I read a couple other books and was interrupted reading another by my phone. There was a message from Anna, asking me to meet up with her for dinner. I realized then that time had passed and it was indeed dinner time for me now. But she was not in the club, instead asking me to meet her at the fifth-floor cafeteria. I told her I’d be right there.

Of course, even if we were eating in the cafeteria, she was my date, so I didn’t jump immediately over there, but instead portaled back to my room and dressed appropriately for it, deciding to try out purple. It was spur of the moment, so I made basically the same dress I’d worn the first day, just in a different color, and remade my purse, shoes, and lipstick in that color as well. Did purple lipstick work? I checked it out in the selfie-mirror and decided it did. I portaled out from my room to a wall near the third-floor cafeteria, which I knew, and then down two flights of stairs nearby.

Anna was waiting for me outside the doors, dressed in some sort of shimmering outfit that defied being categorized as a color. I felt underdressed. But getting to date a woman who looked like Anna was a treat. There were tons of great looking women here, but she outshone everyone else in the room.

“Wow! You look amazing!”

“Thanks. I think we hit it off really well the other night, and I wanted to impress you.”

“Well I didn’t have much time to plan anything.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it. I like you just like this. You have a sort of simple elegance. Some of the women here go way over the top. And if you think I’m over the top, just let me know; I can scale back.”

“I love it. Makes me feel like I’m dating someone important, like I would have had to be wearing a tux in my old life.”

“A tux? You were closeted?”

“Yeah. I’ll tell you about the hater government later. Let’s eat!”

The cafeteria was the same as the one on the third floor with the short serving lines on each side of the entrance, and as we got into line and I tried to think of what I wanted to eat, I asked, “Why here instead of the club?”

“The club is for dancing or hooking up. It would be crammed full if everybody dating tried to use it at once.”

“Ah, I see. Yes, there are only so many people working in the restaurant.”

“It can also be useful for you in exploring other foods. You’re going to be here a very long time, and you’ll never get fat no matter what you eat. You should try different things.”

“Good point! But since we’re here, does that mean you’re going to suggest something for me?”

“Let’s start with this,” she said, grabbing an extra plate and turning it into a bowl shape. She filled it with about an inch deep of the rice, and then transformed it into a bowl of nachos with the works. Not just chips and queso; there were jalapenos, olives, and several other kinds of ingredients in there.

“Nice!”

Then to my surprise on her original plate she made a Chinese-style dish of rice with beef and green bell peppers.

“Oh, I thought we were doing Mexican.”

“No, you can mix and match. That’s the beauty of it. And you can use the chips to dip into mine if you decide you want a taste.”

Having trouble thinking of something, what I did instead was to cover my plate with a good pile of rice and transform it into one of the menus from the restaurant.

Anna laughed. “I didn’t think of doing that!”

Glancing through it, I decided on an Italian dish with bowtie pasta and tiny shrimp. Tucking the menu under my arm, I refilled my plate and made that. Then we got drinks and went to a table.

Anna commented, “The way you carried the menu wasn’t very ladylike, but it worked.”

“Sorry, I didn’t have much practice being ladylike before I came here.”

“Oh, you said something about the hater government. What’s that about?”

“The United States. I don’t know where you were from, so I don’t know how much you’re aware of it.”

“France, but when I came here 14 years ago, the United States was starting to allow same-sex marriage. I thought things were going well there.”

“A lot has changed in that time. They elected a president, I can’t even get myself to say his name, who is a general bigot. He hates blacks, Hispanics, women, and has a particular hatred for anybody LGBTQ.”

“How did he get elected hating all those people? Isn’t that over two-thirds of America in that one sentence?”

“He knew how to talk to specific groups. For instance, he courted the fundamentalist Christian vote by appealing to their feeling of gays being sinful by promising to legislate against them. And he basically took over the conservative political party by drawing all the white, racist voters to him, and pulled in other votes he had no chance in hell of getting otherwise simply by being chosen as that party’s candidate.”

“Wow. I don’t quite understand a couple of those words, though.”

“I know which ones. Fundamentalist and conservative both mean the same thing in this context, wanting to maintain old-time values. For some of these people in both groups, those old-time values are the ones from the racist past, when society was run by white, straight men and everybody else was a second-class citizen. And enough of the leadership of those groups believed that way to drag the rest of their supporters into his camp.”

“I get it now, though it sounds awful. Thanks. What did he do once elected?”

“In his first term, he was utterly incompetent, selected incompetent advisors, and was largely ineffective. His only major accomplishment, by chance due to deaths and retirements, was to get to select three justices for the Supreme Court. They proceeded to roll back some of the protections the groups he hates had managed to earn over the last half century.”

“His first term? He got elected again?”

“Yeah, after one term out of office. In his second term, his party had control of all the branches of government, and it turned into a bloodbath. Literally turned back the clock of progress 100 years. Blacks and gays were sometimes beaten and killed on the street just for being what they are. His first term made me leery of going public about being trans, and his second term made me decide it was never going to happen.”

“I’m sorry about that, but I understand now why you were closeted.”

“I did actually go out once in a dress, at the Halloween before last, when I was still in high school. I wasn’t openly trans even with my girlfriend then, but I let her think she came up with the idea of us going out as a cross-dressed couple at Halloween, agreed to it, and let her arrange things including what I needed. But it was the only time; we went off to different colleges and started dating other people. So I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity here, even though it’s different from anything I had imagined possible.”

“Hmm. Is there something we should do about the haters there? As I understand it, vampires have stayed out of human politics for centuries, apart from small nudges.”

“Yeah, Kelly told me some about that. I don’t have any specific ideas about what we should do, and since I’m new here, I’m not sure how I’d go about proposing them if I did.”

“Maybe just tell Kelly. She’s your host, right? She’ll have somebody she worked for on the project to bring you here, and can pass the word up the line.”

“Sure. Sounds good. Now let’s eat.”

We ate our food, sharing the nachos and also using a few of the chips to take samples from each others’ entrees. It was all delicious.

After we were done and put the plates away, Anna said, “I’ve got an idea for another fun thing we can do.”

I followed her down to a portal to the 18th level, where there was a theater. But not movies on a screen. We went past the main entrance to the theater, down a long corridor, and through one of several doors, onto an empty stage, behind closed curtains. From some sort of control panel Anna selected something. There was a mechanism that I could hear under the stage which moved some set pieces into place. The title “Romeo and Juliet” appeared facing us at the top of the curtain. She did a bit more, and the display changed to read “Rosalie and Juliet.”

“Do you want to be Rosalie or Juliet?”

“Huh?”

“We’re going to act in the show. The other actors are robots.”

“Oh, I guess I’ll be Rosalie.”

“OK, watch for your cues here,” Anna said, pointing to the stage left wall, a spot which wouldn’t have been visible to anyone in the audience, if there had been an audience, where there was a label reading “Rosalie” and below it the instruction “Silence your phone.”

Anna continued, “Mine are on the other side.” Indeed, there was a similar “Juliet” panel on the other wall.

Once Anna confirmed I had followed the direction, she pressed another button on the control panel, and things started happening. Below “Rosalie” there were stage directions to tell me where to go, and the curtains opened and the play started. There were small spotlights on stage that had our character names written in them that told us where to stand when we had to move somewhere. All the other actors were statues that the same under-stage mechanisms moved into place as they were needed, and there were recordings of their lines, modified to refer to my character as Rosalie, and in the places where it mattered, as female. When there were lines for me or Anna, they appeared under our character names on the side walls and a red light lit up next to them when we were expected to say them. It would wait for us to speak, and if we didn’t, the red light would start blinking after a bit. But if we flubbed a line, when we stopped speaking the show just went on.

There were small lounges on both sides off-stage where lines and stage directions for all characters were visible, so we could be ready for when we next needed to act. When we needed a prop, there were stage directions to tell us where to pick it up and where to deposit it again later. My poison vial late in the show was described as “vial of poison (it’s empty; just pretend).”

When the show ended, I was surprised to hear an audience of about 20 people clapping for us out in the dark seating area, with some shouts of “Bravo!” I entirely missed when they entered, so I don’t know how much of it they saw. Our last stage directions told us to walk to the front of the stage and take a bow, and once we were standing on our marks, the curtain closed behind us, and the lights over the audience came on, revealing them to me.

Most of the audience filed out, leaving just three people, who came forward. When I went down to see who was interested in meeting us, it was Kelly and two men I hadn’t met yet.

“Bravo, Brandy. You were great,” Kelly said.

“How did you know I was here?”

She indicated one of the men. “Michael told me. He’s the one who assigned me to bring you into Trans-Sylvania, and he sent me a message saying you were on stage here, so I hurried down.”

“And how did you know, Michael?”

“It was just by chance. I subscribe to the notifications when a show is starting and sometimes I come down to watch.”

“Oh, so this is something you do.”

Kelly then said, “Brandy and Anna, I’d like to introduce you to my husband, Victor.”

The other man waved to us, then said, “Brandy, it’s nice to meet you. I wasn’t planning to meet you at all, and just let Kelly do the job she was assigned to orient you. We were planning to spend the evening together if Kelly wasn’t needed as host, but because of that, we had not made specific plans. When Kelly said she was going to see you in the stage show, I decided to tag along.” Then he added, “And nice to meet you too, Anna.”

Then I said, “Kelly, since you and Michael are here, it’s a good time to mention this.” I recapped the situation with the US government that I had described for Anna, and Anna’s thought that we should do something, though I still didn’t know what we could do.

Michael responded, “That’s interesting. I am not sure what we can do without blowing our secrecy, and I am sure our leadership would not find this important enough for that, but there could be something. I’ll pass it along.”

“Thanks,” I replied, and Anna and Kelly also both thanked him.

“And thank you, Anna,” I said to her, planting a big kiss before she could respond.

“I’m glad you enjoyed it,” she said once I gave her the room to do so.

“How long has this theater been here?” I asked, intending it for Anna.

Anna shrugged, but Michael responded, “It was revamped in the 1960s to the current mechanical form. The original stages were built in the late 1800s, when electric lighting made such a place possible for us, and with the same intention as now for anyone to be able to try their hand at acting. It needed several workers to move the set pieces and run cue cards. They plays were immensely popular at first, and they had a full cast for the shows and a waiting list to act, and sometimes full audiences. That led to them building more theaters alongside this one. Later the popularity waned, after a lot of the people had seen most of the plays performed, and they sometimes had to recruit audience members to fill roles for one daily performance.”

“Everything new gets old eventually,” Anna commented.

“Yes,” Michael agreed. “In the 1920s, they built the wooden statues to stand in for missing actors, and set workers read the lines, in order to keep some shows going. But eventually, they often didn’t even have actors willing to play the lead roles, and they cut back performances to once or twice a week, and in the 1930s they shut it down completely. But several theater enthusiasts arrived in the 1950s, including me, and we recruited some stagehands to help us put on shows occasionally. Our stories about how the shows used to be available for anybody to try their hand at playing roles inspired some of our audience to give it a try, and some technically oriented people among them helped us build the mechanisms to do fully automated shows. We recorded all the lines; you heard me in this one as Benvolio. We only have the statues for 8 plays, but we set up two of them on each stage, including gender variations in the main roles where relevant, since what little demand there was in those days for running the shows was mainly for doing gender-swapped versions. Once a year we come down here and remake everything to ensure it keeps working.”

“Wow!” I said, and I wasn’t alone. We were all amazed at the history.

But then I realized that going through the whole play on stage was a lot for me. “Thanks, everyone, but I’m bushed. I definitely have to do more with you, Anna. Just not tonight.”

This precipitated the five of us all leaving, using four portals to go back to our respective rooms. I stripped and crashed into bed, asleep in minutes.

---

Wednesday

The explanation about the theater brought to mind more questions, and after breakfast I went hunting in the library for answers.

First off, since they’ve apparently been down here for millennia, before they got electric lights in the late 1800s, how in the heck did they light this place? I know about candles, but wouldn’t they have run out of oxygen? For that matter, wouldn’t they have run out of oxygen just breathing down here? Was there a big air-circulation system I haven’t seen? And if so, how would they have powered it before they had electricity?

It wasn’t immediately obvious what to look up in the library to answer these questions, but by searching for vampire-written accounts of ordinary life down here in those days, I found it. Yes, they used candles, and to light up larger spaces, lanterns, since time immemorial. In fact, candle-making was a job many people did here, and there were a number of accounts of it. In particular, when they brought back hundreds of vampire corpses at the end of Vlad’s war, they converted the bodies to candle wax. That was how they kept them from stinking up the place they way they had done in the human world. For more than a year after that, they used this wax in making candles rather than any other source.

As for the oxygen, it turns out vampires don’t actually need oxygen. We breathe because of the human habit of doing so, and because it lets us speak. But if we don’t breathe, or don’t have oxygen, it doesn’t hurt us. When a candle-user noticed his candle’s flame getting weak, he’d convert a few breaths worth of air into oxygen and breathe it out into the room, not directly over the candle to avoid stoking the flame too much, but enough that when the oxygen circulated and spread out in the air, it kept the flame going.

In the evening, I got back with Anna again, and she didn’t have another amazing bit of entertainment for us like last night, and we just had sex after dinner. Unlike our first time, we went to Anna’s room, and she produced a double-ended dildo. And she taught me how to use my vaginal muscles to push it out, alternately relaxing those muscles to let her push it back into me. We had a lot of fun with that, but after a while, it reminded me too much of my time as Brad and I started crying. When I stopped thrusting, I realized Anna was crying a little, too. I told my story first.

“My parents discovered my trans tendencies early in the hateful president’s first term. They supported me, but also explained to me why it was too dangerous for me to be out about it then. Unfortunately, even when the hater was out of office, we had more of his kind controlling the government in Texas, and it didn’t get any better. Fortunately, I liked girls, and I could stay closeted and pass as straight. I hoped to find a girl who would understand what I was trying to say without saying it, in a way that only someone who’d support me would understand. I didn’t find that girl, or at least, not in the way I expected, since Kelly knew my secret. But it was only just now that I realized that I miss some of the girls I knew. Even though they didn’t understand the real me, there were several who were really good women and probably would have made great wives, and someday, when the environment was safe, I could have told whichever wife I ended up with, and ask for forgiveness for keeping it secret.”

Anna then told her story. “A couple decades earlier, they weren’t actively murdering trans people, at least not usually, and when they did, the murders were actually investigated and prosecuted. But there wasn’t a lot of popular support for trans people. That started happening after I was already down here. So unlike you, I did live as female, hanging out in places that catered to lesbians, which were there when you knew how to find them. And three times I thought I found the right woman, only to be wrong, get exposed, and flee to another city.”

“That’s awful. But why haven’t you found Miss Right down here and settled down?”

“Oh, I did, twice. I had good lives together with two other women here, but both of them eventually got attracted to some other nicer looking woman and left me.”

“Nicer looking than you?”

“Oh, you underestimate the women here. You haven’t seen the really hot ones. You won’t likely see them in the clubs, unless a new one comes along. When a new hot guy or girl comes along, word passes through the grapevine. There are even different tiers of this. Think of, say, the A-list of Hollywood actors and then the more ordinary ones. And then below that you have ordinary people who aren’t actors but still good looking. And then there are people with more ordinary looks. Call them A, B, C, and D.”

“And where do you think you are?”

“At the top of the Cs, potentially bottom of the Bs, if one of them ever noticed me. But I haven’t been invited to their parties, so I’m only at the top of the Cs.”

“And you were dating people like that who did get noticed?”

“Exactly.”

“So what’s that make me? Like a middle C?”

“If I want to be really honest with you, yes. Still hot, but not hot like I’m afraid the stars are going to steal you from me.”

“But I thought we each form our ideal body. So why aren’t we all super-hot?”

“It’s not just the ultimate woman, or even your impression of the ultimate woman, but the woman you personally would want to look like. It’s a brutally honest thing, a piece of your inner conscience exposed for the world to see. What would you make yourself look like, if the time and money to do it was not an issue? People have different ideals, and so we all come out differently. Seeing what other people chose can have some influence on that, and that causes a person’s concept of ideality to change over time, but it doesn’t make you instantly want to look like a copy of a particular person.”

“OK. I get it. What you think looks hot isn’t necessarily what your potential partners think looks hot. And you might not even want to look the hottest possible because of the attention it would draw. But then how is there even a ranking?”

“Popular opinion. Certain people might rank certain other people higher than most would on average, but most people rank most other people close to the average of where everybody ranks that person.”

“OK, sure. So it’s not definitive that you aren’t in the Bs, but just that nobody who the Bs have chosen has chosen you to be among their numbers.”

“Pretty much.”

“And you’re hoping I’m just that little bit less hot in public opinion than your past girlfriends that no B chooses me.”

“Yes. That’s it exactly, girlfriend! Can I call you that, in a romantic way?”

“Yes, I like that, girlfriend,” I replied to Anna.

“You aren’t like those women. You aren’t... inhumanly hot. Not that you aren’t nice looking, but in a normal way.”

“So I shouldn’t try harder to look better.”

“No! Don’t do that. I like you just the way you are.”

“You too, Anna.”

“You are still free to see other people, Brandy. Even if it means I lose you. I want someone who is going to choose me over others, someone who really cares about me. If you’re going to leave me, I’d rather you leave me quickly.”

“I still haven’t had sex with a guy yet. Not proper sex, anyway. I am not sure that, as a human, I would have ever have done that, even if I had gotten surgery. But as a human, I could never have been this much female. Now that I have it, and I literally have eternity down here, I feel like I need to try everything at least once. So at some point I will.”

“Not proper sex? What did you do?”

“There’s this guy in your club, Jason.”

Anna interrupted with a laugh, “Oh, that guy!”

“I guess I don’t need to explain him, then.”

“Nah, everybody there knows about him.”

We didn’t have any more sex that night, but we lay there for a while, naked, cuddling, caressing each other, and pointing out what some people might have seen as minor imperfections each of us had that the other thought were cute, and not really flaws in our true beauty.