Thursday

I was back in the library searching for the answers to more riddles that required doing a lot of searches and reading to find the right materials, and I realized how much easier it would be if they had digitized the collection. While they clearly have adopted new technology in some areas, they were behind here.

I asked Kelly, and she confirmed that while they have the catalog, nobody’s ever tried digitizing the actual books.

“A lot of the vampires didn’t even have any kind of computer until smart phones came along.”

“Oh. So even the thought of doing that is quite a new idea on the timeline of vampires.”

“Right. Say, you work on a proposal for how we might do that, and let me know when you think you can explain it to me. I have some familiarity with tech, but I also have a lot more experience with the way vampires do things here. I can try to help you refine it into something we could practically do, and then we can take that to the head librarian. He is the one who was responsible for the catalog system we have now. That should help you understand the audience you’re going to have to talk to.”

“OK. I’ll do that.”

I spent the rest of the afternoon doing more research to try to figure out the level of technology we actually have here. In theory, it should be comparable to what humans have, because newcomers bring tech with them, but they do so in pretty small numbers, and while they might bring their personal computers, it’s not like they are going to bring cloud servers with them. We don’t need that to digitize the book, but we do to make the scans available.

While I was doing that, the 5 PM reminder went off on my phone. My first shift running the gym was 6-10 tonight, and I wanted to make sure I ate before doing it. While I was doing that Anna called, inviting me to dinner, and I told her my time was limited but I could do a quick one, and I showed up dressed like that.

Anna laughed at my outfit before I explained what it was for. I had basically the same sports bra and tight shorts I had worn for my learning session, but in referee stripes, which were the only required feature of the uniform for this job. Though she hadn’t been a great sports fan as a man, it only took a slight awareness of sports to recognize that I was dressed as a female referee, and she agreed that it made sense. I invited her to stop by the gym if she wanted to see me, but it wasn’t really her thing.

I chatted with Anna right up until it was time for me to go to the gym, and pretty soon felt myself needing to pee. It was only at that point I realized no locker rooms also meant no restrooms, and I had to remake my body to get rid of it. But it was also at that point I realized I hadn’t seen public restrooms anywhere in Trans-Sylvania. Between portaling to your room and remaking your body, there was no need.

And then there was so little traffic in the gym it wouldn’t have mattered if I took a break to go pee in my room anyway. There were only three visitors to the gym during my shift, and I was wishing I had brought something to read. One of them was a woman of my build who was using the machines on near-minimum weight levels, one was a pretty muscular woman, and the last was a ridiculously overmuscled man who sweated a lot. None of them needed my help setting up machines, but I spotted for the muscular woman on free weights. The sweaty guy actually gave me the most work to do, following him and remaking the pads on machines he used, as a way of cleaning them. Even then, he only used four of them. He didn’t use free weights, but if he had, I would have asked the muscular woman to help me spot, because if he somehow collapsed under the level of weights he would have been using, I don’t think I could have lifted them alone.

---

Friday

Some more research, and some more thinking about how to make large-scale scanning of books practical. The server needs were not as bad as I thought. You could easily get a compressed scanned page of a typical text-based book under a megabyte. That meant a million pages per terabyte. Most of these books aren’t huge, 300 pages a book. 3,000 books per terabyte. 20 terabytes for the entire collection, maybe. So it was beyond the capacity of a standard PC, but not by a ridiculous amount.

It would need to have high-speed networking, but within what was effectively a LAN that was feasible. 100 megabit/second would mean a 300 megabyte book would download in 24 seconds, if nobody else was accessing a book at that moment. Gigabit networking would be better to handle loads. I’d heard of network-attached storage, basically devices designed to act as nothing but big file servers with fast networking. I’d never set one up, but I thought one of those might do the job. Probably two, for backup and distributing the load.

Ordinary PCs could be used for the scanning effort, though. They wouldn’t have to have such high capacity. There, the important part was making it quick and easy for people to scan the books. There were probably dedicated devices designed for that, too. You’d want them to be portable so you could take them to where the books are and scan in place, rather than lugging a shelf of books somewhere else to scan them.

I didn’t have an evening date with Anna because she was working in the restaurant again. This time, I decided to try the Straight Only club and find a guy. It was weirder than I expected.

I used to be a guy who dated women. I wasn’t a typical one because of being a closeted transsexual, but because I liked women, I was able to play the role well. And I knew lots of other guys who were completely straight. Naturally, there were different types of guys. Hardly any of the guys here were like any of those. I realized that all these men used to be women who turned into their idea of the ideal man. But that didn’t seem to fully explain what I saw. They were wildly different from one another, though I began to notice a few categories.

There were bodybuilder types like the sweaty guy from the gym, with muscles on top of muscles. In the human world they would have had trouble finding clothes and probably would have needed to have them custom made. Here, that wasn’t a problem, since everybody made their own custom clothes with a mere thought. I marked them off my list right away. I couldn’t imagine being with a man so big I’d be afraid he would break me (even though I knew that couldn’t happen here).

There were more conventional types, the tall, dark, and handsome ones. If that had been what I was after, I knew I’d never be able to keep one here. Each of them was already talking with three or four girls. Most of those girls were, well, I won’t say they were prettier than me, but more feminine. In some cases, absurdly so, with enormous boobs, microscopic waists that made them look like they had tight corsets on, and broad hips. One of these guys would work if I just wanted to try out having sex with a guy once, but I don’t know that I could pry one of them away from all the other women. In fact, I saw one of them leave with three women; was he going to have sex with all of them? I assumed so, since I knew from the Anything Goes club that that sort of thing happened here. I could do that, but it wasn’t really what I was looking for. I focused on the still unattached men.

Some of them were downright scary, like leering monsters. Some of them looked like vampires, in the way some humans perceived them in myth. I couldn’t imagine the woman who wanted to be a man looking like that.

And there were the androgynous ones. The ones that looked like they’d just chopped off their breasts, straightened their hips, and put on a suit. Some of them I only saw as guys because they were wearing men’s suits; I felt like if you put them in a dress they could still pass as women. Maybe some of them were, and they were just uncomfortable with women’s clothes. But I saw their counterparts among the women, ones who looked like men in drag. I decided the ones in male clothing must actually be male under them because this was the straight club. They should at least figure that much out before coming here, right?

They had the dance halls here too, like where I met Anna, each one dedicated to a different style of music. One featured the kind of music for slow, romantic dances. That had never been my thing, but it had an excess of men in it, so I tried to see who I could find there.

There were some different types in here, including some more normal people who were all in couples, but the unattached ones were mostly the scary and androgynous ones. The latter were the least distasteful to me, and it turned out all I needed to do was ask. They were terribly timid, but each one I talked to was glad to dance with me. Most of them were no good at dancing, either. The ones I asked turned out to be pretty new here, by their own description, even if that meant they had been here a couple years. The scary ones were more forward, and some of them asked me to dance, but there wasn’t one I thought I could stand to be that close to for the length of a song, so I declined them all.

It turned out that I didn’t have to worry about having no skill whatsoever in this sort of dancing. The men weren’t much better, but we learned from each other and most of the dances ended with us moving in rhythm with each other and the music. After several dances, I went back to a guy named Phil who I had danced with once.

“You want to dance again, Brandy? OK.”

Phil hadn’t expected me to kiss him, but he got into it when I did, and pretty soon we had forgotten about dancing and were just engaged in intense tongue action. I broke the kiss when the song ended and pulled him toward the door.

“You want dinner?” I asked.

“Sure,” Phil replied.

So I got us a table and got suggestion menus for both of us. We both ordered drinks, which came quickly, and I asked the waiter to wait a bit for our food orders.

“Thank you, Brandy.”

“For...”

“Asking for more time. There are so many choices!”

“Oh! Are you new here, Phil?”

“Yeah,” he said with a sigh.

“You can order anything. Anything at all. Somebody makes it just like you’d do yourself in the cafeterias. That’s why this is called a suggestion menu; it’s a list of popular dishes. It’s broken down into different cuisines so you can focus on a type of food you like.”

“That makes it even worse!”

“Do you have a favorite food? The thing you like eating the most in the world?”

“Yeah,” Phil said, again with a sigh.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s embarrassing.”

“What? Your favorite food is embarrassing? What is it? I promise I won’t laugh.”

“Eggplant.”

“What’s wrong with eggplant?”

“The emoji.”

I started to ask what was wrong with the emoji, but then I remembered it was used as a stand-in for penis because there was no penis emoji and somebody on the Internet decided it looked most like one, and the idea caught on.

Instead, I said, “You’re not eating the emoji.”

“But people make fun of it!”

“If they are taunting you for eating food that you never eat whole, because when it’s whole it looks a little like a penis, they aren’t friends. Was it people here or humans?”

“Humans.”

“Well forget them. You never have to see them again.”

“You’re right. I’m having trouble adjusting.”

“How long have you been a vampire?”

“A little over two months.”

“I got you beat. Less than a week,” I replied.

“Wow! And you can just go in and, and... pick someone up?”

“How about this? I’ll tell you my story about how I was living as a human, and then you tell me yours.”

“OK.”

So I told my story, how I was afraid to be openly transsexual, but I liked girls, so I was able to pass as a straight man.

“Wait, you like girls? So why are you here with me?”

“I’m dating a girl, but she’s happy for me to date other people, too. And I wanted to try dating guys.”

“So you picked me?”

“Well, I didn’t have any interest in the huge muscle-freaks or the leering monsters. There are some real charmers but they all seemed to have three or four women already and I didn’t want to be part of whatever that turns into. The rest of the guys here seem like they have some kind of issues, but I figured I could try one and see how bad the issues are. So, your turn. Tell me about it.”

After a few false starts by Phil in describing what his life was like, the waiter came back to take our orders. I ordered a simple burger and fries, and Phil said he’d have the same, but I said, “Didn’t you want eggplant?” and convinced him to order one of the eggplant dishes off the menu. Phil gained a little confidence in seeing that nobody laughed at him for ordering eggplant, and managed to get started on his story, but it was well after our food arrived and we’d eaten much of it that I really got it out of him.

Phil, who was originally Phyllis, couldn’t stand pushy guys. In fact, she couldn’t find any guys she liked, and thought maybe she needed to be a lesbian. Then she discovered how they, the ones she found, anyway, tended to pair up butch with femme. She saw some of the same traits she disliked in butch lesbians as in men, so she decided she needed to be butch herself, but she wasn’t butch enough for the femmes.

This reminded me that I had heard of the concept of lesbians being butch and femme, but I hadn’t thought about it at all in my relationship with Anna. She certainly was femme, but I was a far cry from butch. I guess I was femme, but less femme than her. Or maybe in this world of trans-women dating trans-women, the concept didn’t apply. Heck, I wasn’t sure it was universal among human lesbians. Since I never got out of the closet as a trans-woman, I never had a chance to really explore the subject there. I filled this in during one of Phil’s many pauses, and then encouraged him to tell me what happened next.

After Phyllis’s failure as a lesbian, she decided to take it further, making herself trans, though she didn’t do much beyond wearing men’s clothing, cutting her hair short, binding her breasts, and using the name Phil. The fact that Phyllis had not had much in the way of hips helped, I imagine. In this way, Phil started dating straight women, but it hadn’t gone well. Some were upset when they discovered Phil was trans. One of these women giggled when he ordered eggplant, and introduced Phil to how the eggplant emoji was used online. Phil was so traumatized by this that he couldn’t eat the food that was served, he ended the date after the meal, and he stopped dating at all for months.

Phil’s host who made him a vampire was only his second date after that incident. The whole story made me think Phil hadn’t been a very good pick. He needed help, to be sure, but I’m not sure becoming a vampire with its forced but completely functional sex change was the right kind of help.

“To tell the truth,” Phil said, “This is only the fourth time I’ve been in the club, as you call it. My host brought me here, and I ended up eating dinner with a woman as insecure as me. We didn’t do anything after dinner that night, and we had a second date which was also only dinner, and neither of us really pressed for a third date, so it just never happened. It was only recently that I decided that because nothing was happening, my relationship with Pam was over, and I needed to find someone else. The last two nights I came here, I only embarrassed myself.”

“Phil, I don’t know that I’m the right person to help you, but I want to do something. Do you think it’s possible for you to get back together with Pam?”

“Maybe.”

“Give her a call.”

After a pause he started recording a message. “Hi, Pam, it’s Phil. Call me when you can.”

“I want you to try to date Pam again, but you’re going to need some practice. I don’t think you know how to be a man, at least not in a way that will satisfy a woman. But you’ve seen what I did tonight, other than helping you. You need to do that, lead the way, especially if Pam is as timid as you, which is what it sounds like.”

“OK, I can try.”

“And Phil, I came here tonight to find a man who would have sex with me, so I could learn what it feels like. I am certainly not going to force you to do that, but I’m giving you the option. Have you ever had sex as a man?”

“No. You really would let me?”

“We’ll try. I’ve never had sex with a man, though I did have sex as a man. Once.”

“I’m in,” Phil said with an accomplished-looking grin.

We finished our meals and I took Phil back to my room. He immediately started taking off his pants, but I was taking it slower, teasing him by grabbing the bottom of my skirt and doing a little dance in which I flashed my panties at him several times but immediately covering them up again, and this caused him to stop stripping and watch. But when I saw the size of his erection in his underwear, I skipped ahead.

“Maybe you don’t need as much of this as I thought,” I said, and took the dress fully off, leading him to continue undressing as well. When our remaining clothing was only my panties and his underwear, I started rubbing my pussy on his erection through the two layers of cloth. He was hard, and he was huge. Finally, I removed my last scrap of fabric, leading him to do likewise.

“Phil, I was told that when we change, our body form is determined by our mental image of the ideal form of our new sex. I was a little worried about you, because your form isn’t very manly. You have no facial hair, no Adam’s apple, a small nose, and a face overall that, when taken apart from your body, is at best of ambiguous nature, and perhaps could be identified as female. With your clothes off, I can see that you also have no chest hair, no arm or leg hair, and a smooth stomach that would not look out of place on a woman.”

“I don’t think I wanted any of those things you think are manly. They’re ugly.”

“Hmm. Do you have a picture of yourself before the change, when you were going as a trans-man?”

“I think so.”

Phil took his phone and soon produced a photo showing him down to the waist. There was a slight bulge where the binding of the breasts didn’t flatten him as much as the body he has now does, but the face and body shape otherwise looked almost identical to the naked man standing here with me.

“I see. This was the ideal male you, so this is what you got. It’s fine, if that’s what you want. But there is one area of your male image where you did not scrimp.”

Phil could see where I was looking. “Is it too big?”

“It’s fully 50% longer than the one I had when I was male, though I think some men have one this large.”

“It seemed right to me. For use on my dates as a butch lesbian and again as a trans-man, I bought, though never used, one of those sex toys that fits in the vagina and has a penis attached I can use like a man. It was this long.”

“Sometimes fiction is bigger than reality. But it’ll fit. Anna had a dildo this long inside me.”

“I thought you hadn’t had sex like that yet.”

“That was a toy. I haven’t had sex with the real thing yet.”

“Does my oversized one count as real?”

“It’s flesh and blood. That’s the biggest difference between you and what you used before,” I said, handing Phil back his phone.

That got me close enough to start rubbing my flesh against his, and we both stopped talking and started doing. Ironically, rather than getting him hard, I was having to get myself ready. My face came near his, though looking just at the face, I’d be more likely to classify it as hers. It didn’t matter. In a moment I was going to have him inside me, and that was definitely his.

I pressed my lips to his, and when I pressed my tongue between them, he let it enter, but upon withdrawing it and repeating the action, he did not do the same. I pulled away for a moment.

“Phil, do to me what I just did to you.”

“With my tongue?”

“Yes,” I said, and left my lips slightly apart, a few inches in front of his, awaiting his attempt.

He pulled me to him, our lips met, and he shoved his tongue into my mouth as far as it would go. I pulled back.

“Gently,” I told him. “When you were Phyllis, and you were dating guys, is that what they did to you?”

“Yes.”

“No wonder you hated guys. It’s supposed to be a tender expression of your love for each other. Let’s try again.”

I assumed the same position, and this time Phil kissed me properly. I slipped my tongue in under his, and our tongues danced around in a proper prequel to what we were about to do. After a couple minutes of that, I pulled back only so I could speak properly.

“That was good. Now treat our parts down below with the same degree of tenderness.”

So far, I had initiated the only contact down there, but now he took hold of his dick between three fingers and rubbed the head along the length of my pussy three, four, five times before gently pushing at my entrance. He didn’t get it in at first, but he gently wiggled it down there until he found the right spot and pushed just the head inside me.

“Yes, like that,” I said, with a small moan to encourage him.

Now that he was inside, the motion became slightly in and out, gradually deeper.

“Yes, keep going,” I told him, putting our lips together for another kiss.

So we had a double dance going, above and below, before I felt the pressure that I assumed meant he had reached my cervix. Fortunately, he was almost all the way in at that point, and the cavity stretched slightly to accommodate the last bit when he pushed it in. He didn’t need more coaching at this point, moving to longer strokes and using just his hips to guide the thrusts as he put his arms around my back. The strokes got harder, though he was never really slamming into me. And then he came. Oh, God, did he come.

Was I abnormal as a man, or was Phil? When I had masturbated as a man, I came, I cleaned it up, and I recall that it was about as much as you got out of one squirt of the soap dispenser. Enough to fill in the little tip at the end of a condom plus a little more, but not much more. Phil’s would have filled a shot glass. I used a washcloth from the bathroom to clean up both of us, and then sat on the toilet squeezing the stuff out of me before I realized that it wasn’t a part of what was normally considered to be me, and I could just remake my body to get rid of it. I also remade the carpet to clean up where some spilled at the place we’d been standing.

I told Phil, “That’s probably more than the normal amount of come.”

“Huh. OK. So sex doesn’t normally make that much of a mess?”

“It can still make a mess, but yes, less of one.”

“I wonder if it’s because I never actually had sex with a man as Phyllis. We are made here in our own image of what’s ideal, and maybe I thought men just came that much.”

“It’s possible. I know some of the men I saw in the straight club are definitely outside the range of what I’d consider normal in other ways. Ideal doesn’t mean realistic, just like there are human women starving themselves in order to reach their personal but unrealistic ideal of thinness.”

“Oh, right. I think it’s less common now.”

“A little. That situation improved when they started teaching women that if they were throwing up to be thin they were overdoing it and needed to get help.”

Phil added, “And you probably won’t see them like that here, because all the women used to be men and they have more sensible ideals.”

“Yeah, I can’t recall seeing any women that thin. With boobs too large, yes, but that was also a problem with human women.”

“With some of them getting implants.”

“Yeah. But back to the subject. Let’s exchange phone contacts. When you get in touch with Pam, let me know. If she’ll agree to it, I want to set up a double date with you two, me, and Anna.”

“Where are we going to do that?”

“Probably in one of the cafeterias.”

“Oh.”

“Anna has more experience here, and she may suggest some other place to go afterward to have fun together.”

“OK.”

“We’ll have to work around our work schedules. I have work Thursday and Sunday evenings, and Anna does Monday and Friday.”

“I have an overnight shift in the cafeterias, and sleep daytimes. I don’t know Pam’s schedule.”

“Mine’s temp work, so it could move, but I just got the assignment. I’m expecting it to stay at least a little while.”

“Right. You just got here.”

“The basic thing, though, is that the things I showed you how to do with me, you need to do with Pam. You may need to go slower so as not to scare her off, but go. If she’s not ready for sex, then you at least want to leave her with a good enough impression to consider it the next time.”

“Thanks, Brandy. I hope this works. I definitely feel better about myself, even though I learned some more ways I’m not normal.”

“Remember, Phil, that nobody’s entirely normal. We’re all above or below the average in some aspect. Everybody’s different.”

“Right. Everybody’s different.”

Phil was putting his clothes back on and getting ready to leave, while I just tossed mine in the hamper. He portaled away, and I just climbed into bed. Even though Phil wasn’t very normal as a man, he was enough so to satisfy the mission I started out with tonight, to feel how it was to have sex with a man. Maybe even more than enough, since for all that he seemed less than a man in appearance, he was more than the usual where it counted. But now could I figure out how to turn him into a proper man? And what was sort of help was Pam going to need?