Reawakening

I was 19 when I encountered a really hot girl at a club and left with her. But we never got to the point of having sex. We kissed and ran our mouths over each other, and during this time my date Kelly bit me hard on the neck. And that was the end of my life as Brad.

I awoke an undetermined time later in a bed, somewhere, with my whole body feeling numb. I continued lying there, and after maybe an hour or so my date showed up, though she was dressed differently from how she was when I met her. More of a goth look.

“Where are we, Kelly?” I asked, but my voice sounded really weird.

“Oh, good, you’re awake. And you’re in our home in Trans-Sylvania.”

“Transylvania? Like where Count Dracula is from?”

“Almost. But the place in the human world only has one S. We are somewhere else, like a parallel universe, and underground, and we call this place Trans-Sylvania,” she replied, leaving a clear gap between the two S sounds.

“So are you actually a vampire?” I asked.

“Yes. And now you are, too. Humans get that part right.”

“Is that why my voice sounds weird? It doesn’t actually sound like how I imagine a vampire’s voice.”

“No. Can you move your body yet? Why don’t you take a look at it?”

I managed to move one arm enough to pull back the covers I was under and turn my head to look down at my body. To my surprise, what I found there was a female body. A young woman’s, looking about my age of 19. That was the reason my voice sounded strange. My whole body had changed. I had breasts and curves and when I moved my hand down between my legs, I confirmed that part was changed too. I wasn’t sure how I felt about being a vampire, but about being a girl, I was ecstatic.

I always felt that I was trans, but the community was so hostile to trans women I had always kept it closeted. They were literally getting murdered out there and nothing was done about it since the hater government was voted in. So, while I had privately dressed up as a girl, I had never dared go out as one, with the sole exception of last Halloween, when it wasn’t weird to be out in a costume with a full face mask.

It would have been even worse to be seen as a girl dating another girl, as was my preference. I had hoped for one of two things: To find a girl who would accept that aspect of me, and help me with it, maybe even get me out secretly into events as a girl, or, by finishing college, to be able to get a job that would allow me to move to one of the more expensive but more liberal parts of America where the local governments protect trans people. I didn’t know whether Kelly knew this, but I wasn’t entirely able to hide it from her now.

“Wow! I’m a girl vampire!”

“This happens to all vampires.”

“All vampires are female?” I asked.

“No, only the ones who were male as humans. Female humans turn into male vampires.”

“Is that only because we’re in Trans-Sylvania?” I asked, saying it the way that Kelly had done.

“No, not really, but there is a connection there. All vampires live in Trans-Sylvania, though we do visit the human world at times. But in the past, even the ones who didn’t live here changed sex during their conversion. We are responsible for the term trans being applied in modern times to humans who want to change sex, but we’ve long tried to find people like that, rather than converting random people.”

“Does that mean you started out as a man?”

“Yes. We only change once, during our conversion to vampires. You’ll have an eternity as a female vampire now if you don’t do one of those things that can get you killed.”

It was getting better and better. “And those are?” I asked.

“You know the human myths about vampires?”

I nodded.

“They are partially correct. Direct sunlight is the most important one. If you step right out into the blazing sun you’ll die quickly. Even partial sunlight isn’t good for you. That’s why we all live underground here.”

“Got it. No sun.”

Kelly went on with the next reason. “Getting stabbed in the heart by a wooden stake is fatal.”

“But wouldn’t that kill a human too?”

“Yes. It’s only notable because it can kill a vampire. You might think that, say, cutting off a vampire’s head would be fatal, but no. You’ll be out of commission for a bit, but you’ll come back if that happens, unless you were cut with a silver blade. Silver is another thing to beware of. Cuts made with silver can permanently scar you and are fatal if they do anything that would kill a human.”

“Interesting. So I should be careful visiting old rich folks who have silverware made of real silver. Anything else?”

“Holy water and holy symbols are a problem only if used by true believers really connected to their God. It’s rare to encounter those these days, but the few who exist are likely to be equipped with such items.”

“What about garlic?” I asked.

“Garlic is unpleasant, but at worst it’ll make you sick, and then only if you ate a dish with a lot of it. Someone waving around cloves of garlic won’t do anything.”

“Do I have to keep going back to the human world to drink blood?”

“No, that’s made up. One of our few laws is that cannibalism is banned, specifically eating or drinking any human or vampire parts, just because of that rumor that leads some new converts to think they should drink blood. None of us actually want to, and when we bite you to convert you, we’re injecting you with what makes you a vampire, not drinking your blood. We eat the same food as humans. The food comes ultimately from farmers, though we convert it to what we need. Some of us vampires are farmers who grow crops on the surface, but live underground most of the time, in rooms like this one. This is your room in our home.”

“So I’m part of your family now?”

“You could say that. We’re all one big family. There aren’t separate houses down here; it’s one continuous burrow with tens of thousands of rooms. Can you move yet?”

I tested my arms and legs. Still a little numbness but I could move everything, and I carefully got out of bed. I was a bit wobbly at first, due to the different balance of the female body, but I quickly adapted and within a couple minutes I was walking comfortably. I was aware I was naked, but there were two reasons I wasn’t worried about giving Kelly a peek. First, she was my date from just before I got here, and second, she and I were both obviously female.

“Can you get me some clothes?” I asked.

“All your old clothes are here. Let me show you how to use them. Just grab anything.”

She pointed out my dresser from my previous life, which someone had moved here, still full of all my old male clothes. I grabbed underwear from the top drawer because it seemed like a place to start. I started to put them on, but she stopped me.

“No, change it first.”

“Huh?”

“Stare at it and think about what you really want.”

I gave it a try, and soon found myself holding red satin panties.

“Amazing!” I said as I put them on. They fit perfectly.

“You can make whatever you want, so these are all the clothes you’ll ever need. It doesn’t have to be the same kind of garment, but it’s easier if you try to match the mass. You can change them again and again, and they’re always like new after you do, so nothing ever wears out. That’s how you do laundry, too. If you have any questions about different types of clothes you just aren’t sure about, feel free to ask me.”

It was obvious this body needed a bra. Of course I had nothing comparable. What of mine was about the mass of a bra? I pulled out a pair of socks. One sock was clearly less material than a bra, though the shape was so different it wasn’t clear. I held up both socks together, and in a moment I was holding a red bra that matched the panties.

I put my arms through the straps and positioned the cups over my breasts. My breasts! When I dressed up as a girl, I had to stuff the cups with something, but no more. I reached behind my back and hooked it together, then checked it with my hands. It fit perfectly! It was smooth everywhere, not too tight nor loose.

“Is the sizing automatic?” I asked Kelly.

“Yes. If you are thinking of something for you to wear yourself, it’ll automatically come out in the right size. You can make something for someone else, but you either have to know their size and think about that size, or know the person well enough you can picture it on them.”

I took the bra off for a moment to check its size.

“36D,” I read off the tag.

When I lived with my parents, my mother had measured me and bought female clothes for me, including a bra. Sadly, overuse in fantasy time at home had worn them out before I went off to college, and since I was going to have a roommate I thought it better to just toss them. That bra was a 38, but I felt like a 36 is what I would have wanted to be if I could have chosen my size. And I had chosen a D cup; though big, it made me unmistakably female when I played dress-up. As far as I was concerned, this size was perfect.

In response to my reading of the size, Kelly said “I should also mention that they are sized in the sizing system you know. You were American, but other countries have different sizing systems, some of them based on centimeters. And there are vampires who have been around since before this sizing system was established. They learned the British and American sizing system, based on inches, because it was the first system developed. I’ll give you a conversion chart later.”

I wasn’t sure why I’d need the chart. Was I likely to be trading bras with other women here? Maybe they had stores, for vampires who want to go beyond what they know. Whatever the case, I ignored that for now, put the bra back on, and thought about what to cover it with. I knew I didn’t know everything about women’s clothes, but I knew enough to choose something now. What I was thinking of was a dress. Not an elaborate one. One that was elegant in its simplicity.

A dress was a bit longer than a shirt, so I took a T-shirt and shorts together and converted it into a cocktail dress the same red as the other items. I had it on in an instant, and I thought it looked great on me. Another thing came to mind.

“Should I wear pantyhose, Kelly? I’ve never worn them.”

“You can make them if you want, but most of us don’t. They’re a nuisance, and most of us who care enough to have smooth legs here have legs that are naturally smooth enough and hairless. The ones who wear hosiery like that are more likely to wear the kind of stockings that go with a garter belt, with visible patterns on them, and only when they expect them to be seen by a lover who appreciates that sort of thing.”

Her response was spoken dryly, so I felt that Kelly must not be one who appreciates stockings of that sort. So I said, “OK. Guess I’ll skip them for now. Let me figure out some shoes.”

I knew I wasn’t ready for high heels, but I converted one of my old sneakers into a pair of sandals with a one-inch heel and straps in the same red color as the rest of my outfit. There was a lot less shoe, even with the heel, so one sneaker made two new shoes.

I put them on, and now I was dressed. And how! I’d dressed up as if to go on another date with Kelly, though I didn’t know whether she was into girls. Well, to really prep for a date, I’d have to put on makeup, but I didn’t see any, nor a mirror, so I skipped that for now and hoped my face looked fine.

“Somebody’s gonna love you!” she said.

“I was kinda hoping that would be you.”

“Nah, I only do guys, and I’m taken. I was only there because I was asked to bring you in, and I’ll be your guide to get you started here.”

“What, your family was specifically targeting me?”

“Yes. Humans get it right in terms of how we make more vampires, but we do it quite rarely because we tend to live a really long time. We only make a new vampire after one dies, to keep the numbers steady. One of the jobs some people do here is search the world for good candidates, people who would like to change sex but are afraid to really do it, and one of them identified you.”

“So you know I am secretly trans.”

“Yeah. I don’t know a lot of detail; they only told me that you were 100% in the closet about it. There’s one other constraint on our recruits; they can’t have established ties, like being married or engaged. They have to be easy to write out of history.”

“Wait, what? I was just erased from history?”

“Yeah, that’s what happens when you become a vampire and are brought here. At least, it does if you haven’t left too big a mark on the world. We bring all your simple possessions, except your car, which is in Limbo. I’ll show you that later. Anything fixed in place has to stay, so if you owned a house, someone else would end up owning it. But the rest of your stuff is here.”

She pointed to one wall which had a number of boxes stacked up against it. I couldn’t clearly identify it due to the boxes, but I trusted that it was my stuff.

“So you said someone died to make a space for me?”

“An old widow named Genevieve Thomas couldn’t bear living anymore, and she suicided by sunbathing.”

“Oh, right, you said the sun thing about vampires was real. Is that a common way we die?”

“Well, we don’t commonly die at all, but yes, if you’re looking to suicide, that’s a common way. It’s the only easy nonviolent way for us to die. It’s theoretically possible for you to die if you simply stop eating, but it takes a long time, and I’ve never heard of it actually happening. But enough about death; let me show you around.”

There were three doors in my room, one on one end and two on the other, and we went through the the door which was by itself. This opened up into a long hallway with many doors.

“Take note of your room number, 3794. That means you are near the end of hallway 7 on floor 3.”

“Do I need keys?”

“No keys. There are no locked doors here. We are family; we don’t mess with each others’ stuff.”

“Huh. OK.”

I was indeed almost at the end of the hall. There was only 3796 past my room on my side of the hallway, and 3797 across from that. The rooms in the other direction went on farther than I could see. But we walked down the hall, and after 3750 on my side of the hall and 3751 across from it, there was a crossing hallway. Down that hall, about 60 feet to either side, there were parallel hallways. In one direction, there was only one more hallway. The crossing hallway continued a short distance to an open doorway and a room beyond.

As she showed me the stairs, Kelly explained, “The floors are numbered going down, so this, the third floor, is the third one from the top. There are just two more levels above and then the stairs to the surface. There are a lot more levels below, but it doesn’t really matter. Unless you’re trying to visit someone you’ve never visited before, you’re never going to need to cross over all these stairs. There are other ways I’ll show you later.”

We went in the direction where there was only one crossing hallway, which had rooms numbered in the 3800s. We went into the room beyond the intersection, which looked like a sort of cafeteria. There were about 20 people mostly sitting in small groups, but there was room for hundreds.

My First Meal

“You’re probably hungry, so it’s a good time for me to explain how we eat here.”

Kelly led me to the wall next to the entrance to the cafeteria. On each side of the entrance, there was a minimalist sort of buffet line along the wall. There was a stack of plates, a hopper full of something that looked like uncooked rice with a dispenser at the bottom, bins of utensils, a rack of glasses, and a single dispenser for what looked like water.

“Grab a plate. You can make it deeper into a bowl if you like.”

And Kelly demonstrated, using the same sort of stare that let me change my clothes into ones appropriate for my new body. It was a broad-sided bowl, basically a plate with the sloped sides going up at a 45 degree angle instead of being very shallow. I repeated the action on the plate I picked up.

“Dispense as much of this as you like, and then change it into what you want to eat in the same way. It’s not really a regular mealtime for me, so I’m going to eat light.”

Kelly turned her bowl back into a plate and turned a handle on the side of the rice container, which dispensed enough rice in two full revolutions to cover the plate about halfway up the sloped sides in rice. Then, with the stare, she turned it into a meal that looked like a bacon-wrapped filet mignon, a few of those tiny potatoes, and a small pile of green beans. But I realized that I was in fact quite hungry, so I left my plate as a bowl and turned the handle several times to fill it to the top with the rice. Since as far as I was concerned it was breakfast time, I changed it into a big stack of pancakes surrounded by lots of bacon, sausages, hash browns, and a couple of buttered rolls. It was easily three normal breakfasts.

Kelly grabbed a fork and knife and added them to her plate. At the next station, Kelly took a glass, filled it with water from the dispenser, and then changed it into some dark liquid. I changed mine into orange juice. Then I followed her to a table where we sat and ate. Despite my having just changed this from uncooked rice and plain water to this meal, it tasted exactly like it was supposed to. When I finished off the orange juice, I went and refilled my glass and made more. I also decided I needed a little more food, so I turned my empty bowl back into a plate, and with a covering of the rice made a ham steak with a pineapple ring.

“All done?” Kelly asked when I didn’t go back for thirds.

“Yeah. I’m surprised I was so hungry. Was I out for a while?”

“Yeah. It’s Sunday afternoon.”

“Oh. That explains it.” It had been Friday night when she bit me.

“The whole becoming a vampire thing isn’t instant. Your body takes a little while to reconfigure itself into your ideal of the opposite sex.”

“My ideal? Ah, yes, that makes sense. So we’re all hotties here?” I wasn’t actually sure how I looked, since I hadn’t seen myself in a mirror, but the parts of me I had seen looked nice.

“Well, some people have different ideals than others. But mostly, yes. And you’ll keep updating each time you sleep, if your ideal changes, but in the future it’ll just be normal sleep periods and not multiple days. Come, let’s dispose of this and I can show you what you look like.”

I followed her to an area beyond the short buffet line where we set the used plates, after first dumping the crumbs in a trash bin. Kelly showed me how to transform the plate and glass and utensils into clean ones before leaving them there.

As we left, Kelly explained, “Someone on each floor has the job to recycle those. He’ll transform the stack of used plates into a stack of clean ones, and likewise for the other things. The trash gets turned into fertilizer or seeds for the farmers.”

We went back to my room, which as Kelly promised was unlocked. She simply turned the knob and opened the door, and quickly led me to the other end of my room.

“The weird shimmery door leads to Limbo. We’ll go there in a bit, but I want to show you what’s behind this ordinary door first, which is the bathroom.”

She opened the door, and there was a pretty basic white bathroom there with a toilet, sink, and shower stall.

“I want to point out that everything here is optional. Each night when you sleep, your body changes to your ideal, which includes being cleaned. And you can force that during the day as well. That change also includes eliminating all your built-up wastes, so you can always avoid needing the toilet by remaking yourself. It used to be that was how all vampires always took care of that, but modern humans have gotten so used to using the toilet that we put them in all the rooms.”

It all worked like I expected. But then Kelly showed me more.

“The hand soap dispenser is drawn from a common supply. It’ll never run out. But you can turn it around this way and pump some out on the side of the sink. Use this if you need any other supply that isn’t here. Shampoo, toilet paper, whatever.”

Peeking under the sink, I saw that indeed the chrome dispenser tube at the corner of the sink was fed by a tube from behind the wall rather than from a disposable container below the sink, as I would have expected. The soap was a kind of gel, rather than a watery fluid.

Seeing how there was a rack that looked like it could hold three spare rolls of toilet paper alongside the dispenser, but there was only half a roll on the dispenser and one spare roll, I made a good sized glob of soap and turned it into a roll of toilet paper and added it to the rack. I figured I’d do other stuff when I needed it.

Kelly continued, “I also want to point out that you own this room now, and the same way you changed the other stuff, you can reconfigure the room. It takes a little more effort, but you can change the shower stall to a bathtub, put in a bidet, or whatever you want. Don’t worry about the plumbing; it’ll all reconfigure itself for what you install.”

“Automatically, just like the clothes sizing? Neat!”

Kelly nodded.

“Can I only change things I own?”

“Only stuff you own and community property, which is everything here not assigned to someone. That applies to the rice and water and plates and stuff for our meals. Those things are ours collectively rather than belonging to any one of us, so anyone can convert it.”

“What’s with this dark panel in place of a mirror?”

“Oh, another thing humans get right is that we don’t show up in mirrors. That holds true for shiny surfaces in metal or glassware as well. For a long time that meant always needing to groom each other in pairs, but modern technology has improved that. If you go back into the main room you should find your phone somewhere.”

Indeed, it was sitting there plugged in and fully charged.

“The panel is an external monitor and the other hanging thing is a movable dock. Put your camera in selfie mode and you’ll get something the equivalent of a mirror, but it shows our images.”

I did that and it worked wonderfully. The arm allowed me to move the phone about, allowing me to see myself from different sides. It was better than a mirror.

“Huh. Seems like I look fine without makeup.”

“That’s part of the whole ideal form thing. Most women here don’t use anything more than lipstick and perhaps eye shadow, which is mainly about using different colors on different days to match your clothes, mood, or whatever.”

I pumped a glob of soap into my hand and turned it into a tube of bright red lipstick matching my current outfit, and put some on.

“Perfect,” I said. I took my phone and headed out of the bathroom.

Kelly followed, and said, “This is a good time for me to help you get your phone set up to work in Trans-Sylvania.”

“Oh, right. It won’t see any networks it knows.”

Kelly produced a SIM tool from somewhere, and popped out my SIM and handed it back to me.

“This one’s now useless. It corresponds to an account that never existed in the current reality.”

She put in a new one and handed my phone back to me.

“Now it will connect to the local wi-fi within Trans-Sylvania and do wi-fi calling. When you’re among humans, it’ll be treated as roaming in an account you’ll never have to worry about, but you’ll have connectivity. You have my number and I’ve got yours, and you can add other people here as you meet them. Don’t try to add humans; they won’t be able to call you, and in most cases, you won’t be associating with them enough that you need to save their numbers. If you need to, you can dial 0 plus country code, area code, and number to call phones in the human world.”

“Great!”

She fiddled with my phone a bit and handed it back to me with a web site loaded.

“Bookmark this site. You can find the size conversion charts I mentioned, maps of Trans-Sylvania, and lots of other useful information there.”

I did that, and located the conversion charts, though I didn’t feel they were especially relevant right now.

“One more thing. In Settings you should be able to set your name. The way we do names here is that, as the one who made you a vampire, my first name Kelly should be your last name. You can pick any first name you want.”

“Hmm, yeah, I can’t be Brad anymore. I didn’t really use the name anywhere, but I called the female-dressed version of me Brandy. So I’m Brandy Kelly.”

“Great, Brandy. Oh, somewhere around here you’ll find your old driver’s license. You can update it.”

I found my wallet on a table and pulled out my license.

Kelly said, “Just do that stare trick and aim for an updated license.”

I did, and a moment later I was staring at a license for Brandy Kelly from Trans-Sylvania, with a picture of the new me and Brad’s original birth date.

“This trick is amazing. I’ll have to keep it in mind for other stuff.”

“You should be aware it only works within Trans-Sylvania. Once you walk through that door, your powers are more limited.”

She was referring to the door to Limbo, which she now opened.

Limbo

I converted the rest of my wallet to more of a woman’s wallet, including the other cards inside at least converting to show my new name, not knowing whether they were going to be good for anything. Then I grabbed some bag from my pile of other possessions and turned it into a small purse also matching my current outfit. I put my license in the wallet, my wallet in the purse, and also put my lipstick and phone in.

“Anything else I should get before going into the unknown place where I am powerless? Tampons, perhaps?” I suggested, trying to think of what else women carried in their purses.

“No tampons, unless it’s just for show and you really expect humans to inspect the contents of your purse. We don’t menstruate and can’t get pregnant. Taking over humans is the only way we make more vampires. And this is only going to be a short demonstration trip, so you’re fine.”

With that said, I closed up my purse and followed Kelly through the door. Once through, she didn’t wait for me to ask the obvious question before answering it.

“Limbo is a place between the dimension in which Trans-Sylvania exists and the one you know, where humans live. It’s a drab, featureless place illuminated by a dim but universal light that doesn’t make any shadows because it shines from every direction at once. Whatever it is, it’s not sunlight, and doesn’t hurt us. We use it as a massive garage to store everyone’s cars.”

Indeed, the short distance we had crossed in the time it took her to say that had brought us to a single line of parked cars that stretched on out of sight in both directions, spaced somewhat irregularly, with enough room to park additional cars after every second or third car. Some of them were fancy, some outrageous and bizarre. I saw mine as we approached and led Kelly to it. It was definitely the plainest car in sight, the cheap used car I’d been using. Well, Brad had used it, as a college student.

“You said that our power doesn’t work here. I can’t change my car into some other car. But it looks like some of these people have.”

“Oh, there’s a trick to that. We have another power that’s still active here inside Limbo. We can make portals that connect us to other locations, including locations within Trans-Sylvania or within the human world. Try to connect to your home. It’ll move the location that Limbo door goes to from over there where it was to right here.”

I wasn’t quite sure how that was going to work, but it just did. The door was there, and I opened it, and my room was there with my stuff just as we left it.

“Now stand in your room, looking at your car, and you’ll be able to change the car while you have the power within Trans-Sylvania.”

I stepped through the doorway and turned around to look at my car. With another thought, I turned my car into a Porsche 911 in the same bright red color as my outfit.

“Now that’s a car!” Kelly exclaimed.

We climbed into my vastly improved car, and after I got a feel for how the car responded in the open plain of Limbo, Kelly showed me how to make a bigger portal which opened like a garage door, and it looked like a garage door, too, even though on the other side it opened out of the side of a hill. A short trail led onto a dirt road that led to a paved road somewhere near where I was trying to go. Once I was through, I could use GPS to find my way around. But we didn’t go very far. I went back into the “garage” and parked in the line of cars, and we went back into my room through the door I’d moved earlier.

Kelly commented, “You parked back in the same space you came out of, but you don’t have to. Commonly, you won’t come back through the same portal into Limbo that you left through, instead creating another one, and it could be far from where you started, though it seems like we always make portals within sight of the line of cars, which is why they are parked where they are. You can park in any open spot in the line and just move your door next to it to get back into your room. Technically, there’s no reason you have to stay in the line, but it’s been our convention so that cars aren’t just everywhere.”

“OK. I imagine that’ll be more useful when I go out there for something real, and not just for practice doing so.”

“Sure. Depending on what kind of job you get, you might go there frequently or hardly ever.”

“So how does that work? How do I get a job? Are there open jobs to apply to, or will I be assigned something?”

“It can be either. There’s no need to take a job immediately, but if you don’t take one, eventually one of the higher-ups will come along and assign you one, typically one that requires minimal skills and is something anyone can do.”

“So I should take a job so that I can do something I enjoy doing, rather than something random.”

“Yes. You won’t actually get paid; we don’t use money here. It’s just something for you to do to help with the work needed to keep this place running smoothly. None of the jobs need anywhere near as much time as the jobs humans do to earn money to live on, because our powers eliminate a lot of the work, and you’re not trying to pay for a house or taxes or anything. You can take time to explore the different kinds of jobs people do and then join in on something that’s not overloaded with workers, or even replace someone who wants to do something else.”

“Oh, good, so I’m not going to get stuck with the same job forever.”

“Nah, we wouldn’t do that. People switch around. There are people who’ve been around a long time who have basically done every job at some point.”

“How long has Trans-Sylvania been here, anyway?”

“Well, it got named in ancient Roman times, but there were vampires living in this dimension even before that. I don’t think anybody knows how far back it goes. As I understand it, in Roman days there were a lot fewer vampires, and there was a single portal that transported people between a forest in the human world and one on the surface here, and that it how it became called Trans-Sylvania, literally beyond the forest. It’s still possible for us to make portals directly from here to the human world, but it’s harder, so we usually go through Limbo. We established most of the conventions we use now, including the rule about only making new vampires to replace dead ones, several centuries ago. There are some vampires who have been here since that rule was established. Three of them who have been here since before 800 AD are the governors, to the extent this place needs governing.”

“How much governing is there, anyway?”

“Well, there’s very little crime. Most of our laws are loosely defined and boil down to ‘don’t mess with other people.’ There are the same major laws humans have, like don’t steal from other vampires, and don’t kill, maim, or rape anybody. There’s also a general principle not to steal from humans, but it has lots of minor exceptions where something isn’t practical. For instance, when you take your phone with you among the humans you are stealing their cell service, but the principle to maintain the secret of our existence supersedes that for small things and if we made every vampire get a legit cellular service plan, it would ruin the secrecy.”

“Didn’t people centuries ago believe in vampires? How did it become a secret?”

“That’s all associated with the time the rule about making new vampires was created. You can find books about it in the library. Look for stories of Vlad the Impaler.”

“Thanks. I’ve heard the name. I’ll look him up.”

“The library’s just one floor down, on 4. Opposite end to where the cafeteria is, which is the same on every floor.”

The Clubs

“So if you don’t spend a lot of time on your jobs, what do you do here? Are there social events?”

“The social events are all some people do! Let me show you. First off, I need to explain this space. You see how there’s only one door on this side of the room but there’s a space here where there could be another?”

“Yeah.”

“This is for your personal portal. You can put a door here to go wherever you want to go, any public part of the burrow. I’m going to make one for you to the first floor.”

And she made a portal there like she showed me from Limbo. She opened the door, and we were in a different hallway, not the one with the doors to the rooms in the 3700s. There were many doors, but all of them were the shimmery kind that told me they were portals that other vampires had created rather than real doors.

“Now that you’ve been here, you’ll remember this place and you’ll be able to connect to it yourself. Oh, one thing, when you are going to your existing, private portals you can connect to the one that’s there, or place one exactly there on the wall if there isn’t one. When you are opening one in a place like this, you can only approximately place it, because it can conflict with other people’s portals. Existing portals push yours out of the way into a clear spot.”

“Oh, that makes them safer, I guess.”

“Right. Now in this place, there are four big rooms. You can think of these as singles clubs. There are different ones based on what you want.”

I followed Kelly down the hall as she started this explanation, soon arriving at a crossing corridor. On that crossing corridor there were four large doorways, one on each side of the crossing corridor and each side of the intersection. Each had a sign above it in large enough letters that I could read them all from the intersection: Men Only, Women Only, Straight Only, and Anything Goes.

“Seems straightforward enough. As a woman, if I want to meet another woman, I go in the Women Only room. If I want to meet a guy, I go in the Straight room. I don’t go in the Men Only room at all. And Anything Goes means what it says, I guess.”

“Yep. You got it. And anything means anything. Some people just go in there because they are open to pairing up with both sexes. Some form groups. And while I told you everyone changes sex, there are a small number of people whose ideal form isn’t strictly male or female. We don’t get many like that, but they usually have trouble finding life partners, so you can find them hanging out in there a lot.”

So I went into the lesbian bar and Kelly followed. She grabbed a red button from a bin just inside the door and pinned it on her dress just above one breast. Once she got it on, I saw it was actually red and white, a crossed circle “no” sign with nothing behind it to be prohibited.

She explained, “This button indicates that I’m not here to meet someone, but instead as your host. It basically tells everybody to leave me alone. You’re free to wear one of these any time you come into one of these rooms if you just want to get a feel for what they’re like. You can even go into the Men Only room if you put on a button.”

“Wouldn’t it be obvious that I’m a woman?”

“Don’t count on it. Not everybody follows the social conventions you are used to.”

I considered putting on one of the buttons, but decided to give the full experience a try. There was a bar not too far in on the right, and the woman tending bar wore a button as well, but it was green with white icons of a fork and knife on it.

I asked Kelly, “Does her button mean she’s working here?”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you need bartenders if everybody can make any sort of food and drink that they want?”

“Some people just want the experience. Have you ever asked a waiter for suggestions? That’s what they are for. She’s got experience with all sorts of drinks, and there are waiters you’ll find in the dining area with experience with all sorts of meals. They can both suggest something based on whatever sort of mood or situation you and perhaps your date or group are in.”

“Oh, that’s cool. So that’s another job, I guess.”

“Yep.”

The dining area was also on the right, past the bar, while the left held an assortment of different kinds of casual seating without tables or with only small ones for people to set drinks on. Beyond that, there was a wall that went most of the way across but with an open doorway at the far left into a hallway. There were doors on the right heading into rooms from which I could hear music coming, and labels that indicated them as dance halls. There were different kinds of music in each, though I didn’t quite understand some of the genres or whatever they were labeling them with.

I went into one which had interesting-sounding music coming from it, and Kelly came with me. I danced with a few women there, and then came back to speak with Kelly, who’d watched me doing it, and we went back outside to speak where we could hear each other better.

“Looks like you’ll have no problem fitting in here,” Kelly said.

“Yeah. I know, it’s that whole ideal form thing. It’s just made a ton of hot women, and the ones here all want other women. Simply amazing. What was that last song I danced to? Something vampires created?”

“Oh, I should explain the translator.”

I listened eagerly to hear this explanation and waved my hand to indicate “go on.”

“We have translators within us. Each individual vampire has a built-in universal translator. We hear everything as in our primary language, and when we speak, each person around us hears it in their language. If you go among the humans, they will hear you in their primary languages, too.”

“Neat!”

“The few vampires interested in creating music go into human guise to market it in the human world, and it’s one of the ways we get money there legitimately, to cover costs we have there. Mostly we listen to human music, and in the room you went into it’s mostly American music, but there are some foreign songs, too, and that was one of those. I think it’s French, but the translator always makes it hard for me to tell unless I recognize the singer.”

“So those signs I saw like ‘Women Only’, are those translated too?”

“Yes, they are actually written in Latin. Officially, all public signs are supposed to be written in Latin, but the translator makes it hard to tell and I don’t think anybody’s enforced that rule in ages. But that reminds me of one of the limitations. Be careful with puns, and alliteration and other wordplay. Those things don’t translate well and may be lost on the ears of your listeners. Likewise, translated songs won’t necessarily rhyme, but the translation tends to maintain the meter, though sometimes awkwardly.”

“Oh, that’s important to know. I had... Well, Brad had a group of friends he used to eat with in college and every dinner was a contest among our group to top one another in puns. I’ll miss that, though there was a lot of other stuff there I won’t miss.”

“You can still do puns if you find speakers of the same language to do them with.”

“Thanks. Maybe I’ll try to find some English-speaking friends here who I can pun with.”

In another of the dance rooms I met a girl named Anna who seemed completely enamored of me. I almost told her I was named Brad before I caught myself and used my girl name, Brandy. I’d barely used the name at all before, but now I was going to have to get used to it. After three songs with Anna, when I left the dance floor and walked over to Kelly, Anna came with me.

“Oh, who’s this?” Anna asked.

But Kelly took care of it. “Hi, I’m Kelly, Brandy’s host.”

“Host? Oh, Brandy, you’re new here?”

“First day,” I told her.

“Wow! I’ve never met a first-day before.”

“Well, there’s a first time for everything. Anna, I’d like to have dinner with you. Or lunch. Whatever time it is. It’ll be my first date as a girl.”

“Sure, I’d love to. And it’s dinner time, at least for me. Some people follow different schedules here.”

“Let’s go get a table and you can tell me about it.”

Kelly chimed in, “As your host, I’m supposed to stick with you at least until you make it back to your room, but you can tell me to leave and I’ll find you later here, there, or at Anna’s room, wherever. You have my contact on your phone.”

“I’m fine if you eat with us if it’s OK with Anna.”

“Sure!” Anna responded.

So the three of us went over to the dining area Kelly and I had passed earlier. We waited a couple minutes until one of the women with the green fork-and-knife buttons came over and led us to a table.

“I’m Sarah; I’ll be your server today. If you know what you want, I can take your order now, or just the drinks. I can also provide the menu of suggestions if you like.”

Kelly spoke up, “Thanks, Sarah. This is Brandy’s first time in the restaurant and only her second meal in Trans-Sylvania, so please bring the suggestion menu.”

“Wow, first-timer!” Sarah exclaimed as she placed a menu in front of each of us. “OK, Brandy, you should be aware that this menu is just a list of popular dishes, to help people who have trouble deciding. Just like in the cafeteria, you can order anything you want. The only restrictions are the eating laws that apply over all Trans-Sylvania, and also that here, we won’t serve anything that’s still alive.”

I was afraid to ask what people ate that was still alive, but Anna spoke up quickly, “I’ll have a root-beer float with a shot of vodka in it.”

“I’m not actually old enough to drink alcohol,” I admitted.

“That’s true where you came from, but there’s no drinking age here,” Kelly explained. “You were 19, which is old enough to drink in some countries. Except in unusual circumstances we only bring in adults. But nobody’s going to force you to drink. You can order what you want. It’s possible to get drunk, but harder to stay drunk. If you remake your body, even if just as an alternative to peeing, any drunkenness will go away. Even if you don’t do that, when your body remakes itself overnight, any hangover will go away with it. So you can order alcohol if you want, but don’t feel pressured to do so just because your date is drinking.”

“I’ll have a coke,” I said.

“And I’ll have a margarita,” Kelly added.

Sarah left and came back with our drinks after only a minute, and left again to let us think. The menu was huge. In the entrees there were about 30 dishes with pictures, names, and suggested side dishes on each side of each of 8 roughly legal-size laminated sheets. There were two more double-sided sheets for appetizers, with even more on each page because there was no need to list sides. The desserts occupied almost three more of those sheets, but half of one side of one of the dessert pages listed about 100 drinks. The menu spanned every sort of cuisine available anywhere: American, Mexican, French, Italian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Indian, Jewish, Middle Eastern, and still more that I couldn’t place. One of them was just a big plate of various different meats, with no sides, and Kelly explained that was Brazilian.

“You said you usually only bring in adults? What happens in the exceptional cases?”

“In host training I was told that if a child is seen as a convertee, the host would be someone who wanted to be a parent and they would stay together until the child was of age. And they would give those hosts extra training. An area on floor 12 is set aside for those children, their parents, and whatever else they need, but beyond that, I don’t know.”

When Sarah came back, I ended up ordering a steak with a loaded baked potato, Anna ordered a platter of mixed seafood, and Kelly ordered enchiladas and rice with mole sauce. The food came back in about 5 minutes, since of course they didn’t have to cook it, just make it on a plate, so we didn’t even have time to talk about stuff and ended up talking as we ate, with Anna starting by finally explaining the different schedules, as she’d promised.

“Some people, like me, try to follow a typical daytime schedule for our time zone, which corresponds with eastern European time in the human world. They get up around 6 AM and go to bed by 10 or 11. Others behave like people would expect for vampires, sleeping during the middle of the day and up all night. And others do whatever. People who work in places like this club usually work two four-hour shifts a week and are off the other days. Some of those people just sleep whenever they get tired and only bother with a schedule to make sure they are awake for their shifts. We can stay up longer than humans, but I recommend you don’t skip more than one night of sleep in a row. Your body will really appreciate getting some sleep.”

Kelly added, “There are other jobs, like the ones who keep the cafeteria stocked with plates and such, who do a job that only takes an hour or so at a time, but they do that job at the same time every day, so they follow a regular sleep schedule. Different people come in to do it at different hours. There are other jobs that have irregular or even make-your-own schedules, and they sleep as the job permits. For example, farmers work on the surface, so they have to work at night to stay out of the sun, but they do different amounts of work at different times of the year, so there can be weeks they work 6 or 8 hours a night, and other weeks they only work 2 hours all week, but it balances out over the year to a similar amount of time to what other people work.”

There were lots of interesting job options. They both described more of the jobs people do here as we ate our dinners and then dessert, for which we all had a chocolate cake Anna recommended.

I was really feeling attracted to Anna, so much so that during dessert I asked, “What are the rules here about sex?”

Kelly replied, “The only rule is do what you and Anna agree to do; non-consensual sex is still rape here and it’s one of the few crimes we execute vampires for. There is no reason you can’t have sex on the first date if you and Anna agree to it. Of course, the definition of sex is slightly different for you as a lesbian than what you knew as a straight man, but I think you can figure it out, and Anna looks eager to show you. You should do it in one of your rooms; that could be yours or Anna’s. Though I’ll definitely be leaving when you get to that point, of course.”

Anna then responded, “Kelly’s right. I’m happy to help you test out the new equipment, Brandy!”

When we had all finished our desserts, I said, “OK. Even though it’s not really set up yet, let’s try my room. I want to make sure I know how to get back there.”

Kelly said, “OK, that will be my last lesson for you tonight. Let’s go back out into the hall where we came in.”

Kelly dropped off her “no” button by the door, and Anna and I followed her out. She stopped at a blank patch of wall between other people’s portals.

“Where’s the one you made earlier?” I asked.

“I dropped that after we walked away from it. The people who leave their portals up usually aren’t expecting to stay here long; they find someone and leave with them quickly. If we all did that, there wouldn’t be enough room for the doors!”

I thought about the number of people I’d seen in the club, the fact that there were four clubs, and the number of doors. “That makes sense, Kelly.”

“Now it’s time for you to link to that patch on your wall. Just think like you did when you remade the portal to your room from Limbo, but focusing on the blank wall where I made the portal for us to come here.”

It took me a few minutes, but I made it work, and we all went through. Once Kelly saw that we’d made it, she reminded me that I could contact her by phone, and left.

“That’s a good reminder for me to get your contact on my phone, Anna.”

“Sure.”

Once that was done, Anna grabbed me and gave me a long, intimate kiss. For a while, being with her wasn’t any different from one of my human dates at this stage, except for the ability for my date to fondle my breasts and for me to get off from her playing with my nipples. This eventually led to us getting fully naked and Anna teaching me the ways of vampire lesbian sex. It was mostly, I imagine, like human lesbian sex, except with the ability to create lingerie and sex toys on demand. We used the shower after a long session left us covered in sweat and other fluids, and I practiced the ability that substitutes for laundry by remaking the sheets.

Even though I’d started the day late, I’d done a lot, so when Anna was ready to call it a night, I did too. Anna portaled directly to her own room using that fourth door space in my room and closed the portal behind her. I climbed into the refreshed bed naked, and I was asleep within minutes.

Monday

I got dressed in a more conservative outfit the next morning, knowing I was not dressing to date Kelly, and called her and asked her to meet me in the cafeteria. We each had a normal-sized breakfast at what were actually breakfast hours here, and remained talking awhile afterward.

“So what’s your job, Kelly, when you’re not helping orient me? Do you bring new vampires in all the time, or do you do something else?”

“I’m actually a librarian. Along with several other people, I maintain the library here, which you can find on the fourth floor at the opposite end of the main hall from the cafeteria. That entails reshelving books, tracking down delinquent books, and making copies for people who need books for the long term, as well as trying to acquire books from the human world that we don’t have here. But a temp is taking my shifts there for about a month so that I can help you.”

“I have you for a month?”

“Only a week, really, but there was also planning time for me going to get you as well. Half of the month is to allow for the fact that I’m spending more time out of my day on this than I would spend on my regular job, so I sort of get a vacation afterward.”

“How did you get picked for this?”

“They thought I had the right looks to catch your eye, at least, when I was properly attired. The researchers have developed some pretty sophisticated models, not only finding the people most likely to appreciate the forced sex change imposed on new vampires with the least interruption to history, but also finding the one of us here most likely to be found attractive to each target and able to find an opportunity to convert them. We can refuse that duty, but if we accept, they’ll get a temp from their staff of temp workers to fill in for us for approximately the amount of working time we spend retrieving and mentoring the target.”

“There’s a staff of regular temp workers?”

“Yeah. If you want to try out a variety of different kinds of jobs, you can join the temp staff. They’ll train you for each job and then you’ll work anywhere from a week to a few months as needed in place of someone else. It’s not unheard of for new people to get started there.”

“I could certainly try that.”

Kelly helped me get signed up as a temp worker after that, and they gave me quite a lot of info about it, including a brief summary of the kinds of jobs I was most likely to be called to temp for, just because they were the jobs that the most people did and so they were most likely to need substitutes for. A lot of them were ones I’d already heard about, but there were plenty more. Much of the rest of the day, Kelly spent showing me around some facilities that were located on various floors, most of them, like the library, placed opposite the cafeterias that were on every floor. There was a catalog of them in the material about the temp job, because some jobs required working in these places. As Kelly pointed out to me, this also let me learn the places, so I could portal to them later. This, I realized, was why people rarely used the stairs.

Kelly and I ate lunch together as well, and after that, when I felt the need to pee, she showed me how to remake my body during the day so I could skip visiting a toilet. I let her be on her own for the evening. I had hoped for another date with Anna, but she told me she was working. She was a waitress in the Anything Goes club, and it emboldened me to go check out that club, though while using one of the nonparticipant buttons, since I wasn’t sure yet I was really up for “anything.” Now that I had the organ designed for it, I thought it was possible I might have sex with a man someday, but I knew “anything” could go well beyond that. It was worth a visit to get ideas about that. I did put on another date-style outfit, just in case I met someone interesting, this time in green.

But when I got there, instead of just the nonparticipant buttons, there were several other types, and everybody was wearing buttons. A man explained them to me when I asked. They basically helped other people know what you were looking for, and also made it clear most of the people were here looking to have sex tonight. There were buttons with a single male symbol or a single female symbol; wearing one of those implied you wanted to have sex with a person of that gender, though because it was Anything Goes, it was possible you might be asked to be part of a group encounter in which you personally would only have sex with one such person. There were also buttons that had a single combined male/female symbol, which simply meant you were open to sex with a person of either gender. Those were the most common buttons I saw in the club.

There were also buttons with two male, two female, or a male and a female symbol, indicating you were looking for group sex with multiple people of one or both genders. A button with a question mark meant you hadn’t decided; it was basically an “ask me” button to potentially be invited to anything. A button with a stop sign on it meant you weren’t here to have sex tonight, but were interested in meeting people and possibly going on a date that did not involve sex. A yellow triangle button meant you had some sort of unusual fetish; this could be worn with one of the other buttons to indicate who you wanted to participate in that fetish with. Wearing the triangle with the stop sign meant the fetish didn’t involve what people would usually consider sex. And with a nonparticipant button, I could still talk with people and maybe even eat dinner with them, but nobody was going to ask me to get involved in anything unless I asked first.

He also mentioned the green star buttons. They didn’t give these out at the door; they were permanently owned by people with intersex or otherwise sexually irregular bodies. Those people might wear a second button to indicate what they were looking for, but the absence of one, which was the usual case for them, was the equivalent of an “ask me” button, though it meant you’d also be asking them about the meaning of their particular green star button. There were only a handful of these people, but they frequented this club, and he claimed no two of them had exactly the same sort of sexual organs.

I did encounter one of the green star people, who at least superficially looked female. I summoned the courage to ask her about it. She said her name was Dina, and she had normal female parts except that she also had a retractable and normally retracted penis inside her vagina. She could, with the right foreplay, project it out of her vagina and have sex in the way of a man. I found that interesting, and maybe she’d be an alternative for me if I wanted the dick but couldn’t stand the man, but I wanted to at least try a normal man first.

I ended up eating dinner with one of the male fetishists named Jason. He admitted he rarely found someone interested in his fetish and was fine just eating with me and telling about it. His fetish was basically the equivalent of edible panties. It was possible to change your clothes while you were wearing them, and he wanted to date someone, male or female, who would change their underwear into a frosting or whipped cream version of the same, which he would then lick off of them. That could lead to oral sex, but that was as far as he went; he wasn’t interested in any sort of sex with the organs between his legs.

“Hmm, that sounds fun. I know I’m wearing a nonparticipant button, but I could take it off for that. I might have to practice that change, though. I’m new. I’ve only had lesbian sex here so far, and I’m sure I’ll try a dick at some point, but the kind of thing you suggest might be good to let me try being around a man.”

“I hope you enjoy the experience. Most of the people I find who are willing to do this like it and come back to try it again occasionally, though it’s not something that they want to do every day.”

Jason skipped dessert, since he was going to get his afterward, but I had a slice of apple pie before we left and went to his room.

“OK, Jason, I want to practice this conversion into frosting or whipped cream before I try to do it for real with the panties I’m wearing.”

“Go get a glob of hand soap from the bathroom and convert that.”

That seemed like a good idea, and my first try actually worked. I turned the white soap into white frosting that Jason and I shared licking off my fingers.

“OK, where do you want me to be for this? On the edge of the bed, or somewhere else?”

“Just stand with your legs spread apart. That allows me to go around and lick it all off.”

“OK,” I said, and took off my dress so I was standing there in my underwear. “Here goes!”

I barely felt it when it changed, but Jason noticed it and started nibbling at the green frosting that used to be one of the side strings. That didn’t make the rest fall off, though, because it was now frosting stuck to me rather than fabric being held up by that piece. He went around the back to the other side string and then started working his way down my ass, almost to my asshole before he switched to doing the same thing in the front, leaving the important bits for last. When he continued licking me down there after all the frosting was gone, I found the feeling wonderful, and reminiscent of some of what I’d done with Anna the previous night, and I mashed his head into my pussy to encourage him to keep going, until he brought me to orgasm. It was charming, and I could easily imagine a man doing that to me as a form of elaborate foreplay before actual sex, but I knew that wasn’t Jason’s way. I would have been up for a second round, also, but Jason was done.

“Hmm, now do I just go back to my place commando?” I asked.

“You don’t have to. Grab more hand soap and make yourself new panties.”

That worked, and I recreated the garment I’d been wearing at the start of the evening. Then I kissed him goodbye and portaled back to my room.

It was a somewhat earlier evening for me, as well as a less tiring day overall, so I had some time to think before simply plopping into bed. I didn’t need a shower this time, but I washed myself down there. Afterward, still wearing only my bra, I went through some of my other possessions from my life as Brad. I kept a few mementos of my first life, but I made an area of junk to be converted when I needed something, and put most of the stuff there. There was a lot more of Brad’s life that I wanted to forget than what I wanted to remember.

When I checked my phone, I saw that I’d missed a message while I was having fun with Jason. 9 AM appointment tomorrow to get oriented for a job for the temp service. Would have been nice to know sooner, but I’m sure they sometimes don’t get much advance notice.

Eventually I crawled into bed naked again and struggled to get to sleep. I wasn’t completely worn out like the first night, so rather than fall asleep quickly, I noticed how uncomfortable some of the positions I’d slept in as Brad were with this body. I ended up sleeping lying flat on my back.

---

Tuesday

I ate breakfast alone, then returned to my room to prepare for my orientation session. It was at a gym, of all things. I was curious about that. From what Kelly had explained to me, vampires don’t need a gym for the reasons humans do; we automatically form our ideal bodies every night. If we want to weigh less or have more muscles, we simply do it without even trying. But I supposed that some enjoy getting a workout.

The appointment just said to wear athletic gear. I remembered having seen women wear athletic clothes, but it wasn’t something I had ever thought about before for myself, largely because they were form-fitting and really only something that worked at all if you had the body. Well, now I have the body. To get some ideas, I went to the site Kelly had left me a link for and from there to a page about clothes. After following a couple more links, I arrived at a page showing just what I was looking for, lots of different women’s athletic wear options. Based on the pictures I saw, I decided on a top that was basically a sports bra, and skin-tight shorts coming down to mid-thigh. This was worn with cotton briefs, the closest thing women typically wore to the kind of underwear I used to wear as Brad, though the waistband is a narrow thing instead of a full inch of elastic, and it was a single solid layer across the front with no fly.

For my feet, I wore sneakers with women’s socks, which are made of the same fabric as men’s athletic socks but only come up to the top of the sneakers so they are completely hidden. That was something that made no sense to me. Why do men wear athletic socks that come up past their ankles or even past their shins, while women wear athletic socks that are completely hidden inside the shoes, when they wear the same shoes? Just to show off more of their legs? Though I enjoyed being a woman since my change a couple days ago, I can’t say I understand all the things women do.

I put all the clothes on. The sports bra seemed almost too tight, but once I got it on, I realized it hugged my body well and kept my D-cups firmly in place. Then I looked at myself in the selfiecam-mirror thing in the bathroom. The smooth profile around my crotch was amazing; I’d admired that on athletic women before, and now I had my own. This was more revealing than anything I’d worn in public since I’d been here, but I found that it didn’t bother me. It wasn’t slutty. It just looked like I was ready for a workout. And while I expected to be supervising the workouts rather than getting one myself, it seemed likely I was going to be trying out some of the equipment and so I was going to get that workout today.

I headed down for my orientation. The gym wasn’t one of the places I’d visited with Kelly, and it was down on the 7th floor, so I had to take the stairs down for the first time. I took good note of the environment after I arrived. There was a hallway that people no doubted portaled into like the other facilities, but unlike the very busy club area, this one was empty.

It wasn’t a huge gym, but there was a woman working there in what had to be a uniform, a leotard in broad, black-and-white referee stripes. Her name was Lynn, and she was expecting me. Lynn explained how it all worked. There were no showers or locker rooms; people were expected to change in their own rooms and portal in and out. So there was just the equipment. It would be my job to help new people learn to use the equipment, and to clean it, which basically just meant remaking the bits people touched regularly. So most of my orientation consisted of Lynn showing me how all the equipment worked.

There was a running track, and that didn’t need much care at all, except there was a daily check for damage. She showed me how the track was made of sections about 5 feet square, or curved in the corners, and these pieces could be remade individually. Responsibility for this check rotated among the shifts, so I’d have to check a duty roster to see if it was mine on the days I worked. The job was like the restaurant ones, in that people normally worked two 4-hour shifts per week, so while filling in for one person, that was what I would be expected to do for however long I was needed.

Free weights were also easy. You put weights on a bar, and then a piece on each end clamps on the bar and holds them in place. Then you could lift it from different positions, such as a squat or lying on a bench that was nearby. As a sign there indicated, you were always supposed to have a spotter, someone to help if you got in trouble trying to lift too much, and it was possible someone would ask me to spot for them, but usually free weight people came in pairs or groups to spot one another. This equipment was pretty durable but I could remake individual pieces that were dirty or damaged. She showed me how they were supposed to be put away. There were storage areas for the bars, the end clamps, and each different size of weight, which went up to 22 pound (10 kilogram) weights at the heaviest.

And there were lots of machines that were effectively weight-lifting devices but in different orientations, to exercise different groups of muscles. Some of these were more complicated but Lynn showed me how each one was meant to be used, which muscles it exercised, and how to adjust the weight settings. Even though I used most of the equipment minimally, I got quite a workout trying out all of it. It wasn’t the amount of weight lifted, which was on the lightest or near-lightest settings, but just the number of different things I was doing. Lynn cleaned up most of it herself but showed me how the padded benches people sat on could be remade to clean them, and this was recommended because it also kept them from ever wearing out. Most people didn’t try to learn everything at once, so when I had to help people with individual machines it would only be 10 minutes or so, rather than spending half my shift doing it, like Lynn was doing today.

It took even more than 2 hours, because Lynn had to stop to help other people sometimes, though when that was on equipment I hadn’t used yet, she could show me at the same time. Before we finished, she showed me the duty roster including my shifts for the week, and explained that indeed the leotard was a uniform. It didn’t have to be a leotard, but I had to wear a top with broad vertical black-and-white stripes when I was on duty.

When I finally got back to my room, I immediately stripped and showered. I knew I didn’t need to, that I could just use that trick to remake my body, but I wanted to. After I dried off, I also sat on the toilet to pee. It was my third day as a woman, and I hadn’t done this before. The first day, my body was seemingly still too busy finishing making itself, and yesterday, Kelly showed me that trick of remaking my body and I did that each time I needed it. But it seemed to me that this was something I should experience, even though the result, predictably, was that I needed to wipe a little of the pee off me with paper afterward. It was a very ordinary thing and yet reminded me of how I was now really a woman, much more of one than I ever thought possible. I had only dreamed of someday having a mere facsimile of these parts!

After that, I just relaxed on the bed for a bit before I put on new clothes. Once I did dress, in a frilly blouse and pleated skirt, it was time for lunch. I didn’t feel the need to bother Kelly anymore, and went on my own, sitting with some other people who I got to know briefly. It was a bit overwhelming, though. I was a 19-year-old who had been here for three days and each of my companions had lived more than a century as a vampire, one of them over three centuries. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at them. They were glad to meet someone new; they admitted it sometimes got old seeing the same people all the time. Even though there were tens of thousands of people here, over that length of time you got to meet them all.

Also, they appreciate getting new people in here because we understand modern technology. Trans-Sylvanian society uses technology for some things, augmenting what vampiric powers can do, but it was hard for those who grew up in an era without electricity, and for some, without indoor plumbing, to go several stages beyond that to computers and AI. I realized this provided another area of jobs I could look into here. Unfortunately, my life learning those skills was cut short before I had time to really master them. Kelly seemed aware that vampires use technology for certain things but hadn’t really shown me those things. I probably need to find someone else to ask.

But I didn’t need to rush that; doing temp jobs, I’d probably find someone I could ask. Instead, I spent some time in the library, looking to see if I could find more information about the history of Trans-Sylvania. They had a computerized catalog system, showing that they were not completely behind the times. Entering queries for books on Trans-Sylvania showed me that there were in fact books written by vampires and stored in the library here. They even had books written more than a millennium ago!

That made me think about how this interface was probably all being translated for me. Clearly a vampire from 900 AD didn’t write in modern English. Kelly had said the signs were all in Latin and that was probably true here, too. There was a switch on the keyboard above the top row of keys that had several positions with labels such as Chinese, which I found changed the symbols on the keys. It was for people to enter queries in languages that didn’t use the same letters as English. When I typed something in Chinese, it came out in English words on the screen, though it was a meaningless jumble of words since I didn’t know what I was typing. So, yes, my internal translator was doing this, including doing the best it could when presented with gibberish.

Kelly had mentioned Vlad the Impaler to me, so I looked him up. There were lots of books on him, so I read descriptions until I found one that looked like a general history, and noted its call number. All the books were numbered, like in Dewey decimal, but they had expanded on the system to make numbers for fiction, and with extra dots and more digits than I had remembered ever seeing. I figured this was probably because the translator might misinterpret sequences of letters as words and change them into other words. Numbers were universal. So all the call numbers were purely numeric.

There was a lot to read, so I skimmed around to find the highlights.

In the 15th century, some vampires lived openly in the human world. Most of humans’ beliefs about vampires, though treated as legend today, were taken as fact in that era, though even then they did not have all the facts right.

Vlad managed to conquer and subsequently rule a small domain in the human world, which he called Trans-Sylvania after the name of our own dimension, though humans called it Transylvania with only one S. Since Vlad was a common name in that part of the world at the time, one that he had taken for living among the humans there, and there had already been two rulers named Vlad there, he took the name Vlad III.

Vlad accomplished this through murderous brutality and by converting his foes to vampires. While it might not seem smart to give your foes more powers, converting them caused them to go unconscious for one to two days, during which time they could be restrained. As is well known to vampires but seemed to never be learned by humans, this also changed their sex. Since in those days only men fought in wars, the human fighters were all converted to female vampires. This didn’t always make them unable to fight, but it certainly put them off of their training.

Vlad gave these convertees a choice to cooperate or die. One who had a family was expected to lead vampires faithful to Vlad’s forces back to his home, kill any remaining men, and convert and bring back to Vlad all the women, to serve as soldiers after conversion. Bringing back even one woman who agreed to serve as a male vampire fighter relieved her of further responsibility, though she could choose to stay with Vlad either as a combatant, a spy/infiltrator to convert more humans to vampires or assassinate them, or as support staff, such as in preparing meals or making weapons. Those who did not want to continue were sent back to the dimension of Trans-Sylvania. A convertee who didn’t have any women to bring back, or whose women refused to fight for Vlad, was expected to serve in one of the aforementioned roles, or in a few others, such as the army’s harem.

Those who refused this duty were killed by impaling them on tall wooden stakes at night. These stakes were inserted at their vaginas and pierced through their organs until the heart was reached. Humans also knew of the method of killing a vampire by a wooden stake through the heart, but since they generally performed such a feat on those who had been vampires for a while, they did not know that when a new convertee is killed in this way less than 5 days after conversion, the conversion is incomplete, and the vampiric tissue quickly rots away, leaving behind grotesque human forms. Vlad displayed these apparent male corpses along the walls of his fortresses, earning him the moniker Vlad the Impaler.

On the human side of the war, captured fighters suspected of being vampires were bound and placed into the sunlight. This was the one way they knew of killing a vampire that was not also generally fatal to humans. Those who survived this treatment were brought back in and offered deals to fight alongside the humans, or in various other support roles.

Warfare between the humans and vampires was dictated by the strategies of the vampires. Due to their weakness to sunlight, the vampires could not fight openly during the daytime, though they are known to have employed large mobile tents to sometimes move during the day, and they fought using arrows and other projectiles launched from protected positions inside castles and other buildings. They also dug tunnels underground both to connect their own positions and to infiltrate buildings controlled by humans. In the most common pattern, humans attacked vampire holdings by day, and vampires killed or captured any humans left in areas they controlled at nightfall.

Vlad’s reign ended in the battle of 1476. The humans had identified a particular castle as the one Vlad was then occupying, and attacked it by day, while Vlad slept, with what is believed to have been the largest trebuchet constructed to date. This enormous catapult flung huge masses of rock and steel against the castle to break open its heavily fortified walls. Once the castle was breached, a force of approximately 2000 men rushed in, the vanguard serving as shields for those behind them. While a vampire was fighting or attempting to convert one human, another would come up behind the first human and attack the vampire with spears or polearm weapons with silver blades. Most of the humans died or were converted during the assault, but it is believed about 100 of them made it to Vlad’s sleeping chamber. He was no longer asleep by this time, but the sheer numbers overwhelmed Vlad, and though he himself converted many of this final batch of attackers, they succeeded in subduing him with silver-bladed weapons. They impaled his body and left it to stand next to his impaled victims outside the castle.

By the time they brought Vlad’s body outside, it was nearly nightfall. While the vampires in that castle were destroyed, and his other forces had been reduced by similar attacks elsewhere in the preceding months, there were other loyal forces left alive, and they killed most of the remaining force of humans, though a few escaped to tell the story of Vlad’s death to the other humans. But this was the last fighting of the war. With Vlad dead and his forces greatly diminished, the surviving vampires retreated into the dimension of Trans-Sylvania, bringing with them all those still undergoing conversion who had not died due to exposure to the sun.

The battlefield reeked of death. Thousands of humans and vampires alike were dead within a small area, which created such a stench within days that the remaining humans fled miles away. The vampires closed all the portals to the human world to keep the smell out of the dimension of Trans-Sylvania.

The governors held a council to decide on a plan of action. They decreed that vampires shall no longer live permanently within the human world. About a hundred vampires then doing so in other places were recalled. Also, they sent out vampires in the guises of known humans in the lands near Vlad’s realm, carrying with them reports about the human success being even greater than the first returning humans reported. They claimed that they had killed every last vampire. By recalling all the vampires from the human world, this appeared true to the humans, and the altered stories were taken as the truth.

There was a second issue. Vlad had been sending back hundreds of newly converted vampires per month for years, and the retreat, the recall, and the converted vampires from the final battle exacerbated that. There was a housing crisis within Trans-Sylvania. Thousands of vampires were forced to double up until enough additional homes could be dug out. All newly converted vampires were either assigned to the digging teams, or replaced elder vampires in their jobs so that those vampires could dig.

Once the digging was completed, the current size of Trans-Sylvania was declared permanent. The rule that additional conversions of vampires would only be performed to replace vampires who died was established. In addition, those conversions were to be performed in the least intrusive way possible, taking humans on the fringes of their culture, with limited ties to other humans, and where possible ones who would find the sex change less unwelcome. The top candidates in those days were people who dressed as the opposite sex, which were by and large women who dressed as men to gain access to the greater freedoms afforded to men in many parts of the world. In addition to getting candidates who better appreciated the change, this helped over time to restore the gender ratio, which had been greatly swayed by the influx of female vampires from conversion of human fighting men.

A longer-term plan was put into place to try to turn the humans’ memories of vampires into legends. Records and artifacts that could confirm the existence of vampires were bought or stolen and brought back to Trans-Sylvania. The brightest human thinkers of the day were assisted and encouraged to develop a realm of science that ignores the fundamental force that vampires alone wield to perform feats humans have always been unable to accomplish.

Another book told this anecdote:

Humans’ belief that vampires drink blood came only in part from the bite delivered to initiate conversion of humans to vampires. The more specific source of this legend is a story that Vlad’s forces themselves spread to make vampires seem more threatening and literally bloodthirsty. They would install newly impaled victims on the walls of the fortresses they inhabited shortly before dawn, and in the pre-dawn light that signaled to the vampires that they needed to finish their operations and seek shelter from the sun, but visible in the eyes of any humans awake at that hour, they would collect blood dripping from those newly installed corpses in drinking glasses of whatever kind they had available.

The implication was that they drank the blood so collected, though that was not true. Blood of humans and vampires alike tastes foul to most vampires, and they avoid it. The collected blood would be brought through portals into Trans-Sylvania where their powers could convert it to other beverages, usually beer, and then brought back to Vlad’s forces to be consumed. This was part of the duties of Vlad’s many noncombatant support staff to supply the fighting forces with food and drink.

The intent was seemingly to scare the humans into fleeing from vampires, and letting the vampires take territory they abandoned. “Disobey me, and I’ll impale you on a stake and drink your blood” was perceived to be a greater threat than simply “Disobey me, and I’ll kill you.” However, this plan backfired. It made humans see vampiric cannibalism as such a threat that it had to be eliminated even at the cost of many thousands of human lives.

Interestingly, this time period was also the origin of the word vampire, in the languages spoken in eastern Europe, before the word spread to other languages. While vampires had lived among humans at times before that, they always stayed hidden, and Vlad’s era was believed to be the only time vampires revealed themselves to humans. They had never needed a word to describe vampires before, and before that it seemed that vampires used a word that translated as free men to describe themselves. The influx of hundreds of new vampires after Vlad’s war brought the word vampire with them, and it superseded the old word. Vampires have called themselves that ever since.

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.

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?

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.

Wednesday

I had messages from both Phil and Pam this morning thanking me for helping set that up. They are happy now, and invited us to another double date next Tuesday to celebrate.

In the morning I met with Kelly and we finished off the details on my scanning proposal by adding in the specific equipment I had researched. She sent it off to the head of the library.

I went down to the 5th floor and met Anna for lunch.

“Do you think Phil and Pam are going to work out long term?” I asked Anna.

“Probably. Did you see the way they were looking at each other last night when they left?”

“Yeah. They both texted me their thanks.”

“They texted me to say thanks, too. So ready to find two more tonight?”

“Huh?”

“Let’s go to the straight club tonight and find two more of those guys too shy to ask a girl out. If they have someone they were interested in, we try and set them up, and if not, we try to encourage them to ask someone.”

“Oh. Sure. You mean to keep doing this and help everyone who needs it?”

“Why not? I thought it was fun helping Phil and Pam.”

“OK. I’m in.”

“Meet you at 6 at the door to the straight club. Dress like you normally do for our dates; I’ll dress down to that level too, because I don’t want to scare off anyone thinking I’m too good for them.”

“That sounds like a sensible plan.”

When we got down there, we saw one of those couples who were eyeing each other, but neither seemed ready to make a move. I went to the guy and Anna to the girl and we pointed each of them out to the other, but they still didn’t do anything. After a brief strategy discussion, we went back to them and took them separately out on the dance floor ourselves, coming together, spinning them about, and finally Anna and I held each others’ hands on both sides of them, pinning them between us.

They just looked at each other for a bit, and then the guy said, “I think our dance partners set us up.”

“I was actually hoping to meet you, but you wouldn’t come over.”

“I’ve never actually asked someone out before. I was afraid of being too much like the pushy guys I had to deal with before I started dressing up as a guy.”

“How could you be so afraid you wouldn’t ask someone at all?”

The guy just stood there with a stunned look for a moment, and the girl pulled him to her and gave him a big sloppy kiss. While they were doing that, Anna and I released them, and came together for our own kiss on one side. Another song started, and they started trying to dance to it. We danced alongside them, but neither of them was very coordinated about it, and it looked like they were going to split up.

Anna stopped them and asked, “Have you two eaten?”

“No,” they said in unison.

“Let’s go eat something and talk about it.”

They were not nearly as insecure as Phil and Pam had been, just shy, and they opened up pretty easily. They were both embarrassed about their dancing performance, though.

I said, “You don’t have to dance. There are other ways to have fun together.”

I pulled up the list of attractions within Trans-Sylvania on my phone and showed them.

“I’m new enough here that I haven’t done a lot of these myself, but I’m sure you can find something here you’ll both enjoy.”

Anna added, “If you do want to dance, but just need practice, there are dance lessons offered twice a week, and the rest of the time, you can reserve sections of the dance practice room to practice privately.”

By the end of the meal, we got Steve and Carrie to exchange numbers, sign up for dance practice, and come with us to the game room where they found some fun they could do together while standing still.

---

The Head Librarian

Anna and I kept doing this, alone or together, sometimes helping one or two couples a night to get together, and sometimes working on cases like Phil who needed multiple sessions of help.

On Sunday, a week and a half after Kelly sent off my scanning proposal, I was invited to a meeting with the head librarian, Martina.

“I like the two-stage idea, and I’ve ordered the equipment and software. We have some tech people around here who should be able to set up the server. If you’re up for it, I’m going to hire you to start the scanning process.”

“That sounds good.”

“I’ll want you to do two things. First, actually scan some books yourself and get a feel for how it works and how much time it takes. After you have had some practice with that, I’d like you to try to write up some documents about it, a general how-to and any troubleshooting guides, tips, and whatever else will help people do it, so we can train the numbers of people we will need to actually get the job done. If necessary, we can have someone else edit your documents to make them read well. And I’m going to get someone to help set up a tracking system to help them find shelves of books that have not been done yet.”

“Wow, it sounds like you have really thought this through.”

“It’s going to take a lot of work, but I think I can convince people of the value of the project and get enough people assigned to the job to make it a reality. And while the first group works on getting a lot of books scanned, I’ll also try to get started on checking the scans and running OCR. We want to check to make sure the scans are readable, because if vampires cannot read them, the OCR software won’t be able to, either. We also want to run some checks to make sure that you don’t miss pages or anything like that. Finally, there will be some people to check the OCR, correct non-words and wrong words, which will usually be detectable regardless of the language of the person checking because they just won’t make any sense.”

“What about the older, handwritten works?”

“Those will have to be transcribed by hand, so it will be slower, but we can do the same checking on their work. I’ll probably try to work on the printed, OCR-capable books first.”

“And where are you going to find all the people to work on it?”

“There are always what you might call capital improvement projects around Trans-Sylvania. Jobs that last a limited time in order to create something new. My idea would be competing with others for getting a share of a couple hundred workers devoted to such projects. Not the same workers all the time, mind you, because different people are good at different things, but other people will get shifted around to make it work. There are always people looking for a change.”

I went ahead with my temp job at the gym that evening, but before my next such session Thursday, I was told I was no longer part of the temp service and I’d been hired by the library. Martina arranged a time Friday morning for me to meet with the tech who had set up the system to show me how to log on and how to start the scanning software. The rest was on me to figure out.

I was on my own to choose hours, initially, since there was nobody else using the equipment, but my logins and book uploads provided a check that I worked 8 hours each Sunday-to-Saturday week. Since I’d done a gym session already, the two hours Friday learning stuff and two hours afterward actually scanning counted as my time the first week.

I got the hang of it pretty quickly, and in my third week spent almost half my allotted time writing up procedures. Somebody edited those into a much nicer tutorial over the weekend than I could have written, and before the end of the fourth week there were two other people coming in to start scanning books.

Meanwhile, Anna and I kept our informal shy-people-help service running and on average got three couples together each week.

---

Enforcement

During my fifth week on the library job, I got a call from the official Enforcement account. But it wasn’t just to say that some people had been punished, but rather that they wanted more help from me. I was invited to a meeting with Alyssa, the head of the onboarding department, which was in charge of everything from identifying the humans to conversion to the end of the service by their host.

Alyssa explained, “It’s hard to monitor the hosts because it is always a temporary job, usually a single onboard per host. But failures in selecting people are entirely on me and my staff. Since you identified the problem, Brandy, I want to hire you to help me fix it.”

“How am I going to do that?”

“First off, I’m going to show you how we select people, or at least a part of that process. We basically spy on them in a special way with the powers all vampires have. I’m going to have you work directly with my selection staff, and ultimately I’m going to get your advice for how we can do a better job identifying candidates. Once you figure that out, I hope we can figure out how to better monitor the hosts.”

“This doesn’t sound quick.”

“No, it’s not. I’ll have to hire you on as a regular job, and it will take weeks just for you to learn how we currently operate. I understand you’ve only recently started a job as part of a new project, but I’d like to ask you to try to wrap up your involvement in that project and pass it on to someone else.”

“It’s kind of a shame to move on so quickly, but there are people there who understand the goal I set for them. I can do that.”

It was around the same time as this that Anna and I stopped helping shy or unprepared people in the clubs simply because we stopped seeing them. Some of the other people we’d talked to who didn’t actually need help were also helping, and we had such helpers in the other clubs, too, though they had never seemed to have the problem as much outside the straight club.

That’s not to say they all found partners, since people still came to the clubs, but at least they weren’t afraid to even speak to someone, or there were enough people reaching out to ensure that anybody, of any gender and sexual preference, would be approached by somebody.

I also can’t say anything about those not venturing into the clubs, but I’m not sure that I ever could, or maybe even should, attempt to do anything about that. It was a valid choice to be asexual as well, even if some people didn’t understand that. If they are shutting themselves off from the world so much that they don’t do their assigned job, Enforcement will find them.

---

Spying Like a Vampire

Martina understood about my need to move on, and for two more weeks before I changed jobs, I was training a steady stream of new book-scanning workers rather than doing any more scanning myself. I made some minor adjustments to the training documents after seeing how the first recruits to the scanning program were doing, and also wrote up some guidelines for the people who would be administering training.

Alyssa put me with Thaddeus, one of her head seekers, for me to understand how the spying works, for my first week’s sessions under her.

“You need to make a portal, but small. Not one for you to go through, but just to look through. Try making it up in one of the corners of your room.”

I made the portal, and it was a triangle about a foot on each side, with one edge on each of two walls and one on the ceiling of my room, though here it was just a hole in the middle of a wall. I pulled the weird triangular door open, and I could see in. Of course the room was empty; I wasn’t there because I was here.

“That’s a good start, but it needs to be much smaller than that. Let me demonstrate.”

To the right of my portal on the same wall, he made a portal that I could barely see. No door on his; it was just a tiny hole, and he invited me to look through it. And I saw it also went into my room. It was on a wall opposite to the portal I’d made, and I could see my portal up there in the corner of the room.

“You can make a portal into my room?”

“Yes, nothing is really private here.”

“Are there voyeurs watching me all the time?”

“No, most vampires have better things to do with their time, but yes, you are probably being watched, sometimes. Those who we teach this skill to are also taught to avoid using it for voyeurism, and those are really only the people in Enforcement and Onboarding. We use this ability to spy on people surreptitiously, but for other reasons.”

After a few more tries, I made a portal as small as his, up in the corner of the room, which let me look in just as well as his did. I could no longer see either portal through the other; they were too small to spot from across the room.

“Now you have the idea,” Thaddeus said. “But let me point something else out to you.”

From a desk nearby, he retrieved a small box, inside of which were several long stick-pins with round, colored heads. He took one of the pins from the box and put it up against the portal, where it stopped. I expected the pin to go through the portal and leave only the head on this side, but it did not go through at all. He then handed me the pin and I tried it myself. It would not enter his portal nor the latest one I had created.

“The portals are permeable in slightly different ways to light and to matter. At their minimum size, matter cannot go through. They also become one-way to light and sound; if we go over there, you won’t even be able to find the portal when you are looking right at it.”

“So they’re perfect spy cameras, completely undetectable,” I surmised.

“Yes. But when they are at this size, you can also direct them into the past.”

The lesson that followed was surreal, but in the same way that I could adjust the size, shape, orientation, and destination of a portal, when I reduced it to its minimum possible size, and then tried to make it even smaller, the other side of the portal seemed to go back in time. Thaddeus pushed his to the middle of last night, when I was sleeping in bed; I pushed mine all the way back to when Kelly was first explaining to me how things worked on my first day awake within Trans-Sylvania.

Thaddeus continued, “Those of us called seekers do this with portals into the human world. Decades ago we searched randomly to find people who fit ideals of good vampires. Now, we have people data-mining the human world, identifying people without strong contacts there, ones who wouldn’t leave too big a mark on the world if removed, and seekers spy on them in turn, looking for any hint that they might be transgender, or even just dissatisfied with their body. Anything that suggests they would respond favorably upon being converted to vampires of the opposite sex from how they were born as humans.”

Moving the portals to the human world wasn’t too hard, and to go somewhere I knew, I practiced by looking in on myself, on Brad, that is, when I first met Kelly at a club. Even further back, I saw my cross-dressed Halloween. I saw times Brad was alone, dressed in women’s clothing. All of this was there to be found, to any vampire who’d learned how.

Next we went on exploring other people’s history. I felt a little weird spying on Phil, but Thaddeus picked him as a candidate because I’d spent enough time with him to know him, and in particular I knew some of the events in his life before I’d met him. From his onboarding records, we learned where and when to look for him, or Phyllis, in the human world. I managed to find the original eggplant incident, and after I did, Thaddeus had me play it back so he could record the scene through a kind of camera he held up to my portal.

We also looked in on some people I didn’t know, but who’d had problems after coming here, and Thaddeus recorded some bits of their lives as well. I spent eight hours in four sessions of two hours each with Thaddeus doing this, and took all the recordings to Alyssa at the end of it.

---

Time Spy

The next week, Alyssa herself shared with me all the documents they use when training seekers and the guidelines they use for selecting candidates. There was also a list of questionable convertees.

“These aren’t all the vampires who aren’t comfortable in their lives here, but they are the worst of them. The ones who completely locked up, wouldn’t do jobs, and refused to interact with vampires at all. Some of them are no longer with us, and some are still here but stay in their rooms 24/7.”

“Good. I figured there must be vampires here like that and I am glad that somebody is trying to help them.”

“Yes, but don’t you try to help them, even though I know you enjoy that. They need a different kind of help and we have other people working on that. I want you to review their histories. You will have access to the records the seekers took, both notes and recordings, as well as data on their location so you can look back and see them yourself. Surely there are telltale signs that these aren’t good candidates for conversion, and I want you to find them. It won’t be easy, and I would expect you at most to get through two candidates per eight hour weekly job commitment. Don’t spend more than three hours in any one session. Manipulating portals so much is tiring, and you may find yourself both sleeping more and eating more as a result of it. You shouldn’t ignore your body if it is telling you you need more food or more sleep, especially if you exceed four hours.”

“So this is months of work,” I said, looking at the list of 20 or so vampires to investigate.

“Yes. Report to me after you have finished investigating each candidate with what you have found.”

So I started my career as a time spy.

I took a brief look through all the files. It was a pretty pathetic bunch. Three of them had withered away from not eating, and the rest never left their rooms but were apparently hanging on by converting the hand soap into food.

I started with a woman named Alice, originally Alvin or “Al” for short. Her report looked OK, but when I started looking back at her history, it didn’t match the report. Al hadn’t been transgender at all. He did have women’s clothes, but he seemed to only use them as a fetish; he dressed up a doll with them, rather than himself. Not only had he never worn female clothes in front of other people, he couldn’t even fit into the female clothes he owned. But his report claimed he was going out in full female guise and picking up men.

I reported the disturbing findings to Alyssa.

“Here’s the first one, Alice, formerly Al. There’s no hidden sign with this one; it’s really obvious. The entire report your team did is a pure fabrication. The one recorded scene that is supposed to be Al in drag picking up a man is somebody else, and I’ve captured where Al really was at that time in my report.”

Alyssa reviewed my captured video and skimmed the report immediately.

“Disturbing. All these people are supposed to have been re-checked already. It means there’s a serious problem among my ranks. People are actively sabotaging the program. Keep checking the others. The truth about them should help my investigation of what’s really going on.”

It turned out they weren’t all like that. In some cases, the report was accurate, as far as it went, anyway, and there were signs missed. One guy had only been dressing up female to satisfy his girlfriend. She had two friends who were lesbians, and when they brought their partners along, she felt left out having a guy with her, and the guy felt left out being the only guy there. He didn’t dress up female except as part of that group. That girlfriend died in a car accident, and this left him unattached in a way that made him at least show up as a candidate for the program. He had dressed in his female attire to attend the funeral with that group, but he didn’t intend to do that ever again, and they got him on his way home from the funeral. And he ended up looking like his dead girlfriend. The report showed him frequently dressing up female to go out with this group, but missed that he didn’t do it any other time. He was one of the ones who wasted away, never even attempting to eat once after he arrived here.

Alyssa was right that this was tiring, and I often went to bed early, and without any form of evening entertainment, on the nights after I spent time spying. I spread those out, three or even four sessions each week separated by a day I didn’t do any spying. Anna could tell even on the days I wasn’t spying that it was taking a toll on me, and did things for me to help me relax, sometimes bringing in Phil and Pam or others we had helped in the clubs and were grateful for what we’d done for them. They acted in several of the plays, with me in the audience together with whoever else showed up when they activated the stage. We played many of the games and explored other devices vampires had created. There was a truly amazing massage machine. And of course, there were nights Anna and I were alone, exploring ways to pleasure each other. It was amazing how many ways there were for two women to do that.

In the end, 10 of the 22 reports were flat-out lies. By the end of it, Alyssa determined three of her seekers were in cahoots to try to skate by on the minimum amount of work possible, not even investigating many of the people assigned to them and instead just ignoring details or outright making stuff up to make whoever they looked at first look like a candidate. They covered for each other, setting up the questionable ones so others from the group could approve them.

Alyssa had me look into other people the three had approved, and while some were actually OK, they included a number of the misfits from the club including several people Anna and I had helped who we knew had been wronged. So some of them didn’t actually require spying, or not nearly as much of it.

When I reported back about these people, I said, “This accounts for all the classes of misfits Anna and I met in the club except one: The leering monsters.”

After I confirmed the kind of people I was talking about, Alyssa explained, “Sorry. They are a mistake, but one I already know about.”

“A mistake?”

“Some humans found out the truth about vampires, and rather than use other techniques we have for making people forget about them, two rogue agents went in and converted the entire group. This went against multiple of our principles, including the population limit rule, and those agents have been punished. Those converted, though, changed into their impression of what vampires should be, rather than just the opposite sex. Some of them came out fine, or over time their ideal images became more typical, but there are five, all of whom you have noticed, who simply could not be swayed.”

“So they just hang out in the club and hope they find someone who really wants to date someone like that?”

“As I understand it, they do find people interested, sometimes. Just not anyone for the long-term. They’re people who want to try it once. As such, the monsters as you call them aren’t any different from some of the other misfits who get nothing but a series of one-night stands.”

“Oh, right. I have seen some of those in the anything goes club. But these only want women, so they are in the straight club.”

“Exactly.”

With this done, Alyssa had me start checking on hosts. Some of the people who had lesser problems in the club were probably fine candidates but poorly introduced to Trans-Sylvania by their hosts. This was hard to do anything about systematically, since each host usually only hosted one incoming vampire. But at least I could do spot checks, from the top down: What was expected of a host, in general; what was the host told to do and to pass on to the new vampire by the contact, what did the host actually do and pass on. I noticed a couple small lapses by the hosts, but nothing that looked worthy of punishment. The hosts were being told the right things. When I looked back at past hostings, there were major flaws, but it seemed like they had been addressed.

And all through this time, 6 months of spying on people all over, I only spent about 8 to 10 hours a week on it, so I had plenty of time to hang out with Anna and sometimes our friends.

At one point we discovered that, on the floor with the amusement area, but out beyond it, out past the footprint of the rooms on the usual floors, there was an abandoned amusement park. They had used the lack of other rooms overhead to hollow out a space 50 feet high, which allowed building some impressively tall structures. It didn’t have the massive roller coasters some parks did, though that theoretically could have been possible, but other kinds of rides were there, older stuff, like going back in time to amusement parks of the past. None of them functioned, though.

In the library I found some history about it. Some vampires built it in the 1950s. It was pretty popular in the 1960s, but popularity waned in the 1970s, for some reason, and the rides stopped being maintained. An accident on one of the rides in 1978 led to the whole place being closed down. Vampires’ abilities meant nobody was permanently hurt, but they still decided it was better to close it due to its lack of maintenance.

When we spread the word about it, we found lots of people willing to help bring it back to life, including some people with the mechanical engineering knowledge to know what was needed to support the structures. Because people were doing this on their own time, around work schedules, we couldn’t plan things in too much detail, but we worked out an overall list of jobs that needed to be done and we worked on one or two of them at a time. After a month we already had one functional ride, and by the end of my time officially spying on other vampires for Alyssa, we had a whole section of the park open and people were using it regularly while we worked on other areas.

The Governors

When I had done the work Alyssa had wanted, I got transferred to Enforcement. As a trained portal spy, I was considered an excellent candidate for that job, and I usually worked eight one-hour shifts a week, at different times and usually two on the same day so I had three days completely off, in order to check on people doing different jobs. Each Monday morning I’d get a list of assignments for the next seven days, except if I was supposed to check on someone on Monday that assignment would arrive Sunday morning. If it was cafeteria work, I could just arrange to eat there that hour, but most other jobs required portal spying.

I worked at that for a while, but I’d been in Trans-Sylvania for slightly less than a year when I got a private communication from the governors. At first, the governors had been only a vague concept to me. It wasn’t until I was working for Alyssa that I’d seen anything from the governors, and then it was second-hand stuff passed on from Alyssa. When I was an Enforcer, I’d seen group emails sent to everyone in Enforcement from the governors.

This time I was being called in for a private meeting with them, and I was told it wasn’t about my job, or at least, not my current one.

They had to tell me how to find them, which wasn’t obvious at all since they lived behind a secret door on level 4. At the end of the hallway beyond rooms 4396 and 4397, where every other corridor ended in a wall, this one continued on another room-length or so, and where it then ended, if you looked closely, was a door the same size and shape as the entire hallway. There was a completely unmarked spot on the wall you could tap to reveal a numeric keypad, and a 5-digit code they gave me caused the whole door to crack open a bit, and I could push it open the rest of the way.

The first person I encountered was a woman sitting alone at a desk, who introduced herself as Time, but explained it was spelled Tempus, in Latin. After I introduced myself as Brandy Kelly, she directed me to another door which led into a room where the three governors sat on the strangest chairs. Imagine a rolling office chair, but above the head on the back and beneath both arms were solid gold-and-gem covered sections like you might expect to see on a throne. Each of the three governors sat on such a rolling throne. They wore simple brown robes, what looked to me most like a monk’s robes, though it was clear two of the three were female. In terms of appearance, they looked like ordinary people.

They introduced themselves as Eye, Ear, and Brain, but that was again the translation effect. They spelled their names out as Oculus, Auris, and Cerebrum to make clear they were speaking in Latin. The jeweled panels above their heads at the tops of their thrones resembled the eye, ear, and brain that they were named for.

Cerebrum, the male one, said, “We have become aware of a situation in the human world that you first brought to the attention of other vampires.”

I nodded, and when he didn’t immediately continue, I said, “The hater government.”

“Yes. We are concerned enough about this to take action, despite the threat doing so represents to our secrecy. It is something that we have done only rarely.”

Auris said, “The last time we did so was during World War II. In that instance, we passed along critical information on German activities by posing as spies for the Allies. We had spied on both sides, and were able to find all the right passwords and contact points to be accepted as such. But we only did so where the Allies’ own spying operations failed and we thought the need was critical, to avoid revealing our hand.”

“What is your plan now?”

Oculus answered, “We maintain certain operations in the human world that even most vampires do not know about. You might call them black ops. One of those operations has taken place at a medical research lab at which we have influenced human researchers to attempt to develop a vaccine for a communicable disease the exact nature of which we haven’t fully revealed. That disease is actually vampirism, the condition which is applied to humans when we convert them. The human researchers only know that it causes a spontaneous sex change and makes them fatally allergic to sunlight.”

I nodded. Up to this point it made sense.

Cerebrum continued, “The researchers have been asked to find a vaccine against the sunlight allergy in the hopes that we can use exposure to the disease as a mechanism to cause sex change. We have provided them with test subjects from among human criminals whom we have exfiltrated from their imprisonment. Most of them are rapists, so the forced conversion may be worse than a death sentence to them, and so our consciences are less bothered by the possibility of the testing becoming fatal. The others are generally murderers and were already subject to either life or death penalties.”

Auris provided the test results. “A number of the test subjects perished, but the researchers have now produced a vaccine which can be taken half an hour before conversion which allows the sex change to continue, but prevents any of the other effects from occurring. No immortality, no fatal allergy to sunlight, no power to generate portals, nor any of the other effects which you are no doubt aware of. In other words, a 100% success even beyond the effects that we were able to tell the human researchers about.”

Oculus continued, “Upon successful conversion of subjects who would have made good vampires, we were able to simply substitute them in place of their former selves. The distortion field we take advantage of when converting vampires to effectively erase them from history adapts to effectively treat them as if they had always been of the other sex. We have also tested it on some with a single strong connection such as a spouse or romantic partner which keeps them from being candidates for our usual conversion. The test subjects in such a state have been able to maintain their lives, minus the aspect of being trans. They and their partner are aware of the change, but the rest of the world simply adapts.”

When they stopped, I asked, “So what’s the plan? Give this treatment en masse to trans people?”

Cerebrum answered, “Yes. We would give it to these candidates with a single strong connection first.”

“And later?”

“We gradually start giving it to people with stronger connections, and eventually to minor public figures who are known to be trans. We expect that the history-changing effect won’t be strong enough to change those people in everyone’s mind. In this way word will get around that the treatment exists, but not where it’s coming from or how people get it. At that point we contact public figures who express that they want it, even if they weren’t publicly trans before. Gradually, we let word spread to the point that everyone who’s not living under a rock knows this is happening. And finally, we treat the president.”

“What the heck is that going to do?”

Auris replied, “Our analysts think there’s no way the history effect can undo any of his actions as president. There are simply too many people affected and too much of a record of what he did. But the president is widely known as a flip-flopper. He’s also known for just rolling with it when something he does doesn’t turn out the way he planned, and trying to make people believe that what happened was what he wanted, or if he did something wrong, trying to make people believe it was right. So we need to simply come up with a way to make him think that getting into our sex change program was a result of something he did. Or get him to outright ask for it. And then he’ll bend over backward to undo all the actions he has taken as president and protect trans rights.”

“What’s that going to mean for the future of Trans-Sylvania? If humans can change sex without becoming vampires, who are we going to convert?”

Oculus said, “We think we can make the opposite drug, one which can remove the forced sex change aspect of vampirism while leaving all the other aspects. Then our vampires can simply have their ideal bodies, whether those bodies are of the opposite sex to their human bodies or the same sex. Then we’ll simply be looking for the outsiders, ones without close ties, and whether they are trans will become irrelevant. Trans-Sylvanian society will change, but probably for the better.”

“And what’s my role?”

Cerebrum answered simply, “We would put you on the front line, doing sex-change conversions of humans after administering the drug to them.”

“Would I be living in the human world full time, then?”

“No. We would train up a staff to do these conversions the way we do for other jobs, though they wouldn’t all have the whole story we’ve told you. They would simply think they are helping humans who want sex changes who we can’t take in ourselves. You would have a shift, possibly two-hour shifts on different days at first but scaling up to one eight-hour shift a week as we get more patients. You would portal through to an office in the human world and treat the patients the human staff bring in for you, and portal back here when your shift is through.”

“When would I start?”

Oculus said, “We have to work out scaling up production of the drug, so we have hundreds or ideally thousands of doses a week rather than dozens a month as we have now. When we do, we’ll start going out and inviting in some of the many, many candidates from recent years we have rejected because they were too strongly tied to a single partner. It’ll probably be a couple months.”

---

Human Convertees

It was eight weeks to the day when the governors called me again to say I would start in one week, and I wrapped up my work in Enforcement. After we cleaned out the cabal within Onboarding who were covering for each other to shirk off work, while I occasionally found jobs not done, there were no serious offenders and nobody deserving of more than a warning.

At first, they had me working 1-3 PM on Tuesday through Friday. But it wasn’t in any particular place. They had candidates lined up in many different cities, just in the USA at this point, and on the first day I didn’t actually see any of them, but they showed me the places and let me memorize them for the purpose of making portals between them. It was like a bunch of different doctors’ offices and I had a room in each where I was going to be biting an unconscious patient who had been administered the drug far enough in advance for it to have taken effect. They gave me a pinprick test device I used to make sure each patient was ready before the bite. I also had a room in each building that was supposed to be my office, where I was portaling in and out from, so I didn’t arrive that way in front of non-vampires. Some of them probably wondered how I got in and out of the building, but they didn’t see it.

When they scaled it up a bit more, there were larger facilities in each major city and I was assigned a four-hour shift in one of them two days each week and I’d just go around from room to room where they had many patients waiting. Dozens of us provided sex changes to many thousands of humans.

And it got the effect we wanted. While each of the people converted only closely associated with a few people, word got around. This put us into the next phase of the plan, where I was taken off this mass conversion duty, though others kept doing it, different vampires doing eight-hour shifts different days of the week to fully staff the largest centers. Instead, I went into individual service converting people who were better connected. This meant I converted many fewer patients, and I often went to their homes and administered both the vaccine and the bite myself, waiting the time needed for the vaccine to take effect.

Because it took only a couple days for them to recover and become fully functioning members of their new sex, at this point word spread fast. Within a month it went from “a lot of people knew” to “everybody who wasn’t hiding under a rock knew”.

They found that they had to build up the work toward the president in stages, but as predicted, when sex changes became easy and fully functional, a lot more people were interested in them than had ever publicly indicated it before, and we found suitable candidates in lower levels of the administration before working our way up to members of Congress and the Cabinet.

Eventually, almost three years into his second term, during one of his Cabinet meetings, with three secretaries changed male-to-female and one female-to-male, all of them generally looking around age 30 rather than 50 to 60 before the change, the subject came up.

“You who have changed sex, are you getting officially recognized in your new sex? I thought we outlawed that.”

One of the changed ones now named Brenda answered, “We are, but we don’t know how it’s happening. The process knocks you out for a couple days, and each of us woke up to find we had birth certificates and IDs showing our new gender. All our records were updated without us having to do it.”

“They just knock you out and you wake up as the opposite sex? And is the younger appearance part of that, too, or are you getting better makeup or something?”

Sydney responded, “The younger appearance is part of it, too. I don’t know how, but it seems to make you look like someone you want to look like, including the age.”

“Well, I am not so sure about the being a woman part of it, but I could deal with that if it makes me younger. I can imagine myself as a very nice looking young woman. Very nice looking. Can you put me in touch with the people doing this?”

“I can try,” Gene replied. “I don’t actually know the people who did the job, but one of my friends who was changed put me in touch with them. They visited me at my home, not here.”

“Oh, but the White House is my home now. These unknown people can’t just waltz in here. Maybe in Florida, at my home there. I’d still have the Secret Service but it would be a lot more plausible for them to reach me there. Do we have anyone in the Secret Service who’s changed? That’s under you, isn’t it, Charles?”

“Yes, I am the Secretary of Homeland Security.”

“You haven’t changed.”

“No, but I do recall some changes among the Secret Service. Recent ones. I had actually been meaning to bring those to your attention, but the moment hadn’t come up.”

“Let me plan a vacation to Florida and you see if you can get those Secret Service officers appointed there.”

---

The President

He basically did it himself. He set up the trip, got converted guards put on staff, and started undoing all the anti-gender-change rules he could, everything that was done by Executive Order, before we even approached him. Same-sex marriage was back at the federal level, too. He asked Congress to undo what was done by law, too, and some of that had started. It might have been fun just to leave it like that and leave him male, but with his flip-flopping ways, we really needed to go through with it to make him stick with it.

I had been the one who converted both of the Secret Service officers he had there, so during one of my trips to the human world I called them. I had them set up his doctor to care for him during the change, and I confirmed a time when one agent would be at the gate and one at the house. Rather than portaling in secretly, I drove up and walked in like a normal person, and had an escort right to where he was sitting.

“Mr. President, I understand you’ve been looking for our sex change service.”

He gave me a “Who, me?” sort of look for a moment, but then he said, “I hear it will make me look younger as well.”

“That’s true, though the strength of that effect varies. I can’t promise you a specific age, but I know that the people we have changed generally come out liking their new look. Usually we only offer this to people who are more interested in the sex change, but we are making an exception for you.”

“Thank you. What do I need to do?”

“The process will knock you out for a couple days while your body changes. Dr. Samuels will be here to monitor you during that time, but I really just need you to go lie down somewhere where you will be comfortable.”

He called Samuels, who confirmed he was on his way. Then he led me to a bedroom, where he stripped down to his boxers, climbed into bed, and covered himself up to the shoulders.

I explained, “I will inject you with two drugs. The first one will knock you out. It doesn’t make any visible changes by itself, but it prepares your body for the active drug. Then I will have to wait half an hour and test your blood to confirm your body is ready. Then I will administer the second drug, and leave. It’s 100% effective and does not need any further tests, but Samuels will be here to tend to your needs and probably hook you up to an IV.”

He just looked at me and smiled and said, “I’m ready.”

So I did the deed. During the waiting time I was more tense than I had ever been in my entire life, but nothing went wrong, the vaccine worked, and I gave him the bite and got ready to leave. The timing with Samuels was perfect; he arrived just as I left.

---

Aftereffects

Some people were surprised, but knowing both that this sex change service was available and the legal changes he’d made caused many people to expect that this was going to happen. Some rumors circulated before she went public, but it was five days after my bite before America saw its first female president, who arrived in a way nobody could have expected during the last election.

She didn’t do it halfway, either. She had a wardrobe full of fabulous dresses by the time she went back to the White House and started doing presidential duties once again.

Her party was stunned. They had only barely started undoing the things they had done by law during this presidency, the most controversial changes that were easy to revert with minimal support. Now that this had happened, it caused a rift. The Republican Party had not been a true party for a couple decades, but rather a loose coalition united under a single name, and that coalition was now unraveling.

One faction was the traditional Republicans, those who had been here during the Clinton years, when the party felt weak and starting to slip away. Most of them were here only because they considered themselves Republicans, even though the core of the party had shifted. Some of them were the least willing to go along with the hater issues, while many were simply glad they had the numbers to have a party. This group wholeheartedly supported the new female version of the president.

Another faction was the Religious Right, a conservative Christian group. They were also part of the traditional Republican base, but they had lost touch with the more liberal Christians who accepted female ministers, sex change, and same-sex marriage. They had mostly supported the president because of his anti-gay, anti-trans views, and they completely condemned what was happening now.

The more liberal Christians had been split in recent years, some remaining with the party because of their support for religion while others hopped over to support Democrats due to disagreement with the hater agenda. This group now strongly supported the president, regardless of their current party affiliation.

Another faction didn’t have any one name, but was a collection of groups such as the Proud Boys who mostly represented a desire to restore the Confederacy, or the ideas it stood for. They varied in exactly how they hoped to achieve this, some being more political and others looking to start the Second Civil War. What they had in common was hatred of other groups, though some expressed that hatred more toward Blacks, some toward any non-Whites, some toward LGBTQ people, some toward Jews, etc. The current president was largely responsible for bringing this faction into the party and it was with its help that he had been elected twice. They felt completely betrayed by the president’s actions, and she had had to call out the National Guard to put down three uprisings and prevent the Second Civil War from starting to fight against the Republican Party and herself.

Finally, there was Big Money. None of the president’s actions had had any particular effect on their goals, and while they had effects on the markets, those effects were both up and down in different sectors. They continued to support her.

The result was that she no longer had support within her own party for what she wanted done. In fact, her party couldn’t muster enough votes on their own to pass anything. However, there were plenty of Democrats willing to undo the harm that had been done. The repeals and reinstatements of previously repealed laws passed with bipartisan support.

Interestingly, this happened just as the primaries for the next election were starting to happen. Due to the 22nd Amendment preventing the current president from serving a third term, she wasn’t a candidate. But the changes in party alignment caused by this event threw the election into chaos. It had been assumed that the current president’s selected vice president would be the next presidential candidate, and nobody had bothered to enter the race against him, apart from one token opposition candidate from the traditional wing who had most strongly opposed the hater policies. Now, with the newly female president turning the party agenda on its ear, several candidates from the traditional wing of the party also jumped in.

These candidates split the vote in the early primaries, but the results determined who had the most support among them, and quickly the losers dropped out and pledged support to one front-runner, so the Republican primary became a two-man race. The party divide became clear between those aligned with the current president and those aligned with her vice president. And it also quickly became clear that those aligned with the current president were winning.

When the supporters of the president secured a majority of delegates for the convention, those on the other side started getting desperate. It had seemed like they had everything, and suddenly it all was lost and now it seemed like they’d get nothing. They called on the vice president to help, and they didn’t get the response they were looking for from him. He was, after all, only there because the previous version of the president, before her sex change and attitude shift, had selected him and essentially anointed him as a successor. As far as he was concerned, things changed and he lost and he accepted that. He made a concession speech on live TV.

And this led to the more violent elements among his supporters to start rioting. They didn’t have any particular plan, though, in part because they were dozens of little fringe groups rather than any organized resistance. The National Guard had to be put out again, in places along with the Army, local SWAT teams, and other groups such as the Texas Rangers. In some areas the local law enforcement was on the side of the rioters, which led to the bloodiest battles.

They had to move the Republican convention to Chicago, since the planned location in Atlanta was deemed too dangerous. With the Republican candidate supporting the changed version of the current president then accepting the nomination, the Democrats had to figure out, “Now what?” This was so different from what they had planned on that they weren’t even sure what was the right strategy for the campaign. Both sides actually supported a lot of the same viewpoints, with establishing peace within the country a major concern.

Where the parties differed was in economic policy. The Republicans still favored big business and the Democrats still favored policies supporting the common people. But both sides pledged an end to discrimination and racism, and no tolerance for the rioters.

They managed to quell the fighting before the November election, but still had National Guard and other forces stationed to keep peace outside thousands of polling places. Hundreds of people who tried to disrupt the elections were arrested. None were killed by forces maintaining the peace, but five suicide bombers killed themselves and eighteen other people and injured forty-six other people.

Some of the bigots did manage to nominate a candidate for one of the third parties, but all he managed to do was split the Republican vote, or get votes from those who would not have voted otherwise. He got more votes than any third-party candidate since Perot, but still ended up mainly as a footnote in history. The economic differences and the Republicans’ loss of the votes from the bigoted faction combined to allow the Democrats to win. It was close, though, and the states they won differed from any recent pattern.

There were still 37 congressmen from the bigot faction, hailing from areas where there was no strong opposition candidate, and thirteen senators, all of whom were not up for reelection. They were the only ones to vote against further reforms. Some of these passed into law protections for LGBTQ people that had only ever previously been done by Executive Action, ones which had been undone at the start of the previous president’s administration, then reinstated after her transformation.

The first US president elected as a female addressed the nation after her first hundred days in office:

I am pleased that I now lead a more united country than we have had in decades, and I have my predecessor to thank for that, even though such thanking would have been unthinkable two years ago. Sometimes, people change.

But some people have not changed. The rioters attacked people of color, of differing sexual orientation from themselves, and in some cases attacked indiscriminately. They attempted to sow fear and hatred within our great nation, and in some cases still do so to this day. They are the reason we still have the National Guard patrolling our streets and standing watch over our schools, post offices, mass transit systems, and other facilities in parts of ten states.

We made a mistake eight years ago in not pursuing justice vigorously after the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Only a few dozen out of the hundreds of rioters that day ever served any jail time for their deeds. But one of those unprosecuted people had a rather sudden change and turned her life around, and in doing so, turned this country’s course around. In recognition of that, I am prepared to offer a deal for amnesty.

I have been in contact with the people who provided the service to my predecessor which allowed her to turn her life around in this way, and they are willing to offer the same to anyone willing to repent. You agree to give up violence, stop the hate, and live your life peacefully on the other side of the gender fence, and as long as you hold to those vows, you’ll not be prosecuted.

Don’t think you can hide. Our technology is much better than it was eight years ago, and we’ve identified over 95 percent of the people responsible for the violence against our country since last summer. We didn’t come after you yet because, frankly, we’ve been busy. Unless you were caught in the act or you committed murder or rape, you’ve been ignored so far, but we are stepping things up now. Currently only about a hundred of the last year’s rioters are imprisoned or in the process of being prosecuted. The thousands of others responsible for arson, vandalism, assault, and other serious crimes in pursuit of making our country hate again are in our sights.

But you can go to I will change dot gov and register your desire to really change yourself in more ways than one and stay free. Those of you who are innocent but simply want to change, there’s a place for you there too. That’s I will change dot gov.

I was the vampire (still not identified that way, of course) who had spoken with the president prior to her speech to allow her to extend this offer. We kept that promise, but only a handful of the rioters accepted the offer, and most ended up in jail by the end of this new president’s first year in office. But we were plenty busy with the remainder of the transgender people of the United States. And once the US demand started dying down, we went on to the rest of the world.

We still found candidates to make into new vampires among those who really needed a new start on life. We got the cure working that prevented the forced sex change. It let them be whoever they wanted to be, but about 15% of them wanted to be the opposite sex and changed anyway.

Origin

Anna and I continued doing fun things in our time together. The amusement park was fully functional now, and the volunteers had moved on to other devices that needed repair. The number of entertainment devices vampires had invented over the years seemed endless, and when we exhausted the ones Anna knew about we did them again and found catalogs of others to explore. Of course, there were times we simply made out in my room or hers. We had plenty of ways of doing that, too, with or without the assistance of devices.

One day I was talking with Anna. “You know, I never did figure out where vampires came from.”

“Did we have to come from somewhere? Couldn’t we have just developed, like humans did?”

“And what, we converted the apes and Neanderthals back before humans developed? That doesn’t seem right. Why does holy water have an effect on us? Are we demonic in origin?”

“Huh. I never really thought about that,” Anna remarked.

“Most of the histories in the library only go back to Vlad’s time, but I found a couple that tell our history back to Roman times. Even then, though, we weren’t new.”

“Hey, you have that time spy power you used with the Enforcers. Do you think you could use that to look back in our history and find out?”

“I don’t know. I never tried looking back anywhere near that far.”

After I explained to Anna how simple it was, Anna and I agreed to try it, separately, but both of us aiming on my room. I remembered from when I first arrived that Kelly told me a female vampire named Genevieve Thomas died to make space for me, so I assumed she lived here, and we both quickly found her.

We went back further. Genevieve looked old before she died, but merely five years before that she looked young and she had a connecting door to her husband’s room, and we saw him in the room sometimes. I remembered now Kelly had described her as a widow. I guess her husband gave up, or did something stupid and died, and she couldn’t bear to go on without him.

As far as we could tell, he’d just gotten bored. We looked back further, for thirty, fifty, a hundred years, and it was still Genevieve and her husband. They had been together a very long time, beyond a normal human life span, and it seemed they’d gotten together very shortly after Genevieve arrived in 1878. We saw her arrival and how hosting worked back then. Before that, there was another female vampire named Joan living in my room. She was here about thirty years. And we saw vampire after vampire occupying the room, back to and before Vlad’s time. Since I was on one of the upper floors, this room was here before Vlad, but by the time we got that far back we were feeling the strain of using that ability for so long, and we took a break and went and had a large meal.

We didn’t actually try looking back again until the next day, and when we did, we were able to quickly step back to the last occupant we saw and then keep going. Eventually, around 500 AD, we got back to when they first dug out this room, which was another time we had to stop from tiredness. When we resumed a few days later, we saw that before that dig-out, they had only the first five floors and fewer rooms on each floor, so we picked the first room on my side of my hallway and continued going back from there.

We went back through Roman times and far before that. A few sessions later, we were somewhere beyond 2000 BC when we found what seemed to be the beginning. There was only a single room in Trans-Sylvania at first, where the first-floor cafeteria is now, and of course it wasn’t called that before the Romans. It didn’t seem like the place had a name. We went so far back that even that room wasn’t there, and played it forward to see Trans-Sylvania created.

At first, there was just a man there, a sorcerer named Elymas. He quickly got to work summoning a demon. Or was it a god? Elymas and the demon spoke of various gods. We weren’t sure whether the demon was physically present, or Elymas just created a way to communicate with it, but it at least seemed like the demon was there in the room with him.

Was it a demon or a god? Was there even a difference? Elymas’s conversations led us to realize that the demons of Old Testament times were simply other gods, ones whom the God of the Jews didn’t want His people worshiping. What was surprising was that all of this was real. There were real gods, plural, with real power. What happened to them?

Later Elymas summoned other demons as well, and one of the demons he summoned gave him and the followers we saw arrive later the power to make portals within Trans-Sylvania, and between Limbo and Trans-Sylvania or between Limbo and Earth. It seemed that Limbo was created as a way to give people the power to create portals more easily, with less magic, and safely, since Limbo was empty and you didn’t need to know where you were creating the portal.

After a while we noticed there was one demon in particular who was summoned a lot. We also realized those followers we saw were slaves, and unsurprisingly they were the first vampires. The sorcerer used this frequently appearing demon’s power to enslave people to him as vampires. His slaves, maybe a dozen or so of them, worked in this place doing various things for him, but mostly smuggling and theft, and the entrapment of people to feed to the demons to get them to do Elymas’s bidding. Interestingly, all the slaves were male. When they sacrificed people to the demons, they were always men. When they entrapped women, it was always to convert them to more male vampires.

The slaves had the power to make portals, and they used it to sneak into places and kidnap people or steal stuff, or move it across borders and such. But they could only do it during the night of the human world, because part of their enslavement was the spell that made them deathly allergic to sunlight.

In a critical scene, we saw Elymas distracted during a moment his demon was present, and one of the slaves pleaded with the demon for a way to escape the sorcerer. This was seemingly a loophole in the demon summoning spell. The slaves were forbidden many things, but performing magic or wishing for help from the demons was not one of them because the slaves created portals in their work for the sorcerer. The demon could not act directly against Elymas, but he could do so indirectly by granting another person powers. The demon granted that slave the power to bite other people to spread the enslavement spell onto them, and he converted the sorcerer, who started becoming a sorceress, since apparently the sex change was also part of the spell.

The effect of silver on vampires was also part of the enslavement spell. The sorcerer had used that as another way to control them, and to punish or kill those who disobeyed him. It seemed that the slaves were also not able to attack Elymas directly. Once the sorcerer had become a vampire, that stipulation no longer applied, maybe because of something specific, and they used his own silver weapons to kill him.

His death did not end the spell that he had placed on them, though it did end the demon’s summoning. Also, the other slaves did not gain the ability to bite people to convert them into more vampires. That ability was initially reserved only to the one who had asked the demon for a way out. But the ones he converted gained the power. That is how all vampires living today came to have that power; we all trace our lineage of conversion back to that one vampire.

We were able to follow Elymas back to his original location in the human world through the first portal that came into being along with Trans-Sylvania itself. Continuing back from there, we observed him making it, and earlier, saw him researching how to make it. He did it because the demons he wanted to work with had been banished from the human world, and the spells to summon them no longer worked. That explained what happened to at least some of the demons; they had been banished from the human world, somehow. Elymas found a demon who wasn’t yet banished from the human world, one who didn’t have the power to do the things Elymas wanted, but this demon had the power to create another space outside the world, one in which the demons he needed could be summoned.

We hunted for the origin of the gods or demons, and we failed to find it. They were older than Trans-Sylvania and older than Elymas. Their origin was elsewhere in the human world, or in other worlds we still don’t know about, and there was too much for us to search without clues where and when to look. That would have to be somebody else’s quest.

But I talked to Kelly about it, specifically, how I could publish a book to write up this story, so that it would be in the library for all vampires curious about it.

“Just write up a document. I can convert for you into the kind of document we store in the library. We have had 37 new books published by vampires in this way since we started putting the scanned books online, and they were able to put their originals in the library rather than having to print and then scan them.”

So I did that. There were others still writing, so by the time I was done, The Origin of Vampires by Brandy Kelly became the 40th new book published directly as an e-book in our library, though Kelly also helped me make a printed copy we could put in the physical library.