My alarm woke me at 5:00 and I prepared to go jogging. I wore a jogging bra with non-attachable breast forms that felt comfortable while I jogged. I then covered that with an aqua tank top. As an under foundation, I wore my vagina padded panty with only Nike women’s running spandex shorts. I then slid on my slightly undersized pair of Nike aura / mint women’s jogging shoes.

The next two weeks dragged…really dragged. I spent most of the time on my own as my desire and ability to interact with my guards was limited. Did I say guards? It felt more and more like a prison, comfortable, but still confining. I wasn’t even interested in trying to engage with the female police members; I must be losing my touch! Actually, it was probably more that I was fed up trying to explain my position to each individual who arrived on site.

I awoke, in bed, on Thursday, July 27, as Victoria, beside and intimate with what I expected would be Jody’s body. But when I tried to get Jody up, I couldn’t feel him at all in my mind. There was only Victoria. When I looked at the body in the bed beside me, I saw he was blond. Who was he? I roused my bedmate and got a better look at him.

During the next few days, my mind kept going through various scenarios that could explain the pictures. I thought first a sister, no he knew both, a cousin possibly but I still needed to figure out why I had the pictures. I thought that I was coming up with a plausible story when my sister mentioned to me that she had talked to Sam a few weeks ago. She said he sounded a bit lonely and they talked a bit and he wanted to know if she still had that lovely necklace that he and his wife had given to her.

The boutique on Merchant Street is narrow and well-lit, the kind of place that knows what it's doing without announcing it. I hold the door for Emily. We go in.

A woman looks up from behind the counter - fifties, unhurried, the competence of someone who has been doing this for a long time. Name tag says Maria. She looks at me the way Carol at Target looked at me - the brief professional read, taking in the situation, filing it.

"Mike?" she says.

"Yeah," I say.

"Come on back."

---

I grew up in the 1980s and early 1990s as part of Generation X. Looking back, high school was one of the most confusing periods of my life, and the effects of that confusion still influence my relationships today.

I was transgender, although I didn't have a word for it back then. The vocabulary simply wasn't part of my world. I didn't know there were other people who felt the way I did, and I certainly didn't know that what I was experiencing had a name. All I knew was that I desperately wanted to be a girl, yet every mirror reminded me that everyone else saw me as a boy.

As I said, it started with the loss of the USB stick. Unfortunately (or fortunately) for me I did not notice that it was missing from my computer bag until I received that fateful email. Upon opening the email I saw it was a message from Sam asking if I had left behind a USB stick. At first it didn’t occur to me what it was, but a quick look into my bag showed me that I had left the one that had the pictures on it at his place. I surmised that he probably found it while cleaning the room.

Torn from his own world and stuffed into the body of a villainess, facing the end of a doomed route he himself wrote, "Amelia" must navigate a world she really should know - too bad she was never great at worldbuilding.

Stuck in a world she (maybe) created, Amelia quickly finds that reality has filled in the details she failed to describe. The characters who were so flat when she wrote them now have nuance, and motives. The kingdom she wrote into existence is experiencing internal strife she never even thought about. And let's not even get into the complexities of the magic system, or the demon that forced her into this situation to begin with...

Oh, and then there's the fact that she's about to be arrested and executed... but surely she can come up with a way to write herself out of that, right?

...Right?

It's time for the showdown between Martin and Sheila, and the Italian mob of Washington D.C. But Sheila has learned a few tricks in the course of this case, and they might stay with her for her the whole rest of her career.