Too exhausted to actually plan out a dream, I ended up dreaming of Victoria being in the world of the Sea Men together with Nancy and Aries. The three of us were being completely flirty with the Sea Men, having sex with several, and each of us laying an egg before it was over. None of us implanted the eggs, though. Despite our tiredness, we were all aware of how realistic the dreams had become, and we were all afraid we would really produce children whose fathers would present them to us on a future visit. For that matter, I couldn’t be certain I hadn’t made children here in the past when I thought this place was just a dream, but if I did, nobody had come forth to tell me I was a parent. Heck, Jody as a Sea Man had given birth to a daughter in one dream, but I had no idea who her mother was, nor even whether Jody was the genetic father, and if I had ever seen the child again, I didn’t recognize her.

Aries was not eligible due to being summoned the previous day, but Nancy was, as we’d only pulled her from the dream world during our adventure yesterday. So it was like a Victoria and Nancy dream, and on Sunday, August 6, I awoke as alt-Victoria with Nathan. But we were in the world of the Sea Men, and we were of the native species rather than being human. We weren’t even in our house; we were out on the sandy beach area on one side of the pond, along with my co-workers, who likewise all had fins and blue skin.

This was not something I wanted, but it was useful to learn that it was something I could do. I wasn’t previously aware whether people even worked in this world, but we must, since I was clearly in this world’s equivalent of the work camp along with my co-workers, and there was no reason we’d be here unless we did. It was Sunday, though, so not a scheduled work day, if things were the same as my world.

Most of my co-workers were asleep, but a few arose as early as Nathan and I had done. Asleep or not, I wasn’t surprised to see everyone completely naked. That was always the way for Sea Men.

There was a large sign next to the pond. At the top, it proclaimed “No peeing or pooping allowed.” In smaller letters directly under this, it said “Egg laying allowed” and “Do not drink the water.” The rest of the sign was filled with various rules about fishing. Each person was allowed only one fish per species per day and a maximum of 4 total fish per day. Several species were shown with length limits; some had minimum lengths also, and each edge of the sign had inch marks for measuring. There was more in still smaller letters about what to do with any dead fish you find and the remains from fish you eat, and info about other situations.

A second sign was a board to log your catches. This appeared to be a dry-erase board and there was a marker hanging from it to mark the boxes next to whatever you caught. The grids were almost completely clear, but two people had logged one fish each. All the names of the people in the camp were written at the left of two grids, in alphabetical order. The top of each grid was labeled with the names and silhouettes of the species listed on the first sign.

Mostly it was the people from my camp, but a few of the names looked unfamiliar, and there were more female names than I remembered there being women in the camp, but looking at the sleeping people revealed that fully a third of the people here were female. At least, they had breasts. None of the males should have breasts, since they were neither obviously pregnant nor were there any children present. Neither case was likely, since it was just as impractical to raise Sea Man children here as it was to raise human ones.

A third sign that seemed recently built advised about an invasive species. This fish was inedible but a $20 reward was being offered for each one caught. You were to tag them with tags provided here and drop them in a box through a slot in the top.

The instructions for disposing of dead fish on the first sign mentioned a second pond where the dead of some species were to be disposed of. Sure enough, there was a second pond nearby that didn’t exist in my usual world. This one had a sign saying “Peeing and pooping only” at the top. It also said “Egg laying allowed” under it in smaller letters that I could just barely read from here, then “No swimming,” “No diving,” and “No fishing” in letters even larger than the first line. There was some much smaller writing beneath.

I remembered no such rules when I visited the Sea Men in my dreams, including the dream that led us into being here. In those dreams, a community of maybe twice the number of people present here plus some children lived along the shore of a much larger body of water, and as far as I knew, they used that water for everything. If these two ponds were all the water here, it probably had to be carefully managed, thus the rules.

The mobile homes were still there, and Nathan and I each had a key on a cord around our necks when we awoke. We wanted to check them out, but we also wanted breakfast, so we did as we saw one other person already do and what I knew was Sea Man custom. Checking that the cords were secure enough that we would not lose them while doing so, we both dove into the pond that was for fishing and each caught a fish between the claws of our bare hands. The fish were not speared all the way through, but the claws held them tightly enough to ensure they did not escape as we brought them to shore and measured them against the sign, finding both fish well in the middle of the good range for their species. We marked our catches on the second sign next to where Nathan and Victoria were written.

The directions on the sign said we should put the bones we cleared of meat into a bin next to the peeing pond, but throw the heads, fins, and any other parts we didn’t eat of this species into the peeing pond, and since we felt the need for that function anyway, we headed over that way as we ate our fish raw. Is eating fish raw really all that weird? People eat raw fish bits in sushi. The bodies we were in today had no problem with it; we savored every last bit. As we reached the pond, we broke off the fins, heads, and tails and threw them in the pond, and dropped the main parts of the skeletons into the box.

We saw a Sea Man just pee over the side on our way there, but I wondered how that would work for my Sea Woman body. I had even less down there than a human woman had; my vagina was just a tightly closed hole that looked little different from an anus. I couldn’t even see where I would pee from. It didn’t help that I’d never peed in dreams, but in addition, I never remembered the Sea Women in my dreams peeing like this. As far as I knew, they just peed while they were in the water, but that was prohibited here. It was probably less of a concern when there were only 100 Sea Men in a huge lake with tides and currents to dilute it and sweep it away.

The small text below the prohibitions on the sign explained about the bottom-dwelling species that had been introduced here to basically eat our wastes. There was a thin railing consisting of two horizontal bars, one just above knee height and one just above waist height, along the sides of this pond facing the camp and the other pond. In three places there were what looked like open-bottomed chairs made of the same bars. I supposed that people pooping sat in those.

“Would I pee from the chair?” I asked Nathan. “You’ve done this before when Nancy was a Sea Woman, right? How’s it work?”

“Oh, you’ve never...”

Nathan paused for a moment in thought before continuing.

“Just go up there and try to pee like you would as a man and you’ll see how it works.”

I trusted my friend wasn’t just trying to embarrass me, so I stood leaning against the railing beside him and did what I would do to pee. I was amazed when the ovipositor pushed out of my vagina about an inch or so, nowhere near its full length, but far enough for what I needed. With it out this way, I could see that the pee hole was on the end of the organ, literally on the rim of the vaginal opening. I’d never noticed it before because it was hidden in all the folds of tissue at the opening.

It didn’t go any further; the organ stiffened a little and then I peed as neat and strong a stream as Nathan did from his penis. Practically as soon as I was done shaking off the last drop, it receded back into my body and in 15 seconds went from that mini-penis to just an opening in the flat of my crotch like it was before.

With that done, we headed for the homes. The water from the fishing pond ran readily off our slick skins, so we were almost completely dry by the time we made it there. There were still, however, towels on shelves at the entry of my home, the same double-wide I inhabited in my world, and we each took one to dry any residual water from our bodies and hung them on a nearby rack.

The rest of the house was also different, but surprisingly similar to what I was used to. There was a shower and a toilet, showing that we didn’t have to pee in the pond. There was a living room with television and chairs like lawn chairs with strapping attached to metal frames. The fabric of the chairs was made out of some white woven material I couldn’t identify; it looked sturdy but still had some give to it.

There was a kitchen of sorts, including a refrigerator, and a sink with two taps, one of them labeled “drinking water”. We both found glasses and filled them there. The rest of the kitchen seemed to be devoted to preserving and storing fish, rather than cooking. There were packages of sea salt there the size of bushel baskets, and a roll of paper for wrapping preserved fish. Instead of whatever food I had bought and stored previously in the human world, I found nine packages, each of which presumably contained a preserved fish.

The bedroom featured a mat made of the same woven white material as the living room furniture on top of what appeared to be an artificial sand bed. There was no actual sand and so no loose grains to track around. It had a control that would let me set the temperature. The artificial sand appeared porous, and slightly damp, so was probably heated by running warm water through it. It looked as if staying on the white mat would keep us dry. Since everybody was sleeping out on the real beach this morning, I assumed that in the colder months we would sleep here instead.

I still had a cell phone, and I could see from the messages on it that Sea Woman alt-Victoria worked much as the other alt-Victoria did. We still had cars, electricity, and some of the same industries as in the world I knew, a lot more like the human world than I thought the world of the Sea Men would be, and we apparently still drilled enough oil from the ground to need to come up here to Alaska to look for it.

Surprisingly, alt-Victoria did have some of what I would consider normal human clothes and shoes, apart from the cold-weather gear. I suspected, though, given the choices and the fact that there were none for Nathan, that they were for protection when she went out into the oil fields. She had exactly 6 outfits worth of them, enough for a working week plus one to spare in case she was called in on a Saturday.

I confirmed this by searching for this Victoria’s old emails about dress code, safety, etc. and eventually found one from before she actually started work up here explaining the kind of clothing she was expected to wear in the fields and, apart from the hard hat to be worn in certain areas, to acquire before arriving. Apparently there were other jobs that required such protective clothing, and it was possible to buy it elsewhere. Each outfit consisted of the same pieces. There was something like a long-sleeve T-shirt but with leather pads on the elbows, forearms, and upper arms, leaving the sleeves still flexible but mostly covering any part of the arms likely to bang into something. There was underwear designed to hold a protective cup; the same underwear was used with different cups for men and women. These were covered with what looked like ordinary overalls humans might wear, apart from having slits with covers for the fins. There were shoes of a sort that worked on the Sea Man feet, and likewise gloves.

There were additional suggestions for cold weather. And items from these two lists were exactly what she had in the closet. There were no bathing suits; those were in Aries’ possessions only because the wardrobe I saw them in was designed for her to live among humans. There were no bras, either. Despite the fact that Sea Woman alt-Victoria was as big in the bust as the other Victorias, the Sea Woman body seemed to be firmer. The breasts didn’t sag, nor did they jiggle in the least when walking over here.

By the time we were done checking this out, I felt another bodily urge, one that I’d never felt in real life, but I knew from having felt it in dreams what it was.

“Nathan, did you have a condom on when you awoke?”

Nathan thought for a moment and replied, “No, I can’t recall removing it. And I don’t know where I would have discarded it if I had one.”

“Weird, because I’m sure I put one on last night with Aries. In any case, I have an egg coming now.”

“You wanna go back out to the pond to pop it out?”

“Sure, once my ovipositor is all the way out.”

My organ that had only recently receded from having been used to pee was extending out again, and this time it did not stop at the short length for peeing. It took some time to do this, because the change was accompanied by movement inside the body. This was what didn’t happen when I peed earlier. I could feel the whole thing moving inside me. This time, the uterus was descending, and the full length and width of the ovipositor, bigger than a penis, would soon be exposed.

Laying an egg as a Sea Woman is different from giving birth, the biggest difference being that it is only a small egg rather than a whole baby. The egg never gets large enough to make a pregnancy bump in the belly, and Sea Women really only know they are making an egg when they feel these bodily changes start. The uterus descends within the abdomen until it is lying within the pelvic bone. The ovipositor is forced out of the body by the same action. I knew that when the process was complete, the cervix would be located where the opening of the vagina usually was, at the surface of the body.

Once it was most of the way out, I started walking with Nathan back to the pond. There was no reason he needed to come, except companionship or so that he could see me do it, but I wasn’t going to deny him that. I got up to the railing and stood against it much like when we had peed earlier and started the process. Another difference between egg-laying and birth is that egg-laying is completely under my voluntary control. First I have to open the cervix, and this means relaxing a muscle usually held tense. The best way I can describe it to someone who’s only ever been human is that it’s similar to opening your anus to poop, except it’s a different muscle. Once that is done, the next step is to contract the uterine muscles to push the egg through. This has the very obvious effect of pushing the egg into the ovipositor and making a noticeable bulge in the first few inches of it outside the body.

The last step is using the vaginal muscles making up the walls of the ovipositor to push the egg out. This is not like birth at all, at least, what I assume it’s like, since I’ve never given birth as a human even in my dreams. (Giving birth as a Sea Man is clearly not comparable, since the baby basically grows its way out of the sac.) Human women have to push the fetus along very gradually since it barely fits through the dilated birth canal, and it’s a long process that often takes hours. This step of laying the egg is very quick; the muscles sync up and push the egg all at once down the length of the ovipositor, sort of like what happens in the esophagus while swallowing. It’s supposed to push it pretty deep into a Sea Man’s abdominal sac so it can get down to the point where the fetus can latch on to his navel once the eggshell dissolves. When the egg is not going into such a sac, as is the case in the many times Sea Women are just trying to get rid of an unwanted egg, it shoots out with some force. When I got it out, even though the surface of the water was only about 4 feet below my ovipositor, it went at least 20 feet away from us out into the pond. It was a bit of a relief to get it out, and I was glad my dreams had been faithful in teaching me how to do it.

Once I had expelled the egg, my ovipositor immediately started retracting as my body resumed its usual condition. This happened at about twice the rate at which it had extended, and we walked back to the house while it was happening. After we got there, Nathan and I spent hours flipping among different television programs. There were almost none of the programs I knew, though I did find a version of Doctor Who in which the Doctor and humans were Sea Men. Well, the Doctor was a Time Lord who looked like a Sea Man.

Nudity, naturally, was not only allowed on TV but nearly universal, since the Sea Men wore clothing only for protection rather than just to cover the body. There wasn’t even an effort to hide the genitals. Actual sex showing genital contact and implantations of eggs into men’s sacs seemed to be limited to a couple channels specifically devoted to this world’s equivalent of porn.

After we went out and got another fish each for lunch, we took a look into the dream worlds. The doorways were still there, and even still covered in the same way. Instead of the childhood home I was used to, each dream world was a tiny one-room house, so bare of furnishings that it took effort to confirm that the one directly connected to Alaska was alt-Victoria’s and the second one was Jody’s. We quickly realized they were also a place inhabited by Sea Men.

We spent most of the rest of the day there, trying to learn more about Sea Man cities, since they were not like the shoreline community of my dreams. While I lived in the same sized house in the Sea Man camp as I did in the human world, the houses weren’t needed for protection from the cold in the climate where I grew up, so they were only a place to keep electrical devices out of the weather, and a place to preserve food like I had in the kitchen here.

There were two systems of canals dug throughout the city, both clearly labeled, much as the two ponds were in the camp, though they didn’t have the specific fishing rules like in the camp. The pee canal ran where a back fence would have been in the human world, protected by similar railings, while the fishing canal ran along the front of the lot, occupying what would have probably been the street in my world. A wide sidewalk made of the artificial sand stuff ran along the edge of it on both sides. Most of the rest of the land was covered with grass and trees and other ordinary plants.

And there were indeed fish in that canal! There must have been people somewhere keeping them stocked for them to serve so many people. Maybe they pay taxes that are used to keep them stocked. Clearly at least some of the people work jobs here.

There were streets, but they didn’t come right up to the lot where we lived. There were straight-in parking spaces continuously along both sides of the road that ran roughly where the end of the block would have been in my world, numbered to correspond to our lot numbers. A car that didn’t exactly look like the one I had in my human dream world, but was similar, was in my numbered space.

I took this to be what a Sea Man city looked like. The place from my dreams was probably a small coastal town or the romanticized image of an ancestral town. The Alaskan camp might have been how small frontier towns were built there or might have been as much as oddity as the camp in the human world was.

Alt-Victoria the Sea Woman didn’t leave a diary either in the camp house nor in the dream world one, so I didn’t get those insights into her experience in this world, but just seeing this much of the real Sea Man world, as compared with the one in my dreams, was very enlightening.

We went back out into the real world (such as it was) and got a third fish each for dinner, and after dinner I realized that while we’d been in the dream world, the people here had been having sex. Over a stretch of half an hour while we were there to catch and eat our dinner and dispose of the waste, we saw five different women shoot eggs into the water like I had done earlier.

I spent the next couple hours in the house going through alt-Victoria’s messages, trying to make sense of this version of her life. At one point Nathan drew my attention back to the pond. When I looked, it appeared to be an orgy. From what I could see, everyone in the camp was having sex.

I tried to reconcile that with the fact that alt-Victoria the Sea Woman had apparently still made a sex doll and started summoning the men from her dreams. Did it work differently for her because she was a Sea Woman? Or was the wildness of the orgy still abhorrent to her and she spent nights in the house, even in the summers, eventually deciding she wanted sex in her own way and following the same path. I didn’t find that answer in her messages. It looked like, apart from everybody being Sea Men, the job was remarkably similar to the one I was familiar with. But there were things I couldn’t explain. Some of her co-workers had sent messages to her intended for Jody, not recently, but way back in the first months she started working here. And the messages said Jody, even though Nathan was here with me as alt-Victoria today, and there was no Jody.

After failing to reconcile that oddity, I realized it was getting close to the time for me to sleep, so Nathan and I went back out to the beach and got to check out the apparent orgy from close up. Orgy was the right term. A few couples were paired off, apart from the rest. It wasn’t always easy for me to recognize the people here as the ones I knew from the camp, with their blue, hairless skin and in some cases a gender change, but I thought these pairs mostly matched the committed pairs in the camp. They were all male-female pairs, though; I was pretty sure a couple of these women were sex-changed versions of gay men from the human camp. The singles, however, were engaging in sex willy-nilly, with each of the single women having three or four men with her, having sex every imaginable way including some of the men taking anal from other men, and occasionally switching off among groups.

I needed to have some form of sex with Nathan to summon another woman the next day, but there were no condoms in this world, the concept undoubtedly being foreign to them. Dumping their eggs in the pond was the only form of birth control they knew, and that was probably what this version of Victoria did, too. But I needed to worry about getting whichever woman I was summoning pregnant, since in the morning she wouldn’t be a Sea Woman but a human one. So I considered taking Nathan in my ass, but then I had a better idea.

On Monday, August 7, I woke up with Aries back in my mobile home in the normal world again. The most convenient way of solving the problem I had last night was to in fact not summon a human woman. And I also had the busted remains of the missing condom from Saturday around the base of my dick. I didn’t quite understand what had happened to it, but my best guess is that even though it seemed to be absent in the Sea Man world due to the concept not existing there, it still existed in some ethereal sense, and all the activity of the day affected it once I was back in a world where it existed. This was far more than it was designed to handle and caused it to rupture.

I gave a brief version of the events yesterday to Aries. Of course, since I didn’t have an intact condom, she laid an egg even before I left for work, and I didn’t care. She understood the rules now, and didn’t try to put it inside me. 

I wasn’t surprised to see her bathing suit hanging from the shower rod when I got home from work. She had eaten, and had left me a fish to cook as well.

I hadn’t even thought about calling my parents yesterday, and even if I had been able to contact them, I probably would have gotten some other version of them. Before I started dinner, I called my parents briefly, and apologized for not calling back as I’d promised, explaining where I’d been. Even the explanation was too long for the late hour there, so Dad told me to wait until the weekend. He also said he didn’t care which day I called, really; whatever was convenient for me.

“What did you do with the egg?” I asked Aries as I cooked my dinner.

“I fed it to Bruno.”

“The sea dragon? You went into Mona’s world?”

“Yes. Bruno loves me, and I was able to get into the pond with him without all the ridiculous protective clothing.”

“I wonder if it’s because he somehow knows you’re his mother, because you fed him an egg, or because he just likes your aquatic species.”

“Mona thought he was treating me as his mother, though whether it was because he senses somehow that I really am his mother despite the transformation or because of those other things, she couldn’t tell.”