Jacob
Though I was born Jacob Taylor, long ago I was certain that I wanted to become a girl. I’ve been going as Joanna for many years, but that transition took time. At first I was completely closeted, and then was sneaking out of my apartment so not even the neighbors saw Joanna coming and going. I eventually let two female neighbors know about Joanna, and they helped me improve my female appearance. After that, I introduced myself as Joanna to my other neighbors, but didn’t tell them I was Jacob, and just let them think I was Jacob’s sister or girlfriend or whatever. For a few years, though, I’ve been Joanna everywhere except at work.
I did maintenance for a row of buildings here in the city, though ironically not for the similar one I lived in. There were several of us who collectively served those buildings, at least one on site 8-8, seven days a week, with each of us on call two nights a week for emergencies. Though the days moved around, it gave me predictable times I wasn’t working or on call, and could go be Joanna. I didn’t dress as Joanna when working because it just wasn’t practical; the kind of clothes I was able to wear well as Joanna weren’t compatible with the kind of work I sometimes did.
I always figured some day I would save up enough money to take a long leave from work and change the surgical way, but I knew it was a long-term dream. That all changed when I made a connection on that exotic dating site. Maria Lorenti was her name, and as male, he went by Marco. At first, she flew in to New York City for a series of dates, and once we got comfortable with each other, he cross-dressed for dates with Joanna. Those were really good for me, and helped me get to the stage where I was dressing as Joanna almost all the time. Later, I flew to Sicily for dates in his homeland as well, funded by Marco, who could evidently afford it. The Spanish I learned in school helped as I learned Italian during those trips, with the languages and much of the vocabulary being similar. Eventually we agreed to get married and change sex for each other.
Marco assured me that both changing my documents and changing sex physically was easier in Sicily, so my initial paperwork was all done under the name of Jacob. Once all the immigration paperwork had gone through, I packed up all my stuff and had it shipped to Sicily, save for what I was going to take with me on the plane, and most of my male clothes that I was leaving behind for friends and family members to take or dispose of, because I intended to be Joanna full time once I was there.
Marco met me at the airport, dressed as the perfect gentleman, drove me to the inn his family ran, and led me to a room at the inn where he’d already brought some of his stuff. Not all of it; I’d seen that at the apartment he normally lived in during my last visit. There were two beds; we could sleep apart if we wanted to. But would we really want to?
I immediately changed into my dress with the falsies and makeup and all the other appropriate getup to present as female. Only then did I accompany Marco to be introduced to the rest of the family, or at least whoever was around at the time.
“Joanna, since you’re going to become part of the family, it’s time to let you in on the family secrets,” Marco said.
To my surprise the room he led me to was the pantry. It wasn’t surprising there was a bedroom-sized pantry here; they ran a restaurant, after all. But what was surprising was that there were huge worms, as long as my index finger and bigger around, yellow with green and black spots, crawling over the shelves and containers. To my relief, I saw that all the food was sealed up in what appeared to be tightly closed bins. I don’t know how many of them there were, but I saw about two dozen of these worms, and also about a dozen smaller, plain white ones.
“You’ve got a worm problem,” I told Marco.
“No, these worms, we tolerate. They are the worms of change.”
“The what?”
“It’s a family secret going back centuries. Well, secret may be overstating it; a lot of people know, but most people don’t know they are here. But yes, the story. Nobody knows exactly when this occurred, but the place was much smaller then; there was just a small house for the family, and not the restaurant and inn that we have today, but it was located right here. They had seen these worms in their house on occasion, and killed a few, but they were elusive. One day one of them landed in a pot of pasta sauce while it was cooking. Lorenzo tried to get it out, but killed it and sliced it to bits during his efforts, so he figured to just slice it up further and see what kind of flavor it would give to the sauce. And nobody tasted it at all. But to his surprise, he and his entire family woke up changed to the opposite sex.”
Understanding what this meant for us, I asked, “Really? I thought we were going to change the hormone and surgical way.”
“Really. At least, the worms really do work. Some details of the original story are lost and perhaps invented, but as we understand it, this was how the worms’ effect was discovered.”
“What happened next?”
“None of them wanted to be the opposite sex, but the female Lorenzo explained to his family about the worm and made up another pasta meal the next evening, putting in one of these worms on purpose, and they all changed back. They were very relieved! But rather than try to pretend it never happened, Lorenzo’s family realized they had an opportunity. Though the kind of sex-changes with hormones and surgery you know about today are a modern invention, there have been transsexuals throughout recorded history who only did what we’ve done so far. There was a dating couple in Lorenzo’s neighborhood who both wanted to go the opposite way, who shared their clothes with each other to go out on dates both dressed as the opposite sex. They were well known for this within the community, and Lorenzo invited them to try his special pasta. They became the first people to voluntarily and permanently change sex by eating the worms.”
“But you don’t know their names?”
“Like I said, it happened a long time ago and we don’t even know exactly when. But word got out, and others wanted it as well. Lorenzo made a meal for another two couples, which was successful, but there were some failures. They discovered that one worm only provided changes reliably for four people, and it had to be killed and cooked fresh on the day it was served. Once the word got around, there were a lot more people who wanted changes than Lorenzo had worms. So they set a high price, what would have been considered a fortune at the time, for the pasta meal of change. It’s been that way ever since then. We’ve never been able to breed them or produce them in greater numbers, but we let them breed naturally. To tell the truth, nobody’s ever seen them breed, mate, lay eggs, give birth, or whatever they do, but the new white ones come from somewhere, and eventually grow into the big ones you saw. They only live in that pantry; nobody has ever seen them in any part of the house, outside the house, or anywhere else. It was the kitchen of the original house, and eventually was turned into a pantry to give the worms more space to grow. The family built a larger kitchen, and opened a restaurant and eventually an inn as well, and thousands of people over the years have come here, eaten our worms, and changed sex.”
“Do you still charge them a fortune?”
“In relative terms, I think it’s less than the old days, but yes. Today the price is 50,000 euros per person, 100,000 if they come from outside Sicily. And that includes a few days at the inn to let the change fully take effect, and help with the transition and getting your name and legal gender changed. But don’t worry. As a member of the immediate family, I get free changes for myself and for you. The offer is made to every member of the family who stays to help run the place, though only about 1 in 20 or so of us actually want to change.”
“1 in 20 is still a lot,” I commented.
“It is,” Marco agreed. “Definitely more than in the population as a whole, but everyone in our family grows up knowing it’s an option. For most people, it’s at best a fantasy, or at least it was until the 20th century brought sex-change surgery. That’s not any cheaper, though, and you don’t get to be a functioning member of the opposite sex.”
“It’s that thorough?”
“Oh, yes. Members of our family born female have sired children after their change, and those born male have changed and later given birth to their own children. Some of those who paid us have done the same. Usually we don’t keep in touch with them, but we have a file with all the birth announcement cards some of the happy parents have sent here. It’s a 100% fully functional change.”
“Oh, my! Now I have to think about this. I mean, I still want to change and marry you, but do I want to have children with you? I always assumed we’d adopt if we wanted any.”
“I’ll be glad to be the father of your children if you want to bear any with me,” Marco responded.
But it was a much tougher decision for me, as I’d be the one having to carry them. “I’m considering it.”
“Even if you don’t want to bear our children, consider changing with me this way. There will be plenty of opportunities, but our next chance is a few days from now. We have a couple booked to change, with the other two slots open.”
So we ate a normal meal at their restaurant that night, normal meals making up the vast majority of what they served. But I had decided before the end of the night that I would go through with this change (children being a separate decision I could figure out later). Being anxious about the change and our bodies, we chose to sleep apart in the separate beds.
That couple who was changing arrived the following Saturday evening, and the four of us were seated at two small tables in what was called the Room of Change. My Italian was not quite good enough for this, but Marco assured me that just as changing room means something different in English, there is an Italian word for that, and the room here was named not using that term but instead the literal translation of Room of Change.
One of Marco’s family members, a woman named Sofia who appeared to be in her 40s or early 50s, gave a short speech explaining what Marco had already told me, that eating the meal we were about to be served would cause us to spontaneously change gender overnight. She spoke in Italian first, repeating each sentence in broken English for my sake afterwards. Between my limited understanding of the Italian and her translations I understood what she was trying to say.
Next, she handed Marco a boxed pregnancy test and placed one on the table between the other diners, and explained how it was used. She further explained it was important to check every female entrant into the program for pregnancy because those pregnancies ended in a messy way. She didn’t give further details, saying it would ruin our appetites. At the other table, it was the one who appeared to be a woman who took it; apparently they had not arrived cross-dressed. She and Marco separately went off to restrooms to do what was needed for the tests, and brought back the test devices as they returned to the room.
As we waited for the tests to develop, Sofia explained a bit about the change. It wasn’t going to be instantaneous. Overnight we would see the most obvious changes, the new form of the genitals and the growth or elimination of breasts. Some of the internal changes take a bit longer. The changes in the structure of the pelvis, the widening that allows those becoming women to give birth and the reverse of that process in those becoming male, finish during the second night. The changes in body hair, becoming thicker and denser in men and the reverse in women, with the thicker male hair falling out to be replaced by finer, sparser hair, take place more slowly. Where the hair has not been shaven or removed by electrolysis it mostly finishes by the third night. Removed hair grows back over weeks or months, where you’d expect it to grow.
By the end of the explanation, the tests showed negative. Sofia left, but returned with menus as our waitress.
“Vermicelli is traditional, but you can have any kind of pasta, as the magic is in the sauce.”
The other couple didn’t give any kind of reaction to this, and surely they knew vermicelli, which was the same word in Italian, meant “little worms,” so presumably they didn’t know the magic came from a worm. Sofia took our orders and brought us small antipasto trays while we waited for the main course. The pasta meal was nice, but, apart from the change I knew it was going to bring, didn’t seem exceptional. There was optional but strongly recommended dessert, as it provides fuel for the changes overnight; I took a slice of chocolate cake, while Marco had tiramisu. There was no bill to pay, as the other couple had paid their hundred grand in advance which covered the meal and their entire stay, and Marco’s family was covering mine. When we were done, Marco and I retired to the room we were staying at in the inn, as the other couple went to their room.
When we got back to the room, I stripped off my dress, and paused for a bit. Marco and I had only seen each other naked once before, one of the times we met as our original genders in New York, and that was only because we had sex. It was the only time we’d had sex. We were both a bit ashamed of our bodies, as we wanted to be the opposite sex, so we both preferred to show the cross-dressed version of ourselves. And now I know Marco could have become fully male any time he wanted, but was waiting to share his family’s gift with the right partner.
But Marco was stripping down completely, having removed shirt, pants, and underpants, and was now only wearing the accessories that hid his body’s feminine shape, and starting to remove even those. So I went on as well, removing the pocket bra with breast forms I would never need again, as well as the gaff which was supposed to keep my penis from showing, while Marco unwound the elastic bandage holding his breasts tight against his body, and then the sports bra under it.
The last garment Marco removed was a padded thing that went around his stomach. I was aware of the garments that some women today wear, body briefers and such, which are the evolution of the girdle from the mid-20th century and the corset from even before that, designed to enhance the feminine shape and give the appearance of a narrow waist to women who don’t naturally have one. This was the opposite, padding to make his waist appear larger than it actually is. It even had fake abs on the front.
“Are you still going to need that pad to look like a man after the change?” I asked, curious just how much our bodies would change as a result of what we’d just done.
“Tomorrow, yes, but the extra material from the breasts and hips gets distributed across the waist, and after the second night my body will be straight enough for men’s clothes without it. You should develop some curves during the reverse process, though I cannot guarantee how much. Just like some women grow that way and some are straighter, the shape of your figure after this transformation can vary, but your size won’t change drastically, because your body’s mass is conserved. It just gets redistributed.”
I had to pee, and noticed that the change had in fact already started that evening. My balls had gone up inside my body and there was enough penis left for me to pee standing, but not much more than that. When I returned to the room, Marco was already in bed, with the covers pulled partially back, and he invited me to join him there. I accepted that invitation. I knew it was just to snuggle, since our organs were in transition and sex wasn’t really a thing we could do right then.
We awoke fully transformed, at least in terms of the breasts and sexual organs. We stood and looked at ourselves and each other for a bit. And we liked what we saw. I had worn C-cup breasts with the falsies, but the ones that had grown in on my chest appeared a little larger and were probably D-cup. And before we got done admiring ourselves, Marco had his first erection, and I think he was a little bigger than I had been, unless it was just an illusion due to it being on his smaller body.
The transformation had generated a lot of sweat and dead skin cells, which I could peel off in places, so we went into the shower right away, together. We agreed it was just to shower, not for sex, though we certainly explored our anatomy in there.
“I think I have to pee,” Marco told me while we were still showering.
“Me too,” I replied. “Let’s just do it here. You’ve done that before, I imagine.”
“Yes, but never with anyone else in here with me.”
“But how often did you shower with another person?”
“Point taken.”
It felt weird to pee without a penis, and dirty the way it ran down my legs, though it was washed off by the shower about as quickly as it was produced. Marco showed me how I could hold myself open and pee without getting it on myself, or mostly, anyway, and I explained to Marco how to think down the erection to overcome that natural lockout that keeps a man from peeing inside a woman, so that he could get his own need taken care of.
A fair bit of my body hair had already come loose and been washed off in the shower, or stuck to the towel as I dried off. The next order of business was to try to get dressed. Wearing women’s clothes was nothing new to me, and they were all the clothes I’d brought along with me. Of course, the pocket bra was now useless. I had a regular bra which had fit me when worn over the pocket bra, on occasions when I wanted a bit of the lacier bra to show. Just as I had thought, it was too small for the breasts that had grown on me overnight. I could just get it closed on the largest hook, but it clearly wasn’t fitting right, digging into my breasts painfully. I decided to do without it and put on panties and a dress.
But Marco, who was fully dressed by this point, saw my plight. “Oh, wait right there,” he said, and once I was decent he quickly ducked out the door. He soon came back with an XL sports bra with the tag still on it.
“We keep these in stock here for cases like this. Try it on.”
I opened the top of the dress and put on the bra. While I’d seen these before, actually wearing one was a new experience for me. Despite the tightness, it was comfortable in all the ways my other bra wasn’t. After I OKed it with Marco, he used scissors to snip the plastic doohickey holding the tag.
“It’s yours to keep.”
“Included with the package for your paying customers?”
“No, they’d pay full retail price for it. But my treat for you.”
“Thank you.”
I closed up my dress over it, and we went down to the restaurant for breakfast, still using the Room of Change for privacy from other customers, since they only served the worms for dinner. The other couple arrived while we were eating, now dressed as their new genders, and sat at the next table.
When the four of us were all done eating, a man named Antonio confirmed individually with us that none of us had any issues with our changes, then explained the plan for today to everybody. First, we would all go to the small salon within the inn, where we’d get hairstyling and makeup as appropriate to make us more fully look our new genders. Then he would take us to get our names and genders changed in official records at a city office.
There were no other customers in the salon at that hour of the morning, and three people were tending to us four, one for me, one for the other new woman, and a third handling both of the men, who mostly just got haircuts in traditional men’s styles. I had already let my hair grow out and got it done up nicely. The other woman had short hair and had limited options, but they still made her look every bit a woman when they were done.
Then the four of us climbed into the middle and back rows of an SUV and Antonio drove us to that office. We got in pretty quickly, but it took most of the morning to get the paperwork done. I had to pee at one point, and while I’d seen regular men’s and women’s restrooms out front, at this point we were back in the offices, and there was only a single stall restroom. I had used women’s restrooms before since I’d been going as a woman in public for some time, but this would have been the first time where I really had the equipment. “There’ll be a time,” I chuckled to myself. “Lots of times.”
We left with new ID cards showing our new names, pictures, and sexes. All our government records were being updated. It wouldn’t be a completely impenetrable secret; a thorough investigator would be able to see that we changed, but wouldn’t know it was any different than any other sex change people got elsewhere. In my case, the immigration record was updated to show me arriving female.
When we got back, we went straight to lunch. They explained that because our hips and waists were not fully changed yet, they were waiting until tomorrow before taking us to shop for new clothes. But we got a DVD to watch in our room; Marco and I actually got two, the English and Italian editions. Marco confirmed he’d already seen everything on the video and we only watched the English version. What an understatement! Marco had narrated most of the video! Or Maria did, anyway. It was the “everything you would have learned about your sex if you had grown up this way” lesson and was clearly something Marco’s family had filmed at the inn. It was mostly unnecessary for me as well, but there were a few bits that were helpful. It was pretty thorough, and completely explicit, too. The part about tampons showed a woman inserting and removing one. And it reminded us several times to make sure we were going into the right restroom.
After we finished watching the “new woman” part, we watched the “new man” part just for fun, which was mostly narrated by Antonio. Unsurprisingly, it was shorter, but it included subjects like peeing at a urinal, advice on dealing with unwanted erections in public, and wet dreams. It also had the repeated bit about going into the right restroom, but with the sounds of women screaming or beating on the man with their purses each time the man went into the women’s room before hurriedly leaving and going into the men’s.
Both videos had included masturbation, and when the video ended I realized that Marco and I were actually both masturbating. Marco noticed me noticing, and gave me a look that clearly said, “You wanna?” and I said yes by going for the box of condoms Marco had supplied. But moments later when I was helping unroll a condom down the length of Marco’s huge shaft, I was having second thoughts.
“Go easy on me, OK? Remember that I’ve only had this vagina a day, and literally nothing’s been inside it yet.”
Indeed, when Marco tried to enter me, I was so tight he couldn’t even get in, and after ten minutes of failed attempts, Marco had lost his erection and we gave up on the idea.
“It may be easier tomorrow,” Marco suggested. “Your pelvis will widen and your vagina may grow larger.”
“I remember Sofia saying that, or trying to in bad English, and Antonio also, this morning.”
“Yes, normally I would have given the English explanations at last night’s dinner, or Antonio would have. But I was a participant this time, and I don’t know where Antonio was then. We aren’t all working here 24/7.”
“But you know the details Sofia was describing, right? What happened to the pregnant women who changed into men?”
“You understand how the change is gradual, right? Where there is a correspondence, body parts change into corresponding parts. In me, the ovaries became the testes, the fallopian tubes became the vas deferens tubes, and so forth. The penis is more complicated, but parts of the vagina and the vulva form the penis and the scrotum, with the clitoris forming the head of the penis.”
I nodded at this explanation.
“The uterus doesn’t have a corresponding part, but it turns into structures at the base of the penis. You know how you have... er, had, a muscle that you could use to lift your erection? The uterine and vaginal muscles that force the baby out during birth change into that.”
“I know what you’re talking about, though of course I no longer have the ability.”
“In the pregnant women, the fetus also migrated to this area. The changes destroyed the ability of the placenta to feed the fetus, and it died and triggered labor pains in the middle of the first night. In both cases, the stillborn fetus was small, because the women did not yet realize they were pregnant. But the penis had already started forming. It was more stretchable than it would normally be, due to being in the midst of changing, but they had to give birth through the urethra of that penis.”
I winced.
“Realize that we’re talking about a fetus which was roughly the size of an erection. It got out, but the birth permanently disfigured the penis, and they suffered for real the pain you were feeling sympathetically.”
“OK. I had been picturing something larger. I can still imagine the pain.”
Marco guffawed. “I’m sure my ancestors would not have even allowed a woman so obviously pregnant to even attempt it. The first woman this happened to, we gave a refund. The second one had been warned the change wasn’t for pregnant women and we did not give a refund. Since we have had pregnancy tests available, none of our customers have ever turned up pregnant, but we still check because we can.”
I nodded.
We engaged in some mutual masturbation in lieu of actual sex, each of us getting to experience orgasm.
“That was pretty powerful,” I told Sofia. “Are you going to miss that?”
“Well, the male orgasm was more intense, but shorter. You may have gotten the better side of that aspect of the change, but what I got is still good.”
We cleaned up and got dressed again for dinner. This time we exchanged some stories with the other couple, who’d had similar experiences to us. Well, mostly Marco did, because they didn’t speak English, but I assured them I knew enough Italian to understand most of what they were saying.
I could see that the new woman from that couple was wearing a bra, and I asked, in probably bad Italian, about it. She replied that she and her wife-turned-husband were close to the same size and were sharing clothes. She was a band size bigger, but had come out the same cup size. She had an extender which allowed her to wear her partner’s bras. She raised the back of her blouse to show me. This was a thing I never knew existed, but made sense. It just hooks into both ends of the bra band to make it bigger. I am guessing she had used those before, during dress-up, even though they had arrived dressed as their original genders.
That night, Marco and I slept naked together again, though we didn’t try having sex again yet after our failure in the afternoon. It was weird to me, trying to get to sleep as a woman. The breasts made a real difference in getting comfortable, but I eventually got to sleep.
They were certainly right about the changes. I awoke with a womanly figure, and Marco with a straighter one. There was more hair loss, and a partial change of our voices. Marco’s voice was cracking like a teen boy’s does.
When Sofia returned to say we’d go on a shopping trip for clothes today, I was excited. The women’s clothing I owned was restricted to certain kinds of styles that I could wear on my male body with fake breasts and straight hips. Now I had a body which could wear many other styles of clothes I’d never considered. What I had I could still wear, but I was going be able to wear so much more now! Of course, I was still going to be wearing large and extra large sizes, but nobody was going to miss I was a woman, unless I wanted them to.
Most of the day we spent on a guided shopping trip with Sofia and a man named Giulio, pronounced like “Julia” with an O at the end. The clothes we bought were not part of the package, but Marco assured me he could cover it if anything was too expensive for me. Ultimately Marco paid for about half of what I got. The other couple, who could wear some of each others’ clothes, also felt they didn’t need to buy an entire wardrobe today. Nevertheless, we tried on every kind of clothes, which meant a lot more changes for me than for Marco. I think our hosts wanted to make sure were familiar with all our options, and the sizing, which was actually more unusual for me because of the European sizing than because of women’s sizes. When I commented on it, Marco explained that it was even worse than I realized: Italy has different sizes from the rest of Europe. I guess I’d get used to it. And I did get to use a women’s public restroom with my real equipment for the first time while we were there.
After dinner, Marco and I tried sex again, and this time he was able to fit his big schlong inside me. It felt amazing! The intensity of feeling it moving inside me was beyond belief. Marco came pretty quickly in the condom, but stayed inside me, got hard again, and we made love until he came a second time.
After cleaning up, we got ready for bed. I was able to wear a nightgown I’d purchased today. Marco was wearing his underwear, which were men’s briefs, but blue satin ones, not Fruit of the Loom. We slept together again, and I got to sleep easier this time.
The third morning after the change was checkout day. The other couple went back to their home, and Marco and I just went down the street to his apartment. It was small, but at the moment I didn’t have much. I had a bunch of stuff that would arrive in a week or so, though, and I worried about the space.
“I’ve got a house lined up for us, but the current occupants don’t move out for three weeks. We’ll just have to stay here until then.”
“OK. I guess I won’t worry about unpacking too much, then. Just hanging up my clothes to keep them neat.”
“Sure. I have lots of old female clothes to get rid of, which should give you plenty of space. You can have your pick of them, but most are probably too small for you,” Marco commented.
We spent that day piling loads of Maria’s old clothes that neither of us would ever be able to wear into Marco’s car, and some into the trash. We took the better looking items to a consignment shop, and the rest were donated to charity. At the end of the day I had plenty of room to hang my clothes.
The next day Marco showed me around the area, so I learned about the local stores and such. And the next day was back to work. Well, back for Marco; it was my first day working at the inn. While we weren’t married yet and I wasn’t a legal member of the family, we were engaged and had changed for each other and they all treated me as a new member of the family. Marco had assured me I could work there, and just like starting any job there was paperwork to fill out, only in Italian this time, but they helped me through what I couldn’t understand.
I wasn’t going to be a maid. The maids were not family members, but they were locals, paid 15% on top of the going rate to be quiet about anything unusual they saw in any sex-changers’ rooms. But there was plenty of maintenance, cooking, and more, in addition to serving customers. Most of the family members working there were multi-purpose and got trained on different jobs. As a native English speaker, I was going to be a backup for Marco and Antonio in dealing with any English-speaking customers, whether ordinary diners or sex-changers, so that Sofia didn’t have to with her broken English. There was one other thing, Marco explained.
“The fees sex-changers pay are split among all of us family members who work here. The inn makes enough money already, and we only charge those rates to make sure we don’t run out of worms. After deducting the costs of services we provide along with the change, the rest is split among us. With you, there will be 18, and when a Sicilian couple comes in to change, like the ones who changed along with us, we’ll each get about 4,000 euro, before taxes. If we get a foursome or outsiders, it’s even more. This can triple your base pay, or more. However, we will have to get married officially before that can happen. It has to do with the way the business is organized; it’s owned by the family, and its charter only allows legal family members to share in those profits.”
“How could any of your family members pass up that offer?”
“Some of them have bigger dreams beyond running an inn. Some of them don’t want to stay in Sicily. And a few are really put off by the idea of sex changes; the Roman Catholic church is strong here.”
“Well I’m more than committed now. I can do it as soon as you can set it up.”
Then Marco surprised me with this question, “Do you want to have a wedding back with your friends and family back in the United States?”
I thought about it, and replied, “My family never accepted my trans nature. I made friends with neighbors and those in the trans community there, but I wasn’t especially close to them. In fact, many of the neighbors never realized Joanna and Jacob were the same person. I’d only really want to invite Tricia and Dana, the two neighbors, both natural-born women, who helped me learn to look like a woman, and it doesn’t make sense going back there just for them.”
“Then we’ll invite them here, and I can pay to fly them over and put them up here at the inn if they accept.”
“That’s wonderful!” I replied, now understanding the source of Marco’s generosity.
So we planned a wedding only two weeks in advance, at a time when we had plenty of vacant rooms in the inn, which we all held for wedding guests pending determination of who was coming. The wedding and reception would all be right there in the inn and restaurant. It turned out we only needed a few of those rooms; most of Marco’s guests were locals from Sicily. The other travelers were his other family members who changed and moved away, the three others still alive who had taken advantage of the family’s standing offer to change sex, and their spouses. And Tricia and Dana both came with their husbands.
I worried about getting a wedding dress on such short notice, but a family member in town was a tailor and was happy to do a rush job. No doubt, Marco paid him well; he didn’t let me see the price. Marco’s family also worked out among those who worked at the inn who would be wedding guests: Marco’s parents and siblings would fill out the wedding party, and the rest of those who normally worked at the inn would set up, cook, and clean up.
In the middle of all that planning, my stuff arrived from the United States, and we stashed it wherever we could find space in Marco’s apartment.
The wedding was a great success. The ceremony was performed by a trans-woman within the family who was a reverend in one of the more accepting churches, not a Roman Catholic.
Marco’s parents had a big gift for us, too: A honeymoon in Rome and Venice and a week off work to enjoy it. The one catch: It was the second week after the wedding. We had a foursome coming in for sex changes the week after the wedding, and they wanted everybody here for that.
We stayed in the wedding suite in the inn that night and had the traditional wedding night sex. That was still amazing every time we did it. After that, and one day off, it was back to work, and I saw my first group of sex-changers at the inn. None of them were English-speakers, so I didn’t get to talk to them, but Marco’s uncle showed me how the special sauce is made.
And once that was done, we had one day off to move from Marco’s apartment into the house which had finally become available. Fortunately, it was very close and we could make as many trips as needed to move stuff with Marco’s car, and some furniture was even pushed on a dolly we borrowed from the inn the block and a half between the apartment and the house. We barely had time to enjoy it, though, before we were off on our honeymoon to Rome and Venice.
It was great seeing the sights. Of course, my first period came on the second day in Rome, but I had packed tampons. I knew it was coming; it was only a question of when. Inserting one felt a little weird, but it was way easier than fitting Marco’s dick in there! And it was hardly noticeable once it was in.
I enjoyed both Rome and Venice, but I think I really enjoyed being really female and just being free to be with Marco all day more than either city. Once it was over, we got to really start living in the new house. There was tons of stuff that needed unpacking, including almost everything I’d had shipped from the United States. I was starting to wonder why I even needed that stuff, since I lived a month without it, but when I looked at what it was, I remembered why. There were still parts of my old life I wasn’t ready to completely throw away. Some of them, anyway. I had to laugh at some of the things that were supposed to help me make myself look female. A bunch of that got tossed, or donated to a charity supporting the transgender community in Sicily which Marco helped me find.
It took me a month of days off to get all my stuff unpacked, organized, and discarded when appropriate. And after that it seemed like every day off I was either fixing or improving something about the house. Marco was glad to have a wife who was handy with tools. I was glad to have found a husband who had shared with me the unbelievable gift of being able to be truly female inside and out. And we both enjoyed the sex.
A couple months after the honeymoon, I was trying to track down a water leak that was dribbling water out into the restaurant’s dining room, the first maintenance task I’d had to do that involved anything behind a wall. I asked for building plans, but they didn’t have any. That would never have happened in New York; every building was required to have current, updated plans available all the time, as problems might affect adjacent buildings. Here, the building stood alone, and had been built up by a series of expansions over centuries which nobody had kept track of. All they could give me was a building map that showed the layout of rooms and hallways, the kind of thing we might have given to a guest to help him find a specific room.
When I looked at the area of the leak, I noticed the map didn’t even match the building. It showed the pantry only half as deep as what it actually was, and that wasn’t even right. The dining room occupied the space on the map that actually belonged to the pantry, and it was also bigger in reality than its space on the map.
“What the Hell!” I exclaimed.
“What is it?” Antonio asked.
“Look at this map. The pantry comes further down this way than it shows on the map, and the dining room goes up further this way than is on the map. The two rooms occupy the same space!”
It wasn’t obvious because of the kitchen, some closets, and other things that you had to go around to get between the pantry and dining room, but when I made the trip, paying attention to the relative locations of things, it was obvious. The pantry and part of the dining room really were in the same space! I grabbed my measuring tape and some graph paper, and taped 4 sheets of graph paper together, carefully aligning the lines, and taped them down to an unoccupied dining table to draw a map. Using a scale of 5 squares to a meter, Antonio and I drew a scale map of the entire lobby and restaurant area of everything but the pantry. All the dimensions lined up exactly, except for the pantry itself. The pantry should be no more than 70 centimeters deep.
“I want to take down this entire wall. We’re going to have to get in there anyway to locate the leak, and we’ll get to see more of what’s in the space the pantry overlaps with.”
Antonio agreed, and we moved two dining tables and their chairs out of the way to provide room for the work. We roped off the area, and I dug into the wall, which was made of plaster, and started pulling it down. I’d seen these walls occasionally in one of my buildings in New York. There were studs (vertical beams) just like in more modern sheetrock walls, and little strips of rough wood were tacked across the studs, with gaps between them. The plaster was put up against these strips so that some of it flowed into the gaps to help secure it to the wall. I pulled out a number of the strips while bringing the wall down, and more of them to afterward because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing beyond it.
The dining room wall was a one-sided wall, meaning there was no plaster on the other side of the studs. This enclosed a space where a number of pipes ran to and from the second floor. Beyond the pipes, there was another one-sided wall facing the other way. I’d seen that done to enclose pipe spaces before, too. The small map indicated this other wall would be the back wall of the pantry, but my just-measured map showed this back wall was actually where the front wall of the pantry should be. But instead of the door, there was a large rectangular hole which opened up into ... the outside? It was pretty weird, though. It definitely wasn’t just outside this building. But there was sky, and trees that resembled trees we knew.
Whatever that was needed investigation, but it wasn’t going to be a simple thing. Since we were going to have guests in the restaurant, I didn’t want them seeing that, and Antonio and I tacked up some tarps covering the far wall so only the first wall and the pipes were visible, and I worked on locating the leak. I found it, sealed the faulty pipe joint where water was leaking, and had that part cleaned up by the end of the day.
The next morning there was no more water where it had leaked before, so I figured that the leak was really fixed. Since I knew I was going to need to get back in here to investigate the anomaly, I cut one stud out and installed a door in the near wall at the point where it would be easiest to pass through the row of pipes inside and reach the far wall, and locked it. I removed the rest of the plaster and its supporting slats on this entire wall, and installed sheetrock to close it back up. And once it was closed, I ripped down the tarp inside the pipe space which was no longer needed to hide the portal. The next day I put two coats of paint on the wall, doing other maintenance elsewhere in the building in the time between.
I wanted to consult with the rest of the family before I went any further. Marco and Antonio, at least, didn’t know about whatever this was, and it seemed to pretty clearly contradict at least one element of the origin story. It also seemed to defy reality as we knew it, but then, so did eating the worms, at least, for the reality of most people on Earth. There wasn’t any regularly scheduled meeting of all the family members who worked here, but we talked to the main boss, Mama Martina, and she called such a meeting the next Sunday morning. She informed me, after she’d spoken with everybody individually, that nobody had heard about it. She gave me and Antonio Saturday off normal work to prepare, and Giulio, who was one of the more techie members of the family, also got the day off to help me prepare.
There was a conference room, which was the room we’d transformed into a wedding chapel for my wedding, but this time we used it for an actual meeting, including using the projector. I showed the map the family actually used, and the scale map I had drawn, then overlaying the two (thanks, Giulio!) to make my point. Antonio translated my words into Italian so that everybody could understand.
“The pantry isn’t actually inside the inn. There’s no room for it. The entrance is a portal to somewhere else, and we think that by going through the wall, we can access the other side of the portal, and go somewhere outdoors, presumably just outside of the room that is our pantry.”
There was a lot of commotion as people were shocked at this statement, but I quieted them down, saying, “Let me show you,” a sentence I could manage in Italian. And I led them a short distance to my new door. A number of them were clearly curious about it, since they’d seen the door which they knew wasn’t there last week. I opened it and showed them the portal to somewhere outside, right in the middle of our building. One of them spotted one of the magic worms crawling on a tree, and they yelled excitedly.
After they’d seen enough, I closed and locked the door again and we all went back into the conference room and there was a round of excited discussion, but after a few minutes Mama Martina called the group to order and Antonio went on, summarizing the key points of discussion.
“We know this means that at least part of the history we have passed down within the family for generations is false. We also know part of it is true, since the worms work, as Marco and Joanna here can attest to recently, as can Mama Martina herself and many other people who are not here today. But we can’t change those facts. We can only try to learn the truth.”
This generated a murmur of general acceptance, some of it sounding a bit grudging.
“Who thinks we should explore what’s on the other side of that portal?”
Everyone was universally in favor.
“So the only question is how we go about it. Seeing the worm there just now was pretty exciting, because it supports our theory that it leads to the same area as what’s inside our pantry. Does it lead to some other part of the world where the worms may be known to the locals and they eat them regularly to change sex whenever they want? An uninhabited place where the worms grow wild? How did it come to be connected by a portal to our building? And are there other portals like this on Earth?”
Of course we didn’t know that yet, but everybody wanted to find out. Once the chatter died down, Antonio continued.
“Are we, ourselves, qualified to go explore wherever that is? Is it safe? Are there people we could hire who would be better suited? Are we, as the people with first-hand knowledge of the worms, actually the most qualified? Do we even have enough information to make a qualified decision? Should we actually do it ourselves because bringing in outsiders and telling them the full secret, not just the pasta sauce of change but where it comes from, might be dangerous and putting ourselves at risk from others either wanting to cut in on our business or take it by force?”
And now there was no agreement at all, as clearly everybody in the room had been thinking one or more of these ideas, but almost as many different combinations of them as there were people. Mama Martina called order again, and then people were called on in turn to speak their viewpoints for or against family members or outsiders exploring the place. It took a while to get any sort of agreement, but after more than an hour we decided on this plan:
We were well past our allotted time for the meeting, so in order to not leave any customers looking for brunch unserved for any longer, we adjourned the meeting after appointing a committee to work on identifying who should go and acquiring all the gear, as well as thinking of any other gear we might want to send with them. The committee was going to consist of me and Antonio, as the discoverers, and Mama Martina, which clearly meant she would have the final authority in deciding any issues, but also meant she wanted our input.
Most of the family members went out to serve customers, while Antonio and I were asked to work on acquiring the gear. Mama Martina let us decide on this, up to a price limit; if there was something we thought we needed above that we could ask for her approval. So that was our Sunday, looking online for a lot of the gear and spending a few thousand euros, having most of it shipped to us. We bought the weapons locally.
Monday morning, Mama Martina called us in to her office and showed us a file on a family member I didn’t know. Anna Smith was one of those who’d moved away from Sicily and married outside the family, but she was born here and knew the family secret. She was an experienced biologist and, having been inspired by the worms which were a family secret, she discovered and documented more than 30 previously unknown species in various parts of the world.
“Well I can see why you chose her. I don’t know all your family members, but it’s hard to imagine someone more appropriate,” I said.
“I agree. The best person for the job,” Antonio added.
“Have you asked her yet?” I asked.
“No,” Mama Martina replied. “It’s still early in Britain where she lives, and I wanted to let you know first, but I’ll send her an email right now.”
We watched as she wrote out, “Anna, we have a unique and unexpected opportunity for you at home I know you’ll appreciate. Call my secure phone.”
“Stay close,” she told us. “I expect she’ll call back before the end of the morning and I’ll call you all in.”
So we took care of some other little chores, and about two hours later Mama called us in. Anna was already there on Mama’s computer, in the end-to-end encrypted video call service which the family used.
Anna spoke when she saw us gathered together on the call. “What’s this all about, Mama? Is it something with the worms?”
“Well, yes it is. Anna, you met Antonio, though he was only a teenager when you did. This is Joanna, newly married into the family. Maria, who is now called Marco, chose her as her partner to change with. Before she came here, Joanna had experience doing building maintenance, and that’s been her primary role here, and she was inspecting a small water leak when she discovered something interesting about our building. Joanna, if you’d like to explain?”
“Certainly. Anna, the pantry where the worms live isn’t actually inside the building. There’s simply no space for it. I don’t know how nobody ever noticed.”
Mama Martina was pulling up the slideshow from yesterday’s presentation as I spoke, and started a screen-share once she had it up, showing the crude map the family had been using and then the scale map I had drawn, and where the pantry would actually be if it was really here.
“There was water leaking out of this wall,” I said as Mama indicated which one on the map. “I asked for building plans, because that’s the way I would have worked in New York before tearing into any wall, to know what was inside. But I learned it’s not like that here, and nobody had more than the first crude map shown on the slides. When I was trying to match that to reality, I noticed the inaccuracies. In trying to resolve them, I realized there simply wasn’t space for the pantry.”
I could still see Anna nodding in a small inset image.
“I was going to have to get into the wall to fix the leak anyway, so Antonio and I just took down more wall than would probably have been needed, the entire span running behind this narrow space supposedly overlapping the pantry. And the pantry wasn’t there at all. The entire space I labeled as the pantry on the map I drew is a pipe space between two walls. And on the back side of the door to the pantry, there was an opening to the outside. But it didn’t look like anything outside our building; it goes somewhere else. And we saw one of the worms over there.”
Mama Martina took over at this point. “Anna, I’d like you to come explore whatever this place is. Joanna and Antonio will help haul supplies, defend you from dangers, or whatever is needed. We’ve got no idea, but because it involves the worms which have always been our family secret, we want to keep it within the family.”
“Understood, Mama, and I would love a chance to explore whatever place this is.”
Anna was going to need a week to get free of other commitments and come here, so we let her make those plans. Meanwhile, we got her size and added another suit for her to what we ordered, and waited for all the items to be delivered.