’ve resolved that nicely now, though. But to answer your implied question, no, I’m not seeing any girl. I started doing some checking on the club. Since Trixie is curious also, I thought it would be a good opportunity to try it. And you’ll still get to date me, just in a different body.”

“OK, sure. Let’s do that.”

Kelly approached Trixie and kissed her. Soon it was much more than that. I had to take Teddy out of there because he was stiff as a rod. Even outside the room, I could not block out the signals I was getting from Trixie, and from Kelly as well, due to how slobbery they were being in there; the feelings were too strong. I deanimated Jack and sat Teddy on the toilet, the cleanest way to dispose of the result that I knew was coming. I had learned how to block out, for instance, Trixie’s view of naked girls in the locker room to avoid Teddy getting inappropriately aroused, but this was more than I could ignore.

Kelly and Trixie both ended up topless, and Kelly actually sucked on Trixie’s nipples, before trading off and inviting Trixie to do the same. Finally they stopped, both breathless and soaked with sweat.

“We’re obviously not going to be able to do that during the date, Trixie, but that was amazing and I want to do it again sometime.”

“With Teddy?” Trixie suggested.

“Oh yeah, with him too. Definitely. Not right now, but some time.”

Kelly put her clothes back on, and went to the bathroom to clean up, while I came back into the room to help Trixie clean up.

When Kelly came back, she said, “Now this time, I’m not going to help Trixie get ready. It’s up to you, your mom, your other selves, or whoever to get you ready. But I’m sure you’ll do well.”

---

May 3, 2008

The day of the dance was here before I knew it. I had two nice dresses from my other dates, and considered reusing one of them for the date with Kelly, but Mom said I needed a different kind of dress for dancing, so the weekend before the dance she got me one. This time, like my second date dress but unlike my first one, we had time to have it altered to fit perfectly.

She had invited me, and the dance wasn’t within walking distance, so Kelly’s mom drove her to my place, where they picked me up, and drove us to the dance.

Kelly looked amazing. She hadn’t dressed up this nice for her dates with Teddy... but then I realized that those weren’t dances. Before I got my powers, I was afraid to go to a dance; I thought I didn’t dance well, and I’d embarrass myself. And since then, Kelly and I had barely done any dating.

“Is that a new dress, Kelly?”

“Yes. I see yours is new, too. It looks very nice.”

“Thank you. Let’s go in.”

I wasn’t sure what to expect inside. And I still wasn’t sure what I was seeing once I got in. There was no consistent theme to the decorations. There were hearts, and some decorations that looked left over from Valentine’s Day. Some of them were definitely left over from Easter. There were some pairs of crossed male symbols and crossed female symbols, as well as a single symbol which was a blend of the male and female signs, I guess for the transitioning ones.

Of course, there were boy-boy, girl-girl, and apparent boy-girl couples. At this kind of dance I couldn’t be too sure about some of those. There was one “girl” there I recognized as a boy I knew in school, and a “boy” I knew was a girl; both were dancing with people who seemed to be boys. The boy who was dressed as a girl had what I now understood to be D-sized breasts; I wondered what he had stuffed them with, because they looked much more natural than the breasts did on deanimated Trixie.

Mostly, though, I was surprised how many people were there. There were only about 1200 kids in my school but there must have been over 100 here. I didn’t recognize a lot of them, though; some of them might have just been older kids I didn’t know, and some people probably brought dates who went to other schools.

We danced several dances. Kelly led, at first, but later she had me lead.

There were also a few people who had obviously been changed by their powers. One of them was a bird-girl, covered head to toe in white feathers. I guessed a girl, anyway, since she was wearing a dress. Later, when I was in the ladies’ room, waiting for Kelly to finish doing her business, the bird-girl came in, in a rush. She had some sort of plastic thing in her mouth she was inflating, but there weren’t any stalls open, so she grew more agitated and continued inflating the thing.

“Are you in line?” the bird-girl asked me.

“No. I’m just waiting for a friend. You’re first in line,” I replied.

“Oh, good. My egg can wait a few minutes, but not too long.”

“Oh, I noticed you seemed to be a bird, but I didn’t realize you would be that much of one. I have powers too. My name’s Trixie.”

“I’m Bella. What’s your power?”

“I can animate other bodies. Except this is an animated body; my original body is at home.” I didn’t tell her that the original body was a boy.

“Cool. Well I’m a bird, I can fly (though not in this dress; I actually have to be able to spread my wings). I don’t have much else for powers. I don’t have periods, but once a month I lay a big egg.”

“What’s the inflatable thing for?” It was now clear that the device was about the size and shape of a large cooking pot, with a thin ring protruding sideways two inches all the way around the top, and had inflated to be about an inch thick all over.

“It’s an egg-catcher. I always carry this with me in case I have to lay an egg when I’m away from home. It cushions the egg and keeps it out of the toilet water.”

“Oh, I guess it makes sense, if you’re out, that the toilet is the sensible place to do it. Just how big is this egg?”

“It’s about the size of a football, but egg-shaped instead of being pointy-ended.”

“Wow! Does it hurt?”

“It did the first time I laid an egg, but now it comes out pretty easily.”

“Does this egg-catcher mean that mean you’re saving the egg to take home to hatch?”

“Oh, goodness no. These eggs aren’t fertilized, but just like chickens, I lay eggs all the time anyway. Thankfully not every day like chickens. I save the egg so I can eat it.”

“You eat your own egg?”

“It’s my doctor’s recommendation. The egg has enough nutrients to make a baby about the size of a 5th or 6th month preemie, we think, and every month after laying, my body hoards nutrients to start building the next egg. Since that happens every month, the effect on my nutrition is like being permanently pregnant with quintuplets. He gave me three choices if I didn’t want to end up malnourished: Take some expensive supplements my family can’t afford, eat triple meals for a week each month, or eat my eggs. I could afford the triple meals, but it would mean basically doing nothing but cooking, eating, and pooping for that week. So instead I cook my egg, making seven large omelets, and I eat one for breakfast each day for a week. They refrigerate OK that way.”

While she was saying that, Bella squatted down, reached up under her dress, and removed her panties.

“Um, Bella, how soon will you lay your egg?”

“As soon as I can get into one of these stalls. It’s ready. Once I start, it only takes a minute or two and it’ll be out. You want to take a look?”

“Actually, my request is a little more personal than that, but I’m really curious. In addition to animating bodies, I can temporarily feel what another person is feeling, and since I think this is a rare chance to experience something different, I’m interested. Will you let me do that?”

“Go right ahead.”

“In order to do this, I have to kiss you.”

She puckered up, which I took as an invitation and kissed her, enough of a kiss to get 5 to 10 minutes of her feelings. About this time, Kelly came out of her stall, and Bella went in.

“I heard you talking with the bird-girl,” Kelly said while washing her hands.

“Yeah. Crazy power, huh?”

“Definitely. As much as I hate periods, I would rather keep my period than do what she’s doing. I’m surprised you want to feel that even without the benefit of not having a period.”

“I just wanted to know what it would feel like. Oh! She’s pushing it out now. It feels like there’s a basketball in... my vagina. Or in my ass. Like those two are split open and the basketball is moving down the combination of them both. I’m going to have to wait here until she’s done, because this is intense. Oh, oh, ohhh! And she says it doesn’t hurt! There, it’s out.”

About 30 seconds later, I went back to the dance with Kelly, but I was still experiencing Bella’s senses. She stood up, wiped the egg off with toilet paper, then removed the entire egg-basket from the toilet and set it on top of a large bundle of toilet paper she had spread on the floor. She now sat down on the toilet and wiped herself as well. Then she stayed there to use the toilet normally, which turned out to also be in the manner of a bird. She didn’t pee, but a whitish a pasty mess came out of her butt. After some more wiping, she finally went to wash up. She put the egg in an otherwise empty compartment in her oversized purse, and she was deflating the egg-catcher when my feelings of her faded.

There were no other such distractions, and soon the dance was over. We filed out, found Kelly’s mom’s car eventually among all the other cars arriving to pick people up, and we both went to our respective homes. At my house, Kelly accompanied me to the door, and I gave Kelly a good wet smooch just before we parted, one that would let me keep experiencing her senses until she was home and then some.

The Workshop

The week after the dance, the first week in May, the house expansion was finally finished and it was time for me to move in. With the three of me and Mom and Dad helping, it didn’t take long. My stuff went into my room, Trixie’s into hers, and my tools, experiments, and building supplies (many of them previously in the garage) went into the workshop. We set up Trixie’s mattress on my old bed frame, and I was going to have to keep sharing with Jack for a little while longer, while my parents were getting another bed delivered for me. Jack was going to keep the large bed, as he had the least other stuff in his room.

Seeing the bird-girl and others at the dance had reminded me of the fact that I could animate modified bodies, and made me wonder how far I could take it. It also reminded me of my neglected metal body project.

Although the workshop was attached to my room, I intended to have Jack working in there during the school day when he didn’t have other chores to do. The first task was to do something useful with that robot body. When I started filling up my room with stuff for three people, I had to leave this out in the garage, where there wasn’t enough space to work with it easily. Now there was finally space.

Jack removed the arms and legs. Instead of the fixed duct corners as shoulders and hips, he replaced them with short sections of the springy, flexible kind of ductwork. And instead of attaching them directly to the body, they were attached to plates, each of which was fastened to the body with a short but thick bolt, with large washers on each side and two in the middle, to make a sort of pivoting joint. The head was attached to the neck in a similar manner. For now, I didn’t supply the robot with any genitalia; it had come out male when animated before.

Jack was capable of animating bodies for hours at a time now, so once all the modifications were complete, he did so. But he found that the robot’s other joints - the elbows, wrists, knees, and ankles - were still stiff. More trips to the hardware store and days of work installed similar fixtures in all these joints, and soon I had a robot body that was capable of moving in all the ways a normal human body could. It seemed a little unnatural, though. Although I’d been calling it a robot, I was going for “walking suit of armor.” What I got actually ended up looking more like a robot. I needed to think about how I could make it look better. Were the joints still not made right? Or maybe it was the proportions. In the summer when I had more time, I would look at it.

More Animations

I also did more experiments to see if I could modify my own body, that is, Teddy’s body; I consider Jack’s and Trixie’s bodies also to be mine. Sticking parts on and trying to animate them didn’t work, no matter whether it was Teddy or one of the others animating. So instead, I tried wearing some of Trixie’s clothes. I stripped off all my other clothes, and put on one of Trixie’s loose, summer dresses, one that Teddy’s body fit into. I filled in the top with some spare breast forms. Then I tried it. I licked my hand a little, then pressed that down on top of one of the breasts.

And for the first time ever, it worked. I animated my own body, turning it into a duplicate of Trixie’s, turning those breasts real. I was all female down below, too. In order to run more tests, I immediately ran the deanimation test. I gave my finger the lightest tiny dab of a lick and pressed it against the dress where it was covering one of my new breasts. That worked; in a minute or two, the animation faded and I was back to just being a cross-dressing Teddy.

This was great. I experimented some more, and found that it needed to be a full set of clothes, either a dress or a top and a bottom of whatever sort. A bikini worked, though, so it wasn’t based on a portion of the body covered. And wearing my clothes didn’t work. Of course, I had been wearing my clothes before when I tried this, so I figured it wouldn’t. There was always the possibility, though, that I had developed or unlocked for myself a new ability.

It worked with the others, too. If Jack put on a set of my clothes, he could reanimate himself into a copy of me. Trixie could wear Jack’s clothes and become a copy of him. At one point all three of us existed as reanimated versions of others of us. At this point, before I forgot who was who, I decided to deanimate all the reanimations and go down to just single animations except for one experiment at a time. With that single experiment, by reanimating a body just before it was due to expire, I discovered that the reanimation actually extended the animation time. When the reanimation ran out, and the original animated body returned, it would have left the time which was left before that body got reanimated. I also discovered I could go more levels deeper, and those deeper levels could involve bodies already used. I mean that Trixie could reanimate into Jack, then re-reanimate into Trixie, who would become the first Trixie again after two animations ran out. This provided a sort of emergency time extension for my animated bodies, assuming they had practiced enough to have any real time of their own. And it was different from when I reanimated a body in its own clothes, or naked: That didn’t work at all if the body tried to reanimate itself, and it replaced, rather than extended, the time if another body did the deed.

I experimented more with different clothes, as well. When I first started animating Trixie and Jack, I discovered that both new and used-but-resold clothes generated Jack’s body for boy clothes, and Trixie’s for girl clothes. That still worked that way; I could make an army of Jacks and Trixies if I wanted. Borrowed clothes, on the other hand, generated a copy of the owner. Kelly “borrowed” clothes from her other family members for me, and I was able to create copies of them, and it also worked for a dress Mom borrowed from one of her friends one time. What about rented clothes? When I was getting ready to go to the year-end dance with Kelly, Dad rented me a tuxedo to wear. I tried animating it, wondering who I’d get when the owner was a store rather than a person, but I just got Jack.

Teddy’s Dance

May 31, 2008

I stopped fooling around with my power and, as Teddy, I went to a regular dance with Kelly. This was not the prom, which was reserved for juniors and seniors only, but the last dance of the year for the other classes before prom, and it had become unofficially the lower class prom, and most of the juniors and seniors who would attend the prom only two weeks later skipped this one.

Now that I had had more practice dancing, I enjoyed myself much more here. Kelly and Trixie had taken turns leading, so I got practice in both roles, and the practice leading was now proving useful.

At this dance, as I expected, there were few GLBTTQ members, and even fewer who came as same-sex couples. In fact, there were just two, one gay couple and one lesbian couple, who were somewhat hiding that fact by switching off. One dance same sex, the next guys with girls, and the third guys with girls but paired differently. In any case the four of them always stayed close.

I didn’t run into obviously powered people during the dance, and didn’t borrow the senses of anybody else at the dance besides Kelly. We just went and enjoyed ourselves. Kelly’s mom took us to the dance, and my mom picked us up and brought us home. Kelly did give me a special treat, though, in secret. I gave her an especially slobbery kiss as we dropped her off at her house, and she went into her bathroom and masturbated about 10 minutes later, just enough time for me to get home, but when she knew I’d still be picking up her feelings. Trixie and Jack shut her out, since this was meant for me, but I had to go into the bathroom myself, stripping out of my tux quickly. I came on the toilet twice with the intensity of the feelings I was getting from Kelly before the connection faded.

---

June 1, 2008

Kelly and I had a long phone call the next day. Naturally the subject of her little after-gift came up.

“I mean, I did enjoy it, but it was unexpected.”

“Teddy, I figured you were inviting that by giving me a kiss I knew would have you feeling my feelings for an hour or more.”

“Well, I hadn’t intended to. I was just trying to say goodbye properly after our first dance... the first with Teddy involved, anyway. A step forward in our relationship.”

“OK, maybe we should set up some signals, then.”

“Like a safeword?”

“Yes. If I understand that correctly, that’s supposed to be a code word that means really stop.”

“Yes. Kelly, I think that’s a good idea. I know we’ve both felt like we were going too far sometimes, so let’s set a safeword that means stop all things leading toward sex, pull away from each other, and take a moment to look at what we were doing. And if I give the safeword after a kiss, it means it was only supposed to be a kiss.”

“I agree. Do you have a good safeword?”

I thought for a moment, but when I chose it I knew it was right. “Basketball egg.”

Kelly burst out laughing. “Oh, God, yes that would make me stop. I didn’t experience that the way you did, but the description alone was priceless. I don’t know how you survived.”

“It didn’t actually hurt much. Remember, it didn’t actually stretch any part of me that wide, it just let me feel what Bella was feeling. And what she felt was this wide opening, really an absurdly wide opening, but only a tiny twinge of pain as the widest part of the egg passed through the narrowest part of her. Her body is no doubt modified in a way adapted to doing that.”

“I guess I can understand that. So it’s agreed, basketball egg is our safeword. Either of us says that and we stop what we’re doing, pull apart if we are touching in any way, and if you’ve just grabbed my feelings with a kiss I don’t do anything in response specifically to send you the feelings.”

The character in this story was introduced as an encounter in The Kissing Bandit. I later decided the character deserved a background of her own. Normal started as a way of reconciling the inconsistencies.

Changing

I’m Ben Plover. I was a perfectly ordinary thirteen-year-old boy until it happened. Actually, until two things happened. Where most boys grew hair on their body, I started growing feathers. And I started turning into a girl!

Both of these changes started around the same time, over the Christmas holidays during my eighth-grade year in school. I’d always been blond, but on the morning of December 23rd, I woke up to find that I had hair covering my arms, legs, chest, pretty much my whole body except my face, palms, soles of my feet, and genitals. White hair. Not blond, but really white like I had bleached it. It was about a half inch long most places that it grew, but at this point it didn’t seem any different from normal hair.

Since I’d gone from barely anything to that overnight, I asked Dad at breakfast, “I know you said I’d start growing hair, but I didn’t expect it to grow so fast!”

It was only at that point he looked up at me. “Wow, that is a lot of hair to have so fast!”

Mom arrived shortly after that. “Hmm, that doesn’t seem normal.”

Dad nodded in agreement.

“Let me know if you see any other changes, honey,” Mom continued.

By evening, I had in fact noticed more changes. My balls had retracted into my body, and it seemed like my penis was smaller. When I somewhat sheepishly mentioned these to Mom, she had Dad go examine me in private.

He had me hold it out to its full limp length. That was only 3 inches. I’m sure it was longer before but I didn’t have any measurements.

He left the ruler in the bathroom and told me, “I don’t know how big your penis was before; it’s not impossible for this to be normal for your age, but it should, if it changes measurably, be getting bigger. You measure it once a day so we can track it. Also, if you can, measure it when it’s hard. Do you think you can do that if I leave you alone for a moment?”

“I’ll try.”

He left, and I sat on the toilet but I was unable to get an erection no matter what I did or thought of. I pulled my pants up and told Dad so. He went into his room somewhere and came back with a nudie magazine which was as old as me. But, however old it was, it had naked women in it. I returned to the bathroom with that, and still I was unable to get an erection, which I reported back to him, an hour after our examination began.

---

December 24, 2006

When I woke up the next morning, my changes had accelerated. The “hair” all over my body was now fuzzy. Not like normal hair any more. It seemed like it actually covered a portion of my body now. And I didn’t need a ruler to know my penis was shorter. There was barely anything to it now. And where my balls were, there was less than nothing. A small indentation.

Dad said, “You’re developing powers. And for some reason your powers are turning you into a girl.”

“A fuzzy girl,” Mom added.

“What’s this about powers?”

Mom replied. “Our city, Normal, isn’t actually all that normal. A long time ago, a meteor struck here, and since then, people have sometimes developed strange powers.”

“How come I’ve never heard about this?”

“Two reasons. First, we keep it very low-profile, and try to avoid talking about it where anybody who’s not in on what is a rather open secret around Normal. We don’t tell kids until we think they need to know, and we absolutely do not tell outsiders. And second, a long time ago they cast a spell to keep our secret. Some people’s powers change their appearance, but the spell would keep anybody who doesn’t already know about the powers from being able to see the changes, if they knew the person already, or anything abnormal, if they first met them after the change.”

Dad added, “And what Mom just told you let you in on the secret, so you may now notice some of your classmates or other people in Normal who look different. Don’t go commenting on it in public, but do tell the person when you see them in private. Although with your obvious changes, they will probably already know. But take the opportunity to make friends, or renew your friendship with that person. And if you keep changing, you might have to reintroduce yourself because your friends may not recognize you.”

“Oh, that’s going to be terrible!” and I started crying, literally crying.

“Honey, it’ll be OK,” Mom said, wrapping me in a hug.

Dad changed the subject, or at least got us back to where this conversation started. “Given your description of what you look like now, you might want to have Mom examine you from now on.”

And I cried some more.

---

December 25, 2006

Merry Christmas! I woke up to my new body.

My body now looked completely white. Even on my head, my blond hair had been replaced by the shorter white hair, which had gotten longer. Examining the “hair” showed it was actually small feathers, 1/4 inch wide and up to an inch long. And as for my genitals, there was nothing. No penis, just a slit between my legs. In fact, that was the only thing down there, besides feathers.

Mom took me into the bathroom, with the intention of giving me a lesson in female biology. But she got as much of a lesson as I did. What she found in that slit was not what she expected.

There were supposed to be two holes inside that slit, and there were. But they were deeper inside the slit than she expected.

So we stopped and did some research. Specifically, on the reproductive systems of birds. We learned a lot, and at the same time still had questions.

Some female birds have parts that correspond to mine. They have a vagina similar in function to the human one, but it’s the hole in front. The hole in back is the cloaca, which is sort of the butt, but that weird bird poop comes out, which is actually a mixture of both pee and poop.

Some male birds don’t have penises. They just have a hole they squirt from during mating season, directly into the female after lining up and opening their slits. This hole is in about the same spot as the vagina in females, so it’s almost impossible to tell male and female birds of these species apart from their genitals. In those species the sexes usually have different coloration or other body characteristics, not that that helps with my one-of-a-kind anatomy. A few kinds of birds do have penises, and I saw a really crazy thing about goose penises that Mom and I both decided was better to stop reading.

Because of how far inside my slit this hole was, Mom thought it was likely males of my kind of bird would have penises, but we couldn’t be sure I was female until a doctor examined me. Likewise, I didn’t have any breast development, and my nipples had disappeared under the feathers, but that also didn’t mean much. Birds don’t breast-feed. There is a part of the body called the breast, but it doesn’t make milk, and indeed birds have no nipples. So I still didn’t know whether I had turned female on top of being a bird.

Later the day, I confirmed I now poop like a bird. When I did, the slit opened up pretty wide. This meant I could actually poop in the toilet like a normal person, rather than mashing it all over inside the slit. It was easily wide enough for me to reach in there and wipe myself after I went. And I learned from that how to open up the slit for me and Mom to more easily examine my parts, but it didn’t actually help confirm anything.

Testing

December 27, 2006

Mom made some calls yesterday and ultimately found somebody to properly examine me today.

At 9 AM sharp we arrived at a NANA testing facility. They ran me through a full battery of tests to look for various kinds of powers without finding anything. They didn’t assume that because I grew feathers that I would just be able to fly; they checked all the kinds of powers they had seen and could easily test for. I could run just typically well for a teenager. I healed a little better than normal, but not enough for them to call it a power. They did decide my hearing and vision were enhanced. “Eyes like a hawk” applied literally to me and I learned how I could focus on tiny details.

They spent quite a while trying to see if I could fly. Since I was turning into a bird, they thought it might happen, but for now it seemed I was a flightless one. They also tried to help me try out any form of transformation ability that might let me be more birdlike as opposed to birdman-like. But nothing happened.

Lastly, I got a physical examination. The doctor performing the examination, Dr. Zbigniew (which was pronounced pretty much like it looked except the W was pronounced as a V), introduced another man, one I recognized. Dr. Woods was a local veterinarian. He was serving as a consultant to explain avian anatomy, to help the main doctor understand what he was looking at. He confirmed I was female and that the hole in front was my vagina. He stuck a tool into my vagina and shined a light to look inside. That felt really weird and a little uncomfortable, but ultimately he decided I was OK in there. He suggested it was possible I might be able to become pregnant, but more likely I would lay eggs rather than carry a baby for nine months. All in all, he said that a lot of my internal anatomy had undergone changes to the form of many birds. My bones were lighter and more hollow, with a network of smaller bones in the place of some of the larger bones found in a human body. I didn’t seem to be any particular kind of bird, though; I was an amalgam of different types of birds. As a result, they didn’t really know what to expect, so Dr. Woods gave me a tutorial in the reproductive systems of birds.

“First off, some birds have sex like humans and most mammals. Your parents have explained that, I hope?”

“Yes. A penis goes into a vagina. I am not sure how I feel about that.”

“Well, nobody’s pressuring you to have sex now, but you can. When you do, because your vagina and cloaca are recessed 3 inches inside your cloacal slit, you may need to help your partner find the right hole. I can’t guarantee sex will be pleasurable for you, or even that you would prefer vaginal sex over the other way, but if you do want to get pregnant, your partner will need to find your vagina.”

“OK. Good to know, I guess.”

“As I was saying, some birds have sex that way, but in other species of birds the males don’t really have a penis, and the mating pair just arranges themselves so that the male can squirt his semen into the female.”

“Mom and I found that when she was trying to help me figure out what I was.”

“Because of your anatomy and your potential partners, that’s unlikely to apply; your partner would have a penis.”

I nodded, still not sure how I felt about that, but accepting the fact.

“Now it is possible you’ll get pregnant and carry a child like people do. Your pelvis has changed rather into the shape of a woman’s, which would allow a child to be born live through it. In fact, the opening is larger than in a normal woman, and it probably means you would have no difficulty or pain whatsoever in giving birth to a full-term human baby. If this is how your body works, then you’ll probably have periods like any normal human girl and your mother will be able to explain that.”

“I got the basics of that. I am sure there is more I didn’t hear about because I wasn’t a girl before, but she can tell me.”

“However, the pelvic bone is also modified to be shaped more like the ones in the larger varieties of birds, so I think you’re more likely to lay eggs. If that’s the case, you probably won’t have periods. The wide pelvis might just mean you are going to lay large eggs comparable to those of an ostrich. Here’s a chart showing typical sizes of large birds and their eggs, all sizes based on females.”

Bird	Height	Weight	Egg diameter	Egg length
Ostrich	6’ 1”	220 lb	5.1”	5.9”
Emu	5’ 7”	82 lb	3.5”	5.1”
Cassowary	5’ 5”	129 lb	3.7”	5.4”
Rhea	4’ 11”	55 lb	3.5”	5.1”
Emperor Penguin	3’ 8”	65 lb	3.3”	4.8”
Turkey	3’ 0”	30 lb	1.8”	2.3”

“Out of these,” I commented, “The cassowary looks closest in size to a woman, and the eggs are... pretty big!

“Yes, a little smaller in diameter than the head of a full term baby, and much shorter than one. Fortunately, your large cloacal slit and pelvic hole, combined with the rounded shape of eggs, means you should have less difficulty laying eggs than a woman does giving birth.”

“But won’t the baby be tiny, then?”

“Yes. Do realize, though, that birds fill essentially the entire space inside the egg before they are born. If you lay an egg the size of the cassowary, you may hatch a child from it who has a head 3 inches in diameter and who is 12 to 14 inches tall. Assuming your child has human form, anyway. A child that small may need special care after hatching.”

I sighed. “So I could end up with a bird child?”

“Anything’s possible. Your body is large enough to potentially lay an egg even larger than the ostrich’s, one which could hold a nearly full-term human. There’s no way to know more until you have one, though.”

“That’s a little scary.”

“You could find out sooner than you think. Egg laying birds fall into three varieties, which you may be any of. The first type, which is most common, has certain fertile periods, often once or twice a year. If you get fertilized by a compatible male during those times, you’ll lay one or more eggs probably one to three weeks after the sexual encounter. You’ll feel a pressure inside you which won’t feel like anything else you have ever felt. Find a place where you can do so, and push the egg out of your body. You’ll figure out how when the time comes.”

“Oh god, more than one at a time?”

“The largest birds usually lay only one. The second kind of bird is always fertile. In this case, you could lay eggs after having sex any time of the year. Other than that, everything is similar to what I just described for the first type. The third kind of bird has regular cycles and fertile periods like humans do. These birds always lay an egg, usually just one, each cycle, but unless you’ve had sex recently the eggs won’t be fertilized.”

“How would I know?”

“Well, that kind of bird usually lays eggs more frequently. Rather than one or two fertile periods a year, those birds might lay eggs anywhere from once every two months to once a day, like chickens.”

“Ugh! Every day?”

“I don’t know that it would happen that often. It hasn’t happened yet, anyway, right?”

“Right. But it’s only four days ago that I started looking like a bird at all.”

“If it happens, take note of when it does the first time and the second time to help learn your cycle. If it doesn’t happen within, say, a year, you can figure you’re a type who only lays eggs when you get impregnated.”

Finally, I had to choose a code name. Clearly I needed a bird name, and at least right now it seemed like I needed a white bird, but several of the ones I tried were taken. Ultimately I ended up with Egret.

Returning to School

January 8, 2007

For a while it seemed like no further changes were happening except that the feathers got thicker and covered me more densely. However, over the past weekend, I noticed growth of new feather-covered skin under my arms. Was I growing wings? I was not sure how far this transformation was going to go, but maybe I would be able to fly someday. Elsewhere on my body, the feathers were getting broader and denser. Even on my face and up to the edge of my cloacal slit there were now feathers, and if I am not opening that you, can can’t even see its there. When I am standing naked, except for a few features like my lips and eyes and nails, I’m white all over. And speaking of nails, those still looked human. I didn’t develop the talons some birds have.

Today I was back at school for the first time since the change. Since I didn’t have breasts, nobody needed to know I was female down below. Even showering after gym class, nobody could really tell what I had; it just looked like everything was covered with feathers. By that time I had also learned I could use a towel to dry my body like normal people did, but I had to go in the direction of the feather, which meant downward on most parts of my body. In the bathroom, I couldn’t use a urinal anymore, but nobody could see what I did inside a stall.

Just as had been explained to me, some kids didn’t know about powers yet and just saw me as pre-transformation Ben. Others knew, and I could tell some of them were shying away from my changed form. Two of them called me bird-boy. Some of my closest friends already knew as well and I talked a little with them at lunch about turning into a bird inside and out, and about their own powers or those of other friends they knew about. One of them didn’t know, but we explained the basics of powers and then he could see the new me.

I managed to get through the school day with no particular problems.

---

January 13, 2007

It was fortunately on Saturday when it first happened. There was a strange feeling inside me. Muscles inside me were clenching, pushing against something. But pretty quickly I figured out that it was an egg inside me trying to get out.

Unfortunately, my parents were out and I was home alone. So I went to the bathroom, stripped below the waist, and instead of opening the toilet, sat on the lid, with one hand under me to try to catch the egg.

Pretty quickly, I realized I was laying a really big egg. Somehow it didn’t actually hurt, but it was uncomfortable. Imagine trying to shit a watermelon, and being big enough to do so. After about 5 minutes of trying, I got one end of it just to the opening.

I used a hand mirror to take a look at it. Just barely protruding from my slit was what looked like a grayish, dirty old baseball. I could tell from the feel of it that what was coming out of me was a lot bigger than a baseball, though.

I kept pushing and it opened me up wider. This hurt a little, but also felt really good, somehow. Eventually, I got it to the halfway point, and then it came all out at once as it became easier for the egg to get out of me than to go back in. I used both hands to grab hold of the egg. It was as big around as a football (the American one), but not quite so pointy on the ends. That’s bigger than any of the bird eggs on that chart I saw! It was almost as big as my head. I was stunned something that big came out of me.

Now what was I going to do with it? The egg seemed relatively clean; it was not covered in the pasty poop that I was always wiping out of myself. I did wipe off a little of what might have been poop with some toilet paper.

I decided to take the egg into the kitchen. Resting it carefully on the counter and holding it in place with one hand, I got a large soup bowl, lined it with several layers of paper towels, and put the egg in it.

A couple hours later, my parents came home.

“Mom! Dad! I laid an egg!”

“Wow! Can I see?” Mom shouted.

I led her into the kitchen where I had placed the egg.

“Wow! That’s a big egg! That came out of you?”

“Yeah. I couldn’t believe how big it was either.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Maybe a little. It didn’t hurt anywhere near as much as I thought it would to push something like that out of my body.”

She called the doctors who had tested me and ultimately got an appointment to take the egg directly to the vet tomorrow.

---

January 14, 2007

We went in to see the vet at 10 AM. Dad had found a cardboard box to put the egg in, because I really didn’t want to be showing off to everybody my huge egg.

Dr. Woods examined me only a little, and spent most of his time examining the egg. He subjected it to several kinds of tests. He listened to it with a stethoscope. He shined three different lights on it. He measured it, length and width: 6.3” in diameter, 9.1” long. He weighed it: 5 lb 9 oz. He put several other devices against the surface of the egg. Finally, he put the egg back in its box, handed it to me, and also handed me one of the devices.

“See how one end of the egg is slightly pointed, while the other end is very nearly round? The round end comes out first, but that’s not really important. What’s important is that the yolk is closer to the round end, and that’s where the embryo develops. This device can detect whether eggs of your type are fertilized. When you lay an egg, press this device against the round end of the egg. If it shows a red minus like this, the egg is not fertilized. If it shows a green plus sign, the egg is fertilized. If there’s no symbol,” which he demonstrated by putting it against the pointy end of the egg, “it hasn’t detected the yolk. You can try again in another part of the egg.”

“And then what?”

“Well, if it is fertilized, then you’re going to have a baby!”

“OK, but that’s not going to happen unless I have sex, right?”

“Well, I think so. You can see this one is not fertilized. But I’ve seen stranger things in my time in Normal than self-fertilized eggs. So you should always check.”

“OK. Now what do I do with the huge, non-fertilized egg?”

“Anything you want. However, making an egg this size takes a lot of nutrients from your body. I don’t know yet how often you’re going to lay these eggs, but since it’s been less than a month since you’ve been in this form and you already laid one, it’s possible the cycle is a month or less. For your personal health, either in the week before or the week after you lay an egg, you should eat a special diet.”

“What kind of special diet?”

“You need a lot of extra calories and protein, and quite a bit of calcium. You might eat a lot of eggs, meat, soybeans, and milk, or the nutritional supplements athletes use. This egg weighs about five and a half pounds, so you’d need to eat about 4 pounds of extra food, not counting the milk, or maybe 6 pounds of the nutritional supplements. However, the easiest way to get the nutrients is to simply eat your egg, along with drinking a lot of milk.”

“Eat my own egg? So I’m some kind of cannibal?”

“No, you wouldn’t really be a cannibal as long as you don’t eat the fertilized ones,” he assured me.

“Oh, OK, I suppose. It still seems weird. How much milk would I need to drink?”

He thought for a moment before answering, “About a quart of milk a day for seven days should do it, on top of the usual amount of milk or other dairy products you consume.”

“Is there any special way Ben should prepare the egg?” Mom asked.

“In theory, any of the ways you prepare hens’ eggs should work. However, it would probably take far too long to boil this one whole. Any other way of preparing an egg by cracking it first and cooking the white and yolk should work.”

“It seems like a lot to eat at once.”

“Oh, you don’t have to eat it all at once. You probably can’t and shouldn’t. Even after you remove the shell it would weigh over 5 pounds. Once it’s cooked, put any uneaten part in a sealed Ziploc bag, removing as much of the air as is possible, and store it in the refrigerator. You can heat up any part of it again in the microwave and it’ll still make a good meal. You should eat it within about 3 days of cooking it, though. If you need to keep it longer, you can freeze it, but if you do, cut it up into separate meal-sized bags so you can thaw each one separately. And you can store the unbroken egg in the refrigerator for up to a week. Since you haven’t been doing that for this one, though, you should take it home and cook it up right away.”

“OK. If I did have a fertilized egg, how would I care for it?”

“Eggs need to be kept warm, just not so warm that it cooks them. Birds typically sit over their eggs, keeping them around body temperature, and that’s a pretty good guideline. You want to keep the egg at around 95-100 degrees Fahrenheit. There are incubators you can buy that will do that. You would have to improvise a bit since most of them are designed to hold eggs of chickens or geese, but some of them are large enough so that if you simply remove the egg trays meant to hold several of those eggs, one of your eggs will fit. You would need to see how it comes apart for cleaning to determine whether it provides enough space. For an egg of this size, it might need to be kept for several months before it hatches. By the time it does, your baby would have incorporated almost all the mass inside the shell as part of his or her body, and so weigh about 5 pounds. That would be considered low for a human birth, but only a little below the low end of what is typical; a five-and-a-half pound birth which went full term would not be considered abnormal.”

I wasn’t hoping to lay a fertilized egg anytime soon, but I kept this in mind about incubators.

So we went home, and Mom cooked up the egg. First, she had to figure out how to break open the egg. Cracking it on the edge of the frying pan like you did with chicken eggs was not going to work. Eventually she smashed it by whacking it with one pan while it sat in another, and that just cracked the egg. A second whack in the same spot extended the cracks to the point Mom could break the shell apart into three large pieces.

Mom poured out the contents, filling the pan half an inch deep, so she poured half of it into the other pan. She made an omelet (well, two super-large omelets) by throwing in some chopped up peppers, mushrooms, and other goodies. And she showed me how to do it so I’d know how to tell when it was done. And then I had about half of one of the two omelets for lunch. She put the rest in a big Ziploc bag in the refrigerator and wrote my name on it. I guessed that would provide me with dinner and also breakfast and dinner tomorrow, with lunch being whatever I ate at school.

It was tasty. I tried not to think about where this had been - but then, every egg came from a bird’s butt. It was mainly weird because this one had come from mine.

And I had a glass of milk with it. Milk with every meal for a week was going to be the rule.

---

January 19, 2007

I’d had a good week, which was ruined when my string of successes in not having boys examine my body shape in the locker room came to an end. Some of the boys I was changing with were blinded by the spell and just saw the old me. Some who knew about powers saw that I changed and were sympathetic. But it was always possible there would be rude ones, and two such bullies outed me as a girl. They roughed me up a bit, though the gym coach came over to break it up before I really got hurt. But I knew my attempt to live as a boy was over. I could have tried to explain about how most birds don’t have penises, but there was the shape of my hips and other things. Besides, if it happened so soon, it was likely to keep happening.

The school called Mom, and she came and got the whole story. She called her relatives and found some who could help get my gender officially changed. I would be doing that tomorrow. I was sad about that, but it would mean that I would stop living that lie I’d been living for weeks now. I did manage to get over it and finish the school day, having missed two whole classes, but that’s it. It was over.

Those boys were getting punished, and there would be others. But I would have to deal with them.

---

January 20, 2007

Today I learned how hard it is to get your gender changed, even in Normal.

First off, I had to have a doctor certify me as having a female body. Not the one from NANA who had examined me at my testing, because it had to be one with certain certifications from the state. We had doctors some in Normal with that, but the one who examined me before wasn’t one of those. So I had another internal examination.

And Ben wasn’t going to work as a girl’s name. I decided on Bella; it was kind of like Ben.

Then I had to fill out separate forms to get a reissued birth certificate indicating the change in gender and name, a reissued state ID card, and an update for my school registration. They had a long list of other kinds of registrations that might include my gender, but none of those really applied to me.

None of those new cards would come to me today, except a temporary ID card, but that was enough. I could now start living officially as a girl. That said, I wasn’t going to be one of those girly girls, but at the same time, I wanted to make myself look a little more like a girl so I didn’t get rejected by the other gender too. I thought about fake breasts, but I sure as heck wasn’t going to get implants, not with all the horror stories about those, and any sort of external fakes were going to come off in the locker room among the other girls. When I got a little older, though, and the other girls all had boobs, I would probably need to wear something to fit in.

Oh, heck, I just realized I was going to be showering with the girls. I was excited, scared, and sullen about that all at once. Woo, naked girls! Um, are they going to notice me staring at them? And yeah, naked girls, but I was going to be staring at the flesh I could no longer expose even if I wanted to.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to be wearing dresses and frilly lacy clothes, but I did agree to let Mom help me find some blouses that were not too girly, but also clearly not boys’ clothes. And I’d actually already been wearing girls’ jeans, because I’d certainly gotten the hips! I’d stuck with fairly traditional looking jeans so it was only obvious if you noticed the shape, and not I wouldn’t have to wear bulky sweaters over them to hide the shape.

---

January 22, 2007

School was not as bad as I thought it would be. All my teachers were informed I was now named Bella, and the spell made those who didn’t know about the powers hear them call me Ben, though a lot more of them had been told about powers now. Some of the kids who knew about powers noticed, but knew not to talk too much in public; some gave me either congratulations or condolences privately depending on how they felt about it. A couple of the guys actually came on to me, but I shut them down. Even though I had a vagina, I wasn’t interested in guys, at least not right now. Maybe that would change? A few boys taunted me, but I told them, “I didn’t ask for this, it’s just a thing that happened, and it could still happen to you, too!”

Two girls who were apparently Lesbian and had never been interested in me before also started coming on to me, and I told them maybe. Most of the girls simply accepted me. A few shunned me, and when I was in the girls’ restroom one of them insisted I show her I didn’t have a penis anymore “or get out,” but once I showed her, she seemed satisfied.

At gym class, I was re-introduced to the class of girls at the entrance to their locker room by the girls’ coach, who’d been informed in advance, and all the families of the girls and the boys in my gym class had been contacted over the weekend to let these kids in on the secret of powers. So the entire class knew about powers now and that someone in their class had a power, but they weren’t told it was me until our class started.

“Girls, you all now know about the powers some people have here in Normal. Some of you already knew and some of you just learned. The reason for that is that we have a new girl today. You may already know her, but this is Bella. Say hi!”

“Hi, Bella!”

“Hi, girls.”

“Bella’s powers, in addition to turning her into a bird, have also been turning her into a girl under those feathers, and she’s 100% changed now. No trace of her boy parts remains. So she’s going to be changing with you all from now on.”

That was the public story; nobody needed to know I’d actually been fully female since the end of December. After I went inside, I showed everybody my lack of manhood, since they’d see it eventually while we were changing, and there was no argument from any of them. In fact, I made a couple new friends.

---

January 29, 2007

After a week, things had calmed down. One boy had gotten detention for shoving me in the hallways, in addition to the two who had assaulted me in the locker room, who were still suspended, and there were still a few who obviously didn’t like me, but I was able to get through my day without any obvious trouble. And I was making lots of friends among the girls.

I was still undecided about the two Lesbian girls who were interested in me. I found them together at lunch today and decided to sit with them, something which made them both obviously happy.

“Jen, Tracy, I know you two have been giving me signals.”

They both gave me an innocent, “Who, me?” look, which I ignored.

“I am still trying to sort out my feelings. I am not interested in guys, which means that maybe I need to still be interested in girls. But I am just not sure.”

“Well, you could give it a shot with me,” Tracy suggested.

“Or with me,” Jen retorted.

“Or,” Tracy started to reply, then dug out something from her purse. “Maybe GLBTTQ is for you.” And she handed me a card, a business-card sized note but printed on regular paper. This was a club I wasn’t aware of, and the acronym stood for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, and Queer. No wonder they abbreviated it.

In a low voice, Tracy continued, “You’re certainly transsexual, even if not by choice, and maybe Lesbian too. But we welcome everybody outside of the heterosexual norm.”

I was skeptical. “This isn’t some huge gay makeout session, right?”

“No,” Jen answered. “Anything more than a peck on the cheek is forbidden during our meetings, though some people use them as a way to find dates. It’s about finding friends who have common interests and being ready to stand up for one another when necessary.”

Tracy chimed in, “We meet afterschool on Wednesdays in room 241.”

“Hmm. I’ll need to arrange a ride home.”

“We have several supportive parents who come to pick us up and also give rides to those who need them.”

“OK, I’ll think about it.”

---

January 31, 2007

Mom was going to come pick me up, so I didn’t need to find a ride home, and I was ready to go visit this group after school.

I got my things prepared as if I was going home, and then went to the room.

I was stunned. There were 27 kids there! Some of them I knew but had no idea they were gay.

They introduced me, though most everybody had heard about me by now. It was too many for everybody to tell me their story individually, but they explained the terms, with a different person who identified that way explaining each term:

• Gay and Lesbian I understood. They liked people of the same sex.
• Bisexual people could go with boys or girls.
• Transgender meant people who identified as the opposite gender from their physical sex. They explained that transgender people exhibited this to varying degrees, and there weren’t any showing it during school, but one boy and one girl from the group identified this way.
• Transsexual referred to people who wanted to change their physical sex, or had actually done so. They explained that this was beyond transgender. Not all transgender people wanted to change their body, but transsexual referred to the ones who wanted to. Usually at our age it just meant that we wanted to; those pursuing surgery usually had to wait at least until they were 18. Here in Normal, the term also applied to those whose like me powers caused their bodies to change sex, whether they wanted to or not, and while there were others in Normal this had happened to, as far as they knew, I was the only one in this school right now who it had happened to.
• Queer referred to people who weren’t sure, those who might go back and forth over time, and those whose powers made it hard to say what was heterosexual and what was not.

And it turned out that about a third of the group were in that “not sure” category. A few of them identified as bi, most as gay or lesbian, and most of them admitted they might change their minds later. Most of them had not actually had sex yet, and realized that after they did, their feelings might change. But they at least had an idea now of what they were, and most of them had gone on dates like that. All of the trans people had been out in public dressed as the opposite sex. And they introduced one more trans category, transvestite, which meant you simply dressed as the opposite sex but didn’t consider yourself that sex. Usually this only applied to men dressing as women, since women dressing as men were so common it was practically mainstream.

It was a useful lesson. I hadn’t realized all the different types of gender issues people had, but they did, and increasingly all these groups were banding together like this, though they mentioned that elsewhere they didn’t always use all the same letters or put them in the same order.

After all this, they got on with club business. There was a gay and Lesbian dance coming up which was shared across all the schools in town. Each of the other three area high schools as well as two of the middle schools had GLBTTQ clubs, with a total of 142 members, easily enough to have a small dance if, say, half the kids attended.

But the important thing was learning all these kids were here, that they all would support me, and I could count them all as friends.

Dating

February 7, 2007

At the next meeting of GLBTTQ, I agreed to a date with Tracy for this Saturday.

After I got home, when I was talking about it with Mom (who was fully supportive of me dating either boys or girls), I was unsure whether I should be dressing as a boy or a girl for this date. Although I was technically female now, depending on my clothes I could easily pass as either male or female. Mom was happy to go out and buy me a nice dress to go out on my first date as a girl, but I’d rather wear the guy clothes I already had, and which still fit me. The slacks were loose in the hips normally, so they fit just fine.

I dealt with that dilemma by calling Tracy in the evening and asking if she was OK with me dressing as a guy on this date. And she actually preferred that! Her parents didn’t completely accept her Lesbianism and it would help her in their eyes if she was seen going out on a date with a guy.

---

February 10, 2007

It was four weeks to the day from the first one when I laid my second egg. Exactly the length of a typical girl’s period, Mom noted. This meant another weekend of eating omelets, but it saved on the food bill I’d have otherwise. On the other hand, the two extra gallons of milk cost most of that. I resolved that after drinking milk with every meal for a week, I’d drink one extra glass a day every day thereafter.

The feeling was much like last time, but getting the egg out was easier.

I had agreed to a date with Tracy for this evening, and it was a good thing I laid the egg before lunch. It would have been embarrassing for that to happen while we were out, or while I was trying to get myself prepared. This meant I’d be eating one meal that wasn’t my egg, but that was fine. I’d eat it for all three meals tomorrow and be done.

We had dinner at a restaurant and saw a movie afterward. Tracy was a bit of a tomboy; while she had worn a dress for the date, she told me it was only because her mother made her do it. She never wore dresses or skirts at school. She didn’t go for the romantic movies; we ended up watching an action film. But with me appropriately dressed, and known as Ben for the evening, we went to her house after the date where I met her parents. And her parents were so happy she was on a date with a boy that they encouraged me to go up to her room with her. They never actually said the words, but I could tell from the way they talked that they expected me to have sex with her!

Well, far be it for me to disappoint them, I let Tracy introduce me to the ways of Lesbian sex. During this activity, I experienced the same good feeling that I experienced just for a moment while laying each egg. I realized that was an orgasm! I have a clitoris, which is at the front of my cloacal slit, where a human girl’s would be relative to the vulva, and probably not a standard part of bird anatomy, but I already knew I was a hybrid in a bunch of ways. The egg must have pushed against my clitoris on the way out. But with intentional stimulation I had more of it.

While we were doing this, and thus making a lot of noise, I whispered in Tracy’s ear, “I’m fine to keep doing this with you. But what are you going to do when they realize I can’t get you pregnant?”

She replied at a normal volume, “Dad doesn’t care who I date, boys or girls, as long as I don’t get pregnant until after I finish high school. That’s why I have the condoms. Mom wants me to have children, but accepts Dad’s restriction as practical. However, she is pretty much hoping for me to get pregnant at 18.”

Then, in a whisper, she added, “So at 18, I’ll do what every Lesbian couple does, either find a willing donor or use a sperm bank.”

I replied, “That makes sense,” and then went back to focusing on the sex.

When we were done with the sex, before we put ourselves back together and I went down for the trip home, Tracy had some final words for me.

“I like you Bella, and I want to keep doing this, but I also don’t want to keep you from exploring your new sexuality. If you want to date Jen or other girls, or even guys, go ahead.”

“Oh, OK. Thanks. Did you want to set another date, maybe after a little while?”

“Sure.”

And we did, a month off. While we were having this conversation, she was collecting some of her vaginal secretions in condoms. She added some spit as well. When I asked what she was doing, she said, “This way, it will look like the condoms were used for their intended purpose.”

“Do you really think your parents are going to check on you that much?”

“Yes. Well, they’re not going to run scientific tests on this stuff, but Mom will look through my trash to find these. Seeing some liquid in each should satisfy her.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to get involved with her family issues, but if she didn’t stay close to her family after she grew up, it is possible that it might work out. But more importantly, I didn’t think I wanted to be a parent at 18, so if she was going to satisfy her parents, I didn’t want to stay involved with her.

---

February 15, 2007

My wings continued to develop.

Normally in their current state, they just look like feather-covered arms, and I can wear regular shirts. All the actual wing stuff is folded flat against my underarms and the sides of my body. But when topless, if I hold my arms out to the sides and think hard about it, I can make the wings fold out.

When I do that, there are other changes. My stomach gets very thin, while my upper chest expands. Not like breasts, though. This went all the way across from side to side, and from my collarbone down to the bottom of my ribs, as a single smooth bulge. I knew girls’ breasts (large ones anyway) were jiggly and they wore bras to help hold them in place. There was nothing jiggly about this; it was a solid mass of muscle, like all the muscles in my stomach moved up into my chest.

I showed Mom, and she suggested they were flight muscles. Mom scheduled me a flight test a couple weeks out, figuring I’ll be even more developed by then.

I also showed Mom the other problem I had. When the wings were out, their connection to the side of my body extended 9 inches down below what was normally my armpit. I didn’t have any kind of shirt that I could wear that wouldn’t get in the way. She told me she had some ideas about that.

---

February 17, 2007

Another Saturday, another date. This time with Jen. Again, I asked her in advance about dressing up, and she wanted the girly girl.

So this time I let Mom take me out shopping for an actual dress. I really had no idea what I wanted in a dress, so I basically just let Mom shop for me and suggest things to try on. She tried to teach me about women’s clothing sizes. They were much more complicated then men’s because women’s clothes tended to be more tightly fitted, and the breasts and hips could vary differently on different women. But she explained that the sizes called “juniors” were designed for younger girls who had little breast development, and since my bird body probably wasn’t ever going to have any, I should stick with those.

But even when I tried on the juniors dresses, for the kind of dresses she was looking at for my date, they didn’t fit right on my chest, or in the “bodice” as Mom called it. The dresses expected that I had at least small boobs. So we then went to shop for fake breasts. And that was actually a thing available in Normal because I wasn’t the only person here with gender issues, even if I was the only one in my school now that we knew of. If we ordered online there were more options available, but there were actually some I could walk into a store here and buy.

There were two main kinds of those - ones that you stuck to the body with a sort of temporary glue, and ones that went into a special bra with pockets to hold the breasts. Because my feathers covered my chest, we thought the stick on kind would be difficult and perhaps dangerous to use. But I tried on one of the pocket bras with breasts that were made to turn my completely flat chest into a B cup, and that actually looked good on me. So we got the breasts and two of the pocket bras in white. Then we went back and I tried on the dresses again and they fit well. In some styles the bra was going to show, but the white was so similar to the color of my feathers it didn’t really make a difference. Still, for now we picked dresses in two styles that covered the bra completely.

Mom also took me into a lingerie store. This was a sidetrack from our date shopping, and there was a lot of stuff I knew I wasn’t ready for yet (if ever), but what she brought me in for were garments variously called leotards, bodysuits, and other names. They looked like one-piece women’s swimsuits, but what was useful was there were a few styles that were completely open under the arms down to the waist.

Mom explained, “These are thinner than actual swimsuits, and they’re designed to be worn under or partially under other clothing. With the opaque ones, some women just put on shorts over the bottom and leave the top exposed. You could wear them that way when you are using your wings.”

I tried one on, and pushed out my wings, and it seemed to work. It didn’t get in the way of my wings at all. We got a white one (which Mom thought would be better when I was flying, though I thought it would make me look naked), and a black one, in two slightly different styles that both did the job.

After a break for lunch, I had to get matching shoes for each dress. Pumps, Mom called them. They had heels only two inches high, so were high heeled compared to anything I was used to wearing, but not crazy high, not like the tiny spike heels I knew some women’s shoes had. I think Mom expected this was a way for me to learn how to walk in heels without killing myself, and I was grateful for it. We actually spent more time shopping for the shoes than the dresses because my feet had not changed shape, and so we were basically trying to find women’s shoes to fit a boy’s feet. But we did eventually find some. Women’s “wide” shoes worked for a standard man’s foot, but they simply didn’t make them in a lot of styles.

Just when I thought we were done, Mom added, “Normally, Bella, a girl would want to get her hair done before a date. But all your hair has been replaced with feathers, and I am not sure there is anything to do with them, or at least not that any salon that I know of would know how to do. And a wig might look too weird on your head. So instead, I want to find you a nice lady’s hat.”

This led to another hour of shopping. Including the lunch break, we were out for six and a half hours. I barely had time to take a shower, dry off, and dress for my date.

Jen and I had a long conversation over dinner. She had also come in a nice dress, so it was obvious we were a couple of girls, and she ended up talking a lot about the style choices and preferences of Lesbians.

She explained, “Lesbians come in many different types. Some of them are tomboys and would never enter the women’s clothing section at all if they could find men’s clothes that actually fit.”

“I know men’s jeans don’t cut it.”

“Since you don’t have breasts, you can get away with men’s shirts, but bigger breasts make many shirts fit weird, too.”

I nodded.

“Especially when these tomboyish Lesbians have short hair, they call them butch. Others are girly girls and like wearing dresses and skirts and making themselves up pretty, the same way straight women typically dress for men. Those are called femme.”

Then I asked, “So if you’re femme, why didn’t you suggest I dress butch?”

Jen sighed. “While the stereotype is for a butch and a femme to be a couple, the reality is that Lesbians don’t strictly fall into one category or the other and don’t strictly date the other type even when they do.”

“Well, you see that I can do this look, even if it’s not my preference.”

“I’m sorry if you don’t like dressing this way. Maybe Tracy would be better for you. I hear she goes for more of the tomboy.”

“Oh, she liked that, but it’s because Tracy’s Mom only lets her date boys.”

“And with your tomboy tendencies and experience as Ben, you could pass. Your flat chest is an asset for that role, too. By the way, are you wearing some padding today?”

“Yes. They don’t make date dresses without at least a little space for boobs, and since I have literally nothing, I got something to fill in.”

“It looks nice.”

“But Tracy has family issues. Her mom wants her pregnant at 18.”

“What the fuck?”

“Exactly the fuck,” I replied. “They encouraged me to go to her room with her when I met them after our date, and even before I did I got the feeling they expected us to fuck. Tracy confirmed that along with the pregnancy thing.”

“Oh, God, I knew there was something weird there but I didn’t realize it was that bad.”

“Yeah, and Tracy’s pretty sure she doesn’t want a guy’s dick near her, but she’d be willing to get pregnant once from a sperm donor to satisfy her mother. I don’t know that I want to be mixed up in it. But I know I can get sex there if I am willing to be a part of that, at least until her mom figures out I’m female. But let’s stop talking about her; I’m on a date with you.”

And so Jen did tell me a bit more about herself. There was something weird about her parents she wanted to let them explain later, but nothing like Tracy’s. They let her date whoever she wanted and she’d decided she liked girls. In fact, we talked about her for so long that we almost missed our movie and got there so late that we missed all the ads and previews and they were just starting the actual film.

My mother picked us up. When we took Jen home, I got to meet her parents briefly. I was surprised to find she seemed to have two fathers. One of them, Sam, explained.

“I’m an alternate-day shapeshifter. One day I’m a woman, the next day a man. Buck here is bisexual, and I am his perfect match, someone who can be his perfect girl, and also his perfect guy. I didn’t know what I wanted, only someone who could accept me no matter what form I was in.”

“So how did that work when you were pregnant with Jen?”

“The pregnancy lasted 18 months! I actually have two different bodies which swap in and out, clothes and everything. The other body goes into some pocket dimension or something, but no time elapses for it. So I was a perfectly normal-looking, non-pregnant guy half the days while I was pregnant.”

Buck spoke up, “And after having the one kid, Sam swore to never go through that again. The mental adjustment between the pregnant female and non-pregnant male was too much for her.”

Sam added, “Given this, and the possibility any crazy sort of thing might happen if Jen got pregnant, we are giving her full freedom in choosing who to date. If she wants to date only girls and never ever get pregnant, that is fine by us.”

At least they didn’t expect me to have sex. I gave Jen a goodbye kiss and then went home with Mom.

---

February 24, 2007

I took some time off dating, to think about my experiences. I really preferred dressing as a boy; even at school, where I was now publicly known to be a girl, I opted for the tomboy side of girls’ clothing, just girlish enough to remind the people who know that I’m not a boy. Away from school, it was usually a full boy look for me. If Jen wanted me to look like a girl, I could do it, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into a relationship where I’d be expected to do that all the time.

But I was more worried about what I’d be getting into with Tracy. Sure, she could get a sperm donation and have a kid, who wouldn’t be mine genetically in any way. But I would be seemingly committed to doing so at 18, unless she simply cut all ties with her parents.

As a result, I didn’t think either of them was my right long-term partner. There were a couple other girls in the club I might try. I actually thought about dating boys, but the ones who’d made passes at me seemed like jerks, while many of the straight ones knew I used to be a boy and probably weren’t interested for that reason. The gays knew I was now a girl and wouldn’t consider me, and the one bi boy in the club had a steady boyfriend and a steady girlfriend.

---

March 3, 2007

It was time for my flight test. I had been stretching my wings out every night before I went to bed, and they looked more and more like the wings of a snowy owl with their short, wide, fluffy feathers. So I put on one of my leotards under my other clothes, and we went out to the testing facility. They measured my height and weight (I had lost another 5 pounds since my last visit, though I was the same weight in both winged and unwinged forms) and then they attached a bunch of sensors to me to check my breathing, heart rate, body temperature, altitude, velocity, and who knows what. There was an open field there, and they explained it was protected by spells so that nobody who didn’t already know Normal’s secret about powers would be able to see any flying people. I could go try to fly, along with another flyer and a teleporter on hand to save me if I got into trouble.

The flyer explained to me that there are several kinds of flying powers. Some of them use magic, some have abilities which basically let them ignore gravity, and then there are the ones like me who grow wings and fly partially by generating lift with wings.

He was a magical flyer, so wasn’t the best one to teach me, but he had at one point studied all those mechanisms for flight. And he explained that if I could fly, it would be only partially by wing power. Unless we were unnaturally light or had absolutely huge wings, a human could never generate enough lift to get airborne from wings alone. We always had magical assistance, though that magic might be generating extra lift, reducing our mass, or reducing gravity around us. But however it worked, it allowed winged flyers like me to fly with more or less the same principles as birds use.

The basic idea was to run and flap my wings, of course. But he had some cardboard wings he wore to show me the kind of motion I should be doing with my wings. It wasn’t simply moving them up and down; they turned a bit as well.

I tried this for an hour before I was getting too tired to keep it up. I was never off the ground for more than 10 seconds. While I thought that was disappointing, my flight tutor mentioned that Michael Jordan was known for what they called hang time, the length of time he was in the air when he jumped, and that was never actually more than one second! What I was doing already greatly surpassed the greatest basketball jump of all time!

We made another appointment for two weeks from now and I went home.

I ate lunch, and relaxed for a while before I had to get ready for another date with Tracy. That went in a predictable way. We ate dinner at a restaurant, saw a movie (I let Tracy pick, as I wasn’t particularly looking forward to any of the other movies that were playing now besides the two I’d seen on my other dates), and went to her house for an hour or so of sex.

When we first went up to her room, I asked Tracy if she could get me a glass of milk.

“We only have skim. I hope that’s OK.”

“Yes, thank you.” I didn’t tell her it wasn’t ideal - the milkfat was also part of my fuel for making eggs - but the calcium was more important and that was present at full strength in skim.

She went down and returned a couple minutes later with the milk. I drank it right down, intentionally leaving a tiny bit in the glass when I was done.

After we were done with the sex, I suggested Tracy use the leftover milk instead of spitting into and trying to collect vaginal secretions in the condoms. She thought that was a great idea and did so.

---

March 10, 2007

I didn’t plan any activities for today because I knew I was due for an egg. It was a really good thing I hadn’t planned a date because the egg came a little later today, at 5:30 when I’d be trying to finish getting ready for my date if I had one.

It was also just in time for me to cook that egg for dinner. Mom had already started on a dinner for the family and as soon as she was done with that, she helped me get started cooking my own omelet for the first time. Rather than waste the portion of dinner she had made for me, I threw it all into the omelet. Corn, steak which I diced into small pieces, and potatoes went into the eggs instead of mushrooms and peppers. And I was right about this making an extra meal. One meal’s food was just right to add to the egg, so it meant that if I ate pure egg it would have probably been only three meals. For a normal person, twice as many, but after I made my egg, I was extra-hungry until I replenished myself.

---

March 17, 2007

I had another flight test today. It went significantly better than the last time. I reached a maximum altitude of 25 feet and a longest flight time of 32 seconds. I started to feel like I was actually flying, though I couldn’t keep it up for long.

I went to the GLBTTQ St. Patrick’s Day dance with Jen. I had invited Tracy, but she declined. She isn’t a fan of dancing. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

It took me a little bit to learn the moves, but I got into it and had fun there with Jen. There was a mixture of fast songs and slow, romantic ones, and Jen was into the romantic ones, sometimes resting her head on my shoulder as we slowly swayed with the music, while at other times engaging me in a kiss while we danced. And as little as I cared for that type of dress, I admitted it did work well for dancing.

We didn’t do anything afterwards, though.

---

March 24, 2007

I had another date with Tracy. However, this time, we didn’t bother going out. I went to her house and ate dinner with her family, and afterwards we went to her room. She turned on a stream of Lesbian porn on her computer, and we alternated between watching it and having sex, sometimes trying to do some of the things we saw them do.

---

March 25, 2007

Tracy called.

“She found out!”

“What?”

“Mom was spying on us. She found out you weren’t really a guy, and so she’s forbidden me from dating you.”

“Well that sucks. I was always worried about that happening, though.”

“I know. It was great while it lasted, though.”

“Maybe you could sneak over to my house sometime?”

“Sometime, maybe. But I’m grounded for a month. I’m not even supposed to call you so we’ll talk at school.”

---

March 31, 2007

Today I had another flight test. I’m really improving. I made it up to 40 feet this time, and Mom got some pictures of me while I was flying above her.

Afterwards, I had to agree that the black leotard looked dumb on me when I was in the air. I’ll try the white one next time.

---

April 7, 2007

Predictably, I laid another egg today. This one came in mid-afternoon.

While I was cooking it for dinner, I had a thought and I asked Mom about it.

“Mom, what am I going to do if I am away from the house when I lay my egg? If I sit on the toilet in a public restroom, there’s no lid and I’m afraid the egg will fall in the water!”

“Well, that is where I’d recommend you lay it. That’s going to be where you can most easily find a little privacy. Let me see I can come up with any ideas to help you with the water problem.”

---

April 14, 2007

I had another flight test and continued to do better. This time I wore the white leotard and Mom got pictures of me in it. She was right. While it did look like I was naked, I was a naked bird, covered all over with feathers. My flying posture really did make me look like a bird. My legs held tightly together behind me looked like the tail of a mockingbird. The rest of my body looked like a huge white hawk, except for the lack of a beak.

In the afternoon Dad came to me with an idea. He had been looking at inflatable things online, thinking that he could find something I could insert into the toilet opening to catch the egg. And he found it. An inflatable floating mini beer-cooler. It was round, with a 7 inch inner diameter and 9 inch outer diameter when inflated, with a flat inflatable ring around the top with drink holders in it, which were just mesh pockets I could ignore. That was perfect. The hole in a toilet seat was about 8.5 to 9 inches wide, so I could stuff this in and sit on the ring. And it was 6 inches deep, which was not quite deep enough to hold the egg, but I had to stand after my egg came out the way I was doing it, so this would be no different, really.

Dad ordered it, and it would be here long before my next egg for me to test it out.

---

April 21, 2007

I had another date with Jen.

We had not gone beyond kissing yet, and knowing what was possible with Tracy, I was hoping to have us go further. But during our movie, when I tried touching Jen’s breasts, she pushed me away. I could imagine doing exactly the same thing to a guy who was more touchy-feely than I was ready for, so I just pulled back and didn’t pressure her on it. Everybody’s different.

---

May 5, 2007

Yes, it was time for me to lay another egg.

This time I tried out the inflatable thing at home, and it totally worked. It was solid enough to hold the egg up after it was laid and I was not sitting on it. And it wasn’t actually too much trouble to inflate, either. Maybe 5 minutes by mouth. If I could, I was going to carry a small battery operated air pump with it, though, because if I was in a hurry that 5 minutes might be a problem, trying to huff and puff while my egg wants to come out below. Dad ordered one of those for me and I was going to try it next time.

Also, I’d gotten tired of eating so much egg at once. I decided to spread it out longer, freezing some of it so I can just eat it along with bacon or sausage for breakfast until it ran out.

Flying School

May 12, 2007

I had another practice flying session today. I think I finally have the hang of it. It was tiring, but with practice I was getting stronger and I stayed up 3 minutes this time.

They recommended to me a flying school that was going to be having 5-day-a-week classes this summer, starting in June a week after regular school was out. It was 3 hours a day, 8-11 in the morning. That didn’t seem too bad; I’d still have the afternoons and evenings to do fun stuff. It cost $2000, which was a lot, on top of new clothes and other stuff my parents had spent on me, but it was a one-time thing.

It sounded like the kind of practice I needed to build up my endurance. Three hours a day, five days a week would have been more flying in the first week than I had done already, combined. I told my parents I wanted to do it if they would pay for it, and I was glad to hear them say yes.

Then, on the way home, Mom stopped to buy me more leotards. I had liked the style of the black one more, but she had proven to me the white color was better, so I got five of those in white, enough to wear all week during flight school with the first two as spares. I could probably actually fly naked and nobody would notice, but they would notice when I was on the ground with the others.

There was another GLBTTQ dance tonight, and I went with Jen. She still made it clear that we weren’t going to be getting any more friendly than kissing, and I still preferred not to be dressed up this way. Jen noticed my continued discomfort with this and decided not to ask me to a dance again.

---

June 2, 2007

This was the last egg I would lay before school was out, and it came right after lunch. I got to test the little pump. It worked well and pumped up the little inflatable egg-catcher in 30 seconds.

---

June 15, 2007

Today was the last day of school. Everybody was happy for getting to be out of school for the summer, but I was especially happy because I was going to start flying school in a week.

There were fifty or sixty students at my school I considered friends, including the entire membership of GLBTTQ, but only 8 I considered close friends, and it was exactly that group who I told about my flying school.

---

June 25, 2007

The first day of flight school. And it was amazing how many people here in Normal could fly, or at least thought they would be able to.

To my disappointment, we didn’t go out flying at all today. Instead, we had three hours of lessons in flying safety. It all boiled down to a handful of things to be careful of while flying:

• Power lines. Contact with power lines wasn’t as bad for flyers as you might think! If you weren’t touching the ground, or another line, it was actually safe to be touching one power line. That was how birds sat on them all the time. It was only when you established an electrical connection with the ground or another line that things got bad. That said, those birds were pretty light, not more than a couple pounds in the case birds like seagulls. My classmates were anywhere from 80 to 180 pounds, or more in some cases when their flying machines were included. So the key things were never to rest on a line, and never touch one while touching any other line or any grounded object.
• Other flyers. The low airspace we would normally use was lightly regulated and we were expected to watch for other things in the air. If we were flying at night we had to wear the same kind of beacon lights planes used, and likewise look out for such lights.
• Birds. Usually birds would fly away from anything the size of one of us, but sometimes they might not notice us fast enough to get out of the way, and if we happened to be flying near a nest, some species were territorial and aggressive and would attack us.
• Airports and no-fly zones. If you could take off and land without a runway, flying near airports was generally advised against; if you needed to, you had to contact the control tower and ask for and wait to be granted clearance. There was a set of rules about this we’d learn later. And there were certain fixed no-fly zones, like near the White House, which were always off limits, though there weren’t any of those near Normal.
• Airplanes. If we were flying high enough that we might encounter airplanes not near an airport, we also had to follow rules planes used. The local air traffic control cell was staffed by Normal people (several people snickered when our instructor phrased it that way) and later they’d tell us how we would manage elsewhere.
• Asteroids. Some people laughed when this was suggested, but a couple of Normal’s flyers were actually capable of escaping the atmosphere, and they had to look out for asteroids, satellites, and other space junk. This needed another kind of license beyond what this class offered, so we would not be tested on this.

---

June 26, 2007

This morning we actually went out flying. Each one of us flew just once, separately, to show what we were capable of, so that the instructors knew where we stood. I was actually ahead of about a third of the class with regard to flying ability. A fourth of the class couldn’t even get off the ground yet, and a few others could only do short flights like the first time I did any sort of flight at all. I was able to get to the top of the tower they had built on the flight grounds, with some effort, and a handful of others were like me. About half the class was already capable of flying quite well and had no difficulty getting that high, though some of them did not have the ability to fly slow or hover in place and could only zoom past above the tower.

I learned that some people in Normal had powers that didn’t actually let them fly directly, but which allowed them to levitate objects, reduce their own mass (but not to zero), or modify gravity around them (but not entirely eliminate it). The levitators needed to learn how to use their power when they were on the thing being levitated, and the others needed assistance from some kind of flying machine, like model airplanes, to handle the lift component that their power did not give them. The class was going to help them with that. They had some flying machines of different types they let this group try out, but whatever worked, they were ultimately going to buy or build their own.

The rest of the class we spent inside, learning more about flight rules.

For now, most of us were borrowing helmets that the school had, but that was also something we were expected to get our own. So I’d be shopping for that soon.

---

June 29, 2007

It was now the end of the first week of flying class. I was getting better every day, both in my control and in the ease with which I could get up into and remain in the air. I felt confident that by the end of the summer I would be able fly without difficulty for significant distances. Speaking of which, they explained to us today about various kinds of magical devices we might use to hide us from outsiders if we flew outside of Normal. It might actually be possible for me to fly across the country some day and just look like an airplane to others while I was flying.

After the first two days, the class split into two groups. One group went out to fly at the start of class and came in for lectures afterward, while the other group reversed those roles. We weren’t split by flying ability. Instead, each group with similar flying skill was split in two, so each instructor could work with his or her group separately.

Male and female locker rooms were provided for us, because flight was physically demanding for some of us, and some needed special clothing or to stow materials they were carrying. In my case, I stripped off my cover-up clothes and went out in just the leotard, which I worried at first was going to be awfully revealing, but due to the feathers I didn’t seem to draw any undue attention. When I came back in I showered and put on some regular underwear and the other clothes I came in.

It was due to a locker room mixup that I encountered Freddie. He was a random daily gender shifter. Each morning he/she would wake up possibly, but not necessarily, having changed gender overnight. I had not even realized the two I had seen were the same person until the male Freddie started to head into the ladies’ locker room with me and the handful of other women in the class. He looked about my age (like about half the class; there were also some who looked to be high school seniors or college age, and a few older ones on up to 40s or 50s), and something about Freddie caught my eye. After we were all changed in the correct locker rooms and heading out to the flight field, I caught up to Freddie and let him know I’d like to talk to him more, and after the class was over, we exchanged numbers.

We talked in the evening, and I had my first date with a boy (maybe) tomorrow. His male and female bodies were so different that he had completely different sets of clothing for them, and so he was going to come dressed as a boy if in his male body, or as a girl if in his female body, and he’d call me tomorrow morning to let me know which way he was so that I could do the opposite.

---

June 30, 2007

I had forgotten when making my date that I was due to lay my egg. Fortunately, it came right after lunch and I still had plenty of time to get ready. I had time to go out and find that helmet too. A white one, with the face shield which was optional but recommended. I might be flying along as fast as a car goes down a highway someday, and not having that strong wind in my face would be a nice thing.

It turned out that Freddie was a girl today, so I didn’t yet have my first date with a boy and instead I was dressed in the boyish clothes I preferred.

We ended up sharing our gender changing stories in much detail with each other during dinner.

Freddie started her story, “I was born a girl. What you see today is what I would have looked like if the whole body change thing had never happened to me.”

“So what happened?”

“I developed powers that had me and things around me floating in the air, or sometimes landing on the wall or ceiling as if gravity was pulling the wrong way. I learned how to control the power, so I only altered gravity for things I wanted to move, when I wanted to move them, and I learned to use my power on myself to let me fly.”

“That’s cool. I’m still learning but I kind of have the hang of it now. You’ve seen me out there flapping my wings; my power doesn’t make me weightless. But go on.”

“It was about six months after my powers showed up that the accident happened.”

“What kind of accident?”

“I was flying and another flyer, a boy, crashed into me. I didn’t even see him until the crash; he must have come up from the ground straight into me.”

“Oh no! Did you manage to keep from crashing?”

“It happened too fast. We went straight into some power lines nearby. I knew they were there but I was trying to be careful and avoid them, but the boy hit me and drove both of us directly into the lines. Somebody saw it and called an ambulance and I woke up in Normal Hospital.”

“How bad was it?”

“I had some mild burns and bruising from when I fell afterward, but it wasn’t actually all that bad. They were going to send me home after my second night in the hospital.”

“But they didn’t? What happened?”

“The boy who crashed into me was never found. I’d been talking with the police already from my hospital bed and actually filed a report against this unknown boy. His parents had also reported him missing and everybody thought he fled after the accident. But the second morning in the hospital I woke up in his body. That’s the body you saw me in Friday.”

“Wow! That’s crazy. How did you feel?”

“I was a mess. I was mad at him, but I also felt sorry for him when the NANA people tested me and found that when I had his body, I also had his powers, and they were pretty sure that meant he was gone.”

“And was that right?”

“He never showed up. His name was James, but apparently he was called Jimbo.”

I laughed, and Freddie laughed with me, confirming she thought the name was funny too.

“It was easy for me to skip taking that name. I was Frederika and I became legally Freddie all the time afterward. But I did take up learning how to use his magical abilities and specifically how to cast the flying spell he used. And at first I thought I was going to be good with his family, as they loaned and later gave me his clothes so I’d have something for that body to wear. Six months in, I’d mastered how to fly his way when I had his body, and that’s when his family sued me. They wanted seven-figure damages for wrongful death, claiming I killed him and stole his body.”

“Oh, sheesh! Obviously in Normal court,” I commented.

“Of course. And my family countersued for my emotional distress at having to live half the time in his body. It took a month, which was mostly legal shenanigans on their part trying to make a case, because besides me there was only one real witness, the one who called the ambulance, who testified that Jimbo was under me as we collided and then went upward into the lines. Ultimately a jury found I was mostly liable for my own suffering for flying near the lines to begin with, and Jimbo was mostly liable for his own death for flying near the lines and flying into another overhead flyer. And they decided the result of me ending up with his body was an unforeseeable consequence. Instead of damages for either of us, they forbid me to fly until I got formally trained. I’m not allowed to fly outside of our flying school until we finish. His family is still trying to appeal the result and get actual money I don’t have, but my family and my lawyer don’t think that’s going anywhere. The class seemed like a good idea anyway, so I enrolled.”

“Did you get his memories or anything?”

“Memories, no. But aspects of his personality rubbed off on me. Before this happened, I only liked boys, and I wouldn’t have even considered going on a date with another girl. You know, a date date. I might have gone on a shopping date.”

I laughed with Freddie.

“It turns out that Jimbo had a seriously macho attitude. He wasn’t a gay-hater, but he was 100% certain he could never date a boy. You see how I’m dressed? This was exactly his picture of an ideal date. Not that I would have ever dated that jerk.”

Freddie had on the kind of outfit Jen would have wanted to see on her date. I told her, “Yeah, I’ve had to shoot down my share of jerks too.”

“Even if he had turned into a girl, he’d just have become a Lesbian. The first part of his personality I noticed was that when I was in his body I got erections for girls. It was later that the other bits crept up on me. Before I realized it, I had acted downright rude several times, in ways I never would have before, including to my former boyfriend. When I realized what I had said to him was when I realized I had a problem.”

“Ouch.”

“Once I realized it, I was able to stamp out the negative aspects of the personality I inherited from him, but I never eliminated the way I now like girls. I even like girls now when I’m in this body. I apologized to my poor boyfriend, but we saw that our relationship could no longer be, so now we’re just friends.”

“Well it’s good that you didn’t lose him as a friend.”

“But dating is hard. I arranged one other date with a girl before you, while I was in my male body, and I ended up in this body the day of the date. I’d explained to her I was a girl sometimes, and she didn’t indicate a problem with that, but when I showed up to my date as a girl, she just walked out.”

“Aww... Could you have just dressed this body as a boy?”

“Maybe. But I don’t have male clothes for this body. You know we’re completely different sizes. And I’ve never dressed this body like you are today. I wear athletic gear when it’s practical, like for flying, and dresses otherwise. And I still like it that way. You never could have gotten Jimbo into a dress, but I think he thought this was the proper way for a girl to dress, and that’s what came over, reinforcing my own belief.”

I nodded.

“When I’m a girl, I can still consider dating boys, but if I turned out a boy on the day of the date, my mind simply wouldn’t allow me to go, even if the boy would have me. So as much as I’d like to, I don’t think I can date boys anymore. You’re the closest I can handle. And because of the potential reactions of my female dates, well, I pretty much have to have a bisexual girlfriend.”

I responded, “Or at least one with bisexual tendencies. As I told you, I was a boy before I turned into a girl bird. I was slow to accept my female nature. When I first started, I wore girl jeans and panties because the boy ones didn’t fit right, and pretty much everything else boy clothes. Now I can deal with ordinary girl clothes. And I wasn’t sure whether I liked boys, and I am still not sure, but I tried dating some girls. Things didn’t work out, I think more because of issues with those specific girls more than myself, but also in part because I am still not comfortable dressing like you are now. I could do it once in a while.”

“Well maybe we can have some dressed-down dates when I’m a boy. Not like ripped clothes and all, but I could just wear a nice shirt and pants and you could also wear pants if you wanted. I can beat down the part of Jimbo in me that would have insisted you wear a dress.”

We went on so long like this that we missed any chance of seeing the movies we were interested in, and instead went home to my house where we continued our conversation. Among other things, Freddie explained that she prefers that people use female pronouns to describe her in her female body and male ones in his male body, which is confusing sometimes, and I knew I wasn’t always going to get it right, but she accepted that.

---

July 7, 2007

When I had my next date with Freddie, he was a boy. I did wear a blouse and skirt, but not a fancy dress.

We kept track of time better this time, and made it to a movie. Afterward, we went to Freddie’s house, and I met his parents. They were normal, but Freddie had already told them about me, so they weren’t surprised by my feathers.

After a short meeting with them, we went to Freddie’s room, where he told me more about his parents.

“Before my accident, while not outright gay-haters, they had never really been comfortable with gays and Lesbians, and my father was known to use the word ‘gay’ as a slur. A few months after I changed, when I still hadn’t had any dates yet but I was starting to think about dating girls, one time that he used that word in front of me, I confronted him:”

“Dad, I wish you would stop using that word like that.”

“What? Oh... Does that bother you?”

“Yes it bothers me! I don’t even know any more whether I want to be with a boy or a girl and it’s going to be gay half the time no matter who I’m with!”

“Oh. I am so very sorry, dear, and I will avoid using that word in the future.”

Freddie finished by saying, “And he did. He slipped up a couple times but noticed it and apologized immediately afterward.”

“Well that’s good. I’m glad you stood up for yourself!”

“After that incident and some other talks in which I explained the difficulties I was going through, my parents became fully supportive of my attempts to date girls. The mere fact that I’m now on my second date with a girl (not counting the one that never even got started) I think is making them very happy.”

We had agreed no sex today, but I did partly undress and explain my anatomy to Freddie.

“If you’re going to continue dating me, we’re going to want to have sex eventually, and it should be possible, but it’s not the same as for other girls. You see, this slit between my legs is all I have. There’s no other opening.”

Freddie responded, “Huh? You don’t have an asshole?”

“I do, but it’s inside.”

At my suggestion, he got a flashlight and I held open my cloacal slit so he could see. “Inside a bird, the vagina is the hole in front. The asshole is the one in back. And there’s no pee hole; that gets mixed with the poop.”

“Weird!”

“I do have a clitoris, though, and it’s right where you’d expect. That’s not a bird feature though, it’s just me.”

“Well I learned something. Thanks for sharing.”

---

July 11, 2007

By now, I had a pretty good understanding of my flight abilities and limits.

I could fly at up to about 40 MPH when I got up above the trees, power lines, and buildings; 150 feet up was enough to be above most of those. I could get up to at least 1000 feet, where I would start needing to be on air traffic control, but I wasn’t able to fly faster up there or really have any other advantages, and it was work getting that high, so I probably wouldn’t often do that.

The air traffic control cell in Normal was here at the school. Those who flew that high could practice with them, and they also helped warn any other passing craft, which were rare, and mostly other locals taking off or landing at the tiny air strip here, and the locals would at least be aware there might be flying people around.

Once I got up above the buildings and trees and stuff like that on the ground, I could soar, holding my wings out so they caught the air just right to keep me aloft, only occasionally flapping to maintain altitude. This was work, and unprepared, I’d tire after about an hour, but my school practice didn’t really allow for significantly longer flight times anyway, nor was there anywhere I needed to fly for such a long stretch until I was going outside Normal.

---

July 21, 2007

Tonight for the first time male Freddie and I tried to have sex. It was, to say the least, awkward. We spent most of the time just finding a position where he could fit into me. Any position where we were lying alongside one another, the typical way you think of people having sex, was not going to work. What did work was if I lay on the bed with my butt at the edge and my legs raised and spread apart and held my cloacal slit open. Freddie could stand next to the bed, put his dick and balls entirely into the slit, and get about half his dick into my vagina.

It wasn’t very good for either of us, but we proved it was possible. But we thought it was better to just use our hands or mouths on each other, which we could also do when Freddie was female.

---

July 28, 2007

Freddie and I had been dating every Saturday evening for a while. Today, though, my egg was due, and it did not come until the evening, while I was having dinner with the then-female Freddie.

“Oh, it’s time for my egg!” I exclaimed as we sat down.

“You did mention laying eggs. How often does it happen?”

“So far it has been reliably every fourth Saturday, though the time of day varies. This is the latest in the day that it has happened.”

“You’re going to do it right now?”

“No, not quite yet, but I can feel it coming. Probably when we are ready to leave here.”

So we enjoyed our food, paid for it all, and by then, I knew I was ready.

“You wanna come see me lay my egg?”

“Where?”

“In the ladies’ room.” While I was dressed in boyish clothes today, there was nothing about me that said I wasn’t a lady, including my genitals and ID if anyone questioned me, and I almost always used the ladies’ room when I was out these days, even when dressed in boyish clothes.

“OK.”

We grabbed our purses and went to look for the restroom. When we found it, we saw they had a single-stall “family” restroom in addition to the regular multi-person ones for each sex, and it was available, so we went in there instead.

I pulled the catcher out of my purse and quickly inflated it with the small pump.

“What’s that?”

“I usually sit on the toilet while laying my egg. It’s a comfortable and generally available place. I use this to catch the egg when I do.”

“Oh.”

By that point the catcher was inflated, and I put it in place, removed my pants and panties, and sat on it.

“Now how long does this take?” Freddie asked.

“At the stage I am at now, I can push it out over the course of a few minutes.”

I spread my legs wide and leaned back a bit and beckoned Freddie to watch. She knelt in front of me to do so.

About a minute later, Freddie excitedly commented, “I see it!”

This was the first time I had done this outside my house, and the first time I was sharing the experience with anyone. But I was experienced with the pushing.

“Oh, God, how big is it?” Freddie exclaimed.

Finally, the widest part of the egg was out of me and I stood while expelling the egg completely.

“Wow! I couldn’t believe that huge thing came out of you if I didn’t just see it with my own eyes.”

I grabbed some paper, cleaned the egg, then picked up the catcher, egg and all, wiped the underside of the catcher with some more paper in case it got wet from the toilet, and maneuvered the whole thing back down inside my purse.

“What are you going to do with the egg?”

“Eat it,” I told her, deadpan, while cleaning myself up with still more paper.

“Really? You eat your own egg?”

“Yes. Not tonight, of course; I’ll start tomorrow. It was recommended to me by my doctor because of the amount of nutrients that go into creating an egg this large. If I don’t, I’ll have to eat a bunch of other extra food or supplements.”

“Isn’t that, like, being a cannibal?”

“Well, no. The egg’s not fertilized. When we had sex it was protected, so it won’t be, though I have a device I can check it with. So it’s more like drinking your own milk, which you probably also think is pretty icky, but there is nothing inherently wrong with it.”

I finished getting dressed and we exited the restroom, and the restaurant, our bill being already paid. But Freddie was too grossed out by seeing this and we ended our date early with neither a movie nor sex. Guess I won’t invite her to watch that any more.

---

August 4, 2007

I had another date with Freddie, who was a girl once again. I could not promise not to have to lay an egg during our future dates, but I wouldn’t mention it to Freddie, and that I did promise, much to Freddie’s relief.

Otherwise there was nothing notable about this date. We ate, saw some pretty forgettable movie during which we spent more time kissing and groping each other than actually watching, and went to my house for some Lesbian sex.

---

August 8, 2007

All week, we were doing our final tests to get our flight licenses. We all took the written test Monday and everybody passed that part. Since yesterday, we have been doing our flight tests, one at a time, with everybody else watching. Two people had failed, one for violating rules and one due to being unable to get up in the air. They would get another chance after everyone else was through.

It was now Wednesday and I was third up today. I no longer had trouble getting up into the air, and I felt pretty confident in my ability to manage the rules. The air traffic control tower here had a landing strip that could hardly be called an airport, but it allowed the locals who needed it to take off and land, though it was closed for such purposes during our test period unless someone had an emergency. The airfield around it was being treated a no-fly zone today, except for those who needed it to take off and land, and even for them it was no-fly in the middle of the test. We had to fly a loop around that zone without entering it as part of the test.

Those of us not flying were sitting on a set of bleachers inside the tower-controlled zone, so the first part of the test for those not using the runway was to walk to the edge of the zone before taking off, which I did (as most did) while the previous student was still in the air. I had no trouble getting myself up in the air, and took off to start the maneuvers for the test. Around the no fly zone, through another area used to show control, and made the appropriate communications with the tower before coming back in for my landing.

I passed. When the day was through, they issued my license. I went home a legal pilot, though I was only allowed to fly my own body. Outside of Normal, I’d fly wearing a charm that could either make me appear to be a single-person private plane to anyone who didn’t know our secret, or make me invisible to such people, depending on which mode made more sense for what I was doing. Within Normal, I didn’t need that; people not in on the secret simply wouldn’t see me in the air. Mom was already there to pick me up, so I rode with her, but the last two days of classes, for which I would merely be an observer, I would fly to and from the school (as some of the students already did today). I wasn’t completely confident in my ability to navigate everywhere yet, but I knew the roads in Normal well enough to find my way between here and home.

---

August 9, 2007

Due to his weird dual nature, Freddie had to do his flight test twice, once in each form. Freddie was female Tuesday, and was tested in that form then. Today was the first time Freddie was male during this testing period, so he did tested in that form. He aced it, naturally.

We flew home together to his house after class for a little celebration with his family and lunch before I went home alone to my house. Freddie’s family was going on a vacation next week including both weekends, so I was going to have two weekends without dates.

---

August 11, 2007

As a sort of graduation present, my parents got me a small GPS system and mounted it in my helmet for me. It wasn’t a cheap one, either. It was a miniaturized one designed to be mounted this way, with a piece that projected the map onto the upper right portion of my face shield.

This was great! I turned off all the route calculations, which were based on following roads, and set it in a mode where it just showed me the map and a marker at whatever destination I had set. I could set it into a mode where the destination stayed at the top of the map. This let me use it sort of like a compass, aligning the roads below me to match the orientation of the displayed map to get going in the right direction. Or I could put it in a mode where the direction I was going was on top, and orient myself to keep my destination in view. I wasn’t sure which was better. I’d experiment.

It was also voice activated, and the enclosed helmet made that work well in flight. I could change destinations mid-flight or even just pick a destination after I was already airborne.

---

August 18, 2007

I spent the intermission before school started again and while Freddie was away by doing a lot of flying. It was exhausting, but I’d learned I just needed more carbs, basically fuel to keep me flying. I needed my wings out, and couldn’t eat while flying, but I could make short stops anywhere, sometimes on rooftops. For every hour of flying, I needed to stop and eat 2-3 ounces of pure sugar. Basically, a couple candy bars. If I ate my “fuel” in advance, I could fly for up to 3 hours nonstop, though without a plane charm, there was nowhere I could go that would take that long.

I could fly in a straight line, not impeded by all the obstacles on the ground, and go directly to my destination. Even though I was limited to about 40 MPH with some stops, I figured I could go places faster than cars except on very long trips where the cars could spend almost the entire trip on highways.

---

August 20, 2007

Back to school! After one week off at the end of flight school, it was time for regular school to begin again. I was in high school now, a new school, with lots of new people I didn’t know before. I was still not at the same school with Freddie; he lived too far from me and went to a different high school. I didn’t have gym this year, so I would not have that daily ritual of showering in front of a bunch of naked girls, nor the ordeal of being picked on by the boys who knew me before, when they thought they could get away with it.

I was going to miss seeing Freddie every day. However, we would be able to go to GLBTTQ dances, and Freddie also promised to invite me to the regular dances at his school. I wasn’t sure if I’d go to the ones at my school, due to my past difficulty there. Freddie did not have the kind of confrontation with her classmates that I had with mine when her dual nature became known. Part of that was due to looking so different that most people did not immediately connect her two identities; because her male body was actually that of another person, and not a power, per se, the spell didn’t hide it, and she’d either go around all day as female to everybody or all day as male. Part of it was that she showered with the girls when she was female, and with the boys when he was male, and so always fit in wherever she was. And part of it was that she was initially a girl, and both the girls and the boys who knew her before the change were more forgiving of a girl changing, for some reason.

She’d told me the stories about that. There were still girls, like some who I had to deal with, who didn’t want to be in the same restroom or locker room with her due to her “sometimes being a boy” but they were officially told by school administrators to deal with it, in some cases also pointing out how any alternative would actually put her in a restroom with people who were currently her opposite sex. And there were boys who harassed Freddie’s male form for being a girl. But his male form was actually a pretty large guy, and when he told them forcefully that he didn’t even start out a guy and that they should be impressed he was even sometimes this much of a guy and to wait and see how much of a guy he became next year, they left him alone afterward. This hadn’t been an issue at the flight school. Everybody there had powers and maybe a third of them looked abnormal in some way. Nobody messed with anybody.

After my first day at school, I decided on another change I wanted to make. Since I had to live as a girl anyway, I decided to start, as of tomorrow, wearing the breast forms every day. They were only B cup, which meant they weren’t huge and didn’t really cause any trouble with my clothing or anything, but they would make me look more like the other girls, who all had breasts now. Well, like them in one way, since my feathers still made me stand out. I had already been doing things like wearing high-necked outfits and white clothes to make my feathers less obvious, and I would continue to do these things.

In the evening, when I was pulling out the breast forms and placing them where they’d be more readily accessible when I was getting dressed every morning, I realized that I was now thinking of myself as a girl. I am not sure when that really first happened, but this was the first time I noticed it. At the beginning of the summer, I was definitely still thinking of myself as a boy forced to live as a girl. It shouldn’t have really taken this long, since I have been laying eggs, an innately female action, for more than half a year now. I’ve let my boyfriend fuck me in my vagina. Of course I’m a girl!

---

August 21, 2007

I wore the breast forms to school today. I think some people noticed, but nobody commented, so I don’t know if they realized I had fakes on or if it was just boys realizing I had breasts, and thus looking at them and not at me. And that was fine! While many women hated that, if they were ignoring my feathers and the fact that I used to be a boy, rather than harassing me over those things, so much the better!

Mom commented on it after I got home, though.

“Yeah, Mom, I finally feel like a girl. I can’t say when it happened, but probably some time after I started dating Freddie. At the beginning of the summer, I know I definitely still felt like a boy whose power had forced him to be a girl. Now I feel like a girl whose power forced her to never grow breasts.”

“Well I will go out today and buy you more of the pocket bras so you have a full weekly set.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

---

August 24, 2007

For Friday, rather than dressing down as was some people’s tradition, I wore one of my date dresses to school. I wanted to try to cement the idea in people’s minds that I was a girl, since I didn’t have the hair other girls did nor could you see the softer lines in my face, and the pants didn’t help either.

This sort of worked. I made a couple new friends among the girls. But I also had several of the boys hitting on me, which I did not really want, as I already had Freddie. So I had to think about whether I wanted to keep doing that. It was probably OK. Just part of really living as a girl that I’d have to learn to live with.

---

August 25, 2007

I had a date with Freddie Saturday to cap off the first week of school. We didn’t feel like going out. He ate with my family at my house and we went upstairs to try sex again afterwards. We were well into it before I realized that I was going to lay my egg. But I knew I had a little time, so I let him go on until he came.

“OK, I need a break.”

I eased apart from him and went to the bathroom, where I relaxed a bit until I could lay my egg. I took it downstairs and put it in the fridge. I went back to Freddie, but he wasn’t ready for more sex. We instead shared some more stories of our experiences.

I told him about my experience with boys hitting on me. Freddie had had plenty of similar experiences during his time as a girl. He told me he had an idea and to wait for next weekend.

---

September 1, 2007

Today I went on a flying date with Freddie. We started out at lunchtime by separately flying to meet at a restaurant a bit farther than we would normally have gone to, about 5 miles from my house and 6 from his. I ate a hearty meal to ensure I could fly for a while without stopping to eat; Freddie had no such limitations. And Freddie gave me my surprise, a necklace with a large, flat, heart-shaped locket with a photo of the two of us in it.

“It’s perfect, Freddie. I can wear this with my nice dresses at school, look more like a girl, and drive off the boys from hitting on me all at once.”

When we were done, we took off again directly from the restaurant to wherever. And we flew and flew to see the sights, including flying above some places we’d normally pay to enter, just to watch.

We still did have to stop for me to eat, and for both of us to use the restroom. Our mid-afternoon stop was just for me to fuel up, so I just got something to munch on quickly and we took off again. Our next break was dinner and we went to another restaurant. We both had the required lights for night-time flying with us, so during one stop we turned those on and kept going.

After it was dark, with some low clouds moving in, Freddie wanted to attempt midair sex. We flew up above those clouds, maybe 900 feet up.

“Bella, you fly like normal, and I’ll fly along with you, pull the crotch of your flight suit aside, and slip in.”

Yeah, he tried that. He’d actually planned it and brought condoms. But it distracted me too much from flying and I almost fell out of the sky, and ended up hanging into him for dear life.

“Freddie, I can’t fly like you do. I have to soar. I can’t do that with you dragging on me. You have to either push me along so that your weight does not drag me down, or you have to support us both.”

He figured out how to do the latter, so he floated along on his back while I sat on top of him and got us arranged. That actually worked. When I was not myself trying to fly, I could handle the thrusting, and it actually worked pretty well.

Once he came, I separated us, adjusted the crotch of my flight suit, and launched myself into flight using his body as a jumping-off point. We flew back toward our homes for a bit, and when we reached the obvious separation point, he kissed my face guard so as not to interfere with my flight but still give me a goodbye kiss of a sort, and we flew to our separate homes.

---

October 20, 2007

This was another egg day. Freddie and I had decided to skip dates on my egg days, and on all other Saturdays we were having some kind of date, sometimes like normal people, sometimes flying, and once in a while with sex.

Two weeks ago, during a midair sex session, Freddie had busted through a condom, so I hoped he hadn’t gotten me pregnant. Or, fertilized the egg, I realized, was the correct term.

The egg did not come until evening, and after almost a year in which I had gotten used to laying these eggs, this one was difficult and more painful than usual. Just looking at it, I could see it was different from my usual eggs. It was wider and not as long. Sure enough, the tester told me it was fertilized.

I came crying down the stairs with the egg to Mom, and through sobs told her the story.

“It’s all right, dear. We can deal with this.”

“But Mom, I’m not ready to be a mother!”

“Well, you have two options, Bella. Many girls who get pregnant while in high school have abortions, and for you it’s far easier than most.”

“Noooo! Mom, I couldn’t! It’s my child in there!”

“Well, it’s got to be one way or the other, Bella. Either you become a mother, or we smash this egg.”

Ultimately I decided to hatch the egg. Mom could help me care for my baby when it hatched. She wrapped the egg in blankets with two hot water bottles on either side until we could get an incubator for it. I replaced the water every two hours, and when I went to bed I took apart that contraption and cuddled the egg.

In addition to this, I was going to have to eat a special diet the next week. I would carry my lunch each day rather than eat the school lunch to ensure I got the nutrition I needed.

---

October 26, 2007

Today the incubator arrived. Mom had been changing the water for me every day while I was at school, and I took over in the evenings and warmed it with body heat at night, but today when I got home from school, instead I learned how to use the incubator. It was pretty easy, really; set it and forget it. The egg would be at a constant 98 degrees.

Once a day I would use the tester on it, which had additional modes I had not needed until I had a fertilized egg. It would estimate the progress of the development based on detecting the baby’s heartbeat and blood flow, but it had not reached the point where those things were detectable yet. The doctor had said it would take months to hatch, so it was not too surprising it didn’t have a heartbeat after only one week. I had to be patient.

---

October 27, 2007

Both of our schools were having a Halloween dance/costume party tonight. I had almost told Freddie I wouldn’t go, due to the whole egg thing, but I relented. We had worked out a deal before my egg hatched that we’d go as Superman and Supergirl, who were actually brother and sister rather than a dating couple, but who really cared?

The trick was the Superman and Supergirl costumes were interchangeable. The core of each costume was a long-sleeved legless leotard, one with much more coverage than the ones I wore as flight suits that let my wings be exposed. It would actually serve as either Superman or Supergirl depending on the shape of the person wearing it, and whether they had the blue tights under it covering the legs like Superman did, or the little red skirt which attached to it for Supergirl. Supergirl had a blonde wig, and Superman a short midnight blue one.

The deal was this: If Freddie came out a girl the day of the dance, she’d wear the Supergirl accessories and I’d go breastless with the Superman tights and wig, and we’d go to her school’s dance. If Freddie was a boy, he’d wear Superman, and I had opaque flesh-colored tights to cover my legs to make myself a more convincing Supergirl, rather than the Superbird I’d otherwise look like. And in that case we’d go to my school’s dance.

Well, Freddie was a boy, so it was my school we showed up at. It was great! All my friends got to see the guy who had so far only been a picture in my locket to them. I made of point of introducing the guys who’d hit on me to Freddie. I know I heard a couple of the bullies who remembered me as a boy snickering, I’m sure because they saw me dating a boy and considered me gay for doing so, but I didn’t care about them. At least they were leaving me alone now. And while I could not actually fly in this costume, Freddie could, and lifted us off the ground for a few brief moments at just the right times while we were dancing.

---

October 31, 2007

I hadn’t originally planned to actually trick or treat, but Freddie asked me to go with her. She was female, so we met up and swapped costume bits so that I could be Superman and she could be Supergirl, and we walked in her neighborhood. So the other costumed kids I passed were even less recognizable to me than they might have been, since I didn’t actually know most of them.

A funny bit happened at one corner. Another kid dressed as Mr. Mxyzptlk did a double take on seeing me and Freddie and, as I soon realized, another Supergirl approaching from around the corner, and tripped and fell. Freddie and the other Supergirl helped him up. He thanked us and we introduced ourselves. The Mr. Mxyzptlk was a kid named Robin who sounded like a girl even though she was wearing a male costume, but I knew anything was possible in Normal. The other Supergirl was a kid with an identity problem who called herself George, Shelly, and Samantha.

We got a pretty good haul, enough candy to last me a month if I didn’t want to overdo it. But I knew I could easily use it after my next egg, or when flying, so I saved it all for those uses.

---

November 17, 2007

This morning I checked the egg for the umpteenth time and found it had progressed to a stage the device was now able to call 28% developed. That was four weeks in, so if it was exactly right it would be ten more weeks and some days before it hatched.

Today I laid another egg. This was a weird thing about birds; because we laid eggs rather than bearing live young, our “pregnancy” did not interrupt our cycle one bit. Since I’d had no more disasters with the condoms, this one was of course unfertilized.

---

December 1, 2007

Tonight, GLBTTQ had their first dance of the school year and of course I went with Freddie. She hadn’t realized such a club existed until I mentioned it to her over the summer, but for someone like her, it was perfect. And there was no issue with two girls going as a couple, so we agreed I’d go as a girl and Freddie would dress appropriately for whatever gender she awoke as, which turned out to be female.

I’d been unwilling to keep doing this for Jen, but I did it for Freddie. Why? I thought about it while I was getting ready. A big part of it was, I realized, that Freddie was willing to take me as I was. I made sure to tell her that during one of the slow dances.

“Freddie, I love you. I love you because you take me as I am. And I take you as you are, too, or at least as you became after beating back Jimbo. Don’t ever change.”

Freddie laughed at the mention of Jimbo, and responded, “Thank you, Bella. I love you too. And you’re so right about that; I do take you as you are, and love you as you are.”

---

December 22, 2007

Freddie’s family was traveling to see relatives over the holidays, ones who had been briefed on her dual nature. We’d been dating every Saturday I wasn’t laying an egg all school year until today. But my family had some of our own relatives over, a branch of Mom’s family, some of them with powers, who were anxious to see how I had turned out.

The day was marred by tragedy, though, when I checked the egg to find it now reported as sterile. I wasn’t sure if that meant my baby had died, or was just a malfunction in the scanner. We called the vet, but he said there was nothing to be done about that. He said that by this point I should be able to hear a tiny heartbeat if I pressed the egg against my ear. I checked, and there was definitely none of that. Since it was not there, he said, the embryo was dead. Just like live births, which sometimes ended in miscarriage, not every fertilized egg succeeded in producing live young. He did, however, ask me to bring the egg in so he could study it. He might be able to tell how my baby died and if there was anything I should do differently when I had another.

With that done, I turned off and packed away the incubator, to be used again if I ever needed it. I wanted to forget about it and try to have fun with the visiting family, but they wanted to hear about me and my eggs, since none of them were egg-layers, and they naturally led back to that, so I ended up talking about it all evening and going to bed early to escape that.

---

December 24, 2007

The vet called today and told me my egg was a horror story. Something about our baby was very, very wrong, like major birth defects. The parts were not arranged to form the shape of a human being, nor a bird, nor any kind of being, really. It had managed to live for a while, but as development proceeded, the strain on the malformed body was eventually too much. It needed to have a heartbeat to circulate blood through a circulatory system by this point, and it didn’t.

He wasn’t sure why this happened, but he was going to run some genetic tests, and he wanted my and Freddie’s DNA. I told him Freddie was traveling, but I’d let his family know and after the holidays he might come in to give a sample on a day he was male. He hoped to be able to tell me if there was a mutation that caused this, or if Freddie and I were somehow incompatible.

---

January 7, 2008

Today the vet was able to give me the news. Not only were Freddie and I incompatible, I was probably incompatible with most people. My powers had altered my DNA in some fundamental ways that made it quite birdlike, and there were too many genes that didn’t have counterparts in humans and too many human ones missing from mine. I’d probably only ever have live children with a mate who also had avian characteristics and similar genetic differences. Which meant essentially nobody. People from NANA were able to tell me there were only 7 male avians in Normal.

If at some point in the future I really wanted to have a child, maybe I’d ask them, presumably pay them to get genetic tests done and be my sperm donor. Or Freddie could take a normal sperm donor and we’d find out if she’d have a pregnancy that progressed only on female days like Jen’s mom did.

At least I’d worry less about it; if Freddie and I had another accident, we’d just break the egg quickly instead of nurturing it and finding it dead after 2 months.

---

May 3, 2008

Today was both an egg-laying day and a GLBTTQ dance, and as a result it was the first time I was with Freddie on an egg-laying day in a long time. And as luck would have it, the egg decided not to come until evening, so I had to excuse myself and find the ladies room. Naturally when I went in there, there weren’t any stalls open and one girl was just standing there.

“Are you in line?” I asked.

“No, I’m just waiting for a friend. You’re first in line,” the girl replied.

“Oh, good. My egg can wait a few minutes, but not too long.”

“Oh, I noticed you seemed to be a bird, but I didn’t realize you would be that much of one. I have powers too. My name’s Trixie.”

“I’m Bella. What’s your power?”

“I can animate other bodies. Except this is an animated body; my original body is at home.”

“Cool. Well I’m a bird, I can fly (though not in this dress; I actually have to be able to spread my wings). I don’t have much else for powers. I don’t have periods, but once a month I lay a big egg.”

“What’s the inflatable thing for?”

“It’s an egg-catcher. I always carry this with me in case I have to lay an egg when I’m away from home. It cushions the egg and keeps it out of the toilet water.”

“Oh, I guess it makes sense, if you’re out, that the toilet is the sensible place to do it. Just how big is this egg?”

“It’s about the size of a football, but egg-shaped instead of being pointy-ended.”

“Wow! Does it hurt?”

“It did the first time I laid an egg, but now it comes out pretty easily.”

“Does this egg-catcher mean that mean you’re saving the egg to take home to hatch?”

“Oh, goodness no. These eggs aren’t fertilized, but just like chickens, I lay eggs all the time anyway. Thankfully not every day like chickens. I save the egg so I can eat it.”

“You eat your own egg?”

“It’s my doctor’s recommendation.” I had finished inflating the thing by this point and I told her the details while I reached under my dress and removed my panties.

“Um, Bella, how soon will you lay your egg?”

“As soon as I can get into one of these stalls. It’s ready. Once I start, it only takes a minute or two and it’ll be out. You want to take a look?”

“Actually, my request is a little more personal than that, but I’m really curious. In addition to animating bodies, I can temporarily feel what another person is feeling, and since I think this is a rare chance to experience something different, I’m interested. Will you let me do that?”

“Go right ahead.”

“In order to do this, I have to kiss you.”

I puckered up, and she kissed me. It was more of a kiss than I was expecting, and kind of slobbery. She didn’t force her tongue into my mouth, but she left some saliva on my face.

At that moment a girl came out of one of the stalls, so as soon as Trixie pulled away from the kiss I went into the stall, closed and latched the door, set the egg catcher on the toilet, and sat down on it and started pushing. The egg came out quickly, but once I got it out and cleaned up, I realized I also needed to use the toilet for what it was meant for. I got that done, got myself cleaned up, put away my egg and the egg-catcher, and returned to Freddie.

Of course, I did not speak about it the rest of the night.

Caution: This story contains references to prostitution, murder, and suicide, but there are no graphic depictions of any of them..

I’m George Walda. Shortly after I turned 17, some strange things started happening to me. First it was this recurring dream that I had turned into a pile of goo.

There wasn’t really much of anything to this dream, but I experienced this along with a sense of returning to my proper body shape just as I was waking up, for months on end. And I worried it was real because somehow, without fail, every night I had this dream, I managed to lose my underwear in bed. I mean, I was in bed and so were the underwear I wore to bed each night, just they weren’t on me when I awoke.

In March 2007, I started noticing stuff happening with the goo, like it was forming shapes, but I couldn’t tell what. Finally, one night, the goo formed into a body and climbed out of bed still within my dream, not under my control. There was only dim light in my room from a street light, but the goo body looked in my mirror, and I could see it was a girl. Her naked boobs were visible. Her appearance blurred briefly and she changed to a couple other girls and then back to the first one. I assumed by where she appeared in the mirror that she was about my height. She had dark wavy hair that reached to her shoulders. One of the other bodies had blonde hair, and one had dark, shorter hair and a tiny nose. There was at least one other one I didn’t catch a good glimpse of. All were young, somewhere between my age to mid-20s, as best I could tell in the dim light.

She explored my house, keeping quiet to avoid waking anyone and not turning any lights on. Once she was done, she climbed back into my bed and turned back into goo and I turned back into myself when I woke up.

The next night, my goo turned into the girl again. This time, she looked through my clothes until she found some sweats and put them on. And my shoes; they didn’t fit, and she changed her feet so that they fit my shoes. Then she seemed to change her mind, took everything off, opened a window, and tossed the clothes out, jumping out after them, turning into goo on the way down and landing with a splat. She quickly formed into the girl again, put on my clothes, and spent a while exploring. That night that was all she did. She came back to my house and did a trick where she turned one arm into a long tendril of goo stretching up until she reached my second-floor window, using it to pull herself up and inside. She shut the window, put my clothes away, and got back into bed. This was followed by my now-usual experience of turning from goo back into me when I woke up.

The third night she seemed more intent. She tossed my clothes and herself out my window quickly, walked to a place she had explored the first night, and took off, jogging a few miles down Main Street and turning into some other neighborhood. She located the address she was looking for, but didn’t go into the house. In the garden next to the house, she turned into the goo again, seeped down into the ground, and located a glass jar sealed with a metal lid which the goo pulled out of the ground, leaving a small hole behind. She turned into the girl again and opened the jar. Inside was a small change purse stuffed with cash - 10s and 20s, a few hundred dollars worth - and an ancient-looking ID that expired before I was even born but with a picture that looked like this girl. Shelly Peterson, her name apparently was.

She carried the jar and purse with her after she dressed again and took off again on Main Street. Another mile or so down the road was our 24-hour Wal-Mart. She left the jar on the base of a lamppost in the parking lot but took the purse and money with her. She seemed to know her way around here, and went straight to the women’s clothing department. She picked out a few things and tried them on. She had gotten different sizes of the same things, so I guess she was figuring out her sizes. She got it figured out, kept one of the dresses she had tried on, and picked out a couple bras, a pack of panties, a couple more dresses, a pack of socks, and a pair of shoes. Sneakers, but girly ones. She checked out and paid for all the stuff with money from the jar.

There were restrooms at the front of the Wal-Mart, outside the checkouts, and she went inside, changed into some of the clothes she bought, and put mine in the bag before leaving. After picking up the jar again, she went straight back to my house from there, but she stopped outside and went into the shed where we kept lawn tools and such stuff. She stripped, stuffed all her new clothes and the purse and jar into it, and hid it in a corner, putting on my clothes and repeating her trick to get back into my room.

I told my parents at breakfast the next day about the weird dreams I’d been having. They just thought I was having some elaborate dreams and didn’t seem to think it was important. But the dreams continued. I took my family’s digital camera up to my room, set it up to record video, and aimed it at my bed. I wasn’t sure how long it would record, but I hoped that it would simply stop if it filled up. I started it recording as I went to bed, and I left a desk lamp on so there was enough light for my bed to be visible on the camera.

---

March 17, 2007

The fourth night, she didn’t bother with my sweats. She went straight outside naked, to the shed. She retrieved the bag, dressed, and took her purse, leaving the empty jar and other clothes behind in the bag.

She went back to Main Street, turned on 33rd before reaching the neighborhood she’d visited the previous night, and went down a couple blocks to an area I wasn’t allowed into. There were bars and nightclubs and other places I wasn’t legally allowed to enter until I was 18. But this girl looked old enough. Was she going to get in? She had ID... ID that expired 30 years ago that, if assumed valid, claimed she was almost 60 now. Was the dream happening in the past? How could it if she put on my sweats and visited our shed which was built only a few years ago after we moved here?

She found the place she was looking for, which I think was a nudie bar, though of course I’d never been inside. But she didn’t go up to the front entrance. She went to a back door and knocked in a peculiar pattern. It apparently worked, because some guy answered the door, and they accepted her old ID there and let her in.

“Woot! Shelly, nice one. You actually look like your ID photo now!”

Where was she now? Of course I’d never been inside, but it was obvious she was not in the public part of the club people would normally use. At first I thought maybe it was the strippers’ entrance. The guy who let her in locked the door and led her upstairs to an office with a star on the door but no name. She went in and the guy went elsewhere.

There was another guy inside the starred door, and he was wearing an absurd amount of gold and gems. Like a Mr. T amount of gold, but he wasn’t a bodybuilder, and with diamonds and rubies in addition to the gold. Even gold caps with little diamonds on his teeth.

“Welcome back, Shelly.”

“Great to be back, Freddy.”

“What’s the story behind this body?”

“A boy turns to goo at night, and I can take over the goo while he sleeps. So I’m not going to be able to get here until 10:30 or 11, but I can turn a couple late tricks before things shut down.”

“That’s cool. Some is better than none. You say this is a boy’s body?”

“The goo is very malleable. I could look like anybody, probably, with practice, but I’ve only been practicing for a week and the only thing I can do easily is look like people I’ve lived as. This is actually what Shelly looked like at around 20 or so.”

“We’ll get you an up-to-date fake ID in case anybody asks, which’ll work as long as nobody tries to run it. You can only be here nights?”

“Yeah. I only get to use this body while he sleeps.”

“I’ll get you entered in the system tonight and you’ll be able to start tomorrow night. But I want you to practice looking like other people. If you can look like whoever your john wants, you can probably make double and make up for not being available earlier.”

“Thanks, Freddy. Sure. Let me try something.”

Freddy stared at the girl for a couple minutes while I couldn’t see what was happening, and then said, “Oh, that’s real good, Shelly!”

Freddy got up and stood beside her, and pointed to one side, where Shelly looked and there was a full length mirror. Shelly now looked pretty much like Freddy, but smaller, and she was wearing the dress she’d come in tonight instead of the shirt and tie and jewelry Freddy wore. The dress looked kind of silly on Freddy’s obviously male body.

“I could pass as you only to somebody who didn’t know you well and only if I took your clothes and chains. And it took me what, three or four minutes?”

“It would work if we get a request. I mean, if somebody asks for Marilyn Monroe, they know the real Marilyn Monroe isn’t going to be here, but if you have a passing resemblance you’d be accepted.”

Freddy printed out some documents on his computer, signed some things and had Shelly sign, and took a few pictures of her in her Shelly body, some clothed and some naked. She put her clothes back on, and they hugged and said goodbye, and Shelly started on her way back to my house.

I wasn’t really thinking during the dream, but in the morning I realized Shelly had signed up to be a prostitute. With my body. I had never had sex with a girl yet, but it sounded like possibly as early as tonight I was going to experience what it was like to be a girl having sex with a guy.

---

March 18, 2007

So that was the discussion at breakfast. I showed my parents the part of the video where the goo turned into Shelly. It was grainy and dim, but it was enough to show what I was experiencing was real. And then I told them what happened with Shelly. My parents were concerned this was getting too elaborate and dangerous.

“Did you catch the name on the front of the place Shelly went into?” Dad asked me.

“The Can-Can Club,” I answered.

“I’ll talk to the police and see if they have ever heard of there being a prostitution ring running out of there.”

That evening, Dad told me, “The police have had numerous reports of prostitution happening there, but they’ve never managed to catch anyone. Today they searched the whole rear of the building, confirming with measurements and everything there were no secret rooms on the ground floor nor in the basement, and they were convinced there was no sub-basement.

“Did they search the second floor? She definitely went upstairs from the door she came in.” I responded.

“He didn’t mention it. I’m not sure why he would have omitted mention of it if there was a second floor.”

He made a phone call, and I didn’t hear anything coming from it, but that night when Shelly went to start her job, when she arrived at the place there were police cars everywhere and she turned and left. She went to Wal-Mart and bought one of those pay-as-you-go cell phones, sat in the food court area outside the checkouts for a while charging the phone (but not actually eating or drinking anything), and then called somebody. She was apparently trying to set up another job, but she didn’t have any luck.

---

March 19, 2007

At breakfast, when I saw Dad I cheered.

“Yay, you got ‘em!”

“I did?”

“Yeah, they busted the place. When Shelly got there, they had a fleet of police cars in the parking lot and were loading people into them.”

He made a call, and then told me, “The police said they had never suspected a second floor. It doesn’t look like it has one from the outside, but since you had suggested a ghost might be prostituting borrowed bodies there, they thought maybe it was hidden with magic or something. And he’s coming over tonight to talk with us.”

I followed up with, “If you want to tip the police some more, after Shelly fled from there, she bought a phone and called some people. She plugged it into the outlet out in the shed to finish charging when she gave up last night. You should be able to get the numbers she called off of it.”

“Good idea. I’m on it.”

A police officer indeed came to visit at 7, just after we finished dinner.

“You folks only moved here a few years ago, right?”

“Yes,” Dad replied.

“So you don’t know about what makes Normal special.”

“Nope.” We all shook our heads.

“A long time ago, a meteor struck Normal. Ever since then, people living here sometimes develop powers.”

“What kind of powers?” Dad asked.

“You might think of them as comic book types of powers. They fly, get super-strength, are able to control fire or water or do magic, and other things. Sometimes their bodies change colors or adopt animal characteristics or other changes. Each person who gets powers gets a unique combination. There have been shapeshifters, so what your son described is possible.”

“I’ve never heard or seen anything like that in town.”

“We keep it secret. Outside of Normal it doesn’t happen, and we let the rest of the world stay ignorant of what happens here. We don’t tell newcomers until they need to know so that word doesn’t leak out. There’s actually a spell cast over the town that keeps people who don’t already know from seeing it, but it can’t keep your son from knowing what is happening to himself. Magic is only so strong. But you all know now and you’ll see the things I have mentioned. Don’t go talking about powers in public, but you can speak with the people who have them privately if you get the chance.”

“This would be hard to believe except for what my son recorded on video happening to him. It’s almost easier to believe this than some sort of scientific explanation for it. But thanks for letting us know.”

“If your ghost does anything more, keep calling it in. We’ve tapped all the lines you gave us so we can catch her, and hopefully keep your son from experiencing being a prostitute. Here’s a direct line to vice.” He handed Dad a card.

“Can you do anything about the ghost?”

“I can’t, no. But I can put you in touch with someone who might be able to.”

It was reassuring they were at least trying to do something.

Shelly kept calling around, and Dad kept taking down the numbers she called and feeding them each morning to the vice cops. Three days later, after another one of the places she was trying to get into got busted, word got around that Shelly couldn’t be trusted, and after that everybody was hanging up on her immediately. Or not even answering. They’d changed their numbers to avoid being tracked.

Once this happened, Shelly figured out I was hearing/dreaming what she was doing. To nobody in particular, she said, “Hey, punk, you listenin’ in on me? Rattin’ me out? You cost me and a bunch of other nice folks good jobs. I’ll find some other thing to do, but it won’t pay as well. Still, I’ll give you a cut if you don’t rat me out. Let me know.”

---

March 23, 2007

I told Dad, and he responded, “What do you think?”

I replied, “I think she’s going to keep at it until she figures out something I can’t stop her from doing.”

“Why? Why does she want money such that she’s going to do criminal things? Why does a ghost need money at all?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I can ask her. But I’m definitely going to give her some ground rules. She can’t do anything that’ll get me hurt, infected, captured, or killed. Or pregnant. I don’t know if she can get pregnant and have me still be pregnant when I wake up, but it’s off-limits in any case.”

“Fair enough. Once you learn why she wants the money, maybe you can come up with better ways for her to earn it. I bet crime and prostitution is all she ever knew in her past lives.”

So that evening, I wrote out a note for her. I wrote SHELLY in big letters across the top of a page in Sharpie so she couldn’t miss it, and then I wrote the note normally on the rest of the page.

I don’t know why you want the money, but I will fight you doing anything that has a chance of getting me hurt, killed, infected with disease, captured, or pregnant. Not sure if you can get pregnant or if that will pass on to me, but don’t want to take the chance. But if you do something safe it’s OK.

So why do you want the money? Why do you need so much money that you need to resort to prostitution? You don’t pay for rent, food, or taxes.

George

I left the note at the edge of the bed as I went to sleep, so she’d have to roll across it getting out of bed when she took over my body.

Like the previous nights, she came and took me over, and quickly found and read the note.

“Hmm. Maybe. I feel like the goo body should be more resistant to those things. Like if somebody shoots or stabs you I just turn to goo and remake my body with no wound. Get pregnant, remake the body with no baby, not pregnant.”

She read the rest of the note.

“But why do I want the money? Good one, Georgie. Why do I want the money, anyway? It was to try to pay off Mama’s gambling debts, originally. Whatever happened with that? Heck, I don’t even know if she’s still alive. I’ve done this with four bodies now before I couldn’t use them anymore. You know, I can use cell phones to make calls but I never got this whole Internet thing. Georgie, I bet you can find out what happened to her easier than I can. Let me write down her information.”

She took the paper over to my desk, found a pen, and wrote down:

Etta Carmichael 225 Carlton Street Arlington, Virginia (703) 555-4646 Owed $60,000 in 1962 to Frank Stallone

Then she walked around my room naked for a while, looking at all my stuff, and occasionally picking something up and looking at it. Eventually she climbed back into bed and just went to sleep.

---

March 24, 2007

I reformed normally from the goo on this Saturday morning, and Dad wasn’t up at breakfast. But after I ate mine, I came back up to try to find this woman. It took less than half an hour of searching before I found her. Etta Carmichael, nee Jackson, of Arlington, Virginia died February 12, 1999 at age 79. I don’t know if she ever paid off her debt. I found a page I could print out, and there was a death notice in the Washington Post which some web site wanted me to pay $10 for a copy of. But Normal’s library claimed to have this paper, so I figured I’d get it there later.

Next, I looked up Frank Stallone. He was more notable, or rather, infamous, and there were many reports of his death I could read and print out for free. I printed one.

Finally, Shelly. I looked up Shelly Carmichael, but none of the people of that name lived in the right area or at the right time. And I tried Michelle also, but no luck. Then I remembered her name was Shelly Peterson. Did Shelly marry? Or did Etta marry other times? Anyway, I looked up Shelly Peterson as well. There was one who lived here in Normal, rather than in Alexandria, who committed suicide in 1977. Was that her? It did match her ID which expired in 1977, so maybe it was. I printed out that story as well.

Later in the morning I walked down to the library and got a copy of Etta’s death notice from a newspaper saved on microfilm, which cost me only a dime. And when I got home from that I discussed it with Dad.

“So, your body is getting inhabited by this ghost, the dead daughter of this dead woman from Virginia, every night. The death notice should pacify her - it’s clear that your ghost died young, and may not have had practical means of communication with her mother after death, but wanted to help her out nevertheless.”

“That sounds right.”

“And you think she used other bodies for prostitution for over 40 years? She didn’t have much in the way of her own expenses, so I’m guessing she sent most of this money to her mother, maybe even sent money after her mother was dead and who knows what happened to it. But she should have paid off the 60 grand a long time ago, even with interest, even with a bad pimp giving her a low cut. She might have been having to pay for other expenses - we know nothing about what else this woman might have been dealing with. But it agrees with Shelly not having communication with her mother. I’m no expert on ghosts, but I’m guessing she died trying to do something to help her mother, and her ghost was focused on that one thing and just kept doing it forever. I’ll try to find somebody who knows more about ghosts to confirm that.”

“Thanks, Dad. And I’ll leave these death notices for her tonight. I want her to not worry about the money, so I’m also going to tell her that rather than provide me with money, which she offered to do, that she should help me controlling my goo body. She obviously knows how to do it better than me.”

“That sounds good.”

I left the printouts in my bed the next night. At the bottom of Shelly’s printout, I wrote: Is this you? If not, what was your original name? Frank’s was a page and a half, so I wrote on the bottom half of the second page:

Instead of trying to give me money, show me how to shape my goo. Right now I form automatically into a boy when I wake up and apparently turn to goo when I fall asleep. Show me how I can make other shapes while I’m awake.

P.S.: My family knows about you now. No need to hide. You can go downstairs and walk out the door like a normal person.

---

March 25, 2007

Shelly read the page about Shelly Peterson’s death first and cried for a bit. “This is right, Georgie. Shelly isn’t my original name. It’s the name of the first girl I inhabited as a ghost. She didn’t turn into goo like you; I just used her real body. She figured out that she was going whoring in her sleep, though I don’t know that she ever figured out I was doing it, as opposed to her just sleepwalking or something. She committed suicide in 1977 just like it says here. She was the first one I took to the Can-Can Club and so they knew me by that name, even in the other bodies. My original name... Umm, I forget. I do remember that I kept going until 1967 when I was murdered by one of my johns. Throat slashed.”

Shelly next read Etta’s death report and cried some more. But then she said, “If she didn’t get it paid off, I guess it ain’t going to happen now. So I guess I don’t need that money. Just a little for some clothes so I don’t go around here naked. And don’t I have some?”

Finally, she read Frank’s report and the notes I left at the bottom. “Duh. Yeah, you had me marked good. Glad I can stop hiding. I should go get my clothes. If I don’t need to hide, might as well bring them in here.”

She walked naked out the door to the shed, got dressed, and brought all the rest of her clothes and her phone and purse inside and back to my room. She put the bag on the bottom of my closet with only socks and panties left in it, and tossed all the clothes which had been worn already in the hamper with my clothes.

“OK, Georgie, you did good. Just about everybody is dead now: Mama, Frank, and at least three of the girls I used to turn tricks. And I’m sorry.”

She stopped for a bit and she was crying, but it wasn’t obvious until she continued talking through sobs.

“I’m sorry for what I did to those girls, what I tried to do to you, for everything. I can’t help them now, but I do want to help you. I don’t know if I can explain to you how I shape the goo, though. I just do. And I get kicked out of your body when you wake up. You’d have to find some way to not kick me out, like accept me as a part of you.”

As always, I saw and heard all this in what I now know was not really a dream. Whether she was sincere or not, I needed the help. I tried to respond to her within the dream, “Shelly, or whoever you are! Apology accepted! Come, be with me. Become a part of me all the time so you can help me control my body.”

I didn’t say it out loud, but nevertheless, Shelly responded, “I hear you, Georgie.”

She did several things, and at one point turned back into goo and then back into Shelly.

“I don’t know that any of that did any good. I don’t feel any more a part of you than I did before. See if you can still reach me this way when you wake up.”

I had the familiar experience of being goo briefly and then my own body when I woke up, and Shelly wasn’t there. I shared this with Dad in the morning.

“Well, the expert the police arranged with us is coming over tonight.”

Meanwhile, I searched the Internet for stories of the original Shelly’s death. I could never have found it without the extra detail she provided. A search on girl murdered 1967 mother Etta Carmichael turned up a newspaper report. There was a picture of what she looked like before she ran away and started prostitution, and an actual story about the murder, not just an obituary. Samantha Carmichael, that was Shelly’s original name. I printed that story out, too.

The woman who came over had that whole “fortune teller” look about her, but supposedly she was legit. She introduced herself simply as Stephanie. I handed her the stack of printouts and spent a while telling the whole story, from me just having the dreams about returning to my body from goo (which I had since learned were real and only experienced as dreams), to Shelly taking me over, digging up money and buying clothes, trying to get a job as a prostitute, and the story about her mother’s debt and death, as well as her ability to stretch me into different shapes, and her difficulty of staying with me. Stephanie read through the documents and also examined me, seeming to put herself into a trance for a short while.

“It sounds like Samantha was very focused on repaying her mother’s debts. She died trying to do that, and her soul became a ghost dedicated to completing the deed. Such ghosts often have a one-track mind, and just keep doing whatever it is they were doing when they died. Since you’ve helped her see the task is complete, or at least as complete as is ever going to be possible, she’s going to be very compliant for a while, as she’s lost her purpose. It’s likely she’s sincere and will become completely loyal and obedient to you if you take her in now.”

Dad and I both nodded, but Stephanie went on after pulling out some notes.

“The goo thing is typical for some shapeshifters, especially if they haven’t learned to completely control their powers. But only certain people can host ghosts, and it’s uncommon for them to also be shapeshifters. What is more common is that the person only gets powers at all from the ghost.”

“Do you think I have any other powers? I haven’t noticed any.”

“I can run some simple tests. You can get formally tested to look for more subtle powers.”

After a half an hour of various tests, she decided I probably didn’t have other powers.

“OK, then, how do I open myself up for Samantha? I’m not actively blocking her, but it seems she’s only able to inhabit my body while I’m asleep.”

“I should give you a little background about ghosts. The creation of ghosts and spirit possession of living people are among the few elements of what people think of as the supernatural that commonly happen in the world outside Normal. Ghosts can be created when people die in certain circumstances, such as when somebody dies trying to complete a goal, or when a person with an especially strong soul dies, or when a child dies. Ghosts can enter only certain people, ones whose souls aren’t big enough to fill their... I’m simplifying here, but call it their body. They can enter when there is space left over. Everybody has a little space like this, but for most people it’s too small for a ghost to enter. When the gap is large enough, a ghost can enter, and there are different possible results depending on how much space there is.”

Stephanie drew two circles on a sheet of paper, one inside the other and almost filling it.

“When there’s only a little space, only a small, weak ghost can get in, and it can’t do anything. The person usually never realizes it’s there, but they sometimes get bits and pieces of the ghost’s memory, People who feel like they are reincarnated likely have this sort of ghost.”

She drew beside it another pair of circles, but with about twice as much distance between the inner and outer circles.

“If the opening is a little bigger, a larger, more powerful ghost can get in, but still can’t do anything to the person. If this sort of person realizes the ghost is there, they can use it to access the spirit world and communicate with other ghosts. These are the psychics and mediums out there in the world, at least the real ones, because there are a lot of charlatans who are faking the whole thing, or they have a ghost that has made them aware of the spirit world but they can’t really do more than detect ghosts and they fake the rest. Because of all the fakes, most people think they’re all fake. I have a ghost of this sort, and here in Normal I was able to work with people who actually do understand this stuff and learn how to work with ghosts for real, and safely. You could say this case is the happy medium, pun very much intended!”

We all laughed. Stephanie drew a third pair of circles that looked about like a car tire, with plenty of space between the circles.

“When the ghost and soul are of similar strength, there may be a battle for possession. Sometimes, as you experienced, the ghost may only have control when the person is asleep. But I think this isn’t literally true in your case, because I can see the ghost is not in you now. Usually the ghost hangs on, and only leaves if forced out by a more powerful ghost or an exorcism. Have you ever heard of an exorcism?”

I said “Yes.” Mom nodded, and Dad said, “I remember the movie The Exorcist.”

“There are a lot of inaccuracies in that film, and the spirit is portrayed as a demon rather than a ghost, but the essential idea of removing the ghost from the person it’s possessing is correct. Usually we would only attempt that if the soul and the ghost are in conflict, leading to violent reactions perhaps similar to the ones in the film. Usually the exorcism destroys the ghost, and outside Normal, these more powerful ghosts are rare, so the person may not experience this again, or may encounter a more benign ghost. It’s different in Normal, though.”

“How so?” Dad asked.

“The same thing that gives people here powers acts like a beacon in the spirit world, and ghosts from far and wide are attracted here. So we have to go on the lookout for people whose spirits do not fill their bodies. When such a person is born here, we usually detect it shortly after birth and bond the person’s soul to the ghost of a child who didn’t live long enough to develop any real goals or negative traits, and is the right size to fill the gap. This basically means that the person growing up is an amalgam of their own soul and the ghost, but they live in peace and have a normal life. Sometimes they can access the spirit world later in life, like the second case I described, but usually the bond severs the ghost from the spirit world. But the body and soul don’t always grow evenly, and the gap can grow later in life, and we can’t be checking every person all the time, so we still get these cases here sometimes.”

She drew an even more extreme pair of circles.

“In cases like this, a ghost can move in which is significantly more powerful than the soul. The ghost is going to take over the person entirely. If it happens when the person is very young, nobody will ever know and the ghost simply replaces the original soul. If it happens later in life, depending on the strength of the soul and the temperament of the ghost, the ghost may merge with the soul, usually continuing to live that person’s life. If it was the kind of ghost with a goal, it may redirect that person’s long-term goals toward the person’s long-term goals while keeping other aspects of the person’s personality. In other cases, the soul can be completely destroyed, and the person now controlled by the ghost may experience amnesia, or his or her personality may be drastically altered as it is replaced with that of the ghost.”

“So what about me?”

“Well, your case is confusing. I can see you have a very small gap like this first case or like the case where no ghost can enter you at all. It’s clearly different somehow when you are asleep and turn to goo, in order for a ghost to get in which is powerful enough to control your body and even use your powers. So with your permission I’d like to put you into a hypnotic trance similar to sleep, which I hope lets you turn to goo so I can examine you in the goo mode.”

“I’m fine with it,” I said. Mom nodded and Dad said, “Go ahead.”

She had me lie down on top of the table, and did the thing with the swinging pocketwatch you see on TV or in movies when someone is being hypnotized, and put me to sleep, and turned me into a pile of goo on top of the table, and went on with her examination.

“Oh, it’s huge! Somehow, when George’s body goes into this goo state, a much larger space opens up around the soul. I’ve never seen this before, but it explains a lot. There’s definitely enough room there for a ghost almost as powerful as George to fit in, right in that range where the ghost would only have control when he’s asleep. OK, I’m going to bring him out so we can talk to him some more, but he’s going to be naked because his clothes have fallen through the goo, so get a sheet or something to put over him.”

So I awoke a moment later, aware of what Stephanie had said and covered with a sheet.

“And there, the gap is gone. What I think is happening is that Samantha simply gets pushed out when George returns to his own body shape.”

“So is there anything we can do?” Mom asked.

“I can bond Samantha to George the way I have described. Then she wouldn’t be able to be forced out, and she’d be with George all the time. George’s body should expand spiritually to contain her, though she may sort of “stick out” for a short while until it finishes expanding, or he may be slow in actually changing to George’s body. I think as long as he holds his shape, this expansion should finish within the evening. When George is awake, he would have control. When he’s asleep, Samantha would have control. Would you like that?”

“Sure, let’s do it now. The sooner the better in terms of her being loyal to me, right?”

“Correct, George. If your parents are OK with this, we can get started.”

“It sounds like a good opportunity, to do this while George is on Samantha’s good side. I’m in favor,” Dad said.

“I’m sure we’ll all appreciate your body not getting up and roaming the streets while you sleep,” Mom said. “Let’s go.”

“There’s one thing. I am not actually detecting her. She probably hasn’t gone far, and she may be sleeping until George’s next regular sleep cycle. So the first step is to summon her. And I’m going to need the table.”

So I got down and covered myself with the sheet as I sat in a chair, and Stephanie set up some candles and a lot of the schlock popularly associated with a seance, but apparently if you knew what you were doing and had the power of a helpful ghost within you, this stuff was real. She wrote out some words for me to say on a card I kept in front of me, and we all held hands.

“Samantha, who also goes by Shelly,” she intoned in a low, drawn-out voice. “Samantha Carmichael, also known as Shelly Peterson. There is one here who would like to speak with you.”

It was less than a minute, before Stephanie finished her invocation a second time, that Samantha started to materialize above the table. She was somewhat transparent, but I could tell it was her.

That was my cue. “Samantha Carmichael, I welcome you to come, live in my body, bond with me, and become a part of me. I solemnly swear this on my name, George Walda.”

It seemed like she tried to move into me, but failed.

Stephanie said, “OK, she’s here. Probably not surprisingly, she still can’t get into you, George. Now you get back in the table and I’ll turn you into goo again, and perform the bonding.”

So I did, and when I turned to goo, Samantha jumped right in and I could tell, as my body assumed Shelly’s form. My parents covered me over with the sheet again.

“Is he going to be stuck in that form?” Dad asked worriedly.

“Samantha had good control over the goo, so I expect she’ll be able to change it. We don’t want her to change now, though, because George’s body doesn’t have enough space. I need to perform the bonding first.”

Stephanie performed another ritual, and after a few minutes I felt it work as I gained a closer connection with Samantha than I had before. I could actually feel her in my head in a way. Stephanie announced that was complete and then brought me out of the hypnotic sleep I was in. Surprisingly to me, I didn’t immediately turn back to my own body. I opened Shelly’s eyes and was seeing the room through them. I saw the tent the sheet made over Shelly’s breasts.

“Welcome, Samantha,” I said out loud.

“Nice being in here while you’re awake,” she responded, inside my head.

“You all didn’t hear her respond, did you?” I asked. I got three “no”s in response.

“OK, let me see, I should be able to...”

Talk to you like this. I finished the sentence by thinking a thought directed at Samantha, rather than speaking it.

“Yes, you’ve got it,” came the voice inside my head.

Good, I told her.

“OK, I can speak to her without speaking out loud.”

Stephanie responded, “That’s good, George. You are slowly returning to your own body. It’s forming slowly, because forming quickly would make it too small to hold Samantha. So talk with her a bit.”

“Fine. I’m going to get her story and I’ll repeat it for you all.”

How much of the conversation we had here earlier did you hear?

“I was sleeping. I didn’t hear anything until you and this medium called my name, my original name Samantha, which I haven’t heard or used in a very long time.”

We came to the conclusion that your original body died trying to help your mother repay her debts, and you became a ghost dedicated to that goal.

“That’s right. This guy Frank was threatening her if she didn’t repay the money she’d borrowed and wasted on gambling, and I ran away from home partly to avoid being around Frank and partly to help Mom. In the 60s we got 15 bucks a trick, two or three of those a night, 7 days a week, making $200 to $300 a week, which was pretty good money back then. These days, stiffs working at the grocery store make more than that and barely make ends meet. In the mid ‘60s, $300 paid my rent, bills, and food for a month, so I sent everything over $75 a week to Mom and, at least at the time, she was using it to start paying off the debt. We exchanged letters, and I never told her what I was doing, but I’m sure she suspected it.”

So about $175 a week, that’s seven hundred a month. The debt would have been paid off in 8 years, maybe 10 to 12 years with interest.

“Yeah, if I kept it up. Some john slashed my throat in ‘67 and that was the end of that. Except I became a ghost. I wanted to keep doing it, but at first I didn’t know how. But something attracted me to Normal, and once I got here, I was able to talk with other ghosts. They taught me a lot and hooked me up with that place you saw me visit. They’re all ghosts or people using powers to make temporary bodies or something like that in there, but the johns are mostly unpowered people and they don’t know no difference. They had somebody working for them who could do magic, advertise the place in the minds of potential customers while not letting the police know. By ‘71 I was taking over the other poor girl’s body, Shelly Peterson, while she slept, doing one or two late tricks a night, $20 a trick then, but the girl’s normal job paid her expenses so this all went to Mom.”

So about $200 a week.

“Yeah, only I told her don’t try to write back here, ‘cause I only had control of this girl at night. It was like you, she saw what I did with her body as dreams, at least some of the time. Shelly figured out after a while that all those dreams she was having about sex with so many different men were real after she got some bruises, ones she remembered getting when I had control. But still, she didn’t do anything about it, until about 6 years in, she committed suicide.”

I paused at this point to recap this part of the story to everybody before continuing to speak inside my head to Samantha.

And between the first set of payments and those 6 years, your mom had probably paid off the debt, assuming she was smart enough to stay out of more gambling.

“Yeah, but I wasn’t really thinking like that.”

‘One-track mind’ was how the medium here described it.

“It was weird, though. I could plan things out, go buy clothes I thought would look good, and figure out how to please each john, but I couldn’t think for myself that the debt should be paid off, or go visit Mom in person, even when the next body was some brain-dead girl I had control of all the time. I mean literally. She was in a coma before I found her and without me she would have stayed that way forever, or until they took her off the machines, anyway. I had her for about 12 years when she got too old for what most of the johns wanted, and so I suicided her and found another girl I could take over at night.”

Oh, that’s terrible.

“Yeah, I know, but one-track mind, remember? If I couldn’t do that, the body was worthless to me. And she didn’t have no mind left of her own, so if I left her, what would’ve happened? Either she died, or some other ghost would take over and do something else terrible to her. I thought it was better not to have some other ghost doing shit in a body people thought of as mine. Anyway, the third girl I only had nights, and she didn’t dream what I did with her. She never suspected nothing until the money orders started coming back. I didn’t know if Mom had died, moved, or if I just got so addled I couldn’t remember her address straight. But I kept doing it, promising myself I’d get the money to her some day.”

So you still have the money from the last 8 years?

“Well, she called in an exorcist and got rid of me, and I didn’t find another body for two years. That one suicided also after four years of it. But I kept all that money, $70 a trick, two a night, promising myself some day I’d find a way to get it to Mom.”

What did you do with it?

“Buried it in little jars like the one you saw me dig up.”

That’s a lot of money. $1000 a week, probably $200,000. How many jars?

“That first jar I buried my old ID in, it only had $400 because it was my first one with that girl, and I had to some stuff to set myself up. After that, every two weeks when they put out recycling, I snatched a baby food jar from one of the neighbors. Everybody around there was having babies, it seemed. I put all my money in it and buried it somewhere in her yard. There’s ten of them under her garden but I was worried she was going to notice her garden getting dug up so much so I switched to a dead spot in the far back of the yard where nothing grew. And as far as I know nobody ever found any of them. I was spelling out her name with the jars, ELIZABETH, but I only got halfway through the second E when she suicided.”

Four years, two hundred weeks. So there’s about a hundred jars out there with roughly $2000 each in them.

“Yeah, I guess that’s right,” Samantha replied.

By this time, I realized that I was back to my own body, or mostly so. No more boobs, at least.

“Can I get down from here now?” I asked out loud.

“Yes, it looks like your body has relaxed nicely to accommodate Samantha,” Stephanie said.

So I got down, keeping the sheet over me as I took my clothes into the bathroom with me and got dressed before rejoining the group at the table. And I recapped the story for everybody else that Samantha had taken control of four girls here in Normal to use as prostitutes, three of them dead by suicide, and one exorcised her out.

Then, I thought at Samantha again, Some time I’ll let you use that goo trick to go dig some of those up, but right now I want you make me taller.

My view of the room changed considerably as she made me a LOT taller.

“Nothing to worry about,” I reassured my parents and Stephanie. “Just having Samantha test out changing my body.”

Dad responded, “The silvery effect when you stretched was cool.”

“Silvery effect?” I asked.

“Yeah. When your stomach stretched it turned silvery, kind of like in Terminator 2, before settling into skin color in the tall, narrow stomach you have now.”

“Oh, I bet that’s the goo. I only ever saw it before in my dreams, in my dark room or outside at night, and I couldn’t really see the color.”

I had her change me into the Shelly body, and make a copy of Stephanie and of Dad before returning to my own body. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to be a girl, but knowing I could was useful. Mom held up a mirror during some of the changes and I saw some of it myself, and confirmed it was my goo that was silver-colored.

“Well thanks, Stephanie. This is really going to work out, I think.”

“Good to hear, George, and Samantha for that matter. I should be going, but there’s just one more thing. Since you know you have powers now, you should register with NANA. They can help you verify whether you have any more subtle powers I couldn’t find in my quick tests here, and will help you with any difficulties. For instance, if you decide you want to live as that Shelly girl they can give you a female identity. You know, one who is not a dead girl.”

She pulled out a card with contact info.

“How soon do we have to do this?” Dad asked.

“We don’t have any hard and fast rule. But the sooner you do, the sooner you’ll be eligible for help.”

“Well, thanks, Stephanie,” Dad replied.

She gathered up her stuff, and Dad wrote her a check and showed her out.

“I should have figured out that you had to pay her,” I told him. “How much?”

“Five hundred. A small price to pay for you to get control of your life, and some pretty cool powers to boot.”

“OK. Not that much. I’m worried Samantha’s own worry about her mother’s debt might rub off on me, but five hundred is nothing. Still, she’s got some money buried where she got the money she spent on clothes and stuff, and she’s probably going to want to retrieve some of it to pay you back.”

“She didn’t send it all to her mother?”

“After her mother died, the mail started getting returned. She figured out that the address wasn’t good anymore, but she had convinced herself her mom had just moved and some day she was going to find her and give her more money. So she just kept burying it at the house of this other girl she was in before she found me.”

“How much?”

“About 200 grand.”

“And now somebody else lives in the house?”

“Maybe not. I remember there was a for sale sign there when Samantha visited, which was only a couple weeks ago. She dug up the jar that had Shelly’s old ID in it from there. And by dug up, I mean she used my goo form to ooze down into the ground and pull it out. That jar also had some money she used to buy the clothes and phone. The rest of the money is in other jars on the same property.”

“Well I’m not going to stop you. Heck, I’ll drive you there, and play lookout for you.”

---

March 26, 2007

For once, I didn’t have dreams about turning to goo and then other bodies. But when I awoke, I was in Shelly’s body.

Samantha, why are we Shelly? I asked her.

“Sorry. I lost concentration.”

I have school today, and I need to be George all day. Can you do that?

“Yes. Sorry.”

My body quickly turned into George, and I went about my morning routine.

After school, Dad tested out how he’d notify me if there was trouble when I went digging. I still had the phone Samantha bought, and Dad had his. Samantha confirmed there shouldn’t be any of her contacts calling; they’d all written her off as compromised.

I set the phone to vibrate and put it on the ground near where Samantha turned me into goo and oozed down into the ground in our own backyard for the test. And Dad called the phone and I heard it. So when we went out that was going to be his signal. One ring and a hang up meant hide, stay in the ground. If it kept ringing, I should answer it and he’d tell me what to watch out for as I came out.

---

March 27, 2007

That night, in the middle of the night, Dad got me up and drove me over there. He waited in the car for me, and Samantha gooed me down into the soil like she did with her ID jar, but we pulled up a whole letter worth of jars at once:

@@@@  @     @  @@@@   @@   @@@   @@@@
@     @     @     @  @  @  @  @  @
@     @     @     @  @  @  @  @  @
@@@@  @     @    @   @@@@  @@@   @@@@
@     @     @   @    @  @  @  @  @
@     @     @  @     @  @  @  @
@@@@  @@@@  @  @@@@  @  @  @@@

We’d brought with us a bunch of old plastic grocery bags and we put each letter in a separate one, except the L and I went in together because they were small. And there were ten individual jars in the garden up by the house that we had to go down in separately to get, the ones she had hidden first, and those went in one bag. In two trips I brought the 7 bags out to the car, and we never needed the phone signal; nobody came near. I was naked for the entire excursion from the car to get the jars because I was going to lose my clothes every time I went to goo anyway, but my clothes were in the car, along with some very welcome heat for the trip home.

We weren’t really sure what to do with the money. It was hard to explain having it. It was technically the proceeds from criminal activity, though that criminal activity was committed in the body of a now-dead woman by another dead woman. And it was technically stolen from property we didn’t own, so we didn’t want to be showing it off. But we could certainly spend small amounts of it once in a while. But when we got home I just shoved all the bags under my bed and got some more sleep.

In the morning, I paid Dad back the $500 he spent on Stephanie, and Mom called me in sick to school so I wouldn’t go on as little sleep as I’d gotten tonight. I spent about $200 more on a wall safe, one that fit inside a wall and we’d cover over with a picture. Dad and I spent a couple hours installing it that evening. It wasn’t very deep, but I could fit two stacks of bills side-by-side on each shelf, which gave me two stacks each 15 inches tall. I hoped it was enough.

Then instead of just having the money shoved under my bed, we sorted it neatly into stacks and counted it. There was $194,371 in all, mostly in 20s, 50s, and 100s, and it barely fit into the safe.

Mom and Dad agreed this was my money, with restrictions. If I wanted to spend a significant amount of it, I needed their approval. If I wanted to spend a couple hundred bucks on something nice for myself or the family, gifts for friends if not too extravagant, etc., then I could just do it. They gave me a cap of $500 for things that stay within the family and $200 for anything I was giving to anybody else before I had to ask for approval. Of course, anything I buy should be legal for me to buy.

---

April 7, 2007

Samantha had wanted to donate a good chunk of the money to the families of the girls she used to earn it. And while that sounds like a nice bit of altruism, I worried it would do more harm than good.

“Wouldn’t that creep you out? A family member committed suicide, and years later you get somebody coming by saying it was actually a ghost who caused her to commit suicide, and here’s some of the money the ghost earned using her body?”

Mom and Dad agreed that was probably not the right way to do it. And we’d contacted NANA about the girl who exorcised Samantha out. She had changed her name and moved out of Normal and we were expressly forbidden from knowing who or where she was now.

So what I suggested instead was to donate some of the money to charities.

It wasn’t unheard of for kids to run fundraisers for charities and then buy a money order to send the money off to the charity, and 10 grand wasn’t a crazy amount to earn this way, so I decided money orders were the way to go. I decided to give 5% of the money to each of five charities, 25% in total. I picked out the charities with Mom’s and Dad’s help, ones that helped the poor and homeless, people with mental health issues, runaways, and suicide prevention. I wanted to find one that helped protect people from malicious ghosts, and we ended up choosing NANA itself for this, even though they’d only managed to help one of the four girls Samantha had possessed here. Maybe with more money they could do a better job.

I made five piles of $9718 each plus a small amount of extra money for the money order fees, went to five different stores that sold money orders, filled them out and mailed them to the various charities. I was $49,000 poorer, but I was still $145,000 richer than I had any right to be.

---

Later in 2007

Afterward, most of the time Samantha was just a passenger unless I asked her to do something, but once in a while she asked me something and I replied to her in my head. Nobody else knew this was happening unless it distracted me from what I was doing, and Samantha quickly learned to wait for idle moments. She was actually being very good. She wasn’t a child, but she had never lived as a teen boy, and she only lived bits and pieces of lives in the world after the electronic and computer revolution, so there were just some things she didn’t understand. She understood cell phones, and cable television, but not computers or the Internet. I tried to answer her questions, and when they prompted more involved demonstrations or lessons, I found times to go through those. Any time was fine for Samantha - she wasn’t doing anything else.

I set aside some time, usually in early mornings and in evenings, to explore what shape-changing Samantha could do. She wasn’t changing me at night now, and in fact slept when I did, just having a small part of herself awake enough to hold my form, whichever form I was in when I went to sleep, which was usually my normal form, unless one of the evening shape sessions went so long I fell asleep during it in some random form. But during these lessons, we explored many forms. Samantha could make me into a dog, a cat, a horse, and other animals, though they were all my size instead of the size they were supposed to be. Samantha explained to me that she couldn’t change the amount of my goo and so was limited to my size. She demonstrated in detail by showing how when she made, for instance, an arm longer, it got narrower. We experimented by changing while standing on a scale. My weight was the same in any form.

We didn’t spend a lot of time in forms other than mine, Shelly’s, and goo, but we did experiment. And I kept the clothes Samantha had bought for Shelly’s body, and I was occasionally seen around the house in her form, enough that my parents weren’t surprised by it.

In May, I was finally able to do what I had seen Samantha do with my body many times, and control the goo myself. At first, the only thing I could do was become goo, and when I let up on it, the goo immediately re-formed into George. Even if I started as Shelly, going to goo and releasing it made me George again. So that was good. At least I’d never forget how to make my own body. But she suggested I learn how to turn myself into Shelly, one body part at a time, as an introduction to making other bodies. At the time, I hoped to make that a summer vacation project, with the idea that by the time I started school again in the fall, I’d be able to assume any shape on my own, without having to ask Samantha to do it for me. But it wasn’t that easy.

A first step was practicing extending one arm, making it longer and necessarily skinnier. Once I was able to do that, and reverse it gradually, rather than just turning it to goo and letting it snap back into my proper shape, Samantha worked with me on other changes. I changed my face and hair in front of a mirror, one piece at a time, changing each part of me to look like Shelly, and by early June I was able to change my whole face at once into Shelly’s face.

Then she started working with me on other body parts. It took a while, and some of the parts were complicated. I practiced making skinnier legs while making more muscular arms at the same time, or vice versa, so I wasn’t changing the length of my limbs, just their thickness, and so I could learn to move goo around to different parts of the body.

In June I was asked to testify in court about the prostitution ring. Or rather, Samantha was. No, make that Shelly was. Stephanie testified first, that she had bound the ghost Samantha Carmichael a.k.a. Shelly Peterson into “this person,” referring to me. I had let Samantha change me fully into Shelly for this, since I was clearly not practiced enough to change myself yet and it was Shelly and not George who they wanted to testify. I wore the clothes she had picked out for what would have been her first day prostituting my body, to be more fully in character. When it was Samantha’s turn to testify, the judge announced to the room what had been arranged already: Samantha and I were to be given immunity for whatever we had done related to prostitution in exchange for the testimony. I was a little worried about revealing the money; was digging that up covered by the immunity? But the questioning did not go that way. They really just wanted Samantha to identify people and describe what went on there, that she had had sex with various men for money. I had to stay there the rest of the day, but they didn’t call me up to testify again, and didn’t ask me to come back for the rest of the trial. I was glad for that. There was a whole row of defendants, including Freddy, other people who helped run the prostitution den, the people who ran the public-facing part of The Can-Can Club, people associated with the other locations Samantha had tried to go to after that one was busted, and three people with magical powers who’d been responsible for all the very effective concealment. Or, at least, they were accused of all those things; Samantha did not have first-hand knowledge of it all, and it probably took many days to get all the witnesses in to testify about all the crimes they were charging them with. For me, it was one day and I went home, and I rewarded Samantha for it by staying as Shelly and in those clothes for the evening.

It was well into July by the time I tried to make breasts on my own, and even though I’d been Shelly many times with fully formed breasts, I still had trouble concentrating when I tried to make them. Too often I was breaking down laughing before I even got started. But the arms and legs practice helped, because I was pulling in mass from my stomach and arms to go into the breasts. Still, what I got was clearly wrong.

After my clumsy attempt to make breasts the way I changed the sizes of my arms and legs, Samantha explained, “Female breasts are actually a lot different from anything you have as George and from what you were doing. The basic structure of the nipples is there, but there are a lot more nerves, milk ducts, and everything. Trust me; just reach into your memory and pull out your memory of Shelly’s breasts. Turn that part of your body into goo, combine it with the goo you pulled from elsewhere, and turn that goo into Shelly’s breasts.”

This was a totally different way of changing my body! It worked, but Mom suggested I buy an anatomy book to help me learn all the body parts, what they looked like, what they were called, and what they did. And that helped also. Shortly before school started in August I had finally mastered it enough to make the breasts and hold them long enough to put on Shelly’s bra over them. So the further elements of my transformation went more slowly since I was also having to deal with school.

In September, Samantha explained hips to me. I knew that as girls developed breasts they also got wider hips, but I didn’t fully understand the details until Samantha made me look at myself in detail in George’s form and in Shelly’s.

“It’s not just that your hips get wider, it’s actually that the legs get further apart. Everything down to the bone moves around to make it possible for you to give birth through there.”

Ah, yes, I remember. When I first started spending time as Shelly, Mom pulled me aside one day while we were Shelly, and she gave me the birds and bees talk a second time, from a girl’s viewpoint. Remember that?

“I certainly do. I could have given you that talk too, but I understood why your mother wanted to do so, so I just patiently waited through it. But right now, I don’t want you to worry about genitals. Just leave them like they are but practice on the shape of the hips. You’ll need to pull in some mass from your legs. Remember to focus on this aspect of Shelly’s body and recreate it. It’s too different from yours to just shift.”

I was getting better. With the shorter practice times available, by the end of September I had this part mastered to the point that I could not only do this but also do the breasts, arms, and face at the same time. I could put on Shelly’s panties (somewhat poorly because my dick and balls were there), her bra, and her dress over them and I actually looked like Shelly.

Naturally genitals were next, and Samantha told me not to worry.

“Unless you are planning on having sex, you don’t need to worry about making proper female genitals yet. They are pretty complicated. It would definitely be a copy job when you do, but it’s a whole lot to copy. Just do this for me. In that internal space inside Shelly’s pelvis, pull your balls inside, and pull in your dick just to where the opening is exposed to the outside. Make all the skin smooth and tight over it. You’ll just have the openings to pee and poop, and you’ll be able to do so the way girls do. And then Shelly’s clothes will fit you, and unless somebody else is seeing you naked, you’ll look right.”

When I thought about it, I realized Samantha was right. The space that would have held Shelly’s vagina and other internal parts was also big enough to hold my dick and balls.

But if I still have my dick, it’ll be possible for me to get an erection. What will happen then? I was worried about it because I had gotten erections three times in the last week while trying to be Shelly.

“That’s why you make the skin smooth and tight. The erection will just back further up inside you.”

I did that, and it was actually pretty easy. And it was also pretty easy for me to combine that with all the other stuff and dress as Shelly, including having her panties fit properly. For the first time, that weekend, I went out with Mom as Shelly to spend some of Samantha’s illicit money to buy some other clothes that fit Shelly, and then spent evenings for a whole week turning into Shelly entirely under my control. And I only lost control and snapped back into George’s shape once, ripping one dress. I was doing everything in Shelly’s form except going to school: My homework, eating, going to the bathroom, everything. I had erections frequently, but nobody could see them, even if I was only wearing tight clothes over my crotch that exposed my female shape there.

When we went shopping, Mom pointed out that I still sounded mostly like George. This pointed out another area I hadn’t fixed yet. So the next week I worked on that. I had made my neck and the parts within it slightly smaller for Shelly. I needed specifically to make the larynx, also called the voice box, narrower within my neck to both reduce the prominence of my Adam’s apple and to change my voice. I didn’t think it actually changed much, but Mom confirmed for me that I sounded a lot more like I had a few years ago before my voice started changing.

---

October 27, 2007

Saturday at the end of a second week of being Shelly every evening, I turned into Shelly first thing in the morning. There was one thing I hadn’t done as Shelly, and that was taking a shower. And it was pretty normal. But one thing surprised me. I hadn’t really played around with my breasts much. I knew they were sensitive, but it was only when I was trying to wash them that I realized just how sensitive they really were. Before I knew it, the erection hidden inside me came, and what squirted out of the opening meant for Shelly’s pee wasn’t pee. At least I was in the shower, and could just wash it off.

“Don’t worry about that,” came Samantha’s voice inside my head. “I’ll get you making female genitals later, and you won’t have that problem. They are even more sensitive than the breasts, but when you don’t have male parts at the same time, it’ll probably be easier to manage. You had them before when I made you be Shelly, remember.”

Yeah, but I wasn’t trying to shower.

“True.”

I went back to showering, and the “even more sensitive” comment caused me to come a second time, but I got through it after that, and could even feel my internal erection had gone down by the time I was drying off. Probably a good thing, or else I might have come a third time trying to dry my breasts. I put on the clean outfit I had brought into the bathroom with me, and went out to eat breakfast as Shelly.

Dad was there, and he commented, “Are you going to be Shelly all the time now?”

“No, not all the time. But I am practicing holding the form, and I want to do so across a variety of activities.”

Mom suggested, “If you want to try different activities, how about going trick-or-treating as Shelly?”

“Dear, you know what adult female Halloween costumes look like. Do you think our son-and-occasional-daughter is really ready to go out looking like that?”

“We can find one that’s not overly sexy,” Mom replied.

“I’ll allow it, only if George is OK with it. George, you get to pick the costume and if you can’t find anything you don’t think you can bear to walk around in for a few blocks one night, feel free to call it off at any time.”

“Thanks, Dad. I will try looking for a costume.”

“OK, George. Or should I call you Shelly when you look like that?”

“Um, maybe. How about you do, so that if I reach the point that I’m doing this while someone else is here, they don’t think it’s odd that George is a girl.”

“OK, Shelly.”

So that’s how I ended up going out with Mom and looking at girls’ Halloween costumes a mere 4 days before the big event. And Dad was right, most of them were more sexy looking than I was ready to go out in public, even though I’d arranged for Mom to take me several miles from here where nobody would know me.

Eventually, I decided on a Supergirl costume. There were knockoff sexy versions of this costume, but I stuck with the traditional one. It was skin-tight but completely covered everything above the waist out to the wrists and neck. The bottom was a cheerleader-length skirt over what turned out to be the bottom of the leotard, which I saw fastened in the crotch so I could pull it on like a shirt.

Mom suggested, “You should get skin-colored opaque tights. It could be cold Halloween night, and they will help insulate your legs a little. That’s kind of a girl secret. Samantha could probably tell you if you asked her about this sort of thing. Also, you should get a pair of panties the same color as the costume to help make sure nothing shows through.”

“Nothing, out of the nothing I have down there,” I joked. “Just kidding. I know you meant my panties of another color.”

Mom helped me learn to put those tights on when I got home, and I learned why they were called tights.

“They are really supposed to be this tight. Ideally nobody notices them and they just look like your legs,” she explained. “But you won’t be shivering.”

“Thanks, Mom. I remember shivering in what I thought was a dream one of those nights Samantha went out in Shelly’s body at the start of this whole thing. But it was starting to get warmer then, and not all the nights were cold.”

---

October 31, 2007

It turned out Halloween was a warm night and I could have gone without the tights, but I was determined to wear them after putting in the effort to learn how to get them on.

Nobody really had any chance of guessing who I really was, since on top of doing this outside of my neighborhood, also very few people had seen me as Shelly.

At one corner, a kid dressed as Mr. Mxyzptlk slipped and fell. A moment later I realized what surprised him as a second Supergirl accompanied by Superman coming up from the other direction. I and the other Supergirl helped him up, and Mxyzptlk thanked us and introduced himself, or as I then realized, herself as Robin. The other two were an apparently cross-dressed couple; Supergirt was named Freddy and Superman was Bella. I got so flustered I introduced myself as George, Shelly, and Samantha. I hope they didn’t think I was too weird.

I got a lot of candy, so I shared with Mom and Dad, each of us taking a piece or two after dinner and planning to do so every night for a while.

---

November-December 2007

The very next morning, Samantha wanted to get me going on copying female genitals, the ones from her version of Shelly, but I put a stop to it.

No, Samantha. Not yet. I’m satisfied now I can make myself into a convincing fake girl anytime I want. Well, as long as that girl looks like Shelly. You’re going to have me using tampons and dildos soon the way you’re going, but that’s your life, not mine. Let’s work on other bodies so I’m not restricted to only George and Shelly.

“I wasn’t going to do that to you, Georgie.”

You would have before I took control! You were one day away from having Shelly have sex with guys before I had Dad put a stop to it.

“I’m sorry, Georgie. You’re right. It’s your body. But I have to tell you something. I can only make Shelly in such detail because I lived in her body. When I copied Freddy, and your dad, and the other people you saw me copy, I was only faking.”

Faking? I thought you looked like a good Freddy, and Dad thought you did him well, too.

I mostly just copied their faces, and flattened the breasts. I was actually a girl in my crotch those times. It was only after you brought me in for good during the seance that I even learned how to make male genitals. Before that I only possessed you as goo.

Wow. Good fakes, then.

I can show you how to do these things, and it will be good to help you learn to copy anybody.

I went out to breakfast as George and explained to my parents.

“I’m done being Shelly for a while. Samantha wanted to get me started copying female genitals, but I think it’s more important to learn how to copy other people besides Shelly.”

“That sounds good, son,” Mom told me.

“I’m glad you are exercising some control over your relationship with Samantha. It is your body, after all,” Dad said.

“That’s what I told her. She explained these lessons are going to be harder, but I think they will be more valuable in the end.”

“I’m inclined to agree,” Dad replied. “The main thing you will get out of having female genitals is that you will be able to have sex as a woman, and that can wait, though I’m sure your mom and Samantha will tell you it is important.”

Mom just nodded.

“There is actually one other advantage. By not having concealed male genitals while I’m in a woman’s body, I won’t come in the male way if I accidentally arouse myself too much.”

“Couldn’t you just have no genitals?” Mom asked.

“Maybe.”

Samantha, how hard would it be to make me have no genitals?

“You’d have to improvise. I never tried taking away things, but see if you can make yourself have no pinky on your left hand.”

I tried to do this, but I couldn’t.

“Samantha suggested trying to see if I could have no pinky, and I couldn’t do it. That probably means I can’t have no genitals, either. But I can make it smaller,” I said, demonstrating the latter option. Then I had a brainstorm.

“I should be able to make the hidden male genitals those of a 10-year-old. Then I wouldn’t come.”

“Now that’s a good idea!” Mom, Dad, and even Samantha all said at the same time.

I had to look deep into my memory to recall 10-year-old George, but I did. I tested the 10-year-old genitals idea by putting them on George first, and confirming I couldn’t get an erection that way. Then every day for a week, I showered as my version of Shelly with the genitals this way, and never came during those showers. The idea worked!

The rest of the time, Samantha was mostly helping me work on faces. There were pictures of faces everywhere and lots of options to duplicate them. Mom had a great idea of buying a woman’s makeup mirror, which would give me a closeup of my face and allow me to compare with the face I was trying to copy on the computer next to it. Faces were such an important part of how people identified other people that Samantha was convinced if I could do the face well, I only had to do the rest of the body vaguely right to pass.

“By the way, you’ll never need makeup. Color comes easy with the goo. Did you notice, when I first started taking over your goo, that time I went to Wal-Mart, that I looked in a mirror by the makeup counter and adjusted my colors?”

No. Must’ve been too subtle for me to notice.

“It was mainly my lip color and the bit above my eyes representing eye shadow. I’d put in some color when I made the face, but I was checking how it looked. The basic colors representing Shelly are so ingrained in me that they came automatically when I was copying her from my memory, but I did different makeup colors at times.”

So can you explain how I do colors?

“Well you already made Shelly’s hair the right color. Just think about how you did that.”

Hmm. Yeah, got it!

Pretty soon, like a kid who has just discovered a new toy, I was giving myself blue hair, green skin, yellow lips, and other fun shades, before I got serious and tried making myself look like various ethnicities. I discovered one limit to my power, though. I couldn’t make part of my goo into clothes, weapons, or other objects. I could, to some degree, make an approximation of a sword or spear by shaping my arm and hand, but it was still my arm, and wasn’t any harder.

Samantha told me in my head, “I couldn’t make clothes from the goo either. That’s why I went out and bought some.”

---

December 22, 2007

Samantha continued giving me lessons in changing my body various ways, but I had a funny thought when I woke up this Saturday morning, the start of two weeks off school for Christmas break, and I tried to take all the color out of my body. What I intended to do was go invisible, but the actual result was that I kept my body shape but I was the silvery color of the goo. I stood in front of the mirror so Samantha could see clearly what I’d done.

Ta da!

“Hey, that’s really cool, Georgie! We look like some kind of robot or something.”

It’s just my body with no color at all. I guess the color of the goo shows through, even when the goo is formed into skin and organs.

“That’s interesting. That’s probably what happens when we stretch a lot, too. The color takes a moment to catch up and the silver shows for a moment.”

I changed it to Shelly’s body with my current modifications, and took out all the color.

“Ooh. That looks awesome!” Samantha practically shouted inside my head. “But try this. Make your nipples and areolae really small and the breasts slightly pointed.”

Specific changes like this were what we’d been practicing a lot lately. I did it, and I liked the look. I could see why Samantha suggested it.

“Now get rid of the pubic hair.”

I made that change as well.

“Awesome!” Samantha said to me in my head. “You could actually run around naked this way. People would either think you were a sophisticated robot or a girl in an all-over metallic bodysuit.”

Ha ha! You’re right! A solution to that problem of not being able to make clothes! I said to her as I looked at myself from various angles in the mirror. So I should go down for breakfast like this.

“Do it! do it!”

So I did. Mom and Dad were used to seeing me come down with a different look every day except on school days, when I stuck to normal George. Both of them laughed when they saw me. After I got my cereal and sat down at the table to eat it, Dad started singing.

She’s a... quicksilver girl

A lover of the world

She spreads her wings

And she’s free

“I have wings?”

“No, it’s just part of the song. It’s an old song, but it’s by Steve Miller, who I think is still performing after all these years. You can probably find it online. I haven’t heard it in a long time but you reminded me of it.”

Mom came close to me and whispered in my ear, “Are you naked?” and I whispered back, “Yes.”

I finished and put away breakfast and left the room without Dad ever commenting on my nudity. Not sure whether he noticed. But when I caught Mom alone I soon afterward I talked to her about it.

“I haven’t been able to make the goo into actual clothing, but Samantha suggested making my nipples really small and the breasts slightly pointed, which makes it look like something covering the breast rather than an actual breast. And then I hid the pubic hair, and my fake girl crotch is almost completely smooth already. And I had to test it out. I don’t know whether Dad noticed.”

“He certainly noticed you, but I also don’t know whether he figured out you’re naked. You’ve been making a lot of different looks and he doesn’t know all your clothes like I do. I noticed your nails, though.”

I looked at my hand. Yeah, you could totally tell my hand wasn’t covered by something.

“So what if I did something like this?”

I made my hands, feet, head, and neck normally colored and left the rest of me silvery.

“That actually looks a lot more convincing as clothing,” Mom replied. “You could also try coloring the other parts of you like more normal clothes. Make seam lines and everything.”

“Oh, God, seams? Let me go look at some actual clothes and I’ll find you later.”

I found it too difficult to make fake seam lines, but I made the top pink and the bottom royal blue split at the point where my pants would come up to, and Mom liked that. So then I stuffed an actual pink top I had similar to that and a pair of Shelly’s jeans with pillows and towels to make a makeshift mannequin, adjusted the color of the “pants” on my body, and used that as a model to work from in trying to add those seam lines. It was too much to try today, but I did manage to add the outline of a pocket on one butt cheek.

I was also able to memorize what I had done so far so that after spending time as George I could jump back to this body. That was one of the things I had been practicing with Samantha, memorizing whole bodies so I could recreate them quickly. Every time I add one thing I add it to the memorized version.

---

December 26, 2007

Mom and Dad had gotten me some Christmas presents, including Mom getting me some more clothes for Shelly’s body that I wouldn’t have considered but I admitted were actually nice. But they also gave me a card they said was a ticket to spend up to $500 of the money Samantha helped me recover on fun stuff. So I took some of that money and went out today.

I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do. I bought several different kinds of construction toys and clay which I thought might help me better visualize other bodies I wanted to make. And then I saw a comic book store.

I hadn’t really been buying comic books, but I was inspired by my experience as uncolored goo. Specifically, I thought I remembered there being some characters, fictional heroes, who were just made of something like ice or metal, and didn’t wear any clothes over it. I mean, everybody knew Donald Duck didn’t wear pants, but he’s a duck. These were human-looking people just made out of something other than flesh and bone.

I searched the whole shop, and sure enough, I found 8 comic books featuring 5 different characters who fit that description, and bought all of them to study later. Well, to read, but also study how those characters were depicted.

The comic books were disappointing. It turned out two of them actually wore skin-tight bodysuits and weren’t actually naked, including the only woman among them. But three of them, as far as I could tell, actually went around naked. The drawings simply never depicted them in poses where you could see anything between their legs. But you could see their chests all the time. None of them have nipples. For that matter, they usually depicted them in ways you couldn’t see their nails, either, and when you could see where their nails should be, they simply didn’t have any.

I’d been developing a clothed version of Shelly’s body and I’d already figured out how to shrink the nipples and the two openings in my crotch each down to the size of a hair follicle. I’d gone with rounded breasts rather than the pointed look Samantha had first suggested, which I thought looked more convincing, as if I had some bra on under what I wanted people to see as clothing.

But looking at this, I removed the color and I shrank the nails down, too, letting the skin close up around them. And it did now look like I had some incredibly flashy bodysuit on more than it did that I was naked.

But it was too flashy for practical use. The fake-clothed body I’d been making was better, and even then I didn’t feel like I’d use that in public except in emergency, if I was left without clothes perhaps after having gone to goo and lost them. But if I did, I’d be better off trying to fake-clothe Shelly. Boys didn’t usually wear such tight clothing and the look was much less convincing

---

January 3, 2008

Mom decided it was a good time before classes started again to go get me tested and registered with NANA, and last week she got me a Thursday appointment. I didn’t realize until she explained it that it was going to be an all day thing. They were going to do the tests like the medium Stephanie had done, but in a lot greater detail to test me for every known power.

A tall black woman came out and led me inside to run the testing. The first part was physical testing and they first had me put on an all-over bodysuit.

“I shapeshift, so is this suit going to be able to fit other bodies?”

“As long as you don’t change too much. It’s designed to stretch a lot to support most bodies. We’re not going to be testing your ability to warp outside of normal human shapes in this first part, so it should be fine.”

She had me try some other shapes for some of the tests, more thin and tall, more short and muscular, male and female, but except for the muscular forms being able to lift a little more, and the bodies farther from George’s and Shelly’s shapes being more awkward for me, I didn’t notice any difference in how I performed.

After a bunch of those tests, there was a chance for me to shower, change back into my normal clothes, and go eat lunch. Afterward, there were a bunch of tests where they quickly figured out I didn’t have certain other kinds of powers like magic. In one part of this they had a psychic who could communicate with Samantha directly. Samantha relayed to me inside my head what she was getting.

Then they focused on my shapeshifting. They had me put on something like a sports bra and skin-tight shorts for this part, made out of that same stretchable material, so most of my body was free to change shapes, and I could be male or female, and they could see the things I could do with colors on my skin. As before, I was unable to make clothes, tools, weapons, and such. Also, the goo isn’t actually liquid. It stays together in one semi-solid clump. I can’t turn into raindrops and rain down on somebody.

They did find some tricks that I could do with the goo. First, there was Samantha’s trick from very early on, stretching to reach a high window and pulling myself up by retracting the goo. I could use basically the same trick to go through a small hole, making a hand on the other side to hold on with and bringing the rest of myself through as goo. This worked even down a long straight pipe, to about 12 feet long, and around curves for shorter distances. Of course, I lost my clothes going through the pipe, but it was a chance to use the ability I developed to paint my skin with fake clothes. Another of Samantha’s tricks was to leap from a tall height landing as goo. The goo doesn’t have any bones to break, and it cushions itself, so I could fall any distance they had the facility to check easily, up to a 10-story building, land as goo, and then simply remake a body out of the goo. Between that and the ability to look like other people, they definitely thought they’d have some reason to call on me. And I’d get paid when called upon.

Finally, I had to choose a code name.

“Quicksilver,” I suggested.

“Sorry, that name’s taken,” the woman at the counter said.

“Quicksilver Girl,” I tried next, changing myself to have Shelly’s goo body to go with the name.

“Nope, sorry, that name’s taken too.”

Samantha, would you mind if I used your actual name in my codename? It seems like I need something more unique.

“Go ahead,” she told me in my head. “Nobody’s going to associate this with my original body. We aren’t even using the original Samantha’s shape.”

“Samantha Quicksilver.”

“That name’s available. Congratulations, you’re Samantha Quicksilver.”

The links in this article go to YouTube. At the end there is a playlist of all the songs.

January 22, 2007

Saturday I learned the lie everybody around here has been living.

Some people here randomly at some point in their lives, commonly during teen years but sometimes at other times, develop powers. I thought that was a thing that only happened in the comic books, but it’s real. At least, here in Normal it is. It doesn’t happen elsewhere, or else those other places are hiding it as well as the people of Normal try to.

They hid it from me successfully until they decided I needed to know. And that need was because one of the boys in my gym class developed a power that changed him into a girl, so she’s going to be dressing and showering with the girls now and not with me; that was the thing they couldn’t hide with magic.

I had been in the locker room with her when two other boys who apparently already knew the secret were shoving her around and announced she was a girl to everybody. It didn’t make any sense to me; I didn’t see a girl. But now I know. A magic spell over the whole city of Normal hides abnormal things from people who don’t know; now that I know, they told me I’m going to see changed people in my school, my neighborhood, and elsewhere in Normal.

And I did. Come gym class today, I discovered not only is she now a girl, but a bird-girl, covered with feathers from head to toe. And she had the feathers since the start of the month, but the spell hid them from me. I’ve seen a few other obviously changed people today, and there’s no telling how many of my classmates have powers that you just can’t see.

And this explains why that one radio station KNRM plays so much comic book music. I thought we just had a lot of fans here, but it’s actually personal for a bunch of people. But, for now at least, I’m just David Daniels, 13-year-old middle-school student with no powers.

---

February 12, 2007

The whole powers thing has mostly seemed overblown. After the first week I didn’t encounter any more people with obvious powers. There were only a few and none of them seemed to have great powers. Maybe some people here get cool powers, but I talked with the bird girl today at lunch. She didn’t want to be a bird, didn’t want to be a girl, and doesn’t even fly. And she has to deal with laying a big egg every month instead of periods; I don’t know whether that is a plus or minus, but if she hadn’t gotten stuck being a girl she wouldn’t have periods or eggs. If that’s what powers are like, no thanks.

---

June 8, 2007

Today I got the creepiest feeling listening to KNRM. I don’t know why. They were playing one of those comic book songs that are so popular here, “My Secret Origin” by Ookla the Mok.

I’m waiting for my Lady of the Lake to come and crown me king.

I’m waiting for my rocket to land so I can get my power ring.

I’m waiting for my radioactive meteorite to fall.

I’m waiting but I ain’t got no goddamn meteorite at all.

I’m waiting for my story to begin.

In Normal, it was really only the meteor which gave everybody their powers, and it fell a long time ago and just keeps on giving. That other stuff is just fiction. But it’s clear why this song resonates with people here. I’ve seen that powers can mess some people up more than it helps them, but there are plenty of people who’d rather roll the dice and hope for an interesting life with powers rather than live a boring one, not that there is really anything they can do to influence it except stay in Normal. I’m still not convinced.

But I’ve heard the song before, lots of times, several times since I learned powers here are real, and it didn’t affect me like it did tonight. I had to change the station to one of the ones with normal music. Any other station, really.

---

June 9, 2007

I was kind of bored, studying for finals, and “The Heart of Rock and Roll” was on the radio it happened. Well into the song, but still before it should have been over, the music stopped. Not because somebody turned the music off, but because I was in a different place. There was a weird building with a big pyramid in front of it. You could see the framework inside holding up the pyramid. A lot of people were scattered around a large plaza.

I was there for a few seconds, and then the music resumed and I was back with my study materials. I wondered if I was studying too hard and starting to lose it, and I decided to take a break in any case.

I mentioned it to Mom, and she suggested maybe it was a power. So now I was watching for it to happen again.

---

June 16, 2007

School was over and I was home for the summer. Normal was throwing a sort of city-wide party to celebrate summer, and I got together with my girlfriend Kendra for a walk through the festivities.

There was one guy who was doing his best Sinatra impression, crooning “My Kind of Town” ... and suddenly I was somewhere else. There was a train running on tracks above the road. “Wait!” I thought. “Chicago! The El! That song was about Chicago...”

By the time I finished that thought I was back beside Kendra.

“David! What happened? You disappeared for a few seconds.”

‘Kendra, I think it’s a power.”

Just then I was back in Chicago again for as short a visit as the first one.

When I returned, I started running, yelling back to Kendra, “I gotta get home and tell Mom.” She ran after me, and caught up to me because I blinked out once more before it stopped.

“Mom! It happened again!”

“What happened, David?”

“My power took me to another place. And Kendra saw it.”

Kendra was there beside me now. “Yeah, like David said, he disappeared from beside me for a few seconds. It happened three times.”

“OK. You said that happened before, so tell me specifically what happened this time.”

“A guy in the square was doing a Frank Sinatra impression, singing ‘My Kind of Town,’ a song about Chicago. And then there was a train on tracks above the road. I’ve never actually been there to see it myself, but I thought that could be the El that Chicago is famous for.”

“Could be. Chicago isn’t the only city with elevated trains, but it makes sense. You were listening to music the other time, too, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m going to get you a testing appointment with NANA. Until then, just to be safe, try to avoid music, OK?”

“OK, I’ll try.”

So Kendra stayed with me the rest of the day, and she called home.

“Hi, Mom. I’m still with David. Yes, we’re both safe, but we’re going to be staying at his house for a while because of a possible issue with him developing a power. Yes, I’ll keep you updated.”

We talked about various things, including when Kendra’s brother developed electrical powers two years ago and burned out every electronic device in their house. It cost some money to replace those things, but they’ve started recovering the money. Now they now live off the grid, as her brother charges up a big battery periodically to run everything in their house.

Testing

June 18, 2007

They couldn’t get me a testing appointment until Monday, not because it was Sunday yesterday, but because they wanted to have a teleporter, a GPS tracking device, something to hide my teleports from outsiders, and a bunch of songs on hand. There were actually three people there for my testing.

“Hi, David, I’m Chris. I’m going to be in charge of your testing.”

“I’m Cynthia. I’m a skilled teleporter, and I’m here to rescue you if you end up somewhere that you need it.”

“And I’m Fred. I make magic charms that all our teleporters carry which help hide their comings and goings from outsiders. The charms don’t make them invisible; they just make it so that people don’t notice teleporters suddenly appearing and suddenly disappearing. If you don’t pop out immediately, you would be able to interact with people normally while you are there.”

Fred came over and handed me two charms on necklaces. He continued, “The second one is a magical GPS tracker. It won’t be blocked in any way by the don’t-notice-me charm, and it sends its location back magically to the receiver Cynthia is holding, anywhere in the world, not dependent on the Internet or cell access, and it never has to be recharged.”

Chris said, “Now I want you to tell me what powers you experienced.”

“The first time was about a week ago. I was studying and I had the radio on and “The Heart of Rock and Roll” was on when suddenly I was some other place. There was a strange looking building with a pyramid in front of it that you could see partially through. You could see a lattice structure supporting the pyramid.”

“Well, the most famous pyramid like that is at the Louvre in Paris.”

Chris typed out some commands on a computer and a picture of it showed up on a large screen on one wall of the room we were all in.

“No, that’s not it,” I told him. “The pyramid, I couldn’t say for sure, but that was not the building next to it. The building was not fancy like that, just weird.”

He did some searches and then up popped the right building. “That’s it!” I exclaimed.

“The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. That’s certainly one way of interpreting the heart of rock and roll. Now I want to test this point, now that you have those charms on. I’m going to play the song here - I have the entire catalogs from several of the local radio stations on this computer - and we’re going to see when you teleport.”

It was weird. The song mentions a whole bunch of cities, but I didn’t go to any of those, until, in what turned out to be the last segment of the song which mentions cities, right after he sings “The heart of rock and roll is still beating” he says “in Cleveland.” That’s when I teleported. After I came back, I didn’t teleport again as the song finished, but when he replayed the song I teleported at that point, and to the same location. Cynthia came and watched me the first time, close enough that I could see her, but the second time she didn’t, and I saw her taking notes when I returned.

“You went to the same spot both times,” Cynthia commented.

“Well, we’ve established that that part of that song makes you teleport to that location. If we can figure out other teleports maybe we can understand more precisely how your power works.”

So they tested me with a recording of the real Sinatra singing “My Kind of Town” and confirmed I was going to a spot next to the El, the same spot, and after I came back, each time that he sang “Chicago” I went there again, which was several times. And of course Sinatra has an even more famous city song, “New York, New York.” Indeed, that took me to a place I could see several of the famous buildings in New York City which I recognized, even though I didn’t know what some of them were called.

Next they tried “Rock and Roll Band” by Boston, which is a somewhat fictionalized story about the band itself, and starts “Well, we were just another band out of Boston.” That line sent me to some place in Boston. I didn’t know the specific location I ended up, but I did know about the Citgo sign by Fenway Park, and I saw that. Cynthia confirmed I was in that area.

“One of the stations has a DJ originally from Boston who moved here to retire, and when his powers rejuvenated him, he restarted his career at a station here. So we have a whole bunch of Boston songs. Let’s see if they all take you to the same place.”

They didn’t. “MTA” by the Kingston Trio, popularly known as “Charlie on the MTA,” was a song about Boston’s subway system, and it specifically mentions Scollay Square station. I ended up inside a station called Government Center, but they explained to me that it’s the same station, just renamed. There’s a more recent and slightly modified punk version of the song by the Dropkick Murphys which took me to the same spot. They played “Dirty Water” by The Standells which I thought was strange, but it took me to a park which ran along part of the Charles River, which they explained is where the dirty water in the song is found (and each “dirty water” took me there). But “Into the Mystic” by Van Morrison took me to a spot along the Mystic River, a smaller one that flows into the Charles, and thankfully not actually into the river.

“Wait, how many rivers in Boston have songs about them?”

“Well, I threw that one in as a kind of a test,” Chris explained. “That song isn’t actually about the Mystic River, but especially because he ‘sails into the Mystic’ at one point, a lot of people think it is. Some of these other locations have been mentioned just once in a song with other locations also mentioned, but the most well known bits are where you ended up. Several of Boston’s subway stations are mentioned in “MTA,” but Scollay Square where his wife gives him the sandwich is what people remember most. So it might be that popular opinion has something to do with it. It’s clearly not your belief, though, because you had no idea about the Dirty Water song until after you teleported to the Charles. I want to try other tests, but it’ll take some time to set them up. What happens if you hear a song that is clearly about a particular place but it’s brand new and doesn’t have any popularity at all? I don’t have one, but I know somebody who might.”

He came up with several more New York songs, and some Los Angeles ones including “I Love LA” by Randy Newman, and these songs took me all over those cities. “Land Down Under” by Men at Work took me to a spot where I could see Sydney Opera House every time the title was sung. The song is only generically about the entire country, and in parts of it, a man from Australia who isn’t actually in Australia when the singer encounters him, but that was one of the most iconic sights there.

We took a break, and then they provided me with an iPod and showed me how to use it. The songs I’d just been teleporting from listening to were on it, and I was going to either listen to a prepared list of songs or put one on repeat and see if I could stay there and walk around the area, whether it would keep teleporting me back to the starting spot, or whatever else might happen. And it turned out that as long as the song was playing uninterrupted, even looping back to the start of the song after it was finished, I stayed there and could move about. It didn’t keep teleporting me back to the landing point. If another song started after the one ended, I still stayed where I was, until I reached a teleport trigger in another song. This was good. I could actually go somewhere and do something, though I had to be listening to music continuously to stay there.

When I came back from this set of tests, they had brought a space suit into the room.

“You’re going to send me to space? Why do you even have a space suit?”

“Well, some of the people with zero-gravity-based flying powers can escape the atmosphere, and they need something like this if they do. But what we’re actually going to do is send you to the moon. Your GPS won’t work there, but I’m sure you’ll be able to figure out if that’s where you are.”

They played “Fly Me to the Moon” by Frank Sinatra. Obviously one of the stations had somebody who loved his songs. But nothing happened.

“Why didn’t it work?” I asked.

“Most likely, your power isn’t strong enough. Australia is on the other side of the world, but the moon is 30 times as far away.”

After I got out of the space suit, we had a break for lunch, and after lunch, they tested whether I had any other powers. At first the tests were unassisted by music, to get a feel for my abilities, but then they had me repeating tests with various songs playing, a lot of them from KNRM’s catalog of comic book music. REM’s “I Am Superman” didn’t make me literally Superman, and I wasn’t able to fly, but I could run faster and lift more weight when the song was playing. The theme from Spider-Man, whether the new cover by Michael Bublé or the classic version, didn’t let me shoot webs from my fingers, but it did let me climb the wall. “A Little Prayer (Wolverine’s Theme)” by Jewel did nothing at all for me; I didn’t get adamantium claws, didn’t heal unusually fast, and didn’t get augmented sight and smell. “Das Uber Tuber” didn’t turn me into whatever that Mr. Potato Head character in the song was meant to be. But that reminded me of something.

“Hey, while you have Ookla the Mok playing, can you try ‘My Secret Origin’? The day before I teleported for the first time, that song was playing and I got a really weird feeling. If it was a power, I didn’t notice what. But whatever it was creeped me out so much I had to turn it off. That’s how I ended up on a regular station the next day.”

Chris played the song, and nothing happened. They let it play all the way to the end.

“Nope, nothing this time. Maybe it wasn’t the song.”

Chris suggested, “It still could have been. I have a couple ideas, but heck if we can ever test them. The song is about getting powers, so one possibility is that it gave you the power, and the feeling was the result of your body changing to have your power. Unless we have a song that takes away your power so that we can use the song to give it back, we could never test it, and I don’t know what would do that, anyway. My second idea is that it lets you detect when somebody is in the process of gaining powers. And you happened to hear it when you were gaining yours. Massive coincidence if it happened, and pretty massive coincidence if you ever hear the song again at the same moment you are near someone else gaining powers, depending on how close you actually have to be. The farther the distance, the more likely and less useful it is. If you simply detected that someone in Normal was getting powers, what are we going to do, do test everybody?”

I laughed.

“Let’s just forget about that power until we get more evidence. If you ever get that feeling again, or anything weird during that song, make a note and let me know. But I do have one more important test for you. Hang on a sec.”

Chris left and came back with an assistant, each of them pulling a clothes rack with various shirts and jackets hanging from it.

“I know you take your clothes and other carried items with you when you teleport. I want to find the limit. I’m going to put ‘Dirty Water’ on, and each time you come back here, grab one more shirt or jacket and add it to what you have on already. Cynthia’s going to go watch if anything falls off there and I’ll watch here.”

After a bit it got difficult to layer on more coats, and Chris clearly realized that and slowed the pace of the repeating segment of the song. Eventially I was struggling under the weight of almost the entire two racks when Chris stopped the music.

“OK, I don’t know if that one fell off because it was too far from your body or too much weight, but we’re going to test it.”

Chris helped me take off and hang up all the extra clothes, and he then put one cost on me and put a bunch of small weights in the pockets. After confirming I could teleport with all that weight, again I added more jackets to it. It took a lot less this time before I stopped bringing all the coats with me. They weighed me with all the coats and confirmed I could take approximately 65 pounds of stuff with me. And then Chris showed up with even more weights, and had me just wear one big parka with lots of big pockets and every time I came back, he handed me more weights to stuff in the pockets. This time, when it got too heavy, the entire parka stayed behind when I teleported. The power treated it as a single unit. The weight was the same.

“That’s useful to know,” I said.

“Well, that’s it for today, Normally it would be the end, period, but there are a lot more songs I’d like to test out but which require more setup. But I’ll let you choose a code name and then go home.”

“Because of the way my power is triggered, I think The Listener is a good name.”

He typed it in. “Looks like that’s available. Not surprising, since I’ve never heard of anybody else with powers like yours.”

---

June 19, 2007

I was back in testing in the morning, and I got to see the other songs they wanted to test.

First off, they brought in a live musician. Not the crooner from the square the other day. This guy wrote his own songs, and he had written a new one in the last couple days about the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, because the entire NANA testing group had only been able to find one song about the city and none about the arch. The new song didn’t do anything for me, though, despite being more clearly about the arch than a lot of the songs that did make me teleport were about their subjects. So they decided there was some way my power triggered off popular opinion of the songs, and I couldn’t simply write my own songs to get powers, unless I could get them recorded and recognized by people. They then played the one St. Louis song they knew before, “Meet Me in St. Louis” from one oldies station’s music catalog, and I did get to go to St. Louis, but not to the arch. I was in some park, which Chris explained afterward was in 1904 part of the fairgrounds for the World Fair held there that year. The song was written that year for the fair and that was where the characters were supposed to meet. The arch wasn’t built yet.

Next they took me outside into a field. Chris explained that there was a class for those whose powers let them fly starting next week, and recommended it for me if I could get off the ground, but with a whole playlist of flying songs, including R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly,” I wasn’t able to get off the ground even for a second, not even wearing cardboard wings. I felt pretty silly, and I didn’t believe I could fly.

“How’s your swimming?” Chris asked me next.

“Um, I think I won’t drown?”

“Well, just in case, we’re going to have a lifeguard on hand.”

He took me to a swimming pool at the college, which he said was the only one in Normal equipped with an underwater sound system, and they’d rented it for an hour. He handed me swim trunks, pointed me at the locker room, and I changed, and went in for a swim. Indeed, I didn’t drown, but I almost did trying to dive and swim underwater. I surfaced and then completed a lap across the pool with some difficulty.

Then they played Ookla the Mok’s “Arthur Curry” which was probably the only song about Aquaman anywhere. I didn’t grow gills or anything, but I did swim better. I wasn’t convinced I couldn’t learn to swim that well just by practicing, without the song, though, and the setup of being able to listen to a song underwater was pretty unlikely. This wasn’t going to be a power I could practically use, and Chris said he only tested it to see if I got any benefit from it. I didn’t get any benefit when he played one of the songs about Superman underwater; in fact, I was actually less coordinated at swimming when my strength was increased above what I was used to.

After I got dried off and changed, they bought me lunch, and we went back into the building for a session of songs that might give me other kinds of powers. Some songs about reading minds, including “Read My Mind” by The Killers which was new and playing on some stations right now, let me read a person’s mind, but only if I was physically touching the person, and the song playing made it hard to concentrate, but I could, for example, identify a card the person had just looked at.

There were also songs that gave me magical abilities, including “Magic” by The Cars, but probably really weak ones, and I also needed to concentrate on the actual magic, and it was hard with the song going. I managed to cast the simplest spell, showing that it could potentially work, but realistically my magic ability was 0. I could see why Chris left these options to day 2.

Chris decided I was pretty safe at this point. Songs that let me do things other than teleport were probably going to give me low-level versions of those powers that I was going to have to work at to do anything at all with, so the main thing was going to be the sometimes uncontrolled teleporting to places that had songs written about them. And with my charm, I wasn’t going to stand out when I did that.

After dinner, I had a long call with Kendra, telling her as much of my experience the last two days as I could.

---

July 2, 2007

Rather than an iPod, I ended up choosing another kind of MP3 player that had a set of programmable buttons. I could set up a series of destinations, each song playing on repeat while it was selected, make playlists with specific sequences of songs (which could also be assigned to those buttons), or search the entire list of songs by first letter of the song title and then scrolling by song to pick a specific song to play.

And then I tested out lots more songs to see if they would teleport me. At this point, I was testing songs with cities and landmarks in their titles or in their lyrics (to the extent I could search for that), and trying to find them on YouTube or anywhere. Just two weeks after my testing I’d built up a list of 200 usable songs, of which I’d acquired copies of 40 from a mixture of online purchases and used CD stores.

NANA had given me the magically connected GPS unit, which recorded places I had recently been detected so I could record them in a spreadsheet along with the songs that took me there. I also had a private Google map with numbered pins at the locations that matched to rows in the spreadsheet. I was hoping to eventually find routes to get anywhere in the world, though I expected there would be locations that weren’t practical to reach.

---

July 29, 2007

I was done with the city-name songs after a couple weeks, and since then I had just been trying to listen to a variety of music in case something else interesting comes up, often switching radio stations when a song that was clearly having no effect came on. And I did find more of those songs.

But then when Helen Reddy’s song “I Am Woman” was playing, suddenly I discovered that I was one. Well, a girl.

“Mom!”

I shut off the music and went to find her. And she was running to me at my scream.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Helen Reddy was singing ‘I Am Woman’ and she made me into one.”

“Are you still female?”

I looked at myself. The small boobs under my T-shirt that I had first noticed were still there. I stuck a hand down into my shorts.

“100% girl,” I replied.

“Your voice changed, too. You sound a lot like you did a couple years ago before your voice started to change. I mean, before you started developing a man’s voice.”

“Hmm, I didn’t notice. But now that you mention it, I can tell my voice is different. But why didn’t I change back when I turned off the music?”

“I don’t know. But maybe we can play a different song to change you back.”

“Hmm. That’s a good idea. But what song celebrates being a man?”

“Try ‘Macho Man.’ It’s a song by the Village People.”

I found the song on YouTube, played it, and soon found myself back in the body I was used to. And stayed there after I stopped the song.

“Well that’s a relief. Thanks, Mom.”

Mom didn’t let it end there, though. She had me turn female again and gave me a long talk, similar to one I’d before, but from a girl’s viewpoint. Instead of being careful not to get a girl pregnant, it was being careful to avoid letting myself get pregnant. I assured her I had no interest in changing into a girl, but since I could never be sure I had 100% control of this power, Mom insisted on giving me the whole talk.

---

July 31, 2007

Of course this meant I needed another round of testing. This was thankfully short and I never left the building, but I had my tracker just in case. Chris was there to lead it again.

There weren’t many songs that turned me into a girl, but “(You Make me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” did it. They’d brought a doctor in this time to examine me, inside and out. I learned that a “physical” exam for a woman means looking inside the vagina. That was weird and unpleasant. At least he said I looked normal. He also gave me a close study outside my body, and pointed out to me in a mirror the subtle differences when I changed. The hair on top of my head stayed the same, but the tiny trace of a mustache I’d started to grow, really just a few hairs and not anything people would actually notice as a mustache, was gone when I was a girl. The similarly sparse hair that had started to grow on my arms wasn’t completely absent, but there was even less of it when I was a girl. And my Adam’s apple had vanished, and my waist was a little narrower and my hips a little wider. The doctor explained how women’s hips looked wider because their legs were actually farther apart to allow space for the birth canal. He explained that the breasts and hips would probably both get larger as I got older, assuming that the woman I was changing into aged at the same rate I did.

What was more surprising was that any gender-bending songs, such as “Lola” and even the last verse of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” where the roles are reversed, made me a mixture of male and female. I still had my developing breasts, and the extra hair had vanished, but I had my male voice, Adam’s apple, and everything below the waist was male.

The doctor explained, “This state is common for transsexuals. They take hormones that allow their breasts to grow, remove their body hair with electrolysis, and dress and live as a woman in this form. It’s as far as many of them ever go.”

“How much farther could they go?”

“Well, outside Normal, they get surgery to remove their male genitals and give them the semblance of female genitals. It’s never fully functional but ideally they get a vagina that they can use for sex.”

“And here, obviously it happens automatically sometimes.”

“Yes. Some people get powers which change their genitals to the opposite sex, and sometimes this makes them fully functional as the other sex. In other cases they may have partial or abnormal sexual function. A lucky few like you have the ability to go back and forth and can choose which they prefer. Some shapeshifters also can choose bodies of either gender. Among those who don’t get powers, there are still some who seek to change, but usually they seek out magic users for a chance at full sexual function. There’s still no guarantee, but it’s been successful for some.”

I thought about asking about the failed cases, but decided not to. Instead, I asked, “I’m not really considering it, but suppose I did want to become female. How would I update records that say I’m male?”

The doctor handed this question over to Chris, who explained, “I’m glad you asked. Because of the kind of gender change that is available everywhere, there are systems for updating your gender in any kind of record that tracks gender. For those people who experience a one-time gender change, NANA helps with those updates. For your case, where you might go back and forth, what we would do is update that charm that hides your teleports to also deal with the gender on your ID.”

They ended up taking new pictures of me as female and intersex, and updating the charm so that when I change in the presence of people who don’t know about powers, they won’t notice, and making it so that my ID would match my appearance and gender as each person saw it, treating the intersex form as female. And since David was a weird name for a girl, my name was now legally going to be Robin, though I planned on still going by David unless I had a real reason to do otherwise. Robin was still going to be male in all the records that mattered, but when I was in an obviously female body, the ID I carried with me would show me as female.

High School

August 20, 2007

It was time to go back to school, and because of that, I was ending my research into songs that could give me powers. Sure, if something happened, I’d take note of it, but I wasn’t going to spend an hour or more every day trying to listen to different music in order to find songs that worked for me. It’s going to be high school now, and I’m sure I’ll have enough to spend my time on without finding the 200th song that will teleport me to a unique location.

---

September 2, 2007

Two weeks in, and I can only say it’s not as different as I thought it would be. The kids are bigger. The girls have boobs. The classes are more advanced. But it’s not fundamentally different from middle school. It’s like Middle School: The Next Generation.

---

October 31, 2007

I had been tempted to put on a mix of songs and go trick-or-treating in different cities, a few minutes per city, but Mom convinced me it was a bad idea. But I still wanted to go out. I decided instead to pick the most outrageous looking character to dress as. There were many possibilities, but ultimately I chose to dress as Mr. Mxyzptlk.

Mixy, as he is sometimes called since his actual name pronounces most of those consonants as separate syllables and so is quite long to say, is one of Superman’s occasional enemies. He’s one of the more obscure characters, and I couldn’t find the costume locally and had to order it. Fortunately, it came in time. I’m sure some people would not know who I was dressed as, but with how comic-obsessed the powers had made many kids here, I’m sure some people would. I hoped I was at least unique.

He’s a bald man with white hair on the sides, who wears a purple derby hat covering part of his bald head. The costume came with a skullcap/wig with the hat attached, and also matching white stick-on eyebrows. The rest of the costume was an orange long-sleeved shirt with a V neck and purple bits that stuck out over the shoulders, orange pants, and purple gloves and boots.

It started out OK. There were some houses playing music, but it was the typical Halloween monster stuff and didn’t have any effect on me. It was fine until one of the houses started playing the theme from Ghostbusters. And I guess I’d never tried this song. It teleported me, I guess to wherever the movie was supposed to be. When I got there, rather than the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, there was a huge, more than eight foot tall, perhaps 12 foot long statue of a lioness, and the song “I Am Woman” was blasting out. Hear me roar, indeed. So naturally I turned female as I popped back to Normal, and then I hurried to get away from the Ghostbusters house. I ran and ran, teleporting back in front of the lioness three times before I got out of range of the song in Normal, and I kept running for quite a while more.

After crossing one final street to put distance between myself and the Ghostbusters house, I stopped to get my bearings. I was going to go trick-or-treating around the next block, but was trying to decide between turning left and going straight. To my surprise, Supergirl was coming at me from both directions, one of them accompanied by Superman, and between that and the worry about being female in public, I tripped over my own feet and fell. Both Supergirls helped me up.

“Thank you,” I said.

I was going to introduce myself to them as David, but I realized I had just spoken with my female voice, and after a moment I remembered my new name. I said, “My name’s Robin.”

The Supergirl who was with Superman was named Freddy, and her (his?) Superman was named Bella. The second Supergirl introduced herself as George, Shelly, and also as Samantha. I was glad I’d only given one name, though they probably still thought it was weird a girl was dressed in a male costume. Too late, I thought to exchange numbers with them in case they had any advice about changing gender. Surely at least one of that group had changed! But by the time I did, they were lost in the crowd. I looked around and I could not see them.

I started to pull out my music player and turn myself male again, but I realized I didn’t know where I was; in fleeing the Ghostbusters house I’d gotten myself lost. I decided I should quit instead. I used my cell phone to call Mom to come pick me up. I was able to read street names off a sign and she located it on a map. She told me she needed 10 minutes to get here, maybe 15 with kids crossing the road, so I walked that one block and met Mom just as she was arriving at the corner I had indicated, not having spotted the Superfriends.

“How did you end up way over here?” she asked when I got into the car.

“I got scared and ran. I got lost.”

I told her the whole story to explain how I got scared.

---

December 25, 2007

I had gone months without identifying any more songs that teleported me, but mostly because I had probably found all the easy ones and because I hadn’t been trying. I’d worked more on getting copies of them I could carry with me on my player, and I had most of them by now. For Christmas my parents got me 25 CDs with a total of 31 of the difficult-to-find songs on them.

Ghost Patrol

March 1, 2008

I got a call from NANA today about a job. Not a permanent job, just a thing for today, but they were going to pay me $1000 for about 4 hours’ work if I qualified. The description was something that could only have ever existed in Normal: I was to be a ghost disperser. Mom and Dad were OK with it, and Mom drove me over.

The test to see if I qualified was at the NANA facility where my testing took place, but rather than Chris, there was a woman dressed like a traditional fortune-teller.

“Hi, I’m Stephanie, but for official NANA work today we’ll be using code names. So today you can call me Miss Tix.”

“Mystics? Is there more than one of you?”

“Sorry, it’s M-I-S-S T-I-X, like the name of an unmarried woman. I thought it was funny many years ago.”

“OK, Miss Tix. Then you probably know already, but I’m The Listener.”

“Yes, and welcome. So you’re probably wondering about this job, and why we need a ghost disperser.”

“Yeah.”

“There’s a whole lot I can tell you about ghosts, but most of it isn’t relevant to the job today, so I’m going to try to keep it brief. The meteor is like a beacon for ghosts. Wayward ghosts looking for a new home or who are just lost tend to come to Normal because of it. The really lost and listless ones just go straight into the crater.”

“OK. Does that cause a problem?”

“Well, the ghosts all over Normal cause enough problems to keep me and some other people employed full time. The ones in the crater generally don’t, but the problem is the crater is full. Ghosts pass through normal matter as you might think, but they take up space relative to one another, and the crater is full enough of ghosts now that they are starting to back up into the building. We don’t want people being tested to encounter them on top of what else they are doing.”

“So the crater’s here?”

“Yeah. Now I understand you have quite a few different locations you can teleport to.”

Holding up my music player, I replied, “I believe the current count of teleport songs that I actually have copies of on here is 197. There are many cases where more than one song goes to the same city, but I don’t have any duplicates going to the same spot on here.”

“That’s fine. Are any of them within 50 miles of Normal?”

I thought for a moment and then said, “No. None of them are that close.”

“Then we’ll use them all. Can you set your player to cycle through all of those, pause and restart a song, and skip to the next song quickly?”

“Yes, I do have a playlist with all the location songs in it for when I want to go exploring, and I can do those things.”

“Perfect. If you qualify, we’ll have you teleport out once to each spot with 5 or 6 ghosts to get the 1000 done. But I need to run two tests to see if you qualify. If you don’t, you get 50 bucks for coming in to try, and it’s over. If you can do the job, you get $1000 for helping me clear roughly 1000 ghosts. For the first test, just sit down. I need to examine your soul and make sure you can’t be possessed by ghosts.”

“That’s a real thing? People get possessed by ghosts?”

“Yeah. Only some people. I can tell you more about it afterwards if you like. Just be quiet and sit still for a bit so I can check.”

She did whatever it was and declared I was safe from ghost possession.

“Aren’t the ghosts going to possess other people where I drop them off?”

“The ghosts I am having you move are too weak to possess a person. But you’re going to be right at the nexus that attracts ghosts for quite a while and it’s a precaution. And after I learned last year that ghost possession has been even more of a problem in Normal than we thought, I’m really trying to take precautions. And we’ve always taken the precaution to not inundate any one location with ghosts. We spread them around.”

“OK.”

“Now the second test is whether you can carry ghosts with you when you teleport. We had a guy who was doing this for us about once a year, but he passed away last year. I’ve already had nine other teleporters in here who couldn’t do this part. The ghosts just don’t go with them. So I asked you because your teleportation mechanism is unusual. Our old regular also had an unusual mechanism, though not like yours.”

“OK. How am I supposed to carry a ghost?”

She pointed to what I had first thought was just the table in front of us with a weird, quarter-inch-high raised ring about 2 feet in diameter.

“This is a portable summoning circle. And I’ve trapped a ghost in it. Now put on these goggles.”

I put on what she handed me, and WHOA!

“You should now be able to see the ghost in the circle.”

“Yeah. Creepy!”

“OK, pick up the board. Just grab the corner and pull, and pick up the whole thing as it slides off the table. The ghost should go with it.”

I did that, so now I was carrying a ghost.

“OK, now see this part here?”

She pointed out one bit of the raised circle which was different from the rest. There was a handle on it outside the circle.

“Grab onto this handle and yank it out, and the ghost will fly out.”

“It’s OK to release it here?”

“Yes, this is a pretty benign ghost and one I can re-summon easily.”

So I did it, and indeed the ghost flew out of the circle and across the room.

“OK, now put it down.”

I did, and she reattached the piece I pulled loose and did a little ritual and put the ghost back into the circle.

“Now get one of your songs ready to play to teleport you to another city. I’ll hand you the circle immediately as you do, and after you teleport you release it there. Then shut off the music and come back here with the empty circle.”

“You don’t care where?”

“Anywhere outside Normal will be fine.”

She picked up the circle and made ready to hand it to me. I strapped my player to my arm like was meant for joggers, put the earpieces in my ears, pressed a preset I knew was going to take me to New York City, and took the circle from Miss Tix before the song sent me out. It did, I released the ghost, I shut off the music, and I came back.

“You did it!” Miss Tix cheered.

“Yes, I guess I did. I saw the ghost leave the circle. It’s somewhere in New York City’s Central Park now.”

I set the board down on the table.

“Get your player set up to run through the whole playlist and follow me.”

We went down two levels of basement into the ground, and then we went down a long hallway with a couple turns and finally Miss Tix stopped in front of a door.

“Take off the goggles for now.”

Once I had done so, she opened the door. Inside was a rather large square room, about 40 feet on a side. The floor was actually made of granite paving stones and right in the middle was a round pit with an octagonal railing running all the way around it. There was a weird glow coming up out of the pit.

“I’d like you to meet Freya, Sneak, Dark Vision, and Veda.”

They were standing at four tables which, along with the empty one directly in front of me, were roughly evenly spaced around the pit with about 5 feet of space between each table and the pit. None of them had on the mystical garb Miss Tix wore, but they couldn’t have been a more diverse group. Freya was a tall, somewhat muscular woman with blonde hair and very pale skin. Sneak was an ordinary-looking middle-aged white guy you could have seen anywhere. Dark Vision, despite the name, was a cheerful-looking black woman in her 20s. And Veda was an elderly dark-skinned Indian man with an orange turban covering what I assume was white hair or a bald head, since his mustache and beard were all white.

“Don’t look at the pit with the goggles on. Normally the ghosts are all over this room, but we’ve concentrated them all in the space above the pit for now in a way we can draw out a few at a time quickly. We are all used to the sight, but it would probably be overwhelming for you to see that many ghosts packed together. But go ahead and look in for a moment without the goggles. That’s safe.”

It was clear she meant everybody in the room but myself was used to looking at ghosts. So I walked around the table in front of me and over to the pit, and looked in. The meteor was about 10 feet down, filling almost as big a space as the hole at the top, and it was glowing with a pulsing light. It was hard to say what color it was. It was every color and no color at the same time, but it wasn’t white like I learned in school is the mixture of all the light colors.

I said, “I don’t know what I was expecting, but I guess I’m not surprised the source of all our powers looks so freaky. Aren’t the sides of craters usually more sloped?”

Miss Tix, as I expected, had come up to the table I’d just walked around. She responded, “As I understand it, it was originally shaped more like the craters you are thinking of, but past generations filled it in and paved it for more convenient access to study it. At first, only the central part of the crater was paved and this room was built around it. Later, the rest of the crater was filled in and the rest of the building was built above it. When you are done admiring the meteor, come up to the side of this table opposite me, and look at me, keeping your back to the pit.”

I moved as she indicated.

“Now put your goggles on. You should see five ghosts captive in the circle. And if you look carefully to your left and right, without turning all the way around to look at the crater, you should be able to see ghosts in the other two nearest circles as well.”

I did all that. It took a moment to distinguish them all, but I did count five ghosts. “Yes, I see them.”

“OK, is your music player ready?”

I glanced at it. “Yes.”

“Great. I’m going to hand you this one to drop off at wherever your first song goes, and when you come back, set the circle back on the table and sidle your way over to the next table to your left, keeping your back to the pit. And Freya will hand you hers and you take it to the next location, and so on around the circle. It should give each of us time to refill our circles from the pit by the time you get back to us.”

She picked up the circle to be ready to hand it to me, so I took that as the signal to begin and turned on the first song and got the action going. Once I got the hang of it, it took about a minute to start a song, take the circle, get teleported, release the ghosts, come back, and move to the next table, with a few of the songs taking longer to set up when they didn’t teleport me until later in the song. After a couple hours, at one point when I reached Miss Tix she called for a break, and once they had all refilled their circles we all went into another room nearby where somebody had set up lunch for us. Then we went back and did another two hours of moving ghosts out. I realized I was done upon seeing an empty circle at the next table.

“Thanks. We have the ghosts down below the rim of the pit now, You can look at it now, just don’t look down inside.” Miss Tix told me.

After I glanced at it, seeing only a few ghosts high enough to show through the railing, I took off the goggles and handed them back to Miss Tix, and she led me out of the room.

“My coworkers are going to undo the spell that was confining the ghosts to the column over the pit so that the remaining ghosts can spread out the way they normally would gather, and I’m going to go get you paid.”

As we walked, Miss Tix described what happens when people get possessed by ghosts, and in particular, some of the things that had happened in the past. When we got where we were going, I had to sign a form and then the man there made out a $1000 check to me. And shortly Mom picked me up and I was home.

“So did you have an interesting day?” Mom asked.

“Well I learned a bit about ghosts. It was actually a lot of repetitive work, but they pay well. And they apparently are lacking in anybody else who can carry confined ghosts with them when they teleport, so I might get to do this once a year.”

The songs linked in this story are also available as a YouTube playlist.

June 5, 2008

I was Peter Mills, a 15-year-old boy. I was an honor student, but above all I excelled at math. That is, until one morning when I didn’t get up. My mother arrived in my room when I didn’t come downstairs and found something weird in my bed. She screamed.

I heard her scream, which made me realize I was still in the world I grew up in. I had thought I was in some kind of dream, or worse. It seemed like I’d gone into the Matrix. I couldn’t see my room, my bed, or anything I knew. I couldn’t feel my body. What I could see was a row of computer screens, full of gibberish or static.

I wondered if I could control what was on the screens. I didn’t have a keyboard, nor hands to use one. I thought to clear one of the screens, and it cleared. I proceeded to clear the other screens one by one.

After they cleared, they reset to different things. The screen at the left had a message: Missing geometry. Below this was a > and a blinking cursor. The second screen had a similar cursor but no message. On the third screen was a picture, some sort of blob shape. The fourth screen was the most exciting, because I could see my room. Mom was there, crying.

I needed to do something. But what could I do? I was able, by thinking to aim the focus for the image on the right screen, see other parts of my room. Maybe this whole system worked on thought?

The left screen wanted me to enter some geometry. I thought to add to the screen: x^2 + y^2 + z^2 < 1, an inequality representing a solid sphere.

This text appeared, and on the third screen, I saw the blob turn into a sphere.

Was my body was this blob, and now a sphere? Mom had her head in her arms and was not looking at me. I needed to get her attention.

I assumed, based on the perspective of my view of the room and because of where I last remembered myself being, that I was in my bed. Could I bounce my ball body up and down on the bed?

I changed the equation to x^2 + y^2 + (z-4)^2 < 1, which should put me two diameters above the bed. Well, I moved all right, but I was just floating there. I didn’t fall to the bed, and Mom still didn’t notice.

Could I access a time variable? I hadn’t yet taken trigonometry, but I understood the basic trig functions. A sine or cosine would vary between 1 and -1. I wrote x^2 + y^2 + (z-1-cos(t))^2 < 1, which did move me up and down, but didn’t really hit the bed. I was just grazing against it.

x^2 + y^2 + (z-0.5-cos(t))^2 < 1 would attempt to push against the bed by 1/4 of my diameter, whatever that was. And that worked! I could hear the noise as I hit the bed every several seconds, and Mom noticed it too, and looked up.

“Oh, you’re alive!”

Then, as I continued bouncing the same way, she asked, “Are you alive?”

Now that I no longer needed to make noise to get her attention, I switched to x^2 + y^2 + (z-3-2cos(t))^2 < 1, which continued the bouncing movement higher in the air, no longer touching the bed at all.

After a bit, I stopped, as if to say I was done answering the question, by changing the equation to x^2 + y^2 + (z-3)^2 < 1.

“Are you Peter?”

I did the previous bounce equation for about 5 bounces and then stopped.

“Do you know what happened?”

An up and down motion was a nod, which meant yes. Now I wanted to say no. I wasn’t sure which direction was x and which was y, but I figured I’d try one.

(x-cos(t))^2 + y^2 + (z-3)^2 < 1

Oops. I could tell by the way Mom got closer and farther away in the last screen that this was the wrong way.

I quickly changed the equation to x^2 + (y-cos(t))^2 + (z-3)^2 < 1

Better. After about 5 swings I shut the motion off.

“Can you speak?”

I signaled no again.

Mom stopped to think for a moment, while I also thought about the functions. What other functions did I have available?

Wait, what if the blank screen was a help screen?

I typed help there, and it responded Enter help subject for help on subject.

So I typed help functions, and got a full screen of function names in five columns. In fact, it had scrolled off the screen, but when I thought about scrolling the screen back to see what I’d missed, I was able to do that.

help max

max(a, b, ...) returns the maximum of the arguments.

Sometime when I was alone I was going to have to read through all of the functions available. For now, though, I tried setting my equation to max(x,y,z-2,-x,-y,-(z-2))<1.

Yep, I was a cube.

I shortened this to max(|x|,|y|,|z-2|)<1 and confirmed that the absolute value function could be called like this.

Looking back at the list of functions, another one caught my eye.

help union

union(rel1, rel2, ...) returns the set of all points which satisfy any of the relations specified.

Ooh.

I set the equation to union(max(|x|,|y|,|z-2|)<1,max(|x|,|y|,|z-4|)<1). And now I was two cubes sitting atop one another. I could have made this as a single box by multiplying z by a factor. But this would let me do more complicated shapes.

I added three more cubes on top of those, and more to the side to make a crude letter P. Then, another stack of cubes not attached to the first, so for a moment I made the word PI. But I added more boxes to the right of the second stack, and turned it into an E. Continuing in this way, after about a minute I had assembled boxes spelling PETER.

I thought it would fill the whole bed, but it seemed that the cubes got smaller when I specified more pieces. Maybe I only had so much matter and the coordinates scaled to whatever I entered.

I redid the blocks so they spelled MEASURE ME. This time I was quite long, and extended beyond the length of the bed. Mom left and came back with a measuring tape of the sort used for woodworking, and held it across the length of all the letters. I had written each letter five cubes tall and three cubes wide, except the Ms were five cubes wide, and with a one-cube space between letters, and three cubes between the words. This meant that the whole thing was 41 cubes long, 5 high, and 1 thick. The way I had written them, each M contained 14 cubes, each E 10, A 10, S 11, U 9, and R 10, for a total of 98 cubes. She read the measurements to me as 106 1/2 inches long, 13 inches high, and a bit over 2 1/2 inches thick. Hmm, I needed a calculator. Could I use that help screen like one? It kind of made sense.

I typed 106.5/41 and it replied 2.597 and a bunch more digits I was ignoring. Then I typed 13/5 and it replied 2.6. Well yes, that one was exact. I could see that. If I assumed the thickness was actually 2.6 this was very close to matching the equal proportions of the cubes I know I was made out of.

Then I made one cube again, and Mom figured out I wanted that measured too. It came out to almost exactly 12 inches.

98*2.6^3 gave me 1722.448 and 12^3 gave me 1728. So volume was conserved. And I was only about one cubic foot in size, which seemed small. I guess this meant no matter how good I got working with the equations, I was never going to have a “normal” body.

I did one more check, making three cubes in a line with a space between each equal to the size of a cube, so I was 1x1x5. Mom measured this as 8 1/4 by 8 1/4 by 41 1/2. If I take the 8 1/4 as 8.3 so that the proportions are right, this is 1715.361, which agrees with the other measurements saying my body volume is being preserved.

“I’ll be back, son.

---

Mom left the room, and I was left to think.

Cylinders were better for making bodies, but when I set the geometry to x^2 + y^2 < 1 I turned into the blob. Because it was infinite in the z direction, I supposed. But intersection(x^2+y^2<1,|z|<2) worked.

Suppose I made a child body. 24 inch waist, which was the circumference, so a quick calculation on the help screen told me that was about 7.6 inches in diameter. I rounded it down to 7 for computing the volume because people are not quite round. Let’s say 4.5 feet of body including the head and legs, roughly at that size. Some parts will be a bit wider, some narrower, and this doesn’t count the arms, but the legs are narrower so that should roughly match. The head and neck, however, is significantly smaller, so I’ll add another 4 inches to the final height, making a person 4’10” tall. This all worked out to 2077 cubic inches, a bit too much, but pretty close. Let’s try 4 feet of body and a 23-inch waist. Perfect. So if I could figure out the shapes, I could make a 4’4” body corresponding to an 8 or 9 year old child.

For now, until I learned better how to make the shape of a body, I was simulating this with basic shapes. I had a sphere for a head, a flattened cylinder about 2/3 as deep as it was wide and slightly wider than the head as a torso, two legs and two arms each as narrower cylinders. For now, I had set the radius of the head at 0.8, the torso to be 4/3 unit deep and 2 units wide and 2 units tall, the arms and legs to be 0.4 units in radius and 2.4 units long for the arms, 3 for the legs. This was pretty chunky, but it was a start. This came out to a volume of about 2.1 units for the head, 4.2 for the torso, 1.2 for each arm, and 1.5 for each leg, or 11.7 cubic units in total, so each unit came out to be about 0.44 feet or about 5 and 1/4 inches, and the entire body of 6.6 units tall came out to only 2.9 feet. But it seemed reasonable that when I trimmed off all those blocky corners and made the torso a proper shape, and added a neck, that I might have saved enough volume to get almost 50% taller. Where I’d figured a 23 inch waist, right now, it was about 27. But I thought it wasn’t bad for something I put together in only a few minutes. I imagined that in a day I could get something the right proportions, and over months or a couple years working at it, I could get the detailed shape to actually look like a small human being.

Mom came back in with Dad at this point.

“Hello, son,” Dad said. “Mom explained to me that you developed some strange powers and she was right that I just had to see for myself.”

I erased that body and started drawing cubes. I was going to try something different. Instead of having them change size as I added more cubes, I made a several rows of dozens of cubes and then started replacing some of them with ones in the area for the letter shapes I wanted to draw, leaving the excess as lines above and below the letters. It was still pretty tedious writing this way, but it was easier just going in and changing the numbers, and I spelled out:

HELLO DAD
YES POWERS

Whew! That took over 170 little cubes. I was pretty fast but I think it took about 5 minutes to write those words. I gotta find a better way. After a bit I rewrote it into:

COMPUTERS
IN MY MIND

And then in 3 more rounds:

I DEFINE MY
SHAPE WITH

MATH
FUNCTIONS

WANT TO MAKE
NORMAL BODY

“I’ve never heard of anybody getting powers like this, but I can understand how it is going to take some practice, and maybe you can make more body-like shapes eventually.”

I went back to the set of cylinders making a body, and then Dad asked, “Can you leave the bed?”

That was a good question. I didn’t want to be here forever.

I adjusted the y coordinate to move forward off the bed, the way I momentarily had done with Mom, and then lowered my z coordinate to the floor. Approximately. He turned to leave the room and Mom followed him, and I followed the best I could, teleporting in little hops as I updated my coordinates. This was tedious writing each one six times, so I reduced my body to just a single sphere to continue the movement.

Once I got into the living room, I reformed the body and I tested using parameters. I wrote my location as a set of parameters x0,y0,z0 at the top, and then everywhere I’d been using x plus whatever I put in x + x0 plus just the offset within my body. This worked! Now I only had to update one set of values to change my position, and I could do that very quickly. And if I wrote formulas in time into these parameters, I could generate smooth motion. This was actually pretty good. I could move about the world and see the world on a screen.

I wanted to also try rotations. The one other thing I’d learned about sine and cosine was you could use them to draw a circle. If you made x equal to cosine, and y equal to sine of the same angle, you could draw a circle using the mathematical convention that the angle started at the positive X axis and turned counterclockwise. So I added a rotation angle, and intermediate parameters to calculate the X and Y coordinates for the centers of my arms and legs, and after a little experimentation, the formula for the flattened cylinder that made my torso. Then I could rotate as well as move my body around, and my view of the world rotated with my body.

But as I noticed this, I wondered why that was. It was fine that it moved with my body, if we assumed the view was generated from within my body, but why the rotation? What about my body made one spot the front? When I focused on rotating the view in that last screen without moving my body, I found I could do it. But the moment I stopped mentally aiming that view, the view went in the direction I thought of as the “front” of my body, even though nobody could tell it apart from the back right now - the direction that represented the positive X axis, when the rotation was 0. When I ran some experiments, including setting my body spinning by making the rotation angle vary with time, I realized it was because I was subconsciously aiming the view in the direction I’d set the rotation to when I stopped actively aiming it. When I focused only on the room view while my body spun, my view did not spin.

Getting Tested

It was clear I was not going to go to school today. Mom called me in sick while Dad continued getting ready for work. Normally I’d be getting dressed and getting some breakfast in the morning, but I wasn’t sure there were any clothes in the house that would fit me, I wasn’t sure I needed any, and I wasn’t sure how or if I could eat now, either. In any case I did not feel hungry.

After Dad left for work, Mom made another call, to NANA. I’d learned about the powers people get in Normal after some of my classmates got them. Now it was my turn.

“Hello. My son developed powers overnight, and should probably get tested.”

A pause, about 30 seconds.

“Yes. He seems to be some kind of shapeshifter, but right now he seems to only be able to make simple geometric shapes and collections of them. That and a kind of a blob shape.”

A shorter pause.

“Yes, he flies. Or floats, I suppose.”

Brief pause.

“Yes, some of the time. I believe he does obey the law of gravity as the blob shape. And he was a bouncing ball at one point, but the ball also floated at other times, so I’m not sure that was gravity. The other shapes mostly float all the time.”

Another brief pause.

“No, I have not observed any other powers.”

A much longer pause, longer than the first one.

“I’ll check. He doesn’t seem to be able to speak now, but he has spelled out words in the air.” Then to me, she asked, “Are you ready to go get tested?”

I wanted to make a shrug, but I hadn’t made a body yet with enough features to make that possible. Instead I formed YES out of blocks until it was clear Mom saw it, then returned to the body-like shape. At this point I realized I had an innate memory for the formulas I was writing. I was able to restore the entire body I had constructed just by thinking to do so, even though the rotations had made the geometry pretty complicated.

“Yes, I can bring him in now. See you soon.”

And after another brief pause she hung up.

“You understood what that call was about, I hope.”

I formed the word TESTING. Then after a pause. READY.

Mom grabbed her purse, and after resuming my body shape, I followed her as she walked out to the car. I thought for a moment I should put on some clothes, but why? I didn’t have any of the bits society expects to be covered up. I didn’t even really look like a person. I looked mostly like the man who stands on the restroom sign. Nobody ever told him to wear clothes! So I followed as I was.

After Mom used the key fob to unlock all the doors, she opened the passenger door and let me in, and I moved into the car. I hadn’t tried to sit with this body yet, but I bent the leg-cylinders forward instead of down, and floated into the car, getting as close to the seat as I could.

Mom closed the door, went around to the driver’s side, and got in and started the car. She started to back out of the driveway, and I was thrust against and then through the windshield!

I rotated to look behind me, and to my surprise it did not appear the windshield was broken. My legs were inside the engine compartment and my torso was sticking through the hood. Mom was staring, and then she got out of the car and spoke to me.

“Um, you can phase through things. OK. Can you sit and stay motionless relative to the car?”

I formed DUNNO in the air and then, with less force this time, phased back through the windshield, and let my body assume the blob shape inside the car, since that form seemed to be affected by gravity and I hope also didn’t phase through things. I fell to the seat without going through it.

Mom started driving again, and this time I stayed put. This was going to be bad if I could only interact normally with things in the blob form. But we arrived at NANA without further incident.

Once the car stopped moving, I reformed my crude body in the sitting position, and then rather than sliding it smoothly, jumped it several units to the right, which had the effect of teleporting me outside the car. I then moved my legs into the standing position and lowered myself to just barely above the ground so it didn’t look quite so much like I was flying.

Mom clearly saw what I did and glared at me a moment, but then quickly smiled, I guess realizing that I was just trying to figure out how to live in my new situation. She walked up to the door and I floated behind her. She entered and held the door open for me to enter behind her, so I didn’t have to phase through it.

Mom went up to the registration desk or whatever it was, and I followed.

“Yes, I called this morning about my son’s new powers.”

The woman there called somebody, and told us, “Your tester will arrive in a moment. Have a seat.”

After about 5 minutes, a man came into the room and the woman at the desk directed him to us. Mom stood up and followed him through the doorway he entered through, and I floated behind her, figuring out what angle from the previous spot took me down the hall. We all went down a long hallway, and finally into a room with a table and chairs. I couldn’t use the chairs, but floated a bit lower than I had been to match their sitting height.

“My name’s Greg. I’ll be your tester today.”

Mom replied, “This is Peter, and I’m his mother Hannah.”

“So, Peter, tell me what happened in your own words.”

Mom responded, “He doesn’t talk now except by spelling words in the air, so I will tell the story and he can interject with words if needed.”

I spelled TALKING/IS HARD on two lines above the surface of the table, which helped corroborate Mom’s story and also showed what my words might look like. As Mom continued, I shifted back to the body I had been using.

“Sometime last night, my son here transformed. He had been a normal-looking 15-year-old honor student, but when he did not come down for breakfast, I went up to find out why, and he looked like... well, not like this. Show Greg what you looked like then.”

I moved myself over the table and changed the equation by making an intersection of the whole thing with a shape it did not intersect with, and the null shape caused me to revert to the blob, which plopped down gently on the table.

“He soon figured out how to control his shape, but only by making simple shapes or combinations of them, like the body you saw him use earlier made of a sphere and a few cylinders. He said in his terse manner something about seeing a computer in his mind where he can write equations for these shapes, or something like that.”

“So perhaps with practice he might learn more complex shapes and something more like a human body?”

I spelled out YES in response to this.

“What else have you noticed about his powers?”

“In the blob form he doesn’t do it, but when he is shapes, he floats all the time, he can phase through other matter, and and he can teleport himself.”

I made the blob again, and then the body shape, to demonstrate.

“Interesting. Peter, is the teleportation caused by you changing the position of your body in your equations?”

YES

“What about the phasing?”

INTERSECT
MATTER

“You phase through an object simply by writing your equations so that you intersect the object?”

YES

“Anything more?”

“No,” Mom said.

I WANT TO
TELL STORY
TOO LONG

“Your story is too long to tell by spelling out word shapes in this way?”

YES

“During our testing today, we will try to find another way for you to communicate that makes it easier for you to send longer messages.”

GREAT!

“OK, I am going to take this information back to the staff, and while we figure out what tests to run on you, a nurse will come here to administer the physical tests, to the extent we can, anyway.”

I changed back to the body form, and Greg left. A couple minutes later a short, stout nurse came in. She was only about 4 feet tall, but was almost as wide as the doorway. But she wasn’t fat. It was just like her whole body was wider and shorter than it should be.

“Are you Peter?”

YES

“Oh, OK. Follow me. Your mom can come along too.”

We went to one of those scales you see in the doctor’s office, with the weights on a beam to balance against the weight of the person on the scale.

“I see you’re a shapeshifter, and a levitator in some forms. Can you step onto the scale in the form that is not a levitator?”

I hovered over the scale, and forced my body to assume the blob shape, which then landed on the scale.

The nurse fiddled with the weights until she determined my weight as 90 pounds.

Then she knelt down and placed a ruler horizontally on top of my blob form to read its height on the pole of the scale which, surprisingly, did go all the way down to 0 at the top of the scale itself.

“9 inches. Not sure how useful this particular height is. Can you go back to the other form?”

I did so.

“Now lower yourself until you just touch the platform.”

I did that as well as I could, and she measured my height at 2’11”, which is what I thought it should be.

“Any other forms I should check?”

I turned into the cube shape, which she measured with the ruler in her hand.

“Hmm, a cube almost exactly 12 inches on a side.”

Then I was a sphere. After some difficulty she proclaimed my height as 14 and 7/8 inches.

“Any more forms?”

I turned into the letters SHAPES/ALL SAME on two lines, and for a moment as I started to spell the words she started to measure them, then decided against it as I continued writing the words.

“The geometric shapes you make are all the same ... volume? Probably mass too?”

I wrote YES.

Next she led me to one of those standard doctor’s office rooms with the weird raised bed. I had been in such a room enough to know what to expect in it, but at the same time I also thought few of those tests made sense with me the way I was. Still, after swapping some coordinates I made the body shape so it was lying down over the bed.

Fortunately, this nurse was prepared. She recorded the color of my body, as well as the amount of resistance it gave before I phased through something. She also used some kind of device to measure the smoothness of the curves of my body. Or tried to. She wasn’t able to detect any irregularities from perfect smoothness.

Finally, she said, “I want to take a sample of ... whatever it is you are made of ... to send to the lab.”

She retrieved a scalpel from a drawer, and tried to scrape my body with it, but it phased through.

I switched into the blob form, and waited until she tried again. This time it worked, and I could see she managed to remove a tiny bit of the pink-colored stuff my body was made of, and placed it in a small glass jar which she sealed with a cap.

She led me to two more rooms after this. In one, they took an x-ray of my entire body, which was fast, and in the other they did a CAT scan. This involved me lying on a bed that went into a narrow tube that scanned me. It was loud and took half an hour. They usually provide earplugs, but they didn’t have any way to use them on me. Fortunately, I was able to tune out the noise after a bit and I spent the time studying my functions.

Done with all the tests she could figure out to perform on me, she led me back to the waiting room where Greg had had the conversation with me and Mom and asked us to wait for Greg to return. He did, a few minutes later, and led us to a large room.

I finished these thoughts as Greg figured out where we were supposed to go and led us there. And finally he explained what was about to happen: “You are kind of an enigma to us, so we are going to run the full battery of tests of you, to the extent possible. Some of the physical tests don’t make any sense for a being who phases through other matter and only obeys gravity in a form which is a shapeless blob that can’t move, so we’ll skip those. There are some physical tests we can still do and others that only make sense for someone like you, and we will do those first. Then we will move on to the tests of other possible abilities you might have, which really covers the entire gamut of non-physical powers.”

He looked at a clipboard he had been carrying. “I’m going to stay here and observe the entire experience, and Hannah you can watch too, but each expert in the respective fields will lead their sections of the testing. First is Dr. Springfield, who is going to test how you interact with normal matter when you are in one of your equation-designed forms.”

He indicated a man nearby, who at the mention of his name turned up from what he had been doing and came over to greet us.

“Yes, I am Dr. Springfield. It was indicated that your body deforms somewhat under pressure before it phases through matter. I want to first test how much force you have to exert against matter, or how much it exerts against you, before you phase through it. Can you make a hand?”

Rather than telling them I could only make a crude hand, I started building shapes, not bothering for now to connect them to my body. I made a wide, flat cylinder as the palm, then added a thumb and two more fingers each made of three short cylinders. Then I quickly rewrote their equations to use a parameter which represented how much they were open or closed. It needed some adjustments to make the parts move together correctly, as well as to make the three fingers come together properly in a pincer grip. I used more parameters to make this work. Basically, instead of just having one starting point x0,y0,z0 which everything was relative to, I calculated the positions of points on other shapes to use as the starting points for other shapes, and more parameters defined the rotation of each part relative to the previous one. This was a useful idea, and one that would help me develop more involved bodies later on. But for now it helped me get the hand made quickly.

Finally, I moved it so it connected to my arm. I needed to be able to rotate the hand relative to the arm, and rotate the arm relative to my shoulder. This took two more parameters and some redefinitions of the previous ones. In about ten minutes from the request, I had my crude arm programmed.

“Good,” Dr. Springfield commented. “Now try to pick up this weight.”

He pointed to a weight that looked like one of the ones Wile E. Coyote always tried to drop on Road Runner only to have it backfire and land on him instead, but a lot smaller. It had 4 LB inscribed on the side I was looking at.

I aligned my new hand with the loop on the top of the weight, closed it around the loop, and raised the arm. But the weight phased through.

He produced a smaller weight, but that one phased through as well.

“Come over here to this machine and lift this bar.”

Apparently this was some kind of machine that simulated more weight the more I pulled the bar. So when I phased through, he read off “4.1 pounds.”

“Can you make a second hand and try with both?”

I duplicated the mechanism I had for one arm and hand for the other, mirroring the instructions in one dimension, and using a different set of parameters. Then I placed both hands on the bar and pulled.

“8.1 pounds.”

THIRD HAND? I wrote in the air.

“How about you just make them wider? I have a theory.”

I made the hands again, both hands and fingers horizontally stretched by a factor of 3, and lifted again. I clearly got a lot further.

“23.8 pounds.”

“Try making a hand that runs the length of the bar with a groove in it the same shape as the bar.”

That took a bit of experimentation to get it right, but I did. It didn’t look much like a hand in the normal sense, except that it was at the end of my arm. And I was able to lift more this way.

“64 pounds. Good. Now make both hands like that.” He showed me there was a second bar I could lift.

I’d only made one hand the shape of the bar before. Now I did both. Duplicating it didn’t quite work, because it added more volume. Rather than fiddle with it, I made my legs slightly narrower to restore the right size.

“128 pounds. OK, I think the weight you can lift is proportional to the part of your body in contact with it. With the small weights, you were trying to lift them using a thin ring so the area of contact was small. Your secret to power is spreading out the contact over a large area.”

USEFUL, I wrote. Then IDEA.

The doctor chuckled. “Go ahead and show your idea.”

I made myself into a big rug laid out on the floor. It wasn’t very colorful, but I made something that looked like the tassels I had seen on other rugs and put a few dozen copies of that all along two ends, leaving the rest completely flat. He clearly understood my idea and sat down on the rug and invited Greg and Mom to get on too.

“Flying carpet, up,” Dr. Springfield directed, and I lifted a few feet off the floor, not letting any of my passengers fall through.

“Fly over there near the guy with the goggles.”

I found the guy he was referring to and flew near him.

“Hey, Stan, look!”

“Frank! Um, what is that?”

“The person I’m testing.”

“Huh! Never know what I am going to see here.”

“Hop on if you have time, but climb on board gently. This shapeshifter can go anywhere, but phases through the load if too much weight is put on him in one place. He holds about 400 pounds per square foot.”

“Well that’s a good amount!” Stan said. “I’m just finishing up with another powers test here, but I’d love a ride over to Alma for the both of us.”

I lowered to the ground and let them both get situated, and then took off again and flew where they pointed out Alma to me, and my latest two passengers climbed off.

Then Dr. Springfield said, “OK. I have another idea. We’ll have to get off the carpet for a bit, though, because you won’t fit down some of the hallways and you shouldn’t phase through some of our walls here.”

I let them all off, and turned back into the body form.

“Everybody, follow me.”

We went quite a ways and finally into a large attached garage-like area.

“The vehicle pool? You want him to carry a car?” Greg asked.

“No, that wasn’t actually what I was thinking. The tires probably have too little area of contact anyway.”

Then, to me, he continued, “Come over here and form your rug again.”

I went and did that where he directed. Then he went over and climbed into what I soon realized was the cab of a small crane. Along the wall was a stack of large steel plates.

“Greg, if you could, please help guide the claw into place for me.”

There was a hole in the center of each plate with a metal bar running across it, and the end of the crane had a claw that fit into the hole and around this bar. With Greg’s help, he lifted one of the plates and set it down on top of me.

“Try to lift up now.”

I lifted up carrying the plate, and set back down when he indicated.

They repeated this with a second plate, and a third, and a fourth, and more and more. It didn’t hurt me any, though, nor was it in any way strenuous; I could lift the stack of ten plates as easily as I could lift the first one alone. Finally, I lifted up a huge stack of plates, and I thought it was all collapsing, but instead, what happened was that just one plate fell through me.

Dr. Springfield came down from the crane and counted the plates personally, determining I was carrying a stack of 19 of the plates.

“This confirms my theory. These plates are 4 feet by 8 feet, and half an inch thick. They weigh about 670 pounds each, and 19 of them weigh 12,730 pounds, which is slightly below the limit of 400 pounds per square foot spread evenly over 32 square feet. Twenty plates are above that limit, which caused the plate to phase through. I am a bit surprised that the phasing through shut itself off so immediately that only one plate fell through.”

I could have made a wider sheet and held a second stack of these plates, or more, but Dr. Springfield had proven his point. I could lift amazing amounts if I was spread out like a thin sheet. I lowered the stack of plates to the ground, and transformed myself out of the stack, and the two doctors put the plates back where they came from one by one.

Next, he led me to another large open space to test my flight. He tested how fast I could fly (as fast as I wanted), how well I could stop (as long as I had a good estimate of where I was supposed to stop, essentially instantaneously), my ability to navigate obstacles (excellent), etc. I passed all the flying tests with flying colors (Dr. Springfield’s pun).

Greg left us some time during this test, and when we were done, Dr. Springfield said, “That’s it for the physical tests. Greg is reviewing your lab results and will join us for lunch in the cafeteria shortly.”

Then, remembering my body was made of a uniform goo with no internal organs, he asked me, “Do you eat?”

PROBABLY NOT

“Well, your mother will want something.”

We went back up to the ground level, and he led us to the cafeteria. I went through the line with them, looking at all the food and drink and seeing if I felt a craving for anything. Maybe if I saw something I really wanted, I’d figure out how this body could consume it. But that did not happen and I went to the table without food.

Within a few minutes, Greg found us and sat with us at our table.

“The lab tests gave some interesting results. It appears you are made of a non-cellular material, or actually three of them, woven together. One of them appears photosynthetic, the other appears to spend the energy from photosynthesis somehow, and the third defies the laws of physics so much we can’t explain it.”

While he finished his statement, I spelled out, I EAT LIGHT?

“Yes, essentially. We think your body is powered by light you absorb. You will need to be exposed to a certain amount of light to survive, but we will need to run more tests to figure out how much.”

HANDY, I wrote, before returning to the body-like form.

“Doesn’t photosynthesis require that green pigment, what’s it called?” Mom asked.

“Chlorophyll, and no. While most plants use chlorophyll for photosynthesis, there are other plants and fungi that use other light-absorbing compounds which aren’t green. Peter uses one of those other ones; his is actually colorless, absorbing all colors of light well, and it’s the other compounds in his body that give it the pink color.”

Greg continued, “And you don’t really appear to have any internal organs whatsoever. It looks like you are made of the same uniform material throughout your body.”

When everybody was done eating and turned in their trays, Dr. Springfield said goodbye and Greg took us back downstairs to a different area, where a woman named Stephanie tested me for psychic powers, then a guy who introduced himself as Ed checked me for magic abilities. None in both cases.

Next Greg brought me to a table where a variety of parts and tools were spread around, and he told me I could do whatever I wanted with them. With that kind of introduction it was obvious I was expected to do something. I made my body with hands again and examined the parts, sorting some of them into different types. What we’d discovered earlier was it took 2.8 pounds per square inch of surface for something to phase through me. When I held something in my hand, I had a couple inches of area of contact or the cross-section of the object itself if it was smaller. This allowed me to pick up all of the items present, even the fairly heavy magnet. Really the only reason I had trouble was because I was trying to lift a heavy object by a small handle. Handles are going to make trouble for me. It did, however, take some time for me to do the manipulations. I was still quite a ways from being able to operate a standard body, and sometimes I made nonstandard fingers to pick up some of the things more easily.

Somehow, I figured out that some of the objects present made a radio, including a large speaker, and I set about putting them together. It didn’t look pretty, but I flipped the switch and it made noise. I turned a dial and it was able to pick up a weak signal.

Greg said, “That’s good. You can stop now. We’re underground, so none of the signals are great, so the fact that you hear anything but static indicates you’ve assembled it well. How did you figure out to make a radio?”

MEMORY, I wrote. HAD KIT.

Mom explained, “We got him one of those kits that lets you learn how to build simple circuits when he showed interest in those things. He must have remembered the circuitry for a radio and a speaker from that.”

Greg took note of it and led me to the next station.

There were parts here again, but this time I was given a specific goal.

“Inside this shaft,” Greg said, pointing to a vertical square tube about a foot wide that ran to the ceiling, “there is a bag of gold suspended from a hook on a rope. At the end of this shaft,” this time he indicated a 2 inch round hole in the wall, “there is a glass capsule in a circuit. If the capsule shatters, the hook will release the bag. We aren’t actually going to give you the bag of gold if you retrieve it, but we will give you something, and you should behave as if you are retrieving the gold for yourself and your allies. One more special rule for you: No part of your body may enter either shaft. This is to be a test of your ability to make something with these parts, and not to simply personally navigate the space. Treat it as being filled with poison gas, or something else that will kill you.”

I looked at the parts, and thought of multiple strategies. Clearly some of these parts were designed to let me make a gun, and shoot the capsule. Another set of parts looked like they might allow me to make a drone that could fly up into the shaft with the bag and cut the rope. Still another set looked like they might let me make a laser that could melt the glass capsule.

I spent a while working on each of these strategies, but there was something wrong with each of them that made them just not quite work. The drone didn’t quite fly, the gun only fired a couple feet and not all the way down the shaft, and the laser only made a diffuse light which wasn’t focused enough to melt the capsule way down the shaft. After an hour here, Greg had me stop and move on. As we moved to the next station, he explained, “That test was designed to determine whether the physics-defying ability of your body extends to things you make. It contains parts which almost make functional examples of each of the things you were trying to make, but each invention is missing something which makes it only work marginally, while the tests require one that works well. If you could extend the ability beyond your body, you might make one of them work anyway.”

The next set of tests were sensory related. First, they tested what I could see. If I was in a space that was entirely dark, I could see nothing, but with even the tiniest light, I could see the space around my body. If I was phased through a wall, I could see on either side, but only one side at a time. There was no particular part of my body that was the eyes. Likewise, I could hear what went on around my body even though there was no obvious hearing organ. It seems I did not have a sense of taste or smell, even when they placed food inside my body - nor did I digest the food they put there. My sense of feel was well developed, and even though I might have different body shapes at any given time, somehow I knew which parts were making contact with another surface (or phasing through it), and I could tell hot and cold, light and heavy pressure, and multiple touches at once.

Another set of tests they had for me related to my phasing. They tested my ability to phase through objects on demand, which was easy for me; the farther I tried to push myself through, the greater the pressure resisting it, until it reached my threshold and I phased through. But pushing farther just meant changing a number; it was easy.

When I was done with that, they had brought in a desk with a computer on it.

“We think you should be able to use a standard computer keyboard, as long as it’s not the mechanical spring type. The keys have about a quarter inch of surface area, but it doesn’t require much force to press them.”

I made a vertical square column as a finger, which I rounded the tip of by taking its intersection with a sphere, and moved it about over the keyboard, using a quadratic function of time in the Z coordinate to quickly press and release a key I was over. I had just made one, so I wasn’t able to use the shift key, but still, I wrote out, typing whole words in the time it took me to construct one letter in the air from cubes.

yay i can type. this is much faster. thanks.

“To finish up your registration, you should pick a code name. If you are ever involved with official NANA activities, you’ll use the code name when doing so. It has to be unique.”

I thought, if I was going to be doing geometry, who were the most famous mathematicians for geometry?

I typed out pythagoras.

“Taken.”

euclid

“Taken.”

Hmm. Let me see.

descartes

“Taken. It’s kind of sad; I understand why you want those names, but those people all developed powers that made them especially good at math, and they became skilled engineers or architects. They didn’t have to describe their body in precise mathematical detail just to have a body!”

At this point I was out of names. I am sure there are more, but those were all the ones I knew.

the geometer

“Available. OK, you’re The Geometer.”

yay

Greg added, “If you have the time, we’d appreciate you coming back for some extended testing. There is still a lot we don’t understand about you that will help our understanding of the kinds of powers that are possible, and will help you learn to use your body better, too.”

“How about it, son? Would you like to come back for more testing?”

yes

“That settles it. We’ll be back. When will you be ready for us?”

“We want to do some more in-depth lab study of your sample and other results from today, but maybe Tuesday will be good.”

“OK. Tuesday it is. What time is good?”

“Any time after about 8:30 AM we can get you started immediately on one test or another.”

---

I went home with Mom in time for dinner. Well, her dinner and Dad’s. I wasn’t eating anymore.

“No eating?” my Dad asked.

“Yes. They say he now gets energy through photosynthesis like plants do.”

“Did he get any time outside in the sun today?”

“Not much.”

“Well, son, the sun is still shining. How about you go out, find a sunny spot nearby, and soak up some sun?”

WILL DO, I wrote in my manner of communication, then turned into the body form and headed outside, not bothering to open the door into the back yard but just phasing through it.

I saw a sunny spot along the fence on one side of the yard, so I went over there, and figuring more area was better, formed myself into a flat sheet covering the entire sunny area, the 6-foot height of the fence and about 12 feet long.

The way my body positioned itself, I knew I wasn’t going to blow away or anything. So, just checking every 15 minutes or so and adjusting my position to stay in the sun, I spent time reading through the function list, describing the built-in functions available which I could use in describing my body’s shape.

It was about an hour before the sun was so low in the sky there wasn’t much sunlight remaining and what was left wasn’t very bright, so when I went back inside, my parents were done with dinner and even done cleaning up afterward.

“Thanks, Dad. That was a great idea and I feel like I have a bunch more energy now.”

“So what are you going to do now, Son?”

LEARN FUNCTIONS
BUILD BETTER BODY

“That sounds like a good idea. Any chance you can learn to make something like a voicebox or speaker so you can talk normally?”

GOOD IDEA
NEED TO RESEARCH

“Oh, speaking of research, you might be wanting to research details about the shape of the human body. We put that parental block on your computer which keeps you from visiting web sites with porn, but it might also block sites describing the shape of the body in detail, since that might involve images of nude bodies. So I’m going to go remove that block right now. I am not even sure porn will even do anything for you now, but promise me, Son, that you will use the Internet responsibly.”

I PROMISE

It was an easy promise for me to make. I wasn’t sure there was any way for me to have a sexual response now. I certainly didn’t have the parts, and even if I wanted to make them now, I would only be able to make crude models.

He went up, with me following, and entered the parental block password while selecting the option to completely and permanently remove the parental block.

“Enjoy your search, Son,” he said as he left me there.

I definitely needed to research the shape of the human body. My estimate of the body that could fill 1 cubic foot came out to 4’4” tall, while the body I actually made was horribly blocky and only 2’11”. And I weigh 90 pounds now, about what I weighed two years ago when I was 4’11”. Some of my proportions were definitely off.

I did some research and quickly found a few sources defining the proper proportions of the human body. These included Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, the drawing of a man in a circle and square, which was indeed part of a text about the proportions of the body. I found a translated version of the text to go along with it, in addition to other sources.

The arms were definitely too thick. They should only be 0.3 units in radius up by the shoulder, and get narrower, probably to around 0.18 units down by the hand. While converting these units, I realized how silly this was. I could just write all the dimensions in inches. My body would proportion itself to fit.

Aiming for a 5-foot-tall body, I decided the head should be about 7 inches in diameter, but a little taller than it was wide. Let’s say 8 inches tall. There should be a neck under it, 3 inches in diameter and 3 inches tall, extending up a bit further at the top so it met the head all the way around.

The rest of the body, then, was 49 inches tall. The legs (up to the crotch) should be a little over half the remaining length, approximately 25 inches, while the torso is the remainder, or 24 inches. The arms, down to the end of the outstretched hand, should be as long as the legs, and two arms raised to the sides plus the torso between them should be as tall as the whole body, to the top of the head. That means the torso, around the armpits, should be about 10 inches wide. It should be only 60% as thick as it is wide, or 6 inches. That meant about 25 inches around at that point. It could narrow down to a 22.5 inch waist, represented by narrowing both dimensions 10 percent. The arms should be 3 inches in diameter at the top and 1.8 inches at the wrist. The legs were complicated, but for now, assume they were 4 inches in diameter at the top and 2.5 at the ankle.

What volume did all this add up to?

The head was about 205 cubic inches. Everything else was now part of a cone, and the calculations included subtracting the part that was not there, but I quickly got 894 cubic inches for the torso, each arm was 115, and each leg was 211, and the neck was 21 plus the tiny bit connecting it to the head, which I ignored for now as it was probably less than one cubic inch. The whole thing was 1772 cubic inches, which was only about 3% over my target, which roughly translated to me being 1 inch too short. That was much better!

This was more like it! With this body people could at least see me as the teenager I actually am, and not the little kid the other body looked like. And once I had more time to add facial features, hands and feet, and round off the rough bits, people might actually see me as a person and not a mannequin.

With this much done, and leaving the lights in my room on all night, I got into (well, over) my bed, stretched out as a sheet covering the whole bed, and continued studying those functions.

Friday

June 6, 2008

My powers showed up Thursday morning, and I ended up studying and sometimes practicing some of the function forms all through the night. I don’t know if I just couldn’t get to sleep, or if this body simply didn’t sleep at all. But I learned a lot and experimented several times throughout the night.

There were two important new keywords I learned. The first, file, let me import the contents of a file into my body geometry. I could use this alone if I wrote an entire body definition into a file and just put the file command on the geometry screen. The second screen which provided access to the help and an immediate-mode calculator could also serve as an editor. There weren’t any menus, but if I thought about doing the things you’d expect to find in menus it just did it, like saving and opening files, undo/redo, cut/copy/paste, etc. So I wrote a bunch of files: One with the the first restroom-icon body, one with hands, one with my current body, and ones with words spelling out YES, NO, MAYBE, and some other phrases. Now I could use the files to swap them in and out, and not have to simply remember things. Though I could still remember what I did recently, I had to reconstruct my first body; clearly there are limits on my memory.

But the other thing I could do is define functions: define, followed by a function name and an argument list in parentheses, let me define a function that could define any element of my geometry. So instead of writing out the formula for a sphere every time I wanted to use one, I could define a sphere based on the center and a radius, and reference that in my geometry instead of the formula for the sphere. That isn’t a great example - it’s better with more complex shapes - but those shapes also start to require more parameters. For a cylinder, the center of an end and a radius and height isn’t enough. You won’t know what direction it is oriented in. Both end centers and a radius works, and there are other ways to do it. I figured these things out as I went along.

In addition to the basic box I used for drawing letters, I made a whole alphabet and common punctuation. I was still referencing them as letter_a(row,column) and the like, but once I find the string-manipulating functions I should be able to write one that takes in some text and writes it out as letter shapes. Those letters were all defined in a file, but putting file(letters) in my geometry made all those functions available.

Before I knew it, it was morning, and Mom came up to see how I was doing. Although I had made many shapes during the night, I always went back to the sheet when I was done, and that is how she found me. But when I saw her, I immediately switched to the new body I was using, still without hands since I had been studying other things during the night.

“Wow, you got taller!”

With my new pre-configured letters, which I had set up to all be the same width and height to make it easy to slot them into place, I started “typing” out a response:

YES, MOM. I STILL HAVE MORE TO LEARN,
BUT I HAVE THE RIGHT PROPORTIONS NOW
FOR A PERSON MY SIZE. I LEARNED HOW
TO SAVE FORMS AND SWITCH BETWEEN THEM
MUCH MORE EASILY. I HAVE SAVED EACH
LETTER FORM SO I CAN TYPE MESSAGES
FASTER TOO.

“Well, it will be better when you can speak, but this is much improved since yesterday. You can type fast enough now to have a conversation.”

YES. SO WHAT DO
WE DO TODAY?

“Your dad’s already gone to work. I want to let you keep studying and practicing, but come downstairs so I can watch as you go and maybe give advice.”

OK, BUT I MIGHT
NEED TO LOOK
STUFF UP.

“That’s fine. Nobody will be using the computer in the family room. You can look it up there. And I should disable the porn lock on that one too.”

Mom was always a little more direct in the way she described things. To her, it was explicitly a porn lock. Nothing else mattered. In any case, within 10 minutes that was done, and I was able to look up information about the human body there, while I worked on building a more realistic one.

For typing, I now made three of the fingers I made yesterday, with a set of parameters defined for every key that gave their relative locations based on other parameters that I set to the boundaries of the keyboard, including rest positions with them off the keyboard. Again, when I figured out strings, I could probably write out a function to simply type out something I could write in my mind all at once. I made three fingers so I could use combinations with keys like shift and control when needed.

This allowed my new body to type even faster than I could have typed in my old body, though I think not faster than really skilled typists. I also used the mouse, with another finger over any mouse button on in a rest position, and a frame around it to move it with; the mouse button positions were then relative to the frame.

I started working on smoothing out the figure. Atop the torso, I added a small cone only 1 inch tall, with a base 16 inches wide (covering all of the top of my arms and torso) and 6 inches front to back. I added another inverted cone below this, with the same dimensions except 6 inches tall, to smooth out the connection between my arms and the shoulders.

I needed a similar thing for the pelvis, but it should be a distorted sphere. I shortened the actual torso unit 5 inches at the bottom, in the area representing the pelvis, while the legs got 5 inches longer. Centered at the bottom of the new torso was a sphere, with axes distorted to match the base of the pelvis and extending 5 inches vertically below the new torso. Also, I realized I made a mistake with the legs, which was more obvious now that I had a pelvis. They were only 8 inches across at the top, but the torso was 9. The solution here was simple - there should be a little space between the legs, so make that space 1 inch. But that turned out to make a seam at the top of the legs. Because they curved out more than the pelvis, this caused little ridges to stick out where they met the torso. Reducing the space between the legs to 0.8 inches fixed this.

I wasn’t entirely happy with the shoulders yet, but I had eliminated the worst of the blockiness. The volume removed in the pelvis area made up for the volume added at the shoulders, approximately - the overlaps in the new figure made it very hard to calculate an exact volume.

Something was still wrong with this. I figured out this shape for the shoulders was not really right. It was right that the sides of the body are fairly straight all the way up to the armpits, but the shoulder joint was entirely wrong. It’s a ball-and-socket joint, and there should be a ball there.

I played with various ways of putting spheres and spheroids there, including ones that were cut off beyond a certain point, and the whole thing just did not work. I finally realized my entire approach to modeling the entire shoulder blade was wrong.

The top of the shoulders was basically a sideways half-cylinder, and the rounded part of the shoulders above the arms was a quarter-sphere aligned with the end of that half-cylinder. This extended below where I was putting the shoulder piece, about as tall as the top of the arms are wide, and the top of the arms should be at this level, too. The chest (even on a guy) pokes out below this, and I can make the transition by putting in a half-spheroid on top of the lowered torso piece. This was still not quite 100% right, but it looked a lot better, with approximately the right amount of roundedness, and it partially captured the way the chest got flatter close to the shoulders.

Also, I figured I should put the hands back on and add some feet. Feet were complicated; I made a ball heel, a box with rounded sides for the blade of the foot, and cylinder toes. Fingers were delicate things, and this time I made full five-fingered hands. Lots of little cylinders, rotating around spheres at the joints, small spheres on the ends, and I haven’t yet figured out how to do the nails properly. They wouldn’t work anyway, since nails are supposed to be harder than the skin but my flesh is all uniform. Maybe I could get some of those fake nails women wear, cut them to not be too long, and stick them on. Assuming they would stick on me, and assuming that I could put them back on after the first time I changed into any other form.

I still need to figure out how to make a face, but I am making progress on the rest of the body. Another thing I just noticed is that the back is all wrong. I centered everything but the feet within the y=0 plane, but this made my back side look just like my front. The top of the back should be different, flatter. The head and neck should be centered slightly behind this plane. When I figure out how to make knees and elbows, they will be different on the backs. And most importantly, I should have a butt! I made comments in my program for drawing in these features later.

I was getting tired, though, and that meant I needed to eat, which meant getting some sun. So I put away the file for the body I had been working on, found Mom and told her what I was doing, then went out into the back yard, found a sunny side of the house, and turned myself into a sheet covering a good portion of the house between windows.

While I soaked in the sunlight, I looked out at the neighborhood and spotted some details I had never noticed before. For instance, the little birdhouse next to the bird feeder next door has a little name plate above the door, reading “Tweety.” There had never been an actual bird living in that house that I could remember, despite the fact that birds come to the feeder; maybe we just didn’t have the right kind of birds around here. I noticed a couple dozen things like this by the time I felt full. Not in the same sense that you feel after eating a big meal, but in my own way, I felt like I was not able to absorb any more energy. I went back inside using the latest form of my body, and found Mom eating lunch. It was 12:30, so I’d been out there a little over 2 hours.

In the afternoon I got to researching those string functions. I also read about arrays, program loops, and other such constructs, but in the end, I had a function I could send a position, direction, and string of text to and it would write those words there.

Tuesday

June 10, 2008

Mom had confirmed my appointment for further testing yesterday afternoon, and we got there bright and early after she’d had breakfast and I’d had an early morning dose of sun. When we checked in, the woman at the desk paged Greg, who came to meet us and take us down to testing only a few minutes later. We went directly down to the testing floor, but Greg led me and Mom into a little office first.

“First off, Peter,” Greg began, “I want to commend you on how much more human-looking your body is. It’s still not nearly good enough to fool anybody into thinking you are a normal human, except maybe in a very dark place where they can only see a vague outline of your shape, but you’re making great progress, and someday you might make a body with enough detail to make people believe you’re a normal human.”

THANK YOU.

“There are a few areas we want to experiment in today. We want to try to understand your photosynthesis and its limits. And because you are making more humanoid bodies, we want you to try to wear a bodysuit that we usually equip with a bunch of sensors to check people’s vital signs while they perform athletic tests. In your case, we’re going to remove almost all the sensors because we don’t think they’ll help, but we want to see how this affects your phasing ability.”

I’M WILLING TO TRY THAT
AS LONG AS YOU THINK
IT’S SAFE FOR ME.

“Oh, yes, we will stop any test at the first sign of any danger to you.”

He led me to a part of the testing area where several people were assembled. The group seemed excited by this and looked eager to run or perhaps to participate in experiments with me in this form.

“Peter, let me introduce you to Diane, Nick, Tracy, Mel, and Vladimir. You met Stephanie and Ed last time. They’ve all agreed to help in your testing today in their own ways.”

As their names were called, each one of them waved, bowed, curtsied, flew up into the air, or, in Vladimir’s case, a giant neon arrow appeared in the air pointing to him. I guess his power let him make stuff, though whether it was real or an illusion I wasn’t sure of. Would my sight show me magical illusions?

“For our first test, we want you to phase through Diane.”

She stepped forward and said, “I’m ready.” The girl couldn’t have been more than 19 or 20, and was dressed in clingy athletic clothes which showed her shape. I wasn’t sure what was special about her.

READY, I wrote in the air briefly before returning to a body shape and heading toward Diane. I went straight through without any real issue.

Greg had me make various shapes, phase through matter, lift the entire group of them while in the form of a large sheet, etc. A lot of the same stuff I did last time, but clearly to show this group what I do.

Next, they brought out the bodysuit they mentioned, which had about a dozen sensor patches on it, but marks suggesting they sometimes had four times that many on it. Within the bodysuit, I had none of the problems I’d had lifting weights by small handles and the like. The group agreed this was probably because in order to phase through it, my whole body would have to phase through the bodysuit. As a result, instead of an effective area of one or two square inches, the effective area was about half the surface area of my body, about 4 or 5 square feet, and as a result, I could lift, push, or pull almost a ton before I pushed myself completely out of the suit. Likewise, if I intentionally pushed myself through a wall, the suit stayed behind.

Finally, he had me explain how I thought my powers worked. I was glad to have the faster text writing routine here.

I HAVE TWO DIFFERENT KINDS OF SIGHT.
I CAN SEE THE REAL WORLD, BUT I
ALSO SEE MY OWN INNER SPACE.
THIS SPACE CONTAINS FOUR COMPUTER
SCREENS, EACH FOR A DIFFERENT
PURPOSE. THERE ARE NO OTHER THINGS
THAT I CAN SEE IN HERE. THE FIRST
SCREEN CONTAINS THE GEOMETRIC
DEFINITION OF MY CURRENT BODY. IF
IT IS EMPTY, INFINITE, OR HAS
ERRORS, I TURN INTO THE BLOB BODY.

I gave them a moment to read all that, and then I replaced that with my next wall of text.

THE SECOND SCREEN LETS ME DO
CALCULATIONS, READ HELP ABOUT THE
FUNCTIONS I CAN USE, AND EDIT FILES.
THE THIRD SCREEN SHOWS AN IMAGE OF
MY BODY, AS YOU MIGHT SEE IT. THE
FOURTH SCREEN SHOWS A VIEW OF THE
WORLD FROM THE POSITION OF MY BODY.
I CAN AIM THAT VIEW IN ANY DIRECTION.
I CAN FOCUS ON ANY SCREEN OR ALL OF
THEM. I ALSO HEAR WHAT IS HAPPENING
IN THE WORLD NEAR MY BODY. DONE.

“Thank you, Peter. Now that he has shown us all what he can do, I’d like each of you to explain your powers to him.”

“I’m Nick. I have the ability to see streams of light or electrons that vary in artificial ways. Effectively, I can see when anybody is using such methods for communication.”

“I’m Tracy. I see through things.”

“I’m Mel. I can become intangible, a bit like one aspect of your power.” I assumed this was short for Melanie or something, since Mel was clearly female.

“I’m Vladimir. I manifest living matter. Everything I make, no matter how weird it looks, is alive, and typically has tiny analogues of your major internal organs keeping it alive.

“I am Stephanie. I have the ability to peer into the psychic world.”

“Ed. I do magic, and I can see magic when other people do it.”

“I’m Diane. I have the ability to feel precisely what is happening to every millimeter of my body at any moment, and down to the level of individual cells when I focus. I don’t have any powers that let me do anything special, though. This makes me sort of the ultimate test subject for certain things.”

Greg spoke next. “Now, Peter, you should be aware that I asked all this crew to observe you during all of what you do here today, including the parts you just did. So, crew, tell me what you saw.”

Ed went first. “I saw absolutely no magic during any of that.”

Stephanie stated, “When Peter was changing form and merging, I saw the faintest glimmer of psychic activity. There is something psychic about the ability, but either it’s not the main driver for the changes or the power has built-in shielding. I didn’t see psychic communication between his body and the place where he sees the screens, wherever that is.”

Nick said, “I did not see any communication coming from nor going into Geometer’s body during any of that. If Peter really is in a place with four computer screens, it doesn’t communicate with his body in a natural way within our world.”

Diane added, “I felt you push against me when we first came into contact, and up until a certain point when you were starting to push through me. That all stopped at once, shortly before you went all the way through. I didn’t feel any strange effects; there was no apparent interaction between your body and the insides of my body.”

Tracy now spoke up. “Peter’s shaped bodies have a bit of a skin to them. The skin seems to be made of the same substance as the rest of his body but is a little denser. When he goes through a solid object, the part that overlaps with the object is very, very thin, while the other parts get denser, and once he’s through to the other side, the density sort of flows across to the other side.”

Mel said, “My power is a bit different from yours, Peter, in that I can control whether or not I am tangible at any moment. But I don’t have much in the way of observational powers, and I think I’m mainly here as an advisor. I’m going to keep watching and suggesting stuff, but I don’t have anything to really add right now.”

Vladimir shrugged, “None of my powers apply to anything you did there. I think my part is still coming.”

Now Greg said, “It’s Mel’s turn now. She is going to lead you through a set of exercises designed to test the limits of your phasing.

And this she did. First off, she had me phase through a series of ever-thicker walls until I came to one I could not phase through. I went part way in and then bounced back out.

Tracy spoke up, “This is where my observation can probably help you. When you are trying to go through a wall, most of your material does not enter the wall at all; it passes directly across once part of you reaches the other side. So if you reach out for the far wall, you may be able to get through thicker walls.”

This advice got me through walls much thicker than the previous one I got stuck at.

“If you stretch out horizontally like one of the traditional flying heroes, you can go through more. And you can probably get through anything as long as you have the room outside the wall to make a needle long enough to go all the way through.”

This ultimately got me up to flying through 20 feet of solid lead with success. They didn’t have more. I’m not sure why they even had a solid lead wall 20 feet thick, but it was the thickest thing they had.

To everybody, Greg said, “I’m going to call a lunch break, but Peter doesn’t eat like we do. His lunch is going to be another experiment. Peter’s body is solar powered, and we’ve got what is effectively a high-intensity sun lamp. Unfortunately, I don’t think we have a quantitative way of measuring Peter’s energy level, but I want to do a couple things. First off, we’re going to have Tracy study Peter and see if she can see anything different about him when he’s full of energy versus whatever state he’s in now. Also, Peter, I want you to try to judge the rate you are getting power as compared with a sunny day. I’m not sure there’s really anything for the rest of you; we know this function is a known method of photosynthesis some natural beings use, so you can all run off to the cafeteria.”

So they left, and Greg and Tracy and I went to a room where I found their sun lamp was just a tanning bed. Somebody had set up an off switch I could press with a small bit of my body outside the bed, and it would also stop a timer that kept track of how long I was in there. After I confirmed that I could press the button rather than phase through it, I made myself into a big rectangular slab to fill the bed and Greg turned it on.

So that I was never left completely alone, Tracy went and got lunch and ate it in the room with me, and only when she came back did Greg leave. I felt like I was in an energy state where I would have needed one and a half or two hours to fill up under the sun, which had become my regular single daily meal by now, but the bed filled me up in 40 minutes.

Tracy was done eating by then, so after I turned it off, she opened the bed up and studied me again, and when she was done she led me to the cafeteria where everybody else was finishing up.

“I couldn’t see any difference before and after,” Tracy told Greg.

THE TANNING BED FED ME FASTER
THAN THE SUN. WHAT I GOT IN
FORTY MINUTES WOULD HAVE TAKEN
ALMOST TWO HOURS WITH THE SUN.

Greg replied, “Good to know, and probably good for you to know as well.”

Stephanie spoke up, “One other thing I neglected to mention earlier is that I can see your soul, or whatever it is. Your essence. With a few rare exceptions I can see this for everybody, and yours occupies your body fully, whether it’s a blob or a collection of geometric shapes. Even when it’s passing through another person. Because it’s so normal, I didn’t think to report the observation, but conversation over lunch made me think it is relevant. So I think you are in there, and the computer screen interface is probably your mind’s way of coping with what your powers have done. I’m not saying it’s not real, but just that it’s your mind’s interpretation of what’s there, which is actually too complex for you to understand.”

SO MAYBE I HAVE
FOUR DIFFERENT WAYS
OF INTERFACING
WITH MY POWERS?

“Maybe something like that. You have one interface that lets you change your body, one that lets you explore the other abilities granted by your powers, one that lets you see what body you have made with your powers, and one that lets you see the world, which is in some powers-related way, not with eyes.”

In the afternoon, they tried (in various rooms - no one place was set up to test all these things) having me pass through magnetic fields, live wires with electricity running through them, fiber-optic cables, spaces with intense light rays, electron beams, and other things I didn’t even understand the names for. None of this stuff really affected me. Vladimir finally got into the game and created various configurations of living matter, none of which affected me in the least. They had me pass through a sheet of multi-layered kevlar - much like a bulletproof vest except it was a doorway-sized sheet of the stuff - and that took some effort. I had to push through each layer like it was a new wall.

But I could also teleport my body when I knew how far it was to the other side. And indeed I could teleport across all the obstacles they had presented. The phasing was more useful to understand in terms of how I interacted with things. And I knew the solution for that now; I had to put my whole body in a bodysuit and then I’d have to experience enough force to phase me out of the whole suit before I’d phase through anything unintentionally.

I discussed it with Mom afterward, and she agreed. The problem was the sizing. I was still undersized; in fact, the volume added for the details I’d added to my body while smoothing it out had cost me another 3 inches in height, so now I was only 4-foot-8. And it was awfully skinny. It was fine as a child’s body but even if I could scale it up to an adult size at the same proportions I’d look skinny for a woman and impossibly thin for a man. But it got me thinking: Should I try to design myself as a woman?

Subsequent Days

Mom took some measurements and we went out and she got me a bodysuit that fit. But it was a child’s size intended for about a 10-year-old. She helped me put it on; I didn’t think I was dexterous enough yet to do it myself.

But it worked, for the things that I could do now, like open and close doors. Though if I wasn’t wearing the bodysuit, I might not really need to, as I could phase through it or teleport past it, both of which would cause me to lose the bodysuit if I did it while I was wearing it.

And it let me wear clothes. Sort of, anyway. Some of my clothes from a few years ago were still in storage and Mom was able to help me put some of those on over the bodysuit. Even then, they didn’t fit me well; I’d made myself considerably skinnier in an attempt to add height. If I developed a more realistic looking body and wanted to interact with people in the world normally, I’d want clothes.

I spent the rest of the week practicing on making the shape of my body more realistic and in particular working on body motions. Even if I wasn’t really walking, it would seem less disconcerting to people if I moved my legs like I was walking when I moved.

And I finished my school year from home, with my exams carried out over the computer.

But I felt like I needed some other ideas on how to improve the body, and Mom contacted NANA and put me in touch with some other young people with, well, not really similar powers, but at least shapeshifters who had needed to design their own bodies. And I made separate appointments to have them visit me at the house in July.

The first one who came in was actually two bodies. Teddy explained that his power lets him animate extra bodies, and he’d brought a female animated body named Trixie with him. At first I thought it was weird he had a separate name for his other body, but when I thought about it, it made sense. Most people, even ones who knew Trixie was his other body, wouldn’t be thinking about it all the time, and it would make interactions with other people smoother if they could call the girl body by a girl’s name.

But when he told me about how his power worked, I realized he was of no real help for my problems. He made some sort of sculpture, stuffy doll, or anything of that sort and brought it to life, and as long as it was reasonably realistic, it came to life as a complete normal body. He’d never had to design feet beyond stuffing a sock with something. One good thing came out of it: He gave me the idea of making multiple bodies. It was no different from making multiple letters. I just made another copy of the body shape at another location. And of course, they got even smaller than the undersized body I already had. I’m sure this was of some use. I could focus my vision and hearing on either body.

The second one was George, and he had other names, too. He’d had two problems: A shapeshifting power he couldn’t control and a ghost who was possessing his body in his sleep and forming it into a girl body. I didn’t realize ghost possession was real, but he explained to me it was, and the other names he used belonged to the ghost and other people she had possessed in the past.

He’d eventually gotten this under control, keeping the ghost but working with her cooperatively. She showed him how to use his power, and the differences between male and female bodies. There were far more than I’d thought of! And it was his description of the differences that helped me solve one of my own problems.

I HAVEN’T MADE
A VOICE BOX YET.

I told him in my way, after he described his voice box, and the differences there, including the Adam’s apple that protrudes at men’s necks.

“Did you make any internal organs?”

NO, MY BODIES ARE COMPLETELY
SOLID UNDER THE SKIN.

“That’s your problem. Human bodies are mostly water, and having about the same density allows people to swim, but it’s not that simple. Humans have air spaces inside them, especially the lungs, which balance out the tissues and blood, which are heavier than water.”

Together we looked up some information about the capacity of the lungs online. This was complicated, but we found the following statistics: The total lung capacity of an adult human being is about 5.5 to 6 liters. This is the amount of air in the lungs when you take a full deep breath. The minimum volume is about 1.2 liters. When you exhale as much air as possible, there’s still that much air left over in the lungs. The normal amount of air while breathing at rest is 2.5 to 3 liters; you only actually breathe in and out half a liter per breath when you are just casually breathing and not exercising or trying to take big breaths on purpose.

But the topic of density got me thinking. I should put enough empty space in my body to give it the density of water. The density of water varies with temperature, but of course it should be at human body temperature, where it is very close to 62 pounds per cubic foot. I weigh 90 pounds. At that density, my 90 pounds would fill 2508 cubic inches, 46% more than my measured 1712 cubic inches. If I spread that out evenly over 3 dimensions, I’d be 13.6% larger in each dimension. That would bring me up to 5’3.5”, which is about what I was before my powers came in.

THANKS, GEORGE. THAT IS
GOING TO HELP A LOT.

The 6 liters of lungs at maximum inflation, not to mention the 3 liters at rest, was a lot less than the extra 800 cubic inches of hole I had to put inside myself to match the density, in part because the lungs weren’t the only hole, and in part because the density of my material didn’t match the density of flesh. I didn’t have the water; I only had the denser components. Well, at least something that was denser than water.

And then I figured out how to put a big hollow inside my torso and smaller ones in my head and legs. It was pretty simple. For the torso, I just had to specify a smaller cone with a smaller radius and the same slope and axis, and cut shorter on both ends, and invert the inequalities so it matched everything outside the shape, and take the intersection of that with the rest of my body. Naturally, it didn’t match the hollows inside a person, but maybe that was OK, as long as I made the outside look right.

George and I went to show my mom, who was surprised by the bigger me until I explained in another wall of text. Then George had to go, but I asked him to come back to explain to me the shape of the voice box and vocal cords, and, I realized, the entire throat and mouth which I would need to speak like a person.

I needed a larger size of the bodysuit, and I could wear the clothes I wore a couple weeks ago before this started, though I needed to use the smallest notch on my belt to fit my 27 inch waist to hold my pants up. I still looked like a string bean.

George came back a few days later and helped me work on the voice box. This went in stages. First I made just the vocal cords, with no body around it, and then put in half the larynx, which is the actual “box”, and the neck around it so he could still see what I was doing. And when he was satisfied, I enclosed it all and added a torso with some semblance of lungs. At this point, I thought that I should be able to tense the vocal cords and blow air through them from the lungs and make a steady sound, but it didn’t work.

At first we thought I’d done something wrong, but we couldn’t see anything wrong. What we noticed was that the vocal cords didn’t flap. We looked this up online and confirmed voice worked by air being pushed through the vocal cords causing them to open and close repeatedly, which caused pressure waves that echoed at certain resonant frequencies within the voice box to make the audible sound. What my body was made out of didn’t react the way a flap of human flesh did to air passed over it.

I did eventually make it work, by inducing the vibrations myself with math. Forcing air over already vibrating flaps of my body-stuff made the expected sound, which I could change in pitch by altering the size of the opening for the air above the vocal cords. To make many of the sounds for speech, I needed to put a mouth and nose over it, and a tongue, and lips, which took a bunch more direction from George. It took a whole day for me to build. At least these parts worked; they just provided different kinds of restrictions on the air passages.

But I had to learn how to speak all over again. At least I knew what I was supposed to be doing; it was a matter of translating it all into math. I worked on one sound at a time, tried different formulas, and when I had something that worked well I saved it as a function. I had figured out how to make time-varying functions before, and these were no different, except that they were very short and I would call many of them in succession.

Each sound required exhaling a certain amount of air, some less and some more. I basically had an air counter that tracked how much air was in my lungs. One function expelled it when I needed it to speak, and another function would take a breath during the pauses between words when I needed to refill that air, while opening up the channel fully so as not to make sound. On top of that, each sound required one or more movements of the mouth or tongue, opening or closing the nasal passages, and activating or deactivating my artificial voice box waves. Finally, I needed to put in transitions. There was a transition from each sound to the neutral position, and special transitions directly from one sound to another when going through the neutral position created an unnatural pause. The transitions were important; though I could instantaneously change my mouth from one position into another, doing that interrupted the sound in a noticeably unnatural way.

It took me a week to make the initial function for each sound, and after that I could speak, sometimes badly. I wrote a function that let me string together a bunch of sounds and say them just like I could write the words in the air. It took several more weeks to get all the transitions to work. By the time school started in the fall I could speak intelligibly. It still wasn’t perfect, and I started writing another level of functions for syllables and whole words, so that I didn’t have to think so hard about all the little nuances.

But this meant I wasn’t working on my body. I had put eyes and ears on the head just so it didn’t look so weird with only a nose and mouth, but I hadn’t done any more work to make it look like a more convincing human being. And my parents knew I wasn’t really ready to try to do all the school stuff yet, so they’d arranged for me to get my assignments emailed. I could use the computer both to read them and write responses. I hadn’t actually worked on the detailed hand movements necessary to write on paper, so it was better this way anyway.

I also had a tutor come out once a week who I could work directly with on anything where I had trouble. This gave me practice speaking with someone other than my parents, and on a variety of subjects.

Having to do schoolwork slowed down my work on my speech, so it wasn’t until November that I finally got around to testing every sequence of two sounds that could occur in an English word and making sure I had a proper transition and could call that work completed, and adding the pronunciations for words in my vocabulary was an ongoing thing. And it slowed down my work on my body even more, but once in a while I got the chance to tweak something.

So it was Christmas break when I got around to working on my body again. And the first thing I noticed was that I hadn’t grown. My cube shape was still 12 inches to the best that it could be measured by a ruler and my blob shape still weighed 90 pounds.

Christmas morning for the first time I showed my parents my new shape. A little narrower at the waist, small boobs protruding, and otherwise the same body I’d been using the past few months. “Merry Christmas. You have a daughter.”

George, Thursday, January 22, 2009

All the local TV and radio stations were broadcasting an urgent message in the morning.

Small, hard, irregularly shaped pink bits are scattered all over town, but most concentrated in the area around the north end of Collins Street. They aren’t harmful, but you could slip on them. If you find any of these bits, please do not eat them or let your kids or pets eat them. It is safe to pick them up with your hands, but if you’d rather not, feel free to use plastic bags. NANA wants to recover these bits. There are red bins labeled for NANA to collect these bits at all schools, post offices, many major stores, and on street corners in the Collins Street area where the most bits appear. Please simply deposit them in the bins.

Accompanying the TV broadcast were images of street sweepers trying to collect the bits off the roads before dawn, and some close-up pictures of some of the bits in somebody’s hand. They were small, about fingertip-sized.

They intentionally didn’t say it in the message, but it was pretty clear to those who knew about powers that this was related to a new manifestation of a power. So everybody left their houses for school carrying sandwich bags, dog poop bags, and the like. Those who were riding the bus picked up their streets down to the stop; those who walked to school picked up along the whole way, and anybody who was a few minutes late for the first class was excused.

We saw volunteers out at other times in the day trying to locate bits in the grass and in other areas where they might be missed.

---

Saturday, January 24, 2009

I don’t think any of us were surprised to get summoned to NANA this morning. We were asked to show up at the testing entrance at 9, and I recognized some of the people, including the girl I helped last year who had to make her body out of geometric shapes. She actually did make a body that looked like a girl now, though the parts not covered by the simple dress she wore made me think she’d just added boobs to the body she was using before. I was pleased to hear, when she entered and checked in at the desk, that she was now speaking with the vocal parts I helped her design.

It was about 10 minutes past nine when a man who identified himself as Greg came into the room and called roll for our group, by code name even though he didn’t use one, and we then all followed him to a room with a big table in the middle covered in thousands of the little pink bits.

“Welcome, everybody. As I said, I’m Greg, and my usual role here is to be a powers tester. However, the person I am supposed to test is this pile of pieces you see on the table.”

There was only one shocked face. I think the rest of the group assembled here either knew already or had guessed we were picking up parts of a person.

“I don’t normally engage in non-powers-related work, but until we can get this person back together, this is non-testing NANA business, and I’ll be using my code name Kingsman. But I’m not a doctor, nor do I have relevant powers, so I’ll mostly be letting the rest of you run this effort and possibly bringing in additional help or supplies as needed.”

A woman I recognized then spoke up. “I’m Stephanie, but while we’re here today on official, non-testing business I’ll be using my code name Miss Tix. That’s M-I-S-S T-I-X. I have the power to see people’s souls, so I know that there is, beyond any expectation you might have, a living soul embedded in these little pieces. A boy named Jesse developed powers late Wednesday night, and spontaneously burst into these pieces when he did so. There aren’t any conventional life signs coming from them, but I identified the living soul still attached to the pieces, so we sent out the alert you may have seen Thursday morning. We believe we have recovered nearly all the pieces. There are at least enough pieces here that the soul can fit into the psychic cavity that the pieces represent.”

Then a man who came in with us said, “I’m Dr. Springfield, and like the others, while we are assembling this patient today I’ll be using my code name Illinois. My training as a medical doctor and understanding of anatomy make me suited to help out here, and I also have powers as a healer, so if we get this body together but he starts bleeding from the missing pieces, I can probably deal with that.”

A younger woman, the shocked face, introduced herself as, “Janice, code name Tech Wiz. If we have some idea how to use computers to solve this puzzle, I can probably do it.”

She invited me to introduce myself next, and I said, “I’m George, code name Samantha Quicksilver, and these days I am equally comfortable in male or female shapes. I’m a teenager who developed shapeshifting powers a couple years ago. I originally didn’t have any control of my shapeshifting powers, but then I was possessed by a ghost who did understand how to use my powers while she was in my body. Eventually, Miss Tix helped me and the ghost get along, and she showed me not only how to use my power, but also a great deal about the human body and the differences between male and female bodies, which are far more than those of you who have not studied anatomy might realize. And maybe that’s why I’m here. I also helped the last member of our crew with some of her problems.”

I gestured to her. In the slightly robotic but fully intelligible voice she now used, she said, “I am Petra, code name The Geometer. I am also a shapeshifter, but a very different one; I have to define my shape using geometry, so it’s actually quite involved for me to have this somewhat human-looking form. Samantha helped me figure out some of what I was doing wrong, and also showed me how the vocal cords work so that I could learn to speak. But I’m more comfortable as combinations of cubes and spheres and other such shapes, and if I don’t have a working vocal system, I sometimes write words in the air. I have a fixed amount of matter, so don’t be surprised if you see me floating on no legs today while I’m turning the legs part of my matter into tools to assist with reassembling our patient. So, Illinois, since you suggested we are attempting a reassembly, how exactly do we go about that?”

“Well, that is the problem. If you look at these pieces closely,” Illinois said, pulling down a camera I hadn’t noticed was mounted on the ceiling high above us almost all the way down to the table, and turning on a screen which provided a magnified view of the parts, the pieces have little tabs and holes which are irregularly shaped. So I think the body fits together like a jigsaw puzzle, but a three-dimensional one, with thousands of tiny pieces which are all essentially the same color. But we have some pairs of pieces we managed to find matches for by hand, which are over here, and I invite you to take these apart and look at both pieces of a pair closely and confirm how closely the shapes match.”

The paired pieces were passed among those of us who were seeing the collection for the first time, and we all agreed they looked like exact matches.

Geometer suggested, “The pieces seem basically cubical, except the faces of the cubes are very irregular. If we have a way to get 3-D photos of the faces, Tech Wiz, could you match them up?”

“I think I could, if someone could help me understand the image format.”

Kingsman spoke up, “We do have a 3-D camera. Let me go get it.”

While he was gone, Geometer continued her idea. “I can turn most of my body into a bunch of little boxes, just covering this whole tabletop with boxes maybe 1.5 cm square, which I think should hold even the biggest of these pieces in any orientation, and help to keep track of them, and rotate them for the camera. Tech Wiz can process the images and figure out which pieces go together. That should let us build a network of all the pieces, and you can basically call out pieces by number and orientation, and I can lift each one from its box in turn for you to add to the growing body framework.”

“I think that could work,” Tech Wiz said, and the others agreed.

Kingsman came back with a whole cart full of parts: the camera, a set of rails and a mechanism to move it in three dimensions, and the hardware to hang the rails from the ceiling, and the computer that had the software on it to interface with the camera, which wasn’t standard webcam software. We actually moved to another room because this one already had the other camera mounted on the ceiling and what we wanted was a completely different type of ceiling mount.

There was a document for Tech Wiz to study which explained the file format of the 3-D images, while the rest of us participated in varying degrees in the assembly of the camera and its rails, and in moving our patient’s pieces to this room. And then Geometer made his big grid of cells to hold the pieces. But at first we just put one piece in while Geometer and Tech Wiz planned the sequence to capture all these images quickly.

“OK, Geometer, please print a number on the bottom of each cell, small, at the top, where the camera will see it when you are holding up the piece.”

“I don’t really do colors, but what I can do is make the numbers be holes. The table is a different color from my body and it will show through.”

She did that to Tech Wiz’s satisfaction and then proceeded to number all the cells that way. And then they worked out exactly how Geometer was to hold and rotate each piece to photograph all its sides. Once they got going, they could do all six sides of a piece in 3 seconds, 4 seconds including the time to move to the next cell. That meant we did 15 pieces every minute, 900 an hour... but there were 5000 pieces, so it took five and a half hours, during which they sent some of us home. And then it was a couple hours for Tech Wiz to program a solution to match all the images and run it. So it was in the evening when we came back to assemble the body.

Tech Wiz was actually able to piece together the 3-D photos to give us an image of what Jesse looked like.

“Wait, didn’t you say this was a boy?” Illinois asked.

“That is what we were told,” Kingsman replied. “But it doesn’t take a medical degree to see that’s not true now.”

It looked like the girl we were building was in a standing position, so we decided to go from the feet up, assembling her layer by layer. Tech Wiz brought up a display of all the piece numbers in the layer and codes that explained how each one should be rotated, Geometer raised up those pieces from their boxes and put them in the right orientations, and all the rest of us grabbed the pieces and put them together. As the legs got taller, Geometer also helped by providing some supports to keep our work from toppling over. Still, we had 160 of those layers and it was taking us a couple minutes to assemble each layer.

After one of the layers, Miss Tix called out, “Stop, please. This is going to take all night. I need sleep.” There was a general consensus of agreement.

Kingsman asked, “Geometer, can you hold the shape of the bins overnight?”

“Yes, I actually don’t sleep. But it will help if I can get some more time on the tanning bed.. I can take care of that myself, though. I had a session this afternoon, and usually one session a day would be enough for me, but I’m working my power pretty hard today.”

With that, Geometer’s arms disappeared, leaving just a head and torso under her dress. Somehow none of us were surprised, given what we had seen from her already, that she could just teleport part of her body to another part of the building.

And we left Jessie’s legs standing there, assembled up to the thighs.

---

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Sunday morning we gathered again and continued building. We skipped the arms when we first encountered them, and waited until we had the torso fully built to the shoulders before branching out on them. Unlike the straight legs, the arms were in a random position which wasn’t self-supporting.

Before lunch we finished assembling the statue we hoped would turn back into a person, but... it didn’t. We just had a statue of a girl. We were missing only 10 pieces, each of which was a smaller piece on the outside.

Miss Tix said, “Let me take a mental look at her.”

We all cleared out of the way to let her do her thing. After a couple minutes, she informed us, “Her soul’s there, but the psychic cavity is still fragmented and the soul can’t occupy it. She’s basically shut out of being able to connect with her body, though she’s still attached to it in a loose way. I think we need to physically fuse the pieces.”

“How would we do that?” Tech Wiz asked.

Kingsman responded, “Well, we tried applying pressure to the pairs of pieces we had joined at the start. They remained separate bits that we could pull apart by hand.”

“What are they made of, anyway?” I asked. “Could they fuse by heating them?”

Illinois answered me, “As odd as it seems, they are made of living matter, the flesh of a body, just transmuted somehow into this solid form. The striations we saw as we assembled the inner parts of her body correspond to the various organs and tissues. Transmuted by her powers, I guess, and because of that, anything might work. I would test it with two pieces first.”

We agreed that was a good strategy, and Illinois pried two adjacent pieces from her shoulder, then covered the rest of the naked body with one of those plastic gowns from a doctor’s office. We took them elsewhere, where Kingsman scrounged up something ceramic, I think, to hold the two bits together, and we put it in an oven, gradually increasing the temperature, while Miss Tix stared intently, looking for the two soul bits to merge. They finally did when the oven got to a temperature of 300 F, and after some cooling, the pieces seemed permanently fused but otherwise unchanged. Illinois snapped them back into the space they came from and closed up the other bits around them.

While we were discussing the plan to fuse her whole body the same way, Geometer asked, “If we heat her whole body to 300 degrees, won’t she be cooked alive when she comes back to life?”

Illinois answered, “Well, that’s possible. We will want a setup where we can pull her out quickly, and I can apply my power as a healer. But it’s likely that her body has permanently transformed into this material and won’t be harmed. Other people in Normal have powers that allow them to resist heat that would cook ordinary people’s bodies.”

So now we looked for an oven large enough to cook her entire body for long enough to get the temperature up to 300 degrees, and pull her out quickly. Once they determined NANA didn’t have one, they sent some of us home while they looked for a solution. We got the call later in the day that we were going to use a pizza oven in a restaurant after they closed at 9 PM, so the group of us, who were all emotionally invested in seeing this girl live now even though some of our powers were no longer relevant, all showed up at this restaurant, along with its owner.

At our direction to heat the oven to 300 degrees, the owner set it that way. “Normally it would be hotter than that for pizza, but I understand we are most certainly not making pizza tonight.”

Our group rigged up a device to hold her body in the oven but pull it out quickly, so in she went. She was in there for about 10 minutes when we saw her stir to life, and we pulled her out. She thanked us for saving her, and seemed normal for a bit, and didn’t bleed from the few missing pieces, but after a few minutes she froze solid and went still. We all looked disappointed. Then some of her pieces started popping out, one of them stinging Tech Wiz where it hit her.

“Put her back in!” Illinois exclaimed.

Most of her body was still in one piece on the movable rack, so we put her back in the oven, and soon she was alive again. It seemed that not only was she not harmed by being at high temperature, she could only live that way. The reason she was frozen and had shattered was that she was too cold being at normal room temperature.

The pizza shop owner produced an oven mitt, which one of the group used to hand the piece that had struck Tech Wiz back to our now very hot girl, and she put it into the right spot on her body, where it fused with the other pieces again.

“You know where it goes?” Tech Wiz asked.

“Yes, I know where all my parts go. And I know where they all are, sort of. Thank you for reassembling me. I was aware of what was going on that entire time, but a lot of it was hazy due to me being in too many places at once.”

So some of us went home again while they called in other people to build a large mobile oven that they could put her into, and get her safely out of the pizza shop before business the next morning.

We confirmed later that when her pieces popped out, if they had enough energy, they were able to phase through normal matter for a time. Some of the pieces that had popped out that night ended up in the street in front of the pizza shop and in the alley behind it, and one was three blocks away. She gave Kingsman a list of the approximate locations and other NANA helpers went looking for them.

---

Saturday, January 31, 2009

We all got to see her the next weekend via a video feed.

“Hi, everyone! You can call me Jessie. That’s spelled with an I-E now. I have a code name too, Some Like it Hot. I’m not sure there’s ever going to be a need for what I can do, but maybe they’ll have me pulling people out of a fire or something.”

Everybody laughed.

“I requested this call with you all to thank you for putting me together; I literally wouldn’t be able to live without your efforts!”

“You’re welcome,” a few said, and Miss Tix added “That’s what NANA is here for.”

“Not sure how many of you were involved, but I also appreciate you returning my lost pieces to me. I was able to snap those into place, so I have fewer blemishes now. Just this one and one on my thigh. These are both out in large parks somewhere.”

She pointed to one notable gap on her left cheek where a small piece had never been found from the first time she exploded all over town. She had decided on calling those holes “blemishes.” Apparently they didn’t cause her any trouble beyond her appearance.

“So this is my new home, which other people from NANA helped build. Sorry, I can’t turn the camera, but I can step out of the way and let you see what’s here.”

All her furniture seemed to be made of enameled metal. She held up her bed to show it was a perforated metal sheet attached to a frame with springs all around, the kind of thing that substituted for a boxspring on some bunk beds where vertical space was tight, but for her it was the entire bed. It didn’t look comfortable for a normal person, but maybe it was fine for a person who is basically made of stone. There was a folding metal chair and we could just see the edge of what I assumed was a metal desk in front of the camera. She had a window, a mirror, and a closet of some sort.

“Everything here is made of materials that won’t burn or melt at temperatures in a standard household oven, which is basically what I need to live. You saw how I needed to get up to about 300 degrees to activate, but I actually like it hotter, around 450. I usually keep it around 350, though, because that’s all my special computer keyboard and mouse can take. I have an insulated box you can’t see below the camera that keeps them safe when I turn up the heat.”

“How does the computer operate at those temperatures?” Tech Wiz asked.

“It doesn’t. It’s in the next room at normal temperatures. There are hookups for the special keyboard and mouse, and my monitor and camera are behind an insulated window. Think of the oven window and you’ll have a good idea what this is like.”

“Do you eat?” I asked her, wondering if they just slid raw meat into her room and let it cook in there.

“No, it seems that I draw energy from the heat. I told you that I like it hotter, and part of that is that I get more energy from the heat at those higher temperatures. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing, either, so I could put away the computer, turn up the heat, and lie down and take a nap, and get up a couple hours later full of energy.”

“What happened to the mobile oven?” Kingsman asked.

“Oh, I still have it. I had to live in it for three days while they were building this room. Then NANA didn’t have any other use for it, so it’s on a trailer in my family’s back yard and they can back it up to the outside door of this room if I need to go somewhere. We practiced that once to make sure we can do it in case of emergency, but we just went around the block once and then back here. You remember how I didn’t freeze immediately when I came out of the oven? I can take a step or two outside, and as long as the mobile oven is already heated up I’ll be fine.”

Miss Tix asked, “How are you feeling about being a girl now?”

“It doesn’t really bother me. The isolation is more of a bigger thing. Being able to connect over the computer is essential, because it’s impractical for me to meet with people face to face. If somebody’s rude, I can turn them off. If I don’t want people to know I’m a girl, I don’t have to have the camera on. I do have a window and an intercom in my house but it’s just used by my family members. Inviting someone over just to have them chat with you through a window is pretty pointless when we can chat online. I might be having a tutor over here though, since I can’t very well go to school and explode all over the other kids, and for that I will have the tutor here in person some of the time. And as for the other aspects of being a girl, I don’t go to the bathroom so I can’t complain about that sitting down thing, and it’s not likely I’m going to have anything resembling normal periods either. The doctors want to scan me eventually, if I don’t show any obvious sign, to see if I have an active reproductive system, but even if I do, I might not ever... use it.”

There were a lot of implications in that statement, but Geometer responded with, “I didn’t have a chance to mention it when we were busy putting you back together, but I’m a shapeshifter of a sort, and I was originally a boy. I didn’t originally want to be a girl either, but eventually I chose to make my standard body look like a girl.”

“Why did you do that, when you can make any shape?”

“Any shape, but not any size. I have a fixed amount of material. I have to make a huge portion of my insides hollow just to make a girl body that doesn’t look like a little kid. To make a man-sized body, it would be an absurdly thin shell. And I don’t grow; it seems like I have the same amount of matter forever. But like you, I don’t use the bathroom or have periods; I just look like a girl.”

“We can start a club! I’m sure there are others like us in Normal,” Jessie laughed, letting us know she wasn’t serious.

“Even if it’s not a club, I’ll keep in touch.”

I shared my story before we ended the call, or at least an abbreviated version of it, leaving out the awful fates of Samantha’s former host bodies.

Jessie responded, “So she innately had the ability you lacked, to control your shape? And in exchange for that, you showed her how to live a normal life again?”

“That’s a good summary of it.”

“Sounds like a pretty good deal for both of you.”

Samantha was mentally agreeing in my head, and I replied to Jessie, “It has been.”

When nobody else had more stories to tell, Jessie ended the call, promising to keep in touch with all of us.

Late night, Friday, February 6, 2009

Kenny

“No, no! Stop! Stop shrinking!”

Somehow, I wasn’t myself anymore. I was the house. It seemed like the kind of thing that had to be a weird dream, but it felt very real. And I was shrinking, trapping my family members inside the house. One of my sisters had gotten caught up in one of the walls, and I could feel her presence in my mind.

I tried to tell her, “Wake up, Deirdre! Break loose! Run while you still can!” I got a “What’s happening?” response from her, and then nothing. She had passed out.

With all the rest of my strength, I focused on stopping the shrinkage of the house. My other family members weren’t caught in the walls yet. I might still be able to save them. But they were asleep, and impacts with walls had not woken them up.

I could sense them, all of them, asleep in the house. But I could feel my sister most of all. Her bed had gotten flipped upright by shrinking walls and she was embedded in one of the outside walls of the house, but I could feel everything. The bed against one side of her body. The wall against the other. Her nightgown. Her breathing. She was still breathing. I could sense her mind somehow, but it was asleep, as asleep as everybody else. I couldn’t wake her up. And then she was gone.

Eventually it seemed like I had gotten the house to stop shrinking, but it had taken all my effort. And that was the last I remembered.

---

Morning, Saturday, February 7, 2009

Greg

It was a pretty boring morning at NANA when the official phone rang.

“This is Kingsman at NANA.”

“Kingsman, this is Officer Riley with the Normal Police. We need you guys to come over and check out a shrinking house at 227 Fowler Street.”

“A shrinking house?”

“Yes, it was a two-story house and now it’s the size of a garden shed. There seems to be a person embedded in one of the walls.”

“All right. I’ll gather up some people and get over there.”

---

Pretty soon I’d assembled the people we had handy who might help and we drove over. And when we arrived, we had to agree with what the policeman told us. There was a house which looked similar to the others in the neighborhood, except at a third the scale. And on one side there was the back of a head covered with hair, bare shoulders, and what appeared to be a tiny bit of the buttocks of a person protruding from one wall.

“I expect I’m taking the lead here,” Miss Tix suggested.

I agreed, and so did the others. She picked up a lawn chair from the yard and brought it close to the house, and sat to do her thing.

“There are four people alive here. They don’t appear to be possessed by ghosts or have the potential for that to happen. The reading of the one embedded in the wall is very strange. The house is part of the body. It’s all one person, with a normal sized space for a soul, and there is a soul which fits the space well. If that’s a ghost, then the original occupant of that body is dead. There’s no activity; they are all asleep, unconscious, entranced, or otherwise immobilized.”

When she stepped away, Illinois went up and pressed his stethoscope to the exposed skin near the shoulders.

“Despite being embedded in the wall of the house, this body has normal life signs: A pulse and normal, restful breathing. I’m not entirely certain, but I think this is the body of a girl or young woman.”

“The one who developed powers?” I suggested, having seen too many strange things happen in Normal because of such events.

“Quite possibly. It would make sense, to the extent that anything makes sense about this scenario.”

I asked, “Can we reach the others somehow? They might be in danger.”

“If the house really is part of her body, it might harm her to break in.”

“Other powers?”

Jump, a teleporter, said, “There’s no way I could teleport into such a confined space. I’m actually wondering how there’s enough space for their bodies. Are they perhaps stuck in walls too?”

“It could be,” Miss Tix replied, “But only the one visibly embedded in the wall appears to have the house be part of her body.”

When nobody had any other ideas, we got some tools from the police and tried to gently pry the doors and windows open, and also used a suction cup device to try to slide the windows up. But it was no use, even with windows we could see were unlocked. It didn’t even behave the way we would expect building materials to. It was unusually elastic. I could push the middle of the door inward by at least an inch with my bare hands, but it didn’t move apart from the frame on any side. It was almost as if the house wasn’t made of house anymore.

Illinois examined it at my suggestion. “Whatever it’s made of, it doesn’t appear to be living flesh. I can only sense a distant pulse, the pulse of the girl on the far side conducting through the walls. There isn’t blood flowing inside the wall itself, however much it may be a part of her.”

Miss Tix then suggested, “If the house really is her body, then maybe that boy Dawson can help. The one who takes control of people’s bodies by kissing them. I believe his powers do work on unconscious people, and he doesn’t need to kiss their lips. If he takes control of her body, maybe he could open the doors and windows.”

---

Dawson, mid-morning

“Teddy, you’re wanted on the phone by NANA.”

“They want me, really?”

“They asked for you by your code name Dawson, so it’s official business, not testing.”

I took the phone from Mom.

“Hello?”

“Hello, this is Kingsman from NANA. We’re looking for Dawson.”

“That’s me.”

“We’ve got a tricky situation with new powers and we are hoping you can help us. There’s a girl here whose powers have made her become one with her house, but she’s unconscious and there are other people inside. We don’t think we can get them out without hurting her, but we are hoping if you could gain control of her that maybe her powers will let you open the doors and windows to help us get the other people out.”

“My powers only work on people and things shaped like people, like statues, not houses.”

“Well she’s got a human body and the house.”

“Hmm. I’ve never encountered somebody like that so I have no idea if this will work.”

“We don’t know how much time the people inside have. If you are available we want you immediately.”

I put the phone down and told Mom, “They want me right now. They think I can help save some people.”

“Well go ahead! Go save some lives!”

I told Kingsman on the phone, “I can do it.”

“Great. We’ll send a teleporter right over, one by the name of Jump.”

“Oh, like immediately immediately. OK. Let me go deanimate my other bodies so I’m at full strength for whatever happens here.”

“You have other bodies? Oh, I guess that makes sense. Is that going to be quick?”

“Yes.”

“Are you at home?”

“Yes.”

“OK, Jump will be at your door in seconds. Just tell her when you’re ready.”

“OK, see you real soon, I guess.”

I hung up the phone, and ran to go deanimate Jack and Trixie. Jump was ringing the doorbell before I got back, and Mom let her in.

“Are you Jump?” I asked when I returned.

“Yes. My name is Cynthia, but my code name is Jump, and on this kind of official business, it’s all code names. You’re Dawson?”

“Yes.”

“OK, I’m ready when you’re ready.”

“Ready, I guess.”

She held out her hand, and I took it, and instantly we were in another place.

A man there asked, “Dawson?”

“That’s me.”

“Kingsman here. This is part of NANA headquarters but we’re going to take you right out to the house now.”

“OK.”

Jump took both our hands and we were then outside, on the street. There was a strange miniature house there, the size of a shed, but with all the doors and windows and trim you’d find on a full size house, just smaller. It was bigger than a dollhouse (unless you had some pretty large dolls). The police had it cordoned off, but Kingsman took us through, just saying I was with him, and up to the other people waiting nearby.

Kingsman now said, “Over on this side, you can see where part of the girl’s body protrudes from the house.”

I went there and looked. “Ew! It looks painful to be inside the wall like that.”

“And it’s possible it is. It seems like everybody in the house, including her, is asleep or unconscious. We don’t know how it happened or why the house shrank. But we are hoping, if you can control her body, that you can open the doors and windows of the house and at least let us get the other people out.”

“OK. Let me try a quick kiss that’ll just give me a feel of her body for a minute so I know what I am getting into.”

I walked up to where her shoulders protruded from the house, with Kingsman following me. And I gave her a pretty ordinary kiss. I touched her with my tongue between my lips just for a moment, not that anybody else could see it. And whoa!

I was a bit overwhelmed by how much sensation I got from the girl and house, and my body fell over backward. Kingsman caught me and guided my body to a lawn chair that was nearby. But the sensation was brief and almost immediately after I got in the chair, I was just Teddy again.

“Are you alright?” another man who was there asked. “I’m Illinois, and I am a medical doctor for ordinary people in addition to helping out with some of the strange cases we get here in Normal.”

“Yes, I’m fine. It was just that the feeling I got from her was so intense. Usually it’s just a body, but she really is that entire house, and I could feel every nail and board that makes up the house in addition to her body. I’m not used to feelings like that. Usually once I am in, even if I’m animating a statue, it’s all flesh and bone.”

“OK. Is she in pain?”

“No, no pain. But she might be overwhelmed by the same feelings I got.”

“What about the other people?”

“I wasn’t in long enough to notice them. How long was it from when I kissed her to when I was in the chair?”

Kingsman replied, “Not very long at all. Less than 10 seconds.”

“I was out of her a second or two after that. So I got maybe twelve seconds for what would have been a one-to-two minute sense-borrowing for a normal person.”

“Maybe the time is reduced because of the size of the body?”

“Maybe. OK, I think I’m ready to try again, but I’m going to need to be in longer, and I am going to need control and not just senses, so this isn’t going to look like the kiss I did before.”

“Do what you need to do,” Illinois requested of me.

For my second attempt, I went up to her, raised her hair with one arm, and turned my head sideways. After working up a good deal of saliva in my mouth, I gave her a lick with my full tongue from one shoulder to the other.

My own body didn’t fall over this time, but Kingsman helped me back to the chair and with my mouth, I explained what I was now feeling to the group assembled there.

You’re right that this girl is one with the house. There are three other people inside, two on the second floor and one on the first floor. And I think I can control the doors and windows. Let me try.

I managed to open the front door, and it came swinging open. However, it was only about a foot wide and two feet tall, and the door and house were too small for people to move around inside. I slid open some windows, too, but they weren’t right next to the people inside. The effort wasn’t completely useless, because they reached in and pulled one person out. About that time, my animation of the girl-house stopped and I was just Teddy again.

“OK, that’s it. I’m not the house anymore,” I told the group. Illinois was overseeing a medical crew who were moving the one person they got out into one of two ambulances that had arrived while we were doing this, but I now had the attention of the rest of the group.

“Can you do it again? Or make the house bigger so we can get in and get the others?”

“I was starting to have the feeling that I could move or enlarge the windows and doors when I lost the connection. But I’m going to need more time to help get the other two out. Do you have a bowl, like one you’d eat soup or cereal from?”

Kingsman started to say something, but Jump reappeared beside me at that moment and handed me a white ceramic cereal bowl with a blue line around the outside.

“Thanks, this will do.”

I started working up a lot of saliva and spat globs of it several times into the bowl. Jump provided me with a glass of water as well to allow me to continue doing this, and when I had about two eggs’ worth of saliva in the bowl, I decided I was ready. I moved her hair aside again and poured the saliva out where I’d licked her before, letting it run down onto parts of the house as well. Where it was running fast, I smeared it to the sides so that it all stayed on the house rather than running to the ground.

And I sat my own body down while I resumed figuring out how to manipulate the house. Pretty soon I had figured out how to rearrange the windows and moved one adjacent to where each other person was inside the house, and opened them. They pulled out one, and then the other, and then, very quickly, the house shrank further, remaining at the same height but shrinking in length and width until it was only the size of a normal door on each side.

“So I guess I don’t have complete control over the house,” I commented.

Once Illinois finished seeing the other two patients off in the second ambulance, and canceled a return trip for the first, we gathered to decide what to do next. “You’re a telephone booth,” he commented.

I vaguely recalled a telephone booth as the place where Clark Kent changed into Superman in old shows, and in even older ones as a place people actually made calls. I hadn’t seen an actual usable telephone booth in my life. They just had pay phones mounted on poles these days, where they had them at all. But Illinois was right about the size of the house now. It was just big enough for one person, or two chummy ones who didn’t mind their bodies touching, if there was nothing else inside.

“Let me see if I can make it more like a telephone booth.”

I raised the second floor to near the ceiling, above the girl’s head, and cleared all the windows off one side. The house was unusually flexible, and I could somehow bend the windows around the edges without breaking them. Then I expanded the door to cover that side. I was just about to open the door at this larger size when I lost control again.

“Sorry, my time’s up. Do you want me to do it again?”

“I think it’s less urgent now,” Illinois responded. “Even if you take control again, I doubt we’re going to get the girl out of there if she’s one with the house.”

Kingsman asked him, “You mind helping me check if the house is actually attached to the ground at all now?”

“That’s a good idea.”

They tilted the house slightly, enough to show it was not in fact attached to the ground. Jump showed up with a flashlight and with it, we could see under the house to confirm that there was no connection whatsoever between the house and the concrete slab we were standing on. They tried to have Jump teleport the house, but it was beyond her capacity. So they called in a truck with a lift on the back and loaded it inside to take back to NANA. Jump teleported the rest of us there to meet it when it arrived.

They moved the house into a doctor’s office in which the usual bed had been removed, and I went with them since I thought they were going to have me animate the body again. But when we got there, the door opened without prompting. The girl inside was still wearing her nightgown, part of which was embedded in the wall, just as it was when I was controlling her. She spoke, “Are we done moving now?”

“Yes. I’m glad to see that you’re awake,” Illinois responded.

“I’ve been through quite an ordeal.”

“How much of it do you remember?”

“The beginning, before you arrived, up to a point where I was a larger house than I am now, but a lot smaller than the house started, with my family members still inside. Thank you for getting them out! I hope they’re OK.”

“They are all receiving medical treatment now. I can’t be certain of the size, but I think the house was the size you remember when we arrived. It had shrunk to that size and wasn’t changing size until we pulled the last of the people out.”

“Well, at some point it was shrinking, and I was trying to keep it from crushing everybody! It already got my sister. Um, I need to explain something.”

“Go ahead.”

“The body you see is my sister’s. I’m her brother, Kenny. Somehow, overnight, I turned into my house. I don’t understand it. But my original body’s gone. The house started shrinking, and somehow my sister got caught up in one of the walls. When she did, I could feel her. I could feel every part of her body, as if it was mine. I could also communicate mentally with her, but her thoughts were only ‘What’s happening?’ and I tried to tell her I was going to save her, but I couldn’t. I felt it when she died. Her mind died, anyway. I thought her body was going to die, too, but it didn’t. Her body was part of the house now, part of me. If I took it from her, I didn’t mean to, nor do I know how it happened.”

“I’m so sorry you had to go through that, and even more so for your sister.”

Kingsman interrupted, “Jump, can you go fetch Veritas?”

Jump replied, “Sure thing,” and teleported away.

“Kenny, because someone died, we’re going to have you repeat your story in front of someone whose powers allow them to tell when somebody is lying. It’s not that we doubt you, but that this has to go into official records that anybody might doubt. But go on with your story for now. What happened after your sister died and her body became part of yours?”

“The house continued to shrink, and I was determined not to let it take the rest of my family members. They had all hit one wall or another already and were knocked out, though none of them had been pushed so much into the wall that they got caught up in it. I knew that I was the house, but I wasn’t in control of the activity that was causing it to shrink. So I studied what was going on, and figured out how to stop it. Well, not stop. Pause it. The effort of doing so knocked me out, but I guess it stayed paused while I was out.”

Kingsman commented, “It did until just after we got the last of your family members out. Then the house quickly shrank to the size it is now.”

“I woke up for a moment, as you were taking out my remaining sister. My parents were already out. And I could feel how much of a toll keeping the building at that size was taking on me. With nobody left inside but the body of my dead sister, I let go of what I was doing, figuring that if my sister’s body was crushed, it would be a loss, but a much less important one since she was already dead. I passed out again, and awoke in the truck you moved me in.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re OK,” Illinois commented.

About that moment, Jump returned with the woman who was apparently Veritas, and they had Kenny repeat the whole story about his sister’s death and how he gained control of her body.

“She’s telling the truth. Or he is. What pronouns would you like?”

“Well, I was always a he, but given that I have this body now, I’d probably better get used to being a she.”

“OK, then. Her whole story is true, how her sister’s mind died and how she gained control of the body,”

Kingsman replied, “Thank you, Veritas. Jump can take you to where you can sign a statement attesting to this truth and then back to whatever you were doing.”

And Jump took her away.

Illinois said, “I’d like to examine you further, if you don’t mind. If you have good control over your sister’s body then I may not need any of the rest of this crew.”

“I think I do. I can’t separate from the wall entirely but I can move around.”

Inside her little room, she turned around - revealing her completely bare back - and when she turned back around, she was naked in the front, too.

“Oops!” the girl cried, and the door slammed shut.

Illinois ordered, “OK, guys out! Miss Tix, you stay so you can help our patient with her wardrobe problem.”

Even though I was part girl most of the time, I knew the boy-turned-girl who’d just sealed herself up wouldn’t know that, and I accepted the dismissal. A few minutes later, Jump came out and told us we wouldn’t be needed anymore, so Kingsman went back to wherever he worked in the building. Jump led me to where I could get my pay for the day, and then teleported me home.

---

Four months later

Dawson

Kenny, now going by Kendra, and her family invited all of us who helped them over for a housewarming party for their newly rebuilt house. It was at the same location as the original one that shrank. After I arrived, Kendra explained how she’s getting along.

“It looks like you have good control over the house,” I commented. Kendra now had her entire head and arms sticking out the roof, most of her legs out the floor, and she wore the house like a weird sort of dress.

“Yes, it’s still inconvenient at times, but I’ve learned to live with it. I can make it bigger or smaller, but only so much. It can get about as big as it was when you rescued the rest of my family, and small enough it only serves as a bikini top, but I usually leave it this size. But I also do this.”

She sat, but not using furniture. She maneuvered her legs to be coming out the side rather than the bottom of the house and extended the bottom to serve as a chair.

“I use the bikini size when going to the bathroom, and a large size when sleeping.”

“You have a bed?” Jump asked.

“Inside the house. Most of the furniture that was in our old house is still in here, miniaturized, but I can make it larger. When I make the large house, I can bring the bed up to a size I can sleep on. Mostly on, anyway. I can’t be entirely on the bed. Some part of me has to be embedded in a part of the house. So I sleep with my feet in a wall and the rest of me on my bed. While I can make the house the size you saw it when you rescued my family, it’s hard to keep it that size. But I can keep it without effort at a size large enough for the bed.”

She showed us around. Most of the new house looked pretty normal.

“NANA helped us rebuild,” she explained. “I wanted to make my house large enough for my family to live in, but I realized pretty quickly that I couldn’t. So they had to build us a new one, and we stayed in an apartment for a few months while they built it. We’ve only been back here a week, but I figured things out pretty well in the apartment so it was easy to set up here.”

Unlike the rest of the house, Kendra’s room was pretty bare. There was a desk, but no chair, since she didn’t need one, and a big space where she put the enlarged house when sleeping instead of a bed. Near the entrance there was a plaque hanging on the wall serving as a memorial for the dead sister whose body Kenny now used. There was a closet in one corner of the room, but no dresser. The closet was open, and pretty empty. There weren’t any clothes visible.

“Do you have any clothes at all?” Miss Tix asked.

“Yeah. I have everything of Deirdre’s. I keep it all miniaturized inside the house unless I want to use something. If I make the house small and wear it up top, I can wear pants or a skirt. Alternatively I can wear the house on the bottom, and wear a blouse of some sort, or even some kinds of dresses, with the skirt hanging down to cover the house.”

“And a bra, I assume,” Miss Tix interjected.

“Yes, I need a bra in that case. The adjustment from being a boy to being a well-endowed young woman was eased by having my breasts covered by the house most of the time. Dressing like a girl took some getting used to, but I have had months to do that and it’s natural to me now. When I am home, though, I usually still wear the house like this and go without clothes, because there’s no need. Nobody can get inside or look into my house unless I want them to, and that’s pretty much only the doctor. Another reason I don’t wear clothes inside my house is that they don’t survive going through the walls with my body. They’re fine when they go into the wall, but they get destroyed coming out, like the wardrobe malfunction some of you saw when I was in the examining room.”

She laughed and the rest of us laughed with her.

I asked, “The house is your body also. Does it need food? Maintenance? Cleaning?”

“It doesn’t seem to need any maintenance. When we identified some damage, the next time I moved part of my body through that area, it came out fixed. Anywhere I put my body through the house, it opens automatically and closes up fully repaired when I move out. And it doesn’t eat. My human body eats normally. The house does need cleaning, though. When I have my head inside the house, I have to breathe the air inside, so I have to open it up periodically. That opening lets dust get inside, and it’s trapped there unless I make the effort to remove it. But it’s not too bad, really, because I can put all the stuff inside the house anywhere.”

She demonstrated how she cleans things by opening a window which had some wooden surface, I assume a table, behind it, and wiped it off with a paper towel. And it was hard to tell exactly what, but different things were moving up to the same window in turn. Obviously it was easy to clean the dust off when the things were small and she could wipe them with a single swipe of her hand.

“I am not sure what would have happened without Deirdre’s body being part of it. I’m not sure you would have even realized I was stuck in here.”

Kingsman asked, “Do you have electricity inside the house?”

“I don’t. We were talking about hooking the electricity back up when I thought I would restore the house to its original size, but due to the size change, which affects everything including the wires, it wouldn’t be safe. And yeah, I could selectively make the wires larger, but it would be too difficult to ensure I always did it right everywhere. Instead, we got some glow-in-the-dark panels that I put on the outside of the house during the day, and on my ceiling at night. They only provide a low glow, like a night light, but it works well to keep things from being completely dark in there. I instinctively know where everything is inside my body, but it’s still less disconcerting waking up with a little light.”

“Did you choose a code name?” I asked.

“Yeah, I was required to. I chose Little House.”

“Haha! I don’t think your case was what was meant by the title of that book.”

“It’s appropriate though, don’t you think? I’m not sure my powers are going to be useful for anything, but I’m glad to at least be able to live with them.”

“Oh, I can see some use. You can change the sizes of things, like you change your clothes. What are the limits with that?”

“I’m not entirely sure. I know that I can’t make anything bigger than its natural size. When I want to restore some of Deirdre’s clothes so I can wear them, I just make them ‘full size’ and they come out right to fit my body. And it has to fit inside my house before the size change. I’m not sure of the minimum. I’ve made some stuff pretty small.”

“I’m sure there are uses for that. Imagine transporting things in miniature size.”

“Hmm. Maybe. But I’d have to be there at the other end to restore them, and we are keeping our abilities secret from outsiders, so it would be difficult.”

“What about people?” Miss Tix asked.

“It doesn’t work with people. Maybe not with anything alive. I can’t change Deirdre’s body’s size. And my sister wanted to experience being really small so I let her inside the house once but I couldn’t change the size of her body.”

“Well, we all have our limits,” I said. “My power only works on people and people-shaped objects, but when I was helping rescue your family I learned it worked on your whole, combined body, even though only part of it is people-shaped. Also, my power is limited in time and during the rescue I learned it lasts less time on larger bodies.”

“What are you doing about school?” Miss Tix asked.

“It’s complicated. So far I’ve been getting lessons sent to me and a tutor to help sometimes. They want to get me back in school, but Deirdre was a senior in high school. I was only a freshman. I don’t know what she knew, who she knew. I can’t go back to school as Deirdre. I have to go back as me.”

“As Kendra.”

“Right.”

“NANA will adjust your school records, make it so Kenny was Kendra and you can continue where you left off as Kenny.”

“But the kids are going to know, right?”

“The kids who knew you as Kenny will know you changed, yes. The ones who don’t know about powers will still see Kenny, but nearly all the kids learn about powers by the time they enter high school, and they will see you as you are.”

“Will it be a problem for those few who don’t know? Will they see Kenny in a dress?”

“Maybe. We’ll find someone who doesn’t know about powers yet to test it on. And whatever happens, we’ll do what is needed to ensure that you don’t have problems.”

Saturday, April 4, 2009

George

This was NANA’s anniversary, or the weekend closest to it, anyway, and there was a big party. The magical members cast a special spell for the event. Anybody in town who didn’t know about powers would simply not be interested in what was going on in the park, on top of the usual spell that would cause them to not see anybody flying or with green skin or whatever. So it was an event where people could let out their powers in public more than they normally could.

KNRM was playing their usual playlist directly from the event. When there wasn’t something else going on, their on-air program was blasting out across the park. The Listener was staying away because of that, but most of the other people I’d met through NANA were there.

Right after a song they said was a new release, “Tony Stark” by a band called Kirby Krackle (the DJ explained that “crackle” was spelled with an initial K), they interrupted the music in the park to announce the actual event, and several people came up and spoke.

One of those was Greg. He said, “I have some news about one of the longest-running stories in Normal. Steve has been born!”

Clearly a lot of people did not know who Steve was, but still a few dozen people erupted in cheers. Miss Tix came up on stage and started speaking after letting the cheering go on for bit.

“I know many of you probably don’t know Steve’s story, but later this year will be the 25th anniversary since Steve’s most unusual power showed up. The story started when we were contacted by Steve’s girlfriend at the time, Emily. She called to tell us Steve had disappeared. They had been having sex, and he just vanished right in the middle of the act. So that’s why she called us rather than the police.”

There was a round of laughter.

“NANA sent over all the people with different kinds of powers they thought might help figure out what happened to Steve, and I was actually the one who figured it out. We spent some time examining the bedroom where it happened, and found nothing. But because we thought it could have happened because of a power Emily had developed, we checked her out too. What I discovered was she had Steve’s spirit within her, but not in the manner of ghost possession that was my usual area of expertise.”

She paused for effect, and it seemed like it had the desired effect. Everybody got quiet to listen to what she was going to say.

“We set up some other tests to figure out just how he was within her, and we discovered he had somehow transformed into a sperm and had gone up into her along with the normal ones. Unlike the normal ones, he had gone right through a condom!”

Once the various reactions from the audience died down, she continued.

“We had no idea what to do about it, though. We set her up with a device that let her hear Steve’s thoughts, and he confirmed he could hear what she spoke normally. We figured that it was their final days, as sperm typically live for no more than about 5 days, but Steve surprised us all by communicating with her for 20 days, telling her, among other things, that he had missed her egg but he hoped to catch the next one. Emily was a little shocked at that suggestion, but when Steve pointed out that was all he could really do now, she said she was OK with giving birth to Steve if he could manage to impregnate her. But she didn’t turn out to be pregnant after that. She kept the device on for a whole month hoping to hear from him again, but there was nothing.”

There were cries of sympathy from the audience.

“But if that was the end of the story we wouldn’t be up here talking about it! It was several months later when another woman with some psychic detection powers reported that she thought she was possessed because she was detecting something around her all the time. Pretty soon we discovered Steve was now inside her. And he had a story to tell. He’d gotten washed out of Emily with her period, made it through the sewage treatment system even with all the things there that are supposed to kill any bacteria and parasites and such, and through the filters that are supposed to keep anything but pure water from making it back into the water supply. Eventually another woman drank him. He made it into her bloodstream, figured out how to get into her womb... and discovered she was on birth control and could never get pregnant.”

This mostly got laughs.

“He left her through her urine and went through the cycle again. This time he got into a guy, worked his way in with the normal sperm, and into his wife, who was the woman who’d reported his presence. But they were using the rhythm method to avoid pregnancy and she wasn’t willing to get pregnant to help Steve, so, reluctantly, he left her body as well. And he went through this cycle dozens of times, hoping to eventually find his way into a woman who wanted to get pregnant or the partner of one. About once a year somebody would detect him and we’d add another mysterious presence or ‘haunting’ to the Steve file, along with whatever new part of his story he could tell.”

She mimed at first a file folder, then a growing stack of paper.

“I can now report to you all that Steve made it into a woman who wanted to get pregnant, succeeded in impregnating her, and his spirit now controls that woman’s daughter. It was only when the daughter was able to speak well enough to get the story across that her mother contacted us. She found the whole thing a bit weird, but she was aware that a child in Normal could be anything but normal, and she’s happily raising her most unusual child. And we’re keeping their names secret. It will probably eventually come out, but for now Steve’s trying to enjoy a second childhood. Apart from being Steve, the girl has shown no powers, but there’s still lots of time for that.”

Miss Tix turned the mic back over to Greg, who, after other announcements, introduced two other people. “Thanks to the work of our historian, we now have a more complete version of the story of how all of us got started with the fall of the meteor more than a century ago, the remains of which a few of you have actually seen in person. Fred and Frieda are here to tell this story.”

Fred and Frieda took turns speaking:

It was April 3, 1899, a Monday, in this small town which for some time had already been called Normal. It was a lot smaller then, just a few hundred people. In mid-morning the meteor struck. It landed in two farmers’ fields, but it was big enough that it shook the whole town. It caused surprisingly little damage, but the homes, barns, and other structures on those two farms were destroyed.

The residents of those farms were the first four people who gained powers from the meteor: Nicholas, Anne, Norman, and Abigail. Nicholas was the first to free himself from the rubble of his house, discovering he had super-strength in the process. He quickly rescued the others.

His wife Anne was the next to notice her powers. She sensed a lot of people from the town had heard and felt the impact (of what, the four of them still didn’t know) and were coming to investigate. Norman was worried other people were hurt, and without realizing he was doing it, zoomed off at super-speed to check on the nearest other neighbors. Abigail felt some strange sensations, a kind of energy that at this point she couldn’t explain.

Pretty soon Norman came back to where the group was gathered near the remains of his and Abigail’s home. He reported nobody else was hurt, but there was a crater on the line between their properties. So the group went out so they could all see the crater.

Before they even got there, they could see it looked pretty weird. There was light emanating from the crater, pulsing in intensity and changing colors. The light seemed less intense as they arrived at a wall of earth that had been created by the impact, which was blocking their view of most of the light. The wall was about 7 feet tall and extended all the way around the crater, which was about 60 feet in diameter. And, close to the crater, it was hot, but not too hot to walk on in their shoes.

They found a place where there was a more gentle slope going up to the top of the wall, and looked in. They immediately turned their gaze away, as it was almost too bright to look at. But eventually they did look at it. The crater sloped down steeply at first, and later more gently, to the remains of the meteor that had struck the earth that day, and was the source of the weird lights. They couldn’t decide if it was beautiful or creepy, but they were sure it was the cause of the powers they had just gained.

Other people from the town arrived while they were at the crater, and the four informed them of what they had seen, and also of their new-found powers. None of the others reported getting any powers, but some of them felt weird when looking at the meteor. Eventually there were about 50 people there, and nobody had any idea what to do, but they agreed to close off the meteor in case it was dangerous. The innkeeper put them up for free while they and other town residents helped build them new houses elsewhere in town, and a high fence was built all the way around their two former farms.

The four devoted themselves to understanding what had happened. They were aided by other people in the town who discovered they had powers, only a few at first, but more people seemed to develop powers over time. Apart from the original four, proximity to the crater didn’t seem to influence who got powers; they showed up all over town. Abigail turned out to be of the most help, as she discovered she had magical powers. It took her time to figure out how to use them, but ultimately she became a sorceress with powers in real life as strong as the strongest magic-users of legend.

They named their group NANA, after their four initials. It was a few years later, after word had leaked out to people in other towns about what happened in Normal that day, that they began getting a steady stream of visitors wanting to look at the meteor, or wanting to move to Normal in hopes of getting powers of their own. The population of Normal tripled in a year, and NANA realized they needed to do something about it. They spearheaded several efforts.

First off, they had the builders of the town construct a building around the crater, pushing much of the earth that had been piled up around the rim back into the crater, significantly reducing the size of the hole, and as a result reducing the size of the building they had to build around it. The hole was now more straight-down, and they reinforced the walls of the new, narrower hole as well as paving the new surface outside the hole with stones. It would be easier for those actually studying the meteor to do so, and they could also control access to it.

Abigail figured out how to temporarily enhance Anne’s psychic powers in a single subject area, and she used that to locate all the people within hundreds of miles who had heard about what happened. There were tens of thousands of them. Too many to go out and try to locate them all individually and magic them into forgetting about Normal. While those among them who were interested in coming to see the meteor were mostly already in Normal, those people could tell others, and the problem would keep getting worse. With the approval of town leadership, Abigail cast a mass forgetting spell from the center of town, with an exclusion zone large enough to cover all town residents. After that, only the people then in Normal would know anything about the meteor or the powers people got from it.

There were still long-term issues. Normal couldn’t completely isolate itself from outsiders, and visitors would find out from people blabbing or by seeing people using powers, especially as more and more people seemed to get powers of more varied types every year. In 1910, after a lot of research into how to cast stronger and more durable spells, Abigail cast the spell that protects us now, which hides accidental knowledge of our powers from those who don’t already know such powers exist. Also, at this time the name NANA was retroactively declared to mean Normal Always Normal Association, with the dual meanings of providing support to keep the town of Normal alive and maintaining the facade that Normal was in fact a perfectly normal town with nothing weird happening in it.

Of course, there is a lot more than that, but this is the end of the beginning, the time when things started being roughly the way they are today.

They ended their speech, and that was the end of the presentation at that time. They went back to just playing music.

At lunch I saw Fred and Frieda eating and sat down at the table next to them. They had two kids also, and once the kids were done eating they were eager to do play more of the carnival games and such. Frieda took the kids and left Fred with me.

“You said you had an interesting story. I know some of it already, as my story will explain, but go ahead and tell me the whole thing. Frieda will get it from me later; my story will explain that too. I’ll tell you our story afterward.”

So I told Fred my story, and then he told me his. (COMING SOON)

Afternoon of April 4, 2009

Fred (Alpha), as told to George

From my earliest memories, I grew up in two different houses, with two different mothers, two different fathers, two different sets of toys, two different kinds of clothes, in two different bodies... with two different sexes. I slept on a regular nightly cycle even at a young age, but every day I woke up in the other body. And during those sleeping times, I never had the kind of dreams most people have. Instead, I dreamed, at high speed, all the experiences of the initially unknown other person who ran each body while I wasn’t in it, before then waking up in that other body.

As a result of this body-swapping, I got to do everything twice, once in each body, but only driving each body half the time. Learning to walk, to speak, to write, to go to the bathroom, to dress myself. Although the constant swapping sometimes confused things, I think having the opportunities to learn everything twice in different environments helped me learn fast. There was another aspect of my power that helped me learn that I didn’t realize for years later, though.

I had just turned four (both of my bodies did) when I first made contact. I left a note for my other self. In my boy body, I wrote:

Dear Other Self,

I know that you must be doing the same as me, changing each day. Dreaming each night what I did in your other body. Let’s send notes this way.

And I left the note, with pencil on top of it, where the other could not miss it near the bed. Of course, the other would remember writing the note in the “dream” before waking up, so it almost didn’t matter where I left it, but still, I wanted to make it obvious to my other self. I made a similar note the next day in my girl body, and when I was the boy again, I found the response below my first note:

Yes, I figured out you had to exist, too. It’s weird, because I think other people don’t do this. They live in the same body every day.

And I wrote back:

So you think we’re the weird ones? Let’s watch for any signs of this, that anybody else lives like us.

The other me agreed, and of course as four-year-olds we didn’t discover much, so we made no progress on that goal for a while. But while we didn’t always have anything to say, it became a habit and we got used to writing a little each day. When we turned five, celebrating a year of communicating like this, and neither of us having observed any sign that other people did the same thing, we decided other people probably didn’t do this. We agreed to still keep watching for evidence, though.

Later that year, both of us had a chance to see our birth certificates when our parents enrolled us in kindergarten. Both of us were born precisely at 2:27 PM on January 30, 1970. We thought that was interesting but didn’t know what to make of it. It spurred us to learn about the calendar, though, and within the year, we had learned what we needed, including about leap years, and also some basic math. We determined how many days we’d been living, and that, if we had in fact changed every night since birth (a fact we could not verify, though it had happened consistently since we had understood it), I was born as Frieda and he as Fred. We started marking day numbers in our notes back then, and while we no longer need to exchange notes that way, we still keep the day count in our heads. Today we turn 14,309 days old.

We assumed that we had swapped since birth, though whether we had actually done so didn’t matter, as we were then and as far as we know forever locked into being both Fred and Frieda. Though we were both in Normal, we weren’t in the same school, so at that time we continued communicating only through these notes.

Before long, I proposed naming our two minds, or whatever it was that was swapping bodies. In my girl body, I wrote:

I know this body is named Frieda and the other one is named Fred, and we both use those names as we live in each body. But we should have names for our SELVES. I made contact first, so I propose that I’m Alpha and you’re Beta.

And the response to that was:

How about I’m Omega? Just because you thought of the idea to exchange notes this way shouldn’t make me secondary. Instead think of me as your opposite.

So I wrote:

A: Fine. I’m Alpha and you’re Omega.

This was shortly after we turned 6. A couple months earlier, I’d encountered the Greek alphabet when one of our parents had left a dictionary open to the alphabet table, and like everything else, we’d committed it to memory. We learned the Hebrew alphabet too, but the Greek one was what we’d seen used a few times. But having decided on the names and working from my precedent, Omega started prefacing all her, um, his or her writings with Ω: and we eventually went back and labeled all our other writings to the very beginning that way, in addition to adding the day numbers.

Sorry, pronouns are weird! Most of the time I’m OK. But for me to tell another person our story, since each of us is male half the days and female the other half, I end up stumped trying to apply a pronoun to Omega generically over time. When we wrote to each other it was only “me” and “you” and there was no problem, and when I’m referring to a specific event I use whichever pronoun applies at the time of that event, so most of the time I don’t notice the problem.

We were 8 when Fred’s dad figured out what was happening. Omega was in Fred when it happened, but I got the conversation in full that night, of course.

“Fred, can you sit with me for a moment? I want to ask you about something.”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Do you experience anything strange? A presence in your head on certain days? Or maybe something stranger than that?”

“Yes, Dad. Maybe ‘stranger than that.’”

“Can you describe it for me?”

“Every night, I swap bodies with another person, a girl who lives somewhere else in Normal. Before I wake up in her body, I see what she did the day before, and before I wake up in this body, I see what he did in this body the day before.”

“Oooo-kay. That was not what I was expecting, but it does explain what I have noticed.”

“What did you notice? We thought we were the only ones doing this, and we were looking for signs it was happening to anyone else.”

“Wait. You communicate with this girl, the other who is sometimes in your body? This body, I mean.”

“We’ve been leaving each other notes since we were four, though the body-swapping has been happening as long as we can remember.”

“OK. I guess that makes sense. Well, I can help, maybe. Although our town’s called Normal, it’s rather abnormal. Sometimes people here develop powers.”

“What kind of powers?”

“A bunch of different kinds, no two exactly alike. Some of them are like comic book heroes. Some of them are weird ones, nowhere near as useful as those powers. Some of them are downright harmful to the people who get them and leave them essentially disabled, but with disabilities that are unique to Normal.”

“You think what Alpha and I have is a power?”

“Alpha? The girl’s named Alpha?”

“No. The girl’s named Frieda. But Alpha and Omega are names we chose for our minds, while Fred and Frieda are the names given to the bodies. She’s Alpha because she was the first one to first think to leave notes they way we’ve done regularly ever since then.”

“Well I have a power too, a psychic power. But it’s a pretty weak one, and I’m not really able to use it effectively. I just sense things once in a while that don’t come through any of the normal senses. So I live like the majority of people in Normal, the ones without powers, in mostly the same kind of life people live everywhere else in the world. You can tell just how weak my power is since it took me 8 years to figure out this has been going on with my own son.”

Fred’s dad contacted NANA, who said not to talk to Frieda’s parents yet, because they were outsiders who moved to Normal as adults and didn’t know about powers. NANA set up what they considered a proper way to inform them about the powers in general as well as our specific power, or what they knew of it.

After that, they arranged a combined testing session, two days long so they could test both of us in each body. We didn’t have any other powers they noticed, except for photographic memory with near-perfect recall. They said that might not even qualify as a power at all, because some people outside Normal have that ability, but the way it occurred with us together with our body-swapping, they considered it part of our power.

In one test, we were given 30 seconds to examine the sequence of cards in a deck, and then we then had to guess the cards in that same sequence. Over several full decks, each of us got about 95% of them right. If we were given only a few seconds to riffle the deck, we’d only get about 20% of them right, clearly better than random but probably not enough to effectively cheat at card games. If we repeated the same deck we’d already guessed one card at a time and been shown our errors, we’d get it 100% the second time, every time, and we’d still be able to remember it perfectly the next day in the other body.

A more powerful psychic than Fred’s dad was able to confirm the body swap, and physical testing showed differences in the way each of us controlled each body. Essentially, we had learned to walk, throw, etc. in slightly different ways and so we continued to do so. Neither of us was better or worse in those physical actions; each was better at some things in each body. Neither of us was significant better at any of those physical activities than a normal person. Even our handwriting was different, but it took a handwriting expert and large samples to tell the difference; nobody could see a difference between the way I signed Fred’s name and the way Omega did.

We got Alpha and Omega as our code names, so they became official, in a sense.

They gave us experiments to try later. What happened if one of us tried to stay up the whole night while the other slept? The answer was that the awake one could only last a couple hours beyond the other getting to sleep. And we figured out that the change happened right then; if we woke up immediately after the second one was pulled into sleep this way, we’d be in the other body and we’d have the whole day’s memories from the other body rush through us all at once. If we went back to sleep quickly after waking up, that didn’t swap us again; there was a minimum awake time as well. By varying when we went to bed, we could vary when the change occurred, and we figured if we tried we could eventually shift around a whole 24 hours, but we never did.

Doing these experiments also helped us understand better how our processing of memories happened. As soon as we changed bodies, we had access to the memory of what happened in that body, but it wasn’t integrated into our minds, Alpha’s and Omega’s minds, yet. We could still, if something suggested to us to look for it, find any event that happened during the body’s previous day and basically read that memory. What took time was making the mind aware of all those events, and the time asleep after we changed usually provided that time. If we didn’t become aware of an event during the day in the body where it happened, we wouldn’t have access to it when we were in the other body. And even with a full night’s sleep, we didn’t get every detail without consciously reviewing the memories, but we usually got enough to allow us to focus on the important moments.

After this point, our families started spending a lot of time together so that we could be together. Some of that time was free play-time, but there were more serious moments. After one shared dinner, we got the birds and bees talk, together, both sets of parents explaining the boys’ side and the girls’ side to both of us, since we clearly needed both. Our four parents occasionally argued about points, but when they did, they quickly came to an agreement. After one of these momentary disagreements, they told us they had agreed they were going to tell us the truth as much as possible, and not get preachy about it (as some parents do), but tell us seriously about the risks of pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and the kind of emotional effects that having had sex with someone can lead to. They acknowledged it was going to be weird for us, even weirder than it is for most teens, because of our daily swapping, and we were going to have to chart our own course, but they wanted us to do so in possession of all the facts they could tell us.

At first, Omega and I agreed only that it was going to be weird and difficult for us, and, for the time being, to simply wait. We weren’t going to be like certain other kids we knew who had declared themselves boyfriend and girlfriend in fourth grade. There was no need; we had time. We had a pretty short discussion in our diaries at that time. (By this point, we’d both graduated from random scraps of paper through spiral notebooks and then to diaries with dated pages for the discussions we had by written notes.)

But it didn’t take long before we were going into middle school and realized we needed to start thinking about it more seriously. Who did we like? Did I like boys or girls? Did I like girls when I was Fred and boys when I was Frieda, or was it the same all the time? And all those same questions for Omega. And wouldn’t it be incredibly awkward if we didn’t like the same kind of person as the other did when we were in the same body? So far, we’d managed to maintain the same friends, but romantic partners are much more than friends. And to tell the truth, neither of us were sure about the answers to any of these questions, so we decided, again, to wait, even though some of the kids were going out on some sort of dates at this age.

We were also now starting gym classes where we were going to be changing and showering with other naked boys or girls, depending on which body we were in. We still hadn’t told any of our classmates about our changes, but most of the teachers and the gym coaches knew. The boys’ and girls’ coaches pulled us aside once each during the first week of classes, and basically told us that what we were doing already was going to continue as long as we personally could handle it. Fred would shower with the other boys, and Frieda with the other girls, and nobody would think anything special of it. Neither of us would stare too much at the other naked people around us, which was actually the way most of the kids behaved. That was a pretty simple rule, and we both agreed.

Soon we noticed the changes in our own bodies, the beginning of erections and the voice change for Fred, breasts and training bras for Frieda, and all the other changes that came with them. Frieda’s periods wouldn’t be far off. And here’s where our stories are a lot alike. Just like you had to do with Samantha, Omega and I came to an agreement about sex and masturbation and such. At this point, we decided masturbation was OK, and would help us each learn what we liked, and sex with other people was off limits. We were still not going to date other people, but we could look, and identify people we might want to be with, assuming they would accept us, and assuming both me and Omega would accept the same person, and we’d discuss it later.

Once we were in high school, we still hadn’t gone on dates, but we accepted that we had to think seriously about it once Frieda had gotten asked for dates a couple times. Clearly it was possible for Fred to ask girls for dates as well, but should we? We decided we would do a few dates to have the experience, but the whole thing was so awkward... was it OK for one of us to plan a date, or accept one, on a day the other would have to go out on it? We decided to discuss all of these things, preferably face-to-face, before we did them. And we’d also go out on some dates with each other. We were, after all, more than friends, though not in the way some people use that phrase!

Just trying to figure out what to do was awkward, but I let Frieda go out on a date first, with one of the guys who asked her. I used the experience, what the guy did that seemed right, what he did that seemed too touchy-feely, what he did that seemed like he was ignoring me, etc. to help guide me on a date as Fred. I can’t say that entirely worked, but it wasn’t a complete failure, either. But neither Fred nor Frieda ever dated the same other person twice.

Part of the problem was I just wasn’t interested enough. I suppose for most girls and boys, a ritual that was a prelude to getting to see someone of the opposite sex naked was interesting, at least for the novelty of it. There was nothing novel for me! Within any span of two days I saw a naked boy and a naked girl. Much more than saw! I had the sexual urges other teens had, but the unknown and the curiosity for finding it out wasn’t there.

The dates when I went out with Omega were the best. We weren’t very romantically interested in each other, but we felt comfortable being with another person who understood our nature, our problem, our difficulties in being with a normal person who lived in the same body all the time. We could just be normal and not worry that we were going to forget something we should know about our date that happened when the other of us was in control of the body, that we were going to reveal we knew something that we shouldn’t, that out nature was going to be exposed, or some other weird thing was going to happen. Together, we knew that if something weird did happen, we’d understand, keep it secret between us if possible, or else one of us would help the other make whatever it was right.

I didn’t know anybody else like us who experienced being both male and female; there were others, as it turned out, but they were less common than today. Of course, we planned those dates so that each of us got to wear both bodies on dates, as equally as we could. For that and for the practical reasons of us necessarily living part of each others’ lives, by the time we were finishing high school, we had decided we were sticking together.

Then we were thinking about college, and certainly about going to college together. Throughout middle school and high school, Fred and Frieda were in the same classes, except for a few electives where we had intentionally taken different classes just to learn a few more things. We aced most tests due to learning the same material twice. But it would be a lot less practical to have Fred and Frieda take the same classes in college. There’s no college in Normal; it would mean going outside, and not having the cooperation of administrators who understand our unique situation. It was explained to us, and I am sure, George, that you’ll soon get the same explanation in school, that Normal never built a college because it would draw in more outsiders than we wanted, and more problem cases. Imagine how many college kids would develop powers and either be unable to explain them to their outside families, or have to bring their whole families in on our secret. We had enough people who randomly ended up here as it was.

It would also cost two students’ worth of tuition when it seemed like one was enough. We learned those electives fully well enough with only one body taking the classes. Sure, we’d get scholarships to cover a lot of it, but even then, we’d be having to apply for all those scholarships twice, and possibly competing with each other for some of them. And it would be real money. Here in Normal, people with powers sometimes do things for others which are easy to do with powers but hard otherwise, at a great discount off what it would cost normally. No such discount would apply to college.

A lot of our college decisions were locked in after people from NANA contacted us during our senior year with a future job offer. They needed a historian, someone to manage all the records, organize them, and get them into computers. With my ability to recall anything I’d ever read, I’d easily be able to determine what documents were missing from searches, though that ability would help later on, as first I needed to get them all in.

At that time, they basically had one computer file, a database of the powered people in Normal, their code names, powers, addresses and phone numbers, and a reference to where their paper files could be found. They knew that a lot better than this was possible, and by the time I finished college our computers were expected to be much more powerful, and even more would be possible. So I was signing up for a degree in library science. That was the most common degree for jobs like this, to the extent that any job was like this one, and would cover both the organizational techniques and the computational ones. They’d made clear they’d be hiring me to make their records available through a computer system, and not to simply memorize all the records and provide the answers myself, though the latter was a side-benefit of picking me for the job.

The solution we found for attending college, one which allowed us to be together and yet not pay redundant tuition, nor confuse ourselves by taking different classes, was to get married. Since we’d already decided we were committed to each other, it was only a question of getting married then or later. At colleges where we were applying there was married student housing, effectively apartments sized for two people, reserved for married students. They were most often used by graduate students and what they called non-traditional students, meaning those who attended college later in life rather than directly out of high school, or returned after dropping out. But any married student was eligible. The housing cost a little more, but it cost a whole lot less than taking two sets of classes. So Fred would go to college, and Frieda would stay around the apartment and do housewife-type things, meaning that Omega and I alternated those roles, and we both learned our skills. This way, later on we’d be able to handle the job the same way. We planned we’d have kids someday and whoever was Frieda each day would take care of them.

The standard for this sort of job was a master’s degree, so I enrolled in a program that would get me the bachelor’s degree after year 4 and the master’s degree after year 5. Though I’d worried about the costs, between the other scholarships I earned on merit and one which NANA gave me, my tuition and fees and rent for the first four years were completely covered, and our two sets of parents were able to provide money for food and other expenses. I had a little debt the 5th year since a lot of those programs only covered four years, but I knew I’d easily pay it off in two years of my job. And I did!

Computers did improve a lot in those five years, and light-years since then. I realized I was going to have to keep up on advances in technology to do my job well. That occasionally meant taking online courses to acquire new skills, but NANA paid for me to take those during working hours as a part of my job. And the system was redesigned several times before I got all the records in. At first, we were just scanning all the documents, storing them on a network server, and providing links to the documents in the records of the people they belonged to. Later the server became a web server, and NANA members outside our headquarters could still access the data (with appropriate security in place). And we added OCR to read the text of the documents. And better OCR later to fix all the errors in the first application of OCR. I’m working on a system now that applies natural language technology to help locate the remaining errors, and hopefully next year we’ll have essentially perfect digital records going back to the start of powers.

But I long ago succeeded in my first goal, so that all the researchers at NANA have a computer system with which they can easily search for any records they need. I’m still going to be employed, improving the technology and keeping everything running, though I might be more involved in the research that many people do at NANA after that time.

Now you might think that with the viewpoint provided to me by my powers, I would also be valuable for my ability to compare how things are for men and women, whether that’s based on society’s treatment or on the sexual functions. I did do that, early on. But since then, we’ve had plenty of other people to fill that role, yourself included, George. And of course I know who all of them are, but that’s only to be revealed for official business.

Omega and I had agreed that once we started the job, we’d also start having kids, but we stopped after the two, Fritz and Felicia, who you met at lunch. Whichever one of us is Frieda takes care of the kids, and whichever is Fred works, much like we split the studying and chores during college, including sometimes informing the other in the evening of big work news rather than letting it pass overnight our usual way.

That’s the end of the story, or at least the end so far. Fritz and Felicia haven’t started showing any powers yet, and definitely not like ours, but they are just at the age where it’s common for powers to show up. And I see my family coming back now to remind me it’s time to tell the history again for a new group of visitors.