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’re going to send family members through first, because introducing it to outsiders represents an incalculable risk.
• We’re going to make sure our family members are well prepared. They are going to have hazard suits with a breathing apparatus, weapons, air quality sensors and other monitoring equipment, GPS sensors, several types of cameras, and possibly other equipment.
• We’re going to do it quickly, because it seems like part of the inside of our building may be exposed to whoever or whatever lives over there. If necessary, we can cover the hole and protect the building from intrusion in this way. As far as we are aware we’ve never had a problem with this, with it open this way for perhaps centuries, but until we know what’s over there we cannot understand the danger.
• If we think it’s too dangerous after our initial foray, we can bring in other qualified people to explore it, or cease exploration.

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.

Soon enough, Anna arrived. We put her up in a room at the inn, and made our preparations. We let her get some sleep and prepared to start our study in the morning.

The first day, we didn’t actually go in ourselves. We just poked equipment through the portal on poles of various sorts, and took readings from it. We didn’t get a GPS signal or cellular phone signal except for what came through the portal from here. By closing the door I’d installed, and using a longer pole, we concluded there was no trace of those signals. Since you can get a GPS signal outdoors pretty much anywhere in the world, we assumed this meant this was nowhere on Earth, at least not today. Because it’s a completely unknown phenomenon, we did consider the possibility that it’s in the same place in a different time.

Next, we took some samples of the air, radiation readings, and a spectrum of the sunlight. All of these were in agreement with present-day Earth, except the air had less carbon dioxide and essentially none of what we consider man-made pollutants. So we again considered the possibility that it’s at another time, offset by thousands of years.

That night, we put out some cameras to take pictures of the sky and locate the stars. First, we did a visual comparison with a picture we took in our world at about the same time. The other side of the portal was clearer; more stars were visible because there was not the air pollution or light pollution of our Earth to disrupt it. But other than that it looked the same; to the extent we could see them (not blocked by trees and such) the stars visible in our world were all visible over there at the same relative brightnesses. Not only that, we were looking at the same part of the sky, meaning it was in the same part of the world. Mama Martina knew that what ancients called the fixed stars are not really fixed, and over time scales of hundreds or thousands of years, changes in the layout of stars in the sky can be observed. We did a little research: If the other side of the portal was at a different time, what stars would we expect to move significantly? We located those stars in the photos; they hadn’t moved.

It didn’t seem that it could be at a time when there wasn’t human habitation. The Romans were here 2000 years ago, and there were some stars visible with the naked eye which should move far enough in 2000 years that we would notice. It could be in the future, if Earth goes through a cataclysm between now and then that wipes everything out, but would the air pollution clean itself up? We decided what made the most sense (to the extent that any of this made sense) was that it was a parallel Earth, one where humans had not developed. Why there was a portal to such a place, when humanity had never encountered one elsewhere, was unclear. Maybe, as someone had done here, there was incentive to hide them all?

The second day, we went out, still in the hazard suits because we don’t know what other hazards we might encounter. And there wasn’t much. In fact, we didn’t see any animal life but the worms. There were trees and bushes and grass and other plants that matched Anna’s data of what was historically naturally occurring in Sicily; there were few of these today because of thousands of years of human habitation which destroyed many plant species and imported others. It was hard to compare the terrain, because thousands of years of human settlement had flattened many areas for habitation. The other side was hillier because it had not undergone such treatment. But the far-off mountains, including the very obvious Mount Etna, matched our world and supported the theory that we were on an alternate or parallel Earth. Except to get some more complete night sky pictures, we restricted our explorations to the daytime, as we needed to bring with us light sources in order to see anything at night, and this made serious exploration difficult.

The third day we traveled a bit further, and upon coming around an outcropping of rock, Anna let out an ear-piercing shriek. Antonio and I hurried to see what happened. Nothing had happened to Anna; it was what she saw.

Sitting on a rock with his back up against the taller outcropping of rock was a man. Maybe a woman; it was hard to tell. But he was covered with the worms, and some of them seemed to be going in and out of open sores on his body. And then to all of our surprise, since we had thought he was dead, the man moved an arm, and we all jumped back.

“We come in peace,” I said in English, almost immediately realizing the futility of it, but Antonio repeated it in Italian.

The man responded, at first we thought in strangely accented Italian. My group spoke mainstream Italian, the language from Rome most closely related to classical Latin, and not the Sicilian dialect, these days spoken only in a few areas, which had many words borrowed from other languages. This was not that dialect; it was closer to our language than that dialect, and different in other ways. After a bit we realized the man was actually speaking Latin, and that’s why we understood much of it. Italian is descended from Latin, as are Spanish, French, and several other languages, but Italian is least changed from Latin.

After asking him in Italian to repeat it, we put our language knowledge together to determine he had said roughly, “I agree; let us be peaceful. How have you come here?”

After we had a brief deliberation, since we had tested the air to be clean, we decided to one at a time remove the hoods of our suits to better converse with the man. Then Antonio said, “We discovered a portal hidden inside a wall of our building. Are there no other people here?”

“I am the only one left. I have been here a very long time; this is only a tiny fraction of it.”

He pointed to another section of the outcropping where there were rows and rows of ancient-looking tally marks, which I estimated as 300 per row, probably counting off a year of days per row. There were at least 40 rows of them going all the way down to the ground.

After making sure we were getting a recording of it, Anna said, “We have plenty of time. Tell us your story.”

“My name is Cassius. I was part of a group of Romans sent here to build more settlements. There were hundreds of us, but about 20 were in the area of your world you came from, clearing trees and brush to allow the building of houses. At one point we came upon a tree which was gnarled around some kind of a frame. As we cut the tree away, we realized the frame wasn’t actually a frame. It was just a hole in the air, and it connected the land to this other place. We were surprised to discover it was a different place, and after stepping through the hole, we could not see any of our other men except by looking through the hole.”

He paused for a moment as one of the worms crawled up to his mouth and went in, and he swallowed it.

“Why did you eat the worm?” Anna asked.

“I have eaten so many of the worms that I am more worm than man. I help them breed, and they feed me their old. But that comes later.”

“Certainly. Go on with your story.”

“After we reported the hole to the leader of our group, deciding this represented more land to clear, he sent half of us through to clear this side. It has all grown back, but before we stopped clearing it we had the area between this rock and the hole clear, and more than that on the other side. Just as the others did on the other side, we ate the food that was available. It was common to cook the fruits and berries of the trees with any small animals we could catch, but here there were only the worms, so we put several of them in the pot. The taste was fine, and we did not notice anything until morning, when we all awoke transformed into women.”

He paused as a group of young white worms emerged from a sore on his arm.

Anna told him, “We are aware of the sex-changing properties of the worms.”

Cassius placed his arm so that the worms could easily climb off his body, and when they finished, he continued.

“We were embarrassed, as this was not women’s work, but we put on our gear, though it did not fit our bodies well over our breasts, and continued our work. We all ate the worms again that day and woke up the third day here as men again. That day we experimented, by having half the men eat stew of only fruits and berries, and half only of worms, and when the men who ate worms changed, we reported it to our leader. He ordered us to stop work on the this side of the hole and all go back to the side from which we came, except the men who were women would eat the worms once more to change back into men. And for several days we stayed on the other side of the hole and cleared land there.”

He paused as another worm entered his mouth and he swallowed it.

“At this point, there was nothing marking the hole, but we remembered where it was. But one man forgot, one who hadn’t gone through the hole before, and he ran into the edge of the hole. It was invisible on edge and was so sharp it sliced him in two as if he’d been cut by the sharpest blade. Seeing that this hole was now dangerous in at least two ways, our leader ordered the hole sealed. We just enclosed it in a solid wooden frame at first. Later, when we were building houses, we built one around the hole. And at this point our leader asked if there were any of us who would like to colonize the other side of the hole on behalf of Rome, but telling us that he was going to close it off and we’d have to live out our lives until they came back for us. I and two of the others did, one of whom wasn’t part of the original group who changed.”

“Because you and they wanted to become women?” I asked.

“Maybe. It has been too long for me to say with certainty why we decided to do that, but at least we didn’t feel the idea of being women objectionable.”

After a pause, Cassius continued, “We built the room you see there, facing the portal from the other side, and a room of similar size on the other side, facing this side. After making sure everybody was on the side they wanted to be on and we had suitable tools, we closed it off from both sides, so the people on each side could reach only one room on the other side, and those rooms were located in the same space so that it looked natural. The edge of the hole itself was heavily encased in wood to protect against the sharp edge. The house was built of wood, surrounded by tar-sealed stone, so it should last a long time, and you can see that what we built still stands, though there are holes in the structure now. They never did come back for us, though. Many years later, on the other side, they collapsed our room down to just the tiny space accessible there now. But by that time only I was left here and I wasn’t using it. Maybe they came back that day, didn’t find me, and made the changes, but they didn’t leave other people here. But I think they forgot about us, and the change was made by somebody else.”

“What happened to the others who were here with you?” Anna asked.

“Well, that’s a long story. After we sealed up the place, we had fun for a while changing each night, and then staying as women for a while. We pretty soon stopped wearing clothes, and lived nude all the time. After realizing the worms worked if eaten raw, we decided to let one of us be male each night and have sex with the others, drawing lots to determine the initial order. This meant we cooked our meal without worms, so that one person wouldn’t change, and the other two ate raw worms. We did that for maybe a year before we thought seriously about colonizing the land, meaning having children.”

Cassius made a big belly-laugh and the rest of us laughed with him.

“None of us had ever thought seriously about becoming pregnant, since we grew up male, and in a year of having sex as a woman two out of three nights we had never gotten pregnant. But since we experienced menses during the periods we stayed longer as women, we thought maybe we needed to stay as women longer before a pregnancy would take. After drawing lots again, Lucius was chosen to stay male and the others of us female until both of us were pregnant. The plan was for Lucius to then become female, one of us pregnant women to become male to impregnate him, and female again later to give birth. I was one of the pregnant females, but we drew lots again and Marcus was the one chosen to become male.”

Now Cassius stared at us with a very grave look on his face. We knew what happened in our world at this point, so we could predict what he was about to say.

“Marcus did become male, but gave birth to the child during the night after transforming, the birth taking place through his penis. It left a huge wound where the penis should be, which caused Marcus to bleed to death. The child wasn’t developed enough to survive, and we buried both of them.”

All of us were staring at each other with mournful looks. The people on Earth who had done this had not been far enough along for their pregnancies to show. For someone more advanced to do it, especially with the very limited medical abilities of the time and even more limited supplies, we weren’t surprised to hear the person transforming died.

Cassius led us to a place nearby where a large flat stone and a somewhat smaller one were embedded in the ground standing on end, with no sign that the ground had been dug up, naturally, since it was 2000 years ago. We hung our heads in silence for a moment, then followed him back to where we found him.

“We understood then that allowing a pregnant woman to become male, even for a day, was not a good idea, and I stayed female until the birth. Lucius went male the next day and stayed male forever after. I stayed female after the birth to suckle my son, who I named Gaius, but I did not have sex. As far as I was concerned it was now Lucius’s turn to bear the next child. But he wouldn’t go female, so there were no more children. I changed female periodically after that and we had sex, but I changed back the next day to avoid becoming pregnant. Gaius was too scared of the idea of giving birth after we’d told the story, so he never ate one of the worms his whole life. And after Lucius was dead, I let Gaius have sex with me, on occasion, but always changing to male the next day so that I never let myself become pregnant.”

Cassius paused a bit, collecting his thoughts to figure out how to tell the next part of the story. After a few minutes he continued.

“Gaius and Lucius lived out normal lifetimes and died, but I lived on, still seemingly youthful after any normal person would have died.”

When Cassius didn’t lead us to their graves, Anna asked where they were buried.

Cassius responded, “I didn’t bury them. I left them to rot, in punishment for not doing their part to let our settlement of this place develop. We could have been the progenitors of a new civilization, but they didn’t want to take their turns. I laid them out beside the other graves, but they are long gone, even the bones.”

“I see,” was Anna’s response.

“I changed regularly, at least once a week and for some long spans daily, and decided that must have something to do with staying young, so I continued doing it. It was after Gaius died and I still felt young that I started tallying the days. It was 45 years before I ran out of room to mark them, and at that point I decided it was clearly abnormal, an additional side-effect from eating the worms, and I stopped tracking them. And I have lived here alone ever since then.”

“Wasn’t the loneliness awful? What drove you to keep going?” Anna asked.

“The repeated changes had other effects on my body. I started to understand the worms in a way I can’t clearly explain. I felt like I understood what the worms near me wanted, and while at first the worms were somewhat elusive, later it seemed like there were always worms available near me. After Gaius was dead, I missed sex, and I sometimes used one of the worms to pleasure myself. One day one of these worms slipped up inside me. I felt it squirm around for a bit and I was in ecstasy. The best sex of my life, and I’d had sex with the men thousands of times while they were alive. After about as long as I could stand it, the worm came out of me, and the worms avoided me the rest of the day. I thought I’d upset them, using them in that way, but the next day, I felt a wriggling inside me, and I discovered the worm I’d used that day was pregnant. The squirming was how it laid its eggs inside me, and those eggs hatched the next day. One or two at a time, the small white worms made their way out of me, giving me orgasms the whole while. Shortly after one made it out, another one started its journey, and it took from midday until dusk for more than 40 of them to escape my birth canal. I was so benumbed by the repeated orgasms I couldn’t move and sat there powerless as another pregnant worm crawled into me and laid its eggs for a repeat performance the next day.”

Cassius slumped back against the rock in imitation of the way he did in his story.

“So I started doing my eating and other activities in the morning, and spent the afternoon birthing worms in complete ecstasy, sleeping wherever I had ended up when the worms started coming out. This continued for a few days, and then one day no other worm pushed its way into my vagina, but one came to my mouth instead. I swallowed it hoping it wasn’t a death sentence, but no other worm touched me and I woke up male and not pregnant with worms the next day. They only let me have one male day, though, and after turning me female again, a pregnant worm came to me to deposit her eggs, and the cycle continued. I regularly had 5 or 6 days of birthing worms in a row, these periods separated by one male day and one female day in which a worm just laid eggs in me.”

We were all rolling in laughter, but Anna managed to ask, “How long did this go on for?”

“Many years,” Cassius answered, standing up and walking over to his panel of tally marks. He pointed to a spot in the second row. “I think it started around here. It was still going in that form after I stopped counting the days. Well, mostly in that form. By about here,” he pointed about a quarter of the way down, “My body was no longer so overcome by the sexual pleasure that I was unable to do anything after birthing a brood of the worms. This meant that if I wanted a day off, I could cover myself with a hand and stop worms from entering me. But I can’t say that I did that often. Frankly, I enjoyed the feeling, and I was rather addicted to it.”

Cassius sighed. “After about 100 years of doing this, now well past any human lifespan, my regular cycles of change no longer ran to completion. I stopped developing much in the way of breasts when female, and I grew only the tiniest stub of a penis when male. The female orgasms were still as strong as ever, though. And when I wondered why, I realized it was the worms. The worms were as addicted to having me as a breeding spot as I was to the orgasms their breeding inside me led to. And besides changing my sex, they had the ability to subtly affect my body in ways that were beneficial to them. They wanted to keep me around, so each worm eaten made me a little younger. They wanted me to enjoy giving birth to their babies, so they made sure the female orgasm function stayed in top form.”

“Does this still happen?” Anna asked. “If we wait until the afternoon, will we observe what you described?”

“Sadly, no. The worms couldn’t keep parts of my body functioning correctly over time. There is still a hole there where my vagina should be, and it’s one of the places the worms lay their eggs, but I no longer feel that pleasure. In later days, when I suffered injuries, the worms came to stop the bleeding, but they ate away a little of me and made new places to lay eggs. Even that doesn’t happen any more. I no longer have blood; it’s all been replaced by worm guts. The same greenish-yellow stuff that comes out of a cut worm comes from my body when it’s cut. I suspect lots of my insides have also been replaced by the worms, but I have neither the knowledge nor the tools to figure out what.”

“Interesting. I can bring some tools here and study you and help you answer those questions you have about yourself. It may take a few days for me to get the tools.”

“I would appreciate the knowledge.”

“Do you want to go back to our world? Or do you want other company here?”

“I cannot leave, unless we take many of the worms with us. They are a part of me and I am a part of them now, and we must stay together. As far as bringing others here, I am also not excited by the idea due to my interactions with the others who came with me going sour. If you could promise me they would be well behaved, that would be great. But I probably cannot serve as either a mother or a father now; they would have to make their own children.”

“We have many people from our world these days who eat the worms to change sex, including ones who become women and willingly have children afterward. They only change once, for life. We have been providing this service based on the worms that have come through the holes in the building, where we can access them in our world, which are many fewer than you have here, and so the changes are very limited in number. However, our world has changed greatly from the one you knew, and it would be a great shock to our people to come here with no other people, no inventions, and essentially no buildings. So I will have to find the special few who are both interested in changing sex and want to live a back-to-nature sort of life. I won’t send others through to live here who want to change everything. I can’t promise I’ll even find anyone suitable.”

“Thank you,” Cassius said.

Since he was content to remain there, we headed back through the portal and started work on a report for Mama Martina, to be shared with her permission with the rest of the family who still lived here, and probably nobody else. And we worked on determining what sort of scanning devices we could get. Upon reading our preliminary report, Mama Martina recommended we add to our team Carlo Maggliotti, a physician who grew up as a member of the family with knowledge of the worms, and let him determine what sort of devices we could scan Cassius with.

Carlo suggested ultrasound would be easiest, as the machines are portable and noninvasive. “But first, try it on a single worm to ensure the ultrasound waves are not harmful to the unknown physiology of the worms.”

We did this, using a few of the worms we brought in from the pantry. Sadly, we discovered that the worms died from the scans. However, one worm we brought in from the pantry died before we even scanned it. We determined that the worms only live for up to about 15 minutes on our side of the portal. We weren’t sure what it was about our world that was fatal to them. We had never noticed before because we always sliced them up quickly and dropped them in simmering pasta sauce. We had never tried to keep them as pets or anything. But it explained why they were limited to the pantry and nowhere else.

Bringing the ultrasound machine into the pantry, we got scans which did not harm the worms. The insides of the worms were surprisingly detailed. Anna pointed out they have much more internal structure than anything we call worms from our world. Some of those structures were identifiable as particular organs, some not. We determined that the worms have separate male and female individuals, unlike many species of worms which are hermaphroditic, having male and female organs at the same time. From this limited observation, we could not tell whether they change sex over time, which is also the case for some species of worms, and we thought likely for these, given their effect on consumption by humans.

Carlo also recommended X-rays, again checking the worms first, which provided less detail on the worms, since little of their body was opaque to X-rays, but was still useful as it showed things the ultrasound did not. There were other types of scanning devices, but they tended to be larger and impractical to take through the portal.

We went through and met Cassius with the machines. He was afraid of them at first, but he understood we only brought them to learn more about him, and didn’t object to their presence after their use was explained. And we quickly found that there was little left inside Cassius which resembles normal human organs. There were, however, hundreds if not thousands of the worms inside him replacing the heart, liver, stomach, intestines, and other organs. His brain was still normal, and his limbs were normal except where cavities had been carved out where the worms laid eggs.

With these scans done, we explained to him that the worms died after a short period on the other side of the portal, so he should never enter our world. We returned home, leaving him there. We prepared a final report to Mama Martina, who authorized sharing it with every family member now working at the inn, though they were not required to read it, and also to any family member who has ever changed sex via the worms, wherever they are. Since there was no real threat to us from the other side of the portal, we didn’t put in place higher security, and treated my locked door as sufficient.

The whole thing had been a great learning experience. We all saw a thing nobody could have ever expected existed, but there was more than that. The family understood why they had never seen the worms being born, despite seeing both young and adult worms, and also why we never saw them outside the pantry. It had been part of the worms’ care guidelines passed down over generations to just let them roam free in the pantry, and now we saw why. Undoubtedly one of our ancestors took the worms out of the pantry and saw them die quickly, and simply told the others not to do that.

One of Cassius’ comments was interesting. At some point someone shrank the room, clearly referring to what was now the pipe space, down from a room the size of the pantry to what it is now. I asked Mama Martina about that, but she didn’t know, and just as they didn’t have proper building plans, they didn’t have records indicating when that work was done.

She couldn’t even say whether it was done before, at the same time as, or after those pipes were installed. She did know, from some of the records the family had managed to keep, that because they were running a restaurant, they had indoor plumbing here drawing in well water before there was indoor plumbing in Sicily in general and a public water supply. So even that was a long time ago.

As far as finding companions for Cassius, we were quite hesitant. We had never even told non-family about the worms, much less that we had access to a whole vacant alternate Earth. An alternate universe, perhaps. But it turned out that three of the remote, transformed family members had trans children who were bullied for their beliefs, and who volunteered to be the beginning of a new settlement. One of them was a senior in high school and the others were in their early 20s and working to try to save up money for transformation via our service.

I was designated the leader of this project, and got the three prospective settlers to join a Zoom call.

“If you agree to this project, we’ll give you free sex changes using the same technique most people pay a lot of money for, making you fully functional members of the opposite sex. But you’ll be permanently moving to live in a parallel Earth which is accessible from our building. You need to understand that you are moving to a world in a natural state, with no technology, and as far as we are aware no other people, apart from Cassius, who may tell you stories of the other people who came with him long ago. You’ll be sealed in there with what you initially take. We can provide simple tools if you would like to build houses and such, and you can take some possessions with you, but nothing that someone from 2000 years ago would find out of the ordinary. Food is going to be all natural, fruits and vegetables which currently grow wild. Since all of your plans are to change sex once and then stay that way, you won’t be eating the worms, but if, as a group later on, you agree for one or more of you to change sex again, that’s fine too. And we expect that you are going to settle it. Since two of you are becoming women and one becoming a man, we expect he will father children from both mothers.”

“Wait, how many children?” one of them asked.

I made a snap decision and said, “Let’s say at least three from each woman. We want the population to multiply. If you want to have more, that’s fine.”

“Whew! I was afraid I was volunteering to have children continuously for the rest of my life.”

“What about clothes?” another asked.

“You can bring clothes with you, but there aren’t replacement clothes there unless you make them. The group who went through before adopted nudity pretty quickly.”

This got a bit of a chuckle from all of them, but they then agreed that they didn’t have a problem with it.

“Are there any other rules we have to follow?”

“Just basic civility. You aren’t going to harm one another, nor Cassius, the only resident there currently, nor force anybody to do anything they don’t want to do, apart from enforcement of the other rules. You won’t have much personal property; most things will be community property. But you aren’t to steal the possessions of others nor take community property for your own, except as agreed by the group. And Cassius is the king and judge. He may make other rules as he sees fit. If you have any disputes you can’t resolve on your own, he shall decide.”

After a moment, I reminded them of one other important rule. “Eating the worms will change your sex. You should not do so unless the group agrees. And you absolutely, positively cannot do so while pregnant. You will turn male first and then abort the pregnancy in a very messy way. One of the original group of settlers died this way.”

Their expressions showed they appreciated the seriousness of this rule.

“What if there’s an emergency?” one of them asked.

“Um, we’ll figure out some way for you to contact us.”

“What about our periods?” one of the women-to-be asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe Cassius will be able to tell us what they did as women.”

“When are we going to do this?”

“This summer. Do you all agree to do this?”

Everybody agreed.

I said, “We’re going to let Amanda finish high school, but you should all start making plans. Let’s make the start of July a target date.”

There was enthusiastic cheering and I ended the call.

I went in and explained the situation to Cassius, along with the rules I’d made for the group to follow, and he found them fully acceptable.

In the last week of June the group started arriving, and we had the three of them transform with one of our usual pasta meals (on the house) and get used to their new bodies before sending them through. We also, after checking for obvious contraband, put all the stuff they were taking through, apart from clothes, in a section of the pantry for a few days and made sure it didn’t affect the worms negatively. Finally, on July 2nd we were all ready and I led the group inside, pulling a trunk of books my team had gathered for them as they each brought their own supplies.

As we went in, I explained, “This space will remain accessible to you through the portal, though it’s technically part of our Earth. We installed this red button here which activates signals in places our inn staff will see and hear. Use it only if there is some serious emergency you cannot deal on your own.”

I introduced them to Cassius.

“Cassius, these three are our new settlers. They have already changed sex and, at least for a while, intend to stay as they are now. This is Giancarlo, this is Amanda, and this is Arabella. I’ve already explained the rules to them and to you, but as a reminder, the two women have agreed to bear at least three children each to Giancarlo, which gives an idea how long, at minimum, we expect them to stay in their current sexes.”

“Welcome, friends,” he said to them.

Amanda commented on the unusual nature of Cassius’s speech.

“Oh, yes, Cassius speaks classical Latin. It is close enough to spoken standard Italian that you should all be able to figure out what he is saying, and he should understand you as long as you don’t try to use any modern terms. He can understand some modern concepts if you take the time to explain them to him, such as anything you brought with you. You’ll both learn a bit from each other.”

And I shut the door and never heard from them again. They never used the emergency call. As much as we were curious how the worms and this portal to another dimension came to exist, studying it in a way to figure that out was beyond the ability of anyone in the family, and letting outsiders in on this, even as a research project, would put our family secret at a serious risk.

Curiosity killed the cat, and we were not risking letting this cat get killed. When I explained that saying to the many Italian-speaking family members, I was told the Italian version: Tanto va la gatta al lardo che ci lascia lo zampino. Literally, the cat goes to the lard so often that it loses it paw. Not exactly lard, but a particular cut of fatty pork that was cured and eaten. The sense being that the cat grabs at this salty meat so often that its paw gets so heavily salted that it falls off. When they explained it that way, I realized that it really was the same saying, only it was weirdly specific in Italian.

---

Cassius

Joanna left the group in front of me and they seemed relatively helpless, like babes who had never lived out in the woods. I had to tell them what food they could eat, how to drink water from the stream, how to clean their butts, and everything. But they adapted pretty quickly, and used the tools they brought with them to bring down some of the non-food-bearing trees and build some simple cabins. I hadn’t seen the need for ages, but they seemed to want them, and it was the nature of my people before I came here, so I could understand it.

A few weeks in, Arabella actually asked me a question with a non-obvious answer.

“How can I control my menses and keep from dripping all over?” she asked.

“Back when I and the other settlers were living as women continuously, we figured that out when we woke up to worms licking up our drippings. It turns out that all you have to do is put one of the worms up inside you, head first. It’ll drink everything you release that day. Put it in in the morning, take it out at night, and if you are still leaking, you’ll probably find more worms cleaning it up in the morning and you can put one of those in.”

“Disgusting!” Arabella said, while Amanda said, “Ingenious!”

But Arabella must have considered it better than the alternative, because as they walked away, she asked Amanda, “Can you put it in for me?”

The next time they came to me, Arabella was there to apologize.

“I’m sorry, Cassius, for saying your idea was disgusting. It worked quite well. To some extent I was disgusted by the worms crawling on you and even going in and out of holes in your skin all the time. But they did say you are 2000 years old. How are you still alive?”

“Oh, is it 2000? I lost track of the years long ago, and Joanna and her friends never told me, though I knew it was a very long time. But I’m still here because each time you use the worms, it rejuvenates you a little. If you use the worms a lot, they get a kind of affinity with you. If you use them so much that you extend your own life span well beyond the years of a normal man, their rejuvenation isn’t enough, and the worms will replace your internal organs to keep you going. But to get to that point, there were periods where I was changing daily, and I ate dozens of the worms daily instead of the one which would be sufficient for a change. I do recommend that after you produce the children you were contracted to make, you do change sometimes, but limit it. Monthly changes, not daily ones. Not overeating the worms just because you can.”

Five or six weeks later, shortly after they were done building their cabins, they also stopped bothering to wear any clothes. Based on how soon both of the women became pregnant, I assume that’s also when they started having sex regularly, and each of them probably only had to worry about their menses twice. They gave birth, two days apart, to a boy and a girl. Next they had two boys, and then a boy and a girl again. And this was when they came to me with a dilemma.

Giancarlo explained, “We know we should have more girls to propagate the species. We ended up with four boys and two girls. We could just keep having more children, but we also don’t want to make it too difficult for us to raise them all. We want to turn two of the boys into girls, but we can’t decide on a fair way to choose which ones we should change.”

I replied, “Well, you certainly have the right idea. When I came here, my group was supposed to settle the place also. When we started having children, we drew lots to decide who was going to be the man first, and once the other two of us were pregnant, I and the other woman drew lots to see who was going to become a man and impregnate the third one. That was our mistake, because we didn’t have other people here to tell us the rules. The woman who changed gave birth early, right after becoming male, and died during that process. Now, we know that you cannot change while pregnant, so you won’t have that happen. But it made the other survivor afraid to ever become pregnant, and I felt like I’d already done my turn, so we didn’t have any more children. And my son grew up male and also didn’t like the idea of becoming female.”

“So what do you suggest?” Giancarlo asked.

“Once they are eating normal food, turn all of the children female. You need not feed each one a whole worm; Joanna’s team told me they used a single worm to change up to four people. Once they are all weaned, you three should change sex periodically so they get the idea that changing sex is natural. Not all the time like I did, but enough that they experience each of you being both male and female. Maybe you can bear some children of your own, Giancarlo. Once they are of age, having grown up female all the time and seen you three change several times, so that they consider changing to be normal, then they can draw lots for an order to become male, and they’ll each get a year as male in which to impregnate the others.”

“That’s fair,” Arabella agreed.

“Yes,” said Amanda.

Giancarlo added, “I wanted to be male, but I’ve had plenty of time being male. I’ll gladly be female again to bear some more children to add to the pool.”

I said, “Let me add one more rule. In order to ensure women can never turn male when pregnant, they can only become male after their menses finishes and before they have had sex again. This should take away the anxiety over changing when possibly pregnant.”

They took my advice to heart. Giancarlo went female right away, and once her period was established, and the other women had each had a period pass, one of the other women went male for a couple days when they thought Giancarlo would be most fertile and presumably had a lot of sex those days, while the other woman cared for the nursing infants, taking turns doing so for three months, after which Giancarlo was pregnant and they all stayed female until the third pair of infants was about a year old, before beginning another cycle of impregnating Giancarlo.

Once Giancarlo was pregnant for the third time, they built one more building to serve as a schoolhouse. Arabella and Amanda alternated teaching the oldest children, and eventually all the children, and by that point Giancarlo joined in. They each changed sex once or twice a year, as I recommended. I also attended some of the classes, learning their language and the ways in which it differed from mine. History, too: The Roman empire fell, but the city of Rome still exists today, and after several other empires and periods when the empire was broken into smaller pieces, it is now part of one called Italy, and the language is called Italian, though it is quite similar to the language I knew. They use books they had brought with them as references for a number of subjects.

I didn’t specify what age was “of age,” letting them use their own sense for that. In Rome what that meant had varied. In some senses they could be considered adults as early as age 12 to 14 when they first started to show the bodily changes of adulthood, and sometimes they were betrothed to one another at this age. They usually did not marry until the women reached age 18, and the men not until they had returned from military service at age 22 or older, and sex was forbidden until marriage. Obviously there was no military service here, nor was there going to be conventional marriage due to my recommendation, which they were following faithfully.

But after they celebrated their 18th birthdays, the two born each year together with one of the original group built a house, and likewise Giancarlo’s single kids, with help from the others, each built a house, so that they had six more buildings. Once the third house was built, they invited me to the drawing of lots that decided the order they were going to be male, and the first six started mating. They had devised their own scheme, which was slightly different from the one I had suggested off-handedly, but was satisfactory. It made changing sex a ritual each of them performed occasionally, and it made them all female most of the time.

They chose to alternate years of mating and rearing children, to give them a chance to wean all the children, with everybody female during the rearing years. In the years they were mating, they made two men each year, so that each of the first six had birthed two children after the first three cycles. In the fourth cycle Giancarlo’s children joined in as all male at the same time, with the first six all female, to give each of them their third child. After another rearing year, Giancarlo’s children were made pregnant three years in a row, with two of the first six being men each year to father them. And after that there were two designated men each year, and any woman who wanted more children could mate with one of those any year except the one before they were designated to be male. Some of them did, but by that point they were starting to teach the new group of children, and they soon stopped.

They also realized the metal tools they had brought with them were ruined after the latest round of construction, and they dug out a book from their trunk on smelting, the art of making metal from ores. Smelting was practiced in my time, but I never learned to do it. But it wasn’t easy; they had to go dig ores out of rock in the mountains. They melted down and remade some of the ruined tools into ones that could help them extract the ores. After this group of children were all weaned, and most of them in school, they knew they needed a bigger schoolhouse, and some of them went into the mountains and mostly destroyed their remade tools in efforts that yielded enough ore to make about twice as many tools. This let them make a new set of saws and hammers and the like, as well as a new round of mining tools which were sturdier and lasted longer.

This group of children, 33 in all, had a wide spread in ages, 12 years from the oldest to youngest, with the oldest ones finishing school by the time the youngest ones were starting it. They agreed on a new birth plan. It had been quite difficult on them raising so many, with other necessities like mining added in on top of their other duties. The original plan had meant to make each generation three times as large as the one before it, by having each woman bear three children, with two out of every three people female at any given time. They had ended up each being a woman to bear three children, and they had done likewise for those children, some of them even voluntarily having more. They made new rules that reduced the requirement for each person to two children, and were better adapted to a rolling cycle of people coming into childbearing age. Now, they gave women more freedom when they had their children, but with deadline ages to have their first and second, and they could declare at the start of each spring whether they wanted to get pregnant that year. They likewise had a system for choosing certain people to be male each year, with rules to balance the number of children each one fathered.

Once while this generation was growing up they asked me to be a judge. Usually they handled behavioral issues on their own, including refusal to go along with the breeding program, but this time one of the children had killed another one. Daria was 15 years old, still a child under their definition, and not yet at the age where they had the children start changing, apart from the initial change to make them all female as infants. There was no doubt that she did it. The problem was that they couldn’t agree on what to do about it.

They had consulted with the three original settlers, who had agreed the punishment in the world they came from would have been some kind of imprisonment. If she had been considered an adult when she did it, in some cases that could have been life imprisonment or death instead of prison, but prison time was the standard. In the world I came from, there was no question; she would have been executed.

But they had no prison here. There were all sorts of objections to building one, ranging from setting a bad precedent, to allowing her to sit and do nothing not being a punishment at all since she wouldn’t be working to support the others.

They decided to tie her to a tree within my sight as an initial punishment. So close to me, worms were bound to crawl on her, and she was not allowed to remove them or kill them. Due to worms having replaced most of my organs, I didn’t really sleep anymore, and in addition, I could see in the dark enough to see what she was doing. I called out when she tried removing or squashing the worms and someone came to rebuke her for it until I had made clear that she couldn’t get away with it, even at night.

I pondered for two days and two nights while she remained there like this. The morning of the third day I told them I had decided on a punishment and they gathered the whole group around us to hear me tell it.

“Daria shall be punished by being forced to become like me. She will eat one of the worms every day for a year as the first phase of that preparation, and as a result change sexes every day. She will work to help you grow food during this time, as she will need more of it. Do not worry; I have many of the worms within me and we will make enough more in the second phase of the punishment to account for any loss. It might take more than a year, but at that point we will stop changing her and leave her female and let the worms start to lay their eggs in her womb.”

“No!” Daria screamed. She thrashed against her bonds and two of the others grabbed her, and I waited until she was still before continuing.

“The worms who do so will come back to me and let me know if she is ready for this, and if not, then she will go back to changing daily. Once she is a good host for the worms, I will send a worm each morning to lay eggs in her. From midday to dusk the worms will be born and wriggle out of her one at a time. This will feel good to her at first, like having sex, despite being revolting to her because worms are crawling out of her.”

Daria was no longer struggling and was instead staring open-mouthed at me.

“However, the extended period of the births will benumb her body, and over time due to the repetition she will cease enjoying the feeling. She will not be able to work during this time, but will be able to work in the mornings. After every 5 or 6 days of this, she will eat a worm, turn male overnight, and spend a day as male, eating another worm to turn female the next day. These cycles will rejuvenate her body and ensure she is capable of doing this indefinitely.”

“How long will this go on?” Daria asked.

“Forever. The repeated treatments will gradually change your body as it changed mine, and you will eventually become dependent on the worms, but the worms themselves will also keep you alive.”

“Forever?!”

One of those of her parents’ generation said, “You ended that other girl’s life forever. This is fair.”

The others agreed, and we fed her the first worm later that day. The punishment proceeded as I had planned, and after they started breeding within her, we had more worms than ever. Nobody else wanted to look at her while this was happening, so they set up a place for the birthing phases of her punishment facing me and a short distance away. And at first she hated it, but soon she enjoyed hearing my stories of the old times.

Not once did they press the button to get back to the world where I and the first ones were born. However, a couple generations after Daria’s punishment began, someone came through from the other side of the portal, another member of the family who controlled the place on the other side. Our colony here had become merely a legend to them, and he sought to corroborate the story that had been passed down over there. He left satisfied, and also with more of the story of how things developed here.

A couple more generations later, I was unable to keep track of all the people, and they had people in all stages of life at the same time. They spread across the whole island, and built boats to reach the mainland from which they could get to Rome itself. But it was just like here; there was no Rome, nor any other people besides the ones descended from the three pioneers.

Somehow there weren’t worms over there; the worms were apparently limited to the island. But the people who went brought some over and they adapted well. However, there were other animals over there, unlike in Sicily, and they had to keep the worms in an area that was fenced in to keep them from being eaten. The worms still got out sometimes by climbing over the fence, but it kept the bulk of the worms from being eaten by animals. Weirdly, they figured out how to make a wire screen to run over the top of the fenced area, and the worms still sometimes got out. But then, the people from the other world said worms got into the room facing their world despite it being an apparently sealed room. Maybe they walked through walls or teleported short distances or something. Even though I was basically made of worms now, I couldn’t ask them things like this.

But they wanted help propagating the species. With the permission of the elders of the group remaining in Sicily, Daria went with them, to help the colony of worms there flourish. They were maintaining the tradition on the mainland of having people change and live lives female frequently and male less often but as a part of everyone’s life, and they needed the worms to support more cities of people. I cried sometimes, because it is what my group of settlers from 2000 years ago should have become.