Chapter 2 - Catalog Shopping

When I started to get interested in bras and girdles I was pretty much out-of-luck, no sister and my mother was considerably larger, but back then the bras went for $1.49. I could actually buy that stuff and try it on!

What happened on Warblington station platform after Rachel left her sister Glenda there.

 

Chapter 1 - Maundering

Maunder. A good, old-fashioned word. You don't hear it much these days unless it's in the cliché about old people maundering on about the past. Since I just hit my 70th birthday, I guess I'm licensed to maunder, so here goes.

Chapter 1

I tried to hope. I like to think of myself as an optimistic person, more ready to smile than frown, but I am pretty sure my smile was brittle today. This would be my third foster home and I had already got the impression that my new foster parents didn't care about any of us, apart from the money that we could bring. On the plus side, the one person I had been most scared to meet was my new foster father after the fiasco with my last one and Greg seemed harmless and completely disinterested.

“Sylvia told us that he doesn’t mind cross dressing for you. I’m sorry to ask, but do you feel the same?”

“Why apologize? We need this information. Yeah, I have no problem doing the same for him.”

“Okay, Reg, now look at yourself. Are you interested in men?” She shook her head. “Are you bi?” Again she shook her head, but this time a smile was forming on her face.

“I see. I believe you’re right. You change sex, and gender to the same as the person who touched you!”

Paula nodded. Beside her, Fred’s expression was one of disgust aimed at his damned brother. What a complete bastard!

The second trial hingeing on Erica's evidence starts in this chapter but evidence emerges unexpectedly.

“Do you want me to show you how to sew?” Pasyala asked. “Or has your mother already shown you?”

 

“No,” Devi said at first. “Girls do sewing and knitting and stuff.” But then he reflected: People go into other worlds to learn valuable lessons and have adventures and stuff. The portal made me a girl, so maybe it wants me to learn about girl stuff before it will let me go home and be a boy again? “I guess I’m a girl now, so I can learn how to sew and stuff.”

Careless Memories
As the court dare approached I tried to block everything else out but my family. I went on those stupid supervised visits but we also tried out my sister’s idea buy hacking my parents take the kids out to Chuck E. Cheese’s or to their favorite hibachi restaurant and I would just “show up” to join them. Rini and Marisa were usually given a lot of tokens or a lot of sushi to keep them occupied from any conversation the rest of us had about how everyone was doing.

The two women on the other side of the room were screaming for the men to stay away from them. For their part, the men got as far away as they could. Fred jumped away from his friend, terrified, and Paul turned and ran from the room. Part way down the hall, his pants could no longer stay up, and he, or rather she, had to pause to pull them up, then she headed for her office. She slammed the door shut and locked it. With a deadbolt and combination that only she knew.

She let out a sigh of relief, then stopped and wondered what the hell had just happened.

In the stories, kids who go through portals to other worlds need to learn something from it. Maybe there’s something I’m supposed to learn from being a little girl. And there’s definitely got to be something I’m supposed to do here, but I don’t know what yet.”

We were called to the command center to find a very grim faced Smythe there. “I’m very sorry for this,” he told us. “I’m able to see Earth now, even to zoom in and see cities.”

We watched as the scopes were brought online. All of the cities were seen through an orange haze, that billowed like smoke. There were no people to be seen although we could see what we thought might be the remains of many. There were craft that appeared to have once been smoking ruins. Some buildings were present, in a very decayed condition, but the vast majority were piles of rubble.

It appeared that Caesar was not happy being the only one gone.

Lola begins to cement her Friendship with Duchess Callie and her wife Maggie. Callie also extends the next invitation to Denton Hall to Lola's step-sisters Olivia, Angela and Erica and thus the sagas on Bab's Resolution and Heir to a title are merged..

Copyright owned by Beverly Guinevere Taff

I stared at the head of my best friend. I don’t know how long it was, but I heard a man crying. I looked toward the body, and there was Marc. He had somehow collapsed on the floor, and his head was on her back. I had not started crying yet, but that scene broke me. Those two had loved each other so much. I felt a weight move from my lap, and saw that my husband had moved Kari’s head, and respectfully placed it on the floor. He took me in his arms and kissed me ever so gently, then he moved to Kari’s body and cut the familiar piece of her leg out and left the room carrying it. A few minutes later, he was back and took me in his arms and let me weep. I wanted so much to hold Marc, but he was unbonded. To do so would kill both John and me. John did something I’d never seen him do. He gently picked up Marc and hugged him. Marc was still weeping over the loss of his wife. We started to ease him to his apartment, when the strangest thing happened. We received an incoming communication!

[The three friends are meeting up once again in London]

The girls laughed themselves silly when Phoebe said that she was not going to go on any more blind dates but that she’d signed up to a speed dating evening.

“But Pheebs…?” exclaimed Lana.

“But what?”

“But… you are just putting yourself… out there.”

“Isn’t that the aim of the game? To go out with some men in the hope that I find someone for a long-term relationship?”

“She’s right Lana,” said the third member of the trio, Sky.

The next morning, he entered the courtroom and asked the jury their findings. He hardly had to ask. The man was guilty.

For the first time in many years, Fred felt that his conscience was clear. Without a moment’s hesitation, he sentenced the man to the punishment Paul had said the night before.

Freeman had accepted that he was a judge to this murderer, and a judge to his brother. He didn’t like the job, but as the president, it was part of his job description. He was determined to change that, but until it was, he would do the job to the best of his ability.

Instead, he reclined his seat and just let the ocean current carry him for awhile. His communication system started beeping. Someone was trying to reach him, but he ignored it. It beeped again, and he picked it up, looked at the name if the person calling him, and threw it as far as he could. He saw no reason to speak to anyone at the moment. Besides, Paul would still be there when he got back to the capitol building.

He leaned back again and closed his eyes. Eventually, sleep claimed him.