Saturday

My experience with Phil and the other people I saw in the club last night gave me a new focus today. I decided to skip working on the book scanning thing today and called Anna to meet for breakfast. We talked about my experience, and she was generally in agreement with me.

“I’m happy to do this double date if we can make the scheduling work, and if Pam agrees. I’m wondering if we should talk to Pam ourselves first, though, to help her get ready like you did with Phil.”

“Hmm, maybe. I agree that she might need help also, but I didn’t actually meet her yet.”

“Play it by ear, I guess. With sufficient notice I can do this anytime, even overnights, apart from my work hours, which you know now.”

“Thanks, Anna. I’ll keep in touch.”

Afterwards, I went to Kelly. I thought maybe she, as a straight woman, would understand why the straight club is so weird.

“Hi, Kelly. I was hoping you could answer something for me.”

“You still have me as your guide to Trans-Sylvania today. You can feel free to ask me questions in the future, too, unofficially.”

“I went to the straight club last night. Why is it so weird and dysfunctional?”

“Huh? Can you explain?”

“There were a few normal, handsome, ideal guys there. They each seemed to gather multiple nice-looking women. But the rest of the people...”

“What about them?”

“Some of the men were hideous. Oversized, leering monsters. The other men, and many of the other women, were so meek they were afraid to talk to each other. They were also very ambiguous, gender-wise, in their appearance, and I only decided which were which based on how they dressed.”

“Huh. I don’t remember that.”

“When was the last time you were in the straight club?”

“Maybe seventy or eighty years.”

“Wow! You did say you had a committed man, but wow.”

“My impression is that the clubs are mainly for new people.”

“So people who’ve been here longer break up or their mates die so rarely, and they pick new people so quickly, that there are never many of them in the club.”

“Or they never even make it back to the club. At least among straights, there’s a grapevine. When someone dies or breaks up, the word gets around who’s available. And there’s a realignment.”

“Realignment? Can you explain?”

“Alice and Bob break up. So Carla leaves Daniel to be with Bob, and Ed leaves Francine to be with Alice. Then other people leave their mates to be with Daniel and Francine. Eventually the two jilted spouses get together, and the realignment is over.”

“So it’s like a massive wife-swap.”

“You could say that. It’s also possible someone goes to the club and picks up somebody new, but you see why it doesn’t happen as often as you would think.”

“Anna related a similar story. She was in the lesbian club because her lover left her. She’s had two long-term companions here over 14 years, but they both eventually left for someone else. I think what she was describing could have been part of one of those realignments.”

“It’s possible.”

“But why are the straight newbies so awkward? The ones in the lesbian club didn’t seem that way.”

“You said you picked one up? Was he one of the awkward ones?”

“Yeah. Here’s his story. He was a human woman named Phyllis. She hated guys because the ones she met were jerks. She tried going lesbian, but she wasn’t femme enough for the butch lesbians and wasn’t butch enough for the femmes. She tried going trans and dating straight women, but pretty early on, one of the women unintentionally insulted him, not knowing how a comment about a penis would be taken because she didn’t know Phil was trans. He stopped dating for two months and had only barely started again when we took him as a vampire.”

“What the hell? Hosts are supposed to find help for their convertees if we find them in such mental states. We are also not supposed to bring in people who are not more committed to being trans than what you describe, unless their lives are in danger. It wasn’t always that way, but the people from back then have all gotten help already and know how to reach out if they need more.”

“It’s good to hear that what I saw isn’t considered acceptable here.”

“C’mon. Let’s go. I want to see this, right now. We’ll go in as nonparticipants.”

“OK, Kelly.”

Kelly called someone first, and she met up with him and he gave her glasses to wear. I realized I had seen only a couple people wearing glasses around here because part of the whole ideal body thing was you got proper vision, and the ones who did had glasses that looked like a fashion accessory matching their outfits. I wasn’t sure what the deal was with hers. Due to the instant travel around here, in less than a minute we were in the club with our red circle-and-slash buttons.

There were different people there, but Kelly saw what I saw before. The few nice-looking guys were gathering three or more nice-looking women each and leaving with them. The handful of weird guys would have creeped out any woman on earth as much as they did me, though some of them seemed to have women. And the largest number of the ones in the club were just standing there, many of them in the dance halls but seemingly afraid to ask anyone to dance. There were some, both men and women, who did go around choosing partners, but most of them were only dancing when asked.

I walked up to one guy, who was clearly interested in a woman on the other side of the room. She was looking back at him, but both seemed unwilling to make the first move. I told him, “You know, you can go ask her to dance.”

“You think so?”

“Just look at the way she’s looking at you. She’s just waiting for you to go on over and talk to her.”

The man cautiously stepped across the room, around some other dancing couples, and asked the one he had his eye on to dance, and they did.

Kelly and I both tried this some more, including encouraging some of the women to ask men to dance, with mixed success.

“I see what you mean,” Kelly said after we had been at this a while. “But to be sure, we need to get some of their stories.”

We found the first couple I’d gotten to dance, who had been out there on the dance floor ever since, and suggested they eat with us. Kelly and I only ordered soft drinks and an appetizer to share since we figured we were going to do this again with more couples, but they ordered full meals. Both their stories were much like Phil’s, with extreme lack of confidence and other issues. The next two couples were the same. Two of them, one man and one woman, said they rarely came here, only about once every three weeks or so, because of how useless it seemed. One woman had been so surprised the last time she did get asked out on a date that she got scared and ran off.

Kelly helped each couple by recommending some other attraction that they might enjoy together, leaving them with comments like “it’s up to the two of you if you do anything else afterward,” clearly hoping that if they were interested in sex that one of them would ask the other and they might actually do it. Or at least they’d exchange numbers and have another date.

After we got three couples off on dates, Kelly led me out of the club.

“I’m reporting this,” she said, and led me back to where she got the glasses. A different man was there. He introduced himself as an “enforcer” named Fred, and took statements from us about both my initial observations as well as what we saw today. The glasses were equipped with video and audio recorders, so they had the entire three hours or so of Kelly’s experience saved. That took a while longer, and Anna called me, asking if we could meet for dinner, and I told her to eat without me but that I’d call her when I was free.

Fred said that our allegations seemed serious and that his team would investigate. Before we left, Fred showed me the official Enforcement account that was pre-configured on the Trans-Sylvania phone sim Kelly had given me.

“If we need to contact you again, it will be through that account, so you can verify it’s a real business call.”

“Thank you,” I told him, and we left. As soon as we got out of the office, I called Anna, and portaled to her location after saying goodbye to Kelly.

“So what were you doing?” Anna asked.

“Kelly and I were checking out the problem I described to you this morning... for the last five hours.”

“Five hours! Sheesh!”

“Part of that was for us to give statements to an enforcer.”

“Enforcer? Wow. Someone’s in trouble.”

“How rare is it for enforcers to get involved in something?”

“Seriously, I think 90% of what they do is either sitting at the rarely used complaint desk or going around and checking on people.”

“What do they check on?”

“They have rounds in which they check that everyone is doing their assigned jobs. You are never supposed to notice them. They go undercover as regular customers of whatever, at least for the jobs with customers, in theory visiting everyone once in a while. So if they are checking on a cafeteria shift where someone is supposed to be cleaning and restoring the dishes between 7 and 7:30, they’ll get food at 6:50 and sit there secretly recording everything going on around them with their drinking glass spy camera until 7:30 has passed. It looks like a regular cafeteria drinking glass, and they will use it as one, but it’s got tiny spy cameras around the rim. If nobody showed up to do the work, they’ll report it and you’ll get checked more often, and eventually get assigned to other work where you’ll work longer hours under direct supervision.”

“They gave Kelly an eyeglasses-camera.”

“Yeah, they put them in whatever works.”

“So if somebody got reported at the desk, how’s that compare to being caught by enforcers?” I asked.

“They will treat it as the equivalent of a report from one of their checkers if it’s something they can’t normally check, or someone to be watched more closely if they do check the role.”

“Kelly and I reported that an unknown number of hosts and also some of the people who identify candidate humans didn’t do their jobs correctly. We gave them info on Phil and 6 others affected by this, but told them there are lots more.”

“Ouch! It might be a while before you hear anything, because they will need to investigate who hosted those people, who identified them as candidates, interview the victims, and secretly watch the accused. But they will come back and say they disciplined someone. Or that they didn’t, but from what you said, there’s no way they aren’t going to discipline someone. it’s just a matter of who and how many.”

Anna and I spent the night wearing non-participant badges in all the clubs, but it was only in the straight club where we saw the accumulation of troubled people.

---

Sunday

Today, I went through the clothes I’d worn here over the last week, refreshing each one and putting it into the closet or dresser, and converting my remaining male clothes into ones more appropriate for me now. Among my old clothes, I found the female clothes I had worn privately as Brad. For sentimental reasons, I kept them, simply adjusting the sizes slightly to fit my new body.

In the afternoon, I went over all my notes about scanning books and wrote up a proposal for a book-scanning system. Essentially, this meant the specs for a server, the specs for a portable scanning device, and recommendations for how to go about doing the work. At one point, I stopped to call Kelly to ask about delicate books.

“Are there books whose pages are old and brittle that will need special care when scanning?”

“No, that’s an asset to our library. Before they get that way, while doing annual inventory, we use the vampiric ability to remake things to freshen them. Also, centuries ago, we figured out that some kinds of paper last longer before getting that way. Long before humans understood acid-free paper, vampires had invented it by simply converting brittle old paper into better kinds of paper.”

This meant we didn’t need to take special precautions on delicate old books, and apart from unusually large ones, all books could be scanned the same way. The software and hardware should make the job as simple as possible. The person scanning had to identify the book they were scanning from the library’s catalog, start the job, and then flip the pages and scan each one using a photo-scanner that would scan a two-page spread every second. One person should be able to do one to two shelves of books in a four-hour shift. If they put a full crew of 21 workers who among them worked all hours, they would scan the entire library in six months.

A second phase of the project would involve OCRing the scanned pages to give us searchable text. This was going to be more tricky. The computer would not have our translator and would work in the native language of each document. If we had some technology that would allow us to capture the translations as seen by speakers of different languages, we could make the text searchable and finish making a usable document. For the older, handwritten documents, OCR would likely not work, and people would have to transcribe the text. That would be slow. But once we did, we might translate that document the same way. I didn’t have a full plan for this yet, but we could start the first part while working out the second part.

I provided it to Kelly to review just in time for dinner before my shift working in the gym. While I was eating, Phil called to tell me Pam was interested in the double-date. Pam worked a daytime cafeteria shift and slept nights, so the evenings when neither Anna nor I was working would be the times we could do it, and Pam was available Tuesday. I confirmed with Anna, who would let us know where to meet.

There were more people in the gym tonight, include a cute girl who went by the name Smiley. She was new to the gym, so while she was there I mostly followed her around the gym explaining how to use the equipment, apart from two times someone needed spotting on free weights.

---

Monday

Kelly got together with me today to discuss my proposal.

“I agree, separate the two parts of the process. The first part delivers meaningful benefits on its own by letting people read books online. And your proposal for it is pretty good already. We will want to identify specific equipment. Probably humans already make the equipment and we’ll buy one of each and make copies.”

“Is it easier to copy something you already have?”

“Yes, and with technological products it’s pretty much essential. Basically everybody knows clothes and basic fabrics and it’s easy to learn about things you don’t by observing them, so anybody can make clothes that work for them. But electronics and computers have microscopic parts with critical details that have to be exactly right to work. So we don’t try to modify those at all, unless it’s something simple like changing the case that the electronics are in. But copying is almost as easy as refreshing an item.”

“OK, so do you want me to search the human world for this equipment?”

“Yes, and all you need to do is take your phone and cross Limbo. You can just stand outside a door and access the human Internet to search for it. Something available on Amazon is best, because of Amazon lockers, but don’t worry about that for now. Just worry about finding the equipment that is going to make it easiest for us to do the work, and make note of the name and exact model number of the item so someone can buy it.”

“Lockers?” I asked.

“Amazon will deliver something to a locker in a public area, rather than to your house, and send you a code to open the locker. The idea was to keep packages from being stolen if they were delivered while you were away at work. But they’re also great if you don’t actually live there at all, and can’t be there while the sun is out.”

“How did you manage before that?”

“We rented an apartment where they receive packages for us in an office and we can go down indoors to the office and pick it up. But the apartment cost human money and we had to send the person whose name it was in. The lockers solve both those problems.”

“OK. I’ll work on that.”

This was Anna’s night working, and I went into the Anything Goes club and found that woman Dina with the retractable penis. Anna actually served us dinner, a bit amused that I was going to try out her tool. And Anna blushed when delivering the dessert Dina ordered for us to share, the Banana Supreme. Unlike a banana split, where the banana is sliced open and ice cream and toppings are put in the middle, here the banana is left whole, two scoops of ice cream are placed on opposite sides of one end of the banana, and a dab of whipped cream is placed over the other end of the banana.

When I asked, Anna explained, “Nobody knows who invented this, and it doesn’t appear on the standard menu because we don’t want to shock people, but all the waiters in all the clubs know about it, and it’s been shared a lot by word of mouth.”

“And we are not going to see one of these tomorrow with Phil and Pam, for the same reason,” I replied.

“Oh, I wouldn’t think of it.”

We finished off the dessert and went to Dina’s room. It turns out that Dina’s organ is on the small side, and not just compared with Phil’s monster. But it was big enough to do the job, and now I have standards by which to judge any other men, assuming I have any others. I really feel like I enjoyed Anna more than either of them, though.

---

Tuesday

I crossed into the human world this morning to search for the computer equipment, remembering an adage Kelly had taught me, a twist on an old human one: The sun never rises on the British Empire. It was possible any time of the day to travel to the human world in darkness, by simply choosing the right part of the world. Trans-Sylvania operates on eastern European time, so in the morning, you could arrive in darkness in the United States; in the afternoon and early evening, in Australia; and at night, in England. It wasn’t necessarily important to visit English-speaking areas, but it reminded vampires where they could avoid the sun.

I was in a park somewhere. There was nobody else I could see, and in the darkness it was likely nobody outside the park could see me. I did the research I needed and returned and closed my portal.

Anna simply asked us to meet tonight outside the 8th floor cafeteria, at 6, leaving our after-dinner plans a mystery. To me only, she said she’d talked with Pam, and decided that she probably did need some help, but she was not as bad off as Phil.

I showed up in one of my usual date dresses in purple. Not the same purple I wore here already; this was a different one. Maybe it was magenta? Fuchsia? In any case, a color that would have gotten Brad beaten up if I’d worn it when I was human. When I create clothes here, I don’t ask for a specific color name; I just envision what I want in my head and that is what I get, in the same way that I don’t ask for a specific size.

Anna was in a yellow-and-white dress that was simpler than some of the ones she had worn but still more elaborate than mine. Phil was in a standard dark blue men’s suit. Pam, who was indeed one of those with an androgynous face, left no doubt she was female with a sequined dress with a broad neckline. It showed just a little cleavage and had long, tight sleeves. It was tight across and under her bust, and flared out smoothly from there. I was betting she didn’t have much in the way of hips, and this dress was a good way of hiding that while showing off what she did have.

It was tough to get Pam to say much, but eventually she opened up.

“I grew up as a boy named Paul. I was never comfortable dating, despite having plenty of female friends in high school. The group I was closest with all had their own boyfriends, but I ate with them at lunch sometimes. I had the advantage of having a car when none of them did, and my transition started when they asked me to drive them to go out shopping. They paid for my lunch and some money for gas, and I got to see them model their pretty clothes. One of the girls, Kayla, figured me out before I had figured it out myself. On the third or fourth of these trips, she asked if I wanted anything. One of the other girls said, ‘I guess we can make another stop for Paul. He’s so nice to drive us around and stick here with us.’ But Kayla said, ‘No, I mean from here. Have you seen the way he looks at us when we show off for each other?’”

“How did you respond?” Anna asked while Pam paused to eat some of her food.

“I declined, but it made me think, and on the next trip, when Kayla asked me again, I told her what I wanted. The salesgirl didn’t blink about trying to find the dress I wanted in my size and the blue color I requested. I don’t know if she thought I was a flat-chested girl, or just didn’t care I was a guy, but she knew sizes. The dress she picked was perfect. But I needed some boobs, and other accessories. The girls knew where to find everything.”

Everybody was cheering for Pam.

“I told my mother it was so I could feel more like I was part of their group, and she supported me.”

“Your father?” Anna asked.

“Passed away when I was 10.”

“I’m sorry.”

“From then on, each time we went shopping, I dressed as a girl, in one of the outfits they had bought me before, and they bought me another outfit, some of them more casual since they knew these were all the girl clothes I owned. It meant I had to use the women’s restroom, since I looked much more like a woman than a man, but one of the other girls always went in with me. Later on, when I started to grow a little bit of a beard and mustache, they took me with them to electrolysis. One of the other girls also had some hair that needed removing, so that started being part of our trips.”

When Pam stopped talking, I asked, “So then what happened after that? Did you ever date any of them? Or any boys?”

“No. I never asked any of them to go on a date. I don’t think they were interested in me that way, and they all had their own boyfriends. And I was too afraid to date a boy, that he’d discover I was functionally male. So even though I had some fancy date dresses, I only wore them on shopping trips. The group all split up when we graduated from high school, some going to different colleges, and others marrying the boys they were dating. I was left alone, but I was confident enough in dressing female that I still went out that way sometimes. Most of the time, in fact. Mom was used to me going places with them or alone dressed as a girl, and Mom helped me fill out my wardrobe with more casual girls’ clothes. But I never went any further.”

“You were still living with your mother?” I asked.

“I was, but she died when I was 20, and so I just stayed there. I got a job as a waitress, which paid the tiny bit of a mortgage that was left and food and bills.”

“I’m sorry. So how did you take coming here?”

“Only having to work a few hours a week instead of full time was nice. I was still unsure about dating guys, or girls for that matter. Eventually I decided to try guys, and visited the club. Phil asked me to dinner, I think at his host’s encouragement. And we had another date, but I didn’t do it any more. Before, I was afraid guys would find out I was male. Now that I’m actually female, I’m just afraid of sex. Afraid of what it will feel like to have that thing inside me.”

Phil spoke up, “We don’t have to. It’ll be nice just being with you.”

“Anna told me you’re experienced now. That Brandy showed you how to do it.”

“She did.”

“I did. And I don’t know if you ever saw it, Pam, but Phil is big. You will enjoy it, but you may have to ease into it. Phil, if you do have sex with her, take it easy, like I showed you.”

“I remember,” Phil replied.

Then Anna said, “It looks like all your plates are clean. Does anyone want any more to eat? If not, I have some entertainment for us to enjoy as a group.”

Nobody indicated we wanted more, and we all turned in our plates and let Anna lead the way.

On the 11th floor was a sort of game room with all original games I had never seen before. Maybe they were invented here. Anna took us to one where we sat on all sides of a square table with dividers up between us so we could only see the part of the table in front of us. There were a bunch of controls; everyone had different ones. Also, each side had a panel that could display messages; much like the mechanized stage show’s cue cards, these were preprinted on something. We were trying to get the table from the middle to a particular side of the room with one person’s chair docked against a station. On each game turn, each person had an instruction that the table could move in one direction by manipulating one of the controls in a certain way, but that control was always one accessible to another person. So we had to figure out who had the instruction to go the right way, have that person call it out, and the person with that control had to take the action. If we did it right, the table moved the way we wanted. If we did something that wasn’t one of the choices, or were too slow, the table moved in a random direction. In either case we got a different set of instructions for the next turn.

After we had messed up once and the table moved sideways, there were two right directions until we got aligned again. It was a lot of frantic fun, and we eventually reached the goal. Then it gave us a new goal, twice as hard since we were twice as far away, though since it was off to the side, we had two right directions most of the way there. By the time we reached the second goal we agreed that we had had enough fun here and stopped. We could have played as long as we wanted, because nobody else was waiting for it, so the timer was off.

There were other games, but Phil and Pam seemed ready to head off together, so we let them go and hoped for the best. Since I had Anna with me, we went to my room for our own fun.