Chapter 5 - The Talk

When my parents got home, I somehow managed to convince them that I hadn't spent the afternoon doing something that was, well, considered perverted back then. Not that they asked, but there wasn't much of anything else on my mind. Heck, a lot of people still consider it perverted right now in 2020.

Bab’s New Year’s Resolution 38 ©

Through the corridors, I could hear screams and panicked voices. A light went red. Thunk! Another light went yellow, while two more went red. Thunk! Thunk! I glanced at, then couldn't look away from the screens showing the bays. The first one, our home, seemed to be crumbling away as it slowly pirouetted, the distance between us growing.

I stared, and everything seemed to be happening at the end of a dark tunnel. The next thing I knew, I was waking up on the floor with Carla beside me, making sure I was alright

"Perfect," Paula told her daughter as she saw the course come alive on the screen. It took her a moment to order it, however. While it ended with them intersecting, this would be dangerous. The course was theoretically possible, but it was closer than any sane person would want to get to a star. Hell with it, she thought. "Do it."

Rhoda committed them by pressing a button, and the engines fired. The ship slowed allowing their fall around the star to become stronger. A moment later, the thrusters realigned them, and the engines fired again, making them accelerate their fall while at the same time, angling them to where they would miss the surface and just barely skim the edge of the sun's atmosphere.

Mary looked down at Meagan as one of her hands stroked her hair. She was worried when Meagan collapsed. But everybody told her she had just fainted. Which was understandable. Everything that’s happened since last night is a lot to take in. And then, to be told that the gods had changed her. Well, who wouldn’t have fainted?

Suddenly,we received a message from Colleen. “Rashda, we have something up here that you need to see.”

Smythe looked around at us all. “John and Rose, will you come with me? Winston, figure this out please.” Then he touched a button that put his voice through every intercom on the ship. “Mr Dodson, would you please come to the command center?”

Then we were off.

 

Chapter 3 - Sonya Henie's Tutu!

Up in my bedroom I sat at my desk in a daze. Until a half hour ago I wouldn't have thought anything could have made me think of anything but not being able to try on my new clothes. I wasn't happy with my mother for trying to distract me from my funk, but - Sonya Henie's Tutu! - she had managed it.

Jonathan Moorland orphaned by his own hand looks for escape. The trouble is he cannot escape his own nature.

 

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.