Join Jody on a mind-bending adventure that begins when the weirdly realistic dreams he has had since his childhood start coming into the real world! Follow along as Jody figures out what is actually real and as he explores his confused sexuality.

Caution: This is a story that could not exist without sexual content, and in some places that content is explicit. Large parts of the story are not about sex, even though you will know it’s still happening. In some places there are descriptions of the sexual anatomy of alien beings.

Author’s Foreword:

This is a long and complex story which I started writing 18 years ago. I encourage anyone who gets lost to ask questions in the comments and I will try to answer them without spoiling unposted parts of the story. Unlike my prior epic-length stories which are anthologies of loosely related stories, Jody is a single story of 128,000 words, to be posted serially in 31 parts, of which this is the first. A longer version of this foreword describing the writing process appears in the book page this story lies under.

I’m Jody Davis. Twenty-five, white, male, five-eight, 175 pounds, with hair so dark brown you’d think it was black unless you caught it just right in the sunlight. And reasonably physically fit, though I’m not some muscle-bound hunk like some of the guys I work with who do physical labor.

When I was studying to become a petroleum engineer, I didn’t realize it was going to lead to me living in the middle of nowhere, Alaska. It’s not even a town, just a camp the company set up so we have somewhere to live within an hour’s drive of all the wells, and there I have a pre-fab house. They call them mobile homes, but they are not really very mobile. My home is not an RV, just a house that can be loaded onto a flatbed trailer and moved somewhere else.

The camp includes a store and a restaurant. There is also a pond nearby where some of the guys fish, including ice fishing when it’s cold enough but not so cold you can’t even stand to be outside any longer than strictly necessary. Outside the camp, there are nothing but oil fields and forest for at least 50 miles. The store and restaurant owners are paid by the company to be here just so we have them. I think the company paid to have cell towers put up so we would have the internet. The well sites are scattered over a large area, and they have internet at each of those sites, too. And we have a satellite-based cable TV system. We get about 50 channels, including the local ones from Fairbanks. Nowhere near what we’d get in any real city these days, but it provides entertainment.

There’s a town about 60 miles away. It has a long Native American name, so everybody just calls it “Town” unless we are trying to have something delivered there. It’s not much of a town, but I can buy stuff beyond the mere essentials in the company store. And there’s a post office. Our camp is so far from the nearest post office that we don’t even have a rural route. Everybody I work with has a post office box in the town. So I can buy anything through mail order, and eventually pick it up there. It even works with stores that won’t use US mail and request “no PO boxes.” I just have to put my name and the address of the post office and they’ll receive it for me. On my day off, if one of my orders has been delivered, I can go pick it up. Letters go in the box, packages I have to ask for at the desk, so I have to be there during the 5 hours, 6 days a week that the desk is open.

That usually means Saturday, so I order stuff early in the week and go get it the next Saturday. When I’m in town, I also make a stop at the grocery store to pick up bulk food at half the price of the company store. Price isn’t all that much of a concern; I’m paid well to live in the middle of nowhere. But when I am there, I do it. Sometimes I buy clothes or other things while I’m in town, too.

One of the things I learned very quickly was an essential is my electric blanket. No amount of insulation keeps this place really warm in the winter; the walls just aren’t thick enough. The first one I got was a cheap piece of junk, though. I quickly learned it was simply two thin blankets, with a heating coil wound around between them, and stitching to hold the two blankets together running between the bends of the heating coil. The heating part worked fine, but the stitching was crap. Fortunately, my mother taught me how to sew when I was a boy, just because I was curious about the things she did. I’m never going to make my own clothes, but I can mend seams and put on buttons, and I originally thought that was all I’d ever do. But I tried to sew the blanket back together when some of the coils started poking out the edges. It worked for a little bit, but more of the original seams broke and pretty soon there were too many of those places for me to patch up, in addition to it being loose and bunching up in spots in the middle. So I just bought a better quality blanket.

Another problem is there aren’t any women. The crew for the wells are all men. A few of the guys were married before coming up here and brought their wives, and we don’t mess with them. Several others are gay and have paired off. Even in the town, there is rather a lack of women. The ones that are there are married, wearing their rings to show it.

There was actually a time I wondered if I might be gay, but by the time I had gotten up here I figured out I wasn’t. So I used my hand; I assume that was true for the other single guys, too. At some point, I upgraded to a Fleshlight.

Later still, I got more creative. Or I was bored, and it was something to do. Maybe both. I stuffed one of my old shirts and a pair of pants with the pieces of the two sides of the blanket that had fallen apart. I put the Fleshlight through the fly of the pants. I recycled the piping that ran along the edge of the blanket that might have helped keep it together if it was sewn properly. I made a sort of belt out of it that ran through the belt loops and some strategically cut slits in the shirt tails, which helped hold the parts together. This was a usable sex doll, but I modified it multiple times.

It should have breasts, right? I wanted to pretend I had a woman. I was not afraid to walk into a woman’s clothing store and buy a bra, and I knew how to estimate the size, so I did that and stuffed it to make the doll’s breasts. I experimented with different ways to give it nipples, such as sewing on small extra bits of the blanket in the right places.

But a woman is warm, rather than just being the meh temperature of clothes and blankets. I ran the old blanket’s heating coil (which still worked) throughout the doll. The blanket had been only six by six feet, but the coil ran all around within it and was almost 40 feet long, so there was enough to run it through both arms and legs with plenty left to heat the torso.

Plugged in and on the lowest setting, it gave the thing the warmth of a real body I could pretend to cuddle with. But I still had problems with the shirt and pants sections not staying together. The makeshift belt only did so much. I dealt with this by replacing the covering that was my old clothes with a woman’s bodysuit with full legs, one of the many things I had delivered. Then I thought it was perfect.

There was never anybody else in my house, so I often left it there in my bed, though it was turned off unless I planned to use it. The bed was really small, so I threw it on the floor when I wanted to sleep. Eventually there was a night when I fell asleep on top of the doll while fucking it, and that night changed everything.

I have always had an active imagination. I invented an imaginary friend when I was 4. That’s not unusual. There was a girl named Pansy who didn’t want to play something or other with me, and in my head I invented a girl named Nancy who did play that game. What was unusual was that I never really forgot about her. I don’t pretend like she’s sitting in the room with me now. But I remember the times when I was little and did pretend she was there. I remember those events as well as, maybe even better than my memories from the same age with real friends. A big reason for that is that she lives on in my dreams.

Everybody has weird dreams. They’re things the mind puts together out of random stimuli, little fragments of memory, and other stuff we still don’t understand. Characters in dreams could be your real friends, famous people, characters you know from fiction, or faceless nobodies. And I have characters like those in my dreams, but I also have Nancy. She grew up with me, in my dreams. Sometimes she was my companion, the best friend I wanted Pansy to be. Sometimes she was my rival. Sometimes she would only make a brief cameo, but frequently she was the central character of the dream, alongside me. Sometimes I’d learn from her; she is smart, sometimes smarter than me, and could give me a fresh viewpoint on things. And once I was a bit older, she was sometimes my romantic partner. Somehow, don’t ask me how, I played “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” with her before I ever saw a girl’s parts in real life, and yet what I saw matched what I later confirmed I was supposed to see. This activity with Nancy didn’t keep me from getting real-life girlfriends later; it may have actually helped, in a way.

Nancy ended up with “girl next door” looks. Five-five, about 140 pounds, blonde, and pale skinned with a few freckles as she still appears in my dreams frequently. But even now, Nancy doesn’t always play the role of my lover. She can still be my rival or a platonic friend. She’s never me, though. No, if I’m a girl in the dream, I’ll be Victoria. But that’s a story for another time.

There are also other characters my weird mind invented, more fantastic ones, some of whom aren’t even fully human, who inhabit my dreams. But Nancy is the immediately relevant one, because I fantasized I was fucking Nancy that night I fell asleep on top of the doll, and Saturday, July 1 I woke up fucking Nancy. In the place of the doll was a real woman, but she was the one who had grown up with me in my mind and in my dreams.

“How? How are you here?” I asked Nancy.

“I don’t know, but you did it. You brought me to life somehow. And I’m cold!”

Nancy was cold once she was no longer covered by my body and blankets, because she wasn’t wearing any clothes.

“I don’t have any women’s clothes, but you’re welcome to wear anything you can find.”

She went to the bathroom first, and came out a few minutes later and started going through my clothes. She wasn’t crazy about wearing my briefs, but she put them on, followed by the thermal underwear which were a mainstay of living up here. Even though it is technically summer, mornings can be cold up here and this one had howling winds that made it feel quite cold even inside the so-called house. Socks, a shirt, and pants finished an outfit, and while my pants didn’t fit her right, they were tight at her hips and didn’t fall down. My sandals gave her some kind of footwear, but it was clear they were too big for her.

“So what do you want to do, now that you’ve made it into the real world?”

“Eat first. All we did last night was fuck and sleep.”

“You remember that?”

“I remember that, and all our dreams together. All the way back to our playtime when we were four. When we were a bit older, sometimes you fed me after school, but otherwise, I can’t remember how I ate.”

“You lived somewhere, with a family who fed you, right?”

“Um, I guess. I can’t really remember them.”

“Well let’s assume you did. People don’t grow up to be nice, healthy-looking adults like you without eating regular meals.”

I got the milk from the mini-fridge and poured us both bowls of cereal. Not one of those dorm room fridges where the freezer is just a metal shield around the part where the cold air comes out. The mobile home was too small for a full-sized fridge, but it came with one that was as wide as one of those cube fridges, but about 4 feet tall with a real freezer section with a separate door in the top foot or so. Of course, in the winter, I could stock up on frozen stuff and just leave it outside in an ice chest in the snow. But it was July now, and not too bad a day despite the chilly morning. We’d probably be OK outside with only light jackets that we could take off in the warm part of the day.

It was also my day off, so I had the whole day with Nancy. Saturday. I don’t always have weekends off, but it’s the norm. The guys who maintain the wells and pipelines might have to work any time of the day or night, and usually work shifts so there is always someone around, but us engineers tend to work daytime Monday to Friday developing new wells and retrofitting existing ones that have gone dry. If the drilling crew encounters something unexpected, or if the oil that comes out of the well isn’t the quality they expected, or if there is some disaster that leads to them shutting down the pipeline, I might be called in to help at other hours. Even so, that usually meant I worked on Saturday or some evening and took off the next weekday I wasn’t urgently needed. I didn’t have any urgent message on my phone, so I expected to have all of today and tomorrow off. If they needed me, they’d call me and I’d go where they asked. But there was nothing to do here besides sex, so we got into my truck and headed to town.

Nancy was most upset about not having proper clothes. But she was understanding enough to appreciate that I lived in a tiny house with not a lot of room to store extra clothes, and also that anything that wasn’t machine-washable would require a long trip into town to take it to a dry cleaner and a second trip to pick it up. So she was satisfied going to Q-Mart and getting some basic clothes. Q-Mart was Town’s main store, the Q standing for the long Native American name nobody ever liked spelling out in full. It had comparable quality and types of goods to Wal-Mart, but less variety within those types, serving Town’s few thousand residents and however many more people like me lived in the surrounding area.

I basically pushed a cart and let Nancy lead the way around the store. She picked up just one short-sleeve blouse and shorts, knowing that even in the summer there were few days above 70 degrees. The other stuff was long-sleeve, and several pairs of jeans. She also picked up one dress, a somewhat heavyweight cotton one that made sense here. And a couple packs of panties, bras, and stuff to wear under everything else to keep warm, which was rather different for women. And two pairs of shoes, sneakers and some shoes with a low heel she called pumps. I knew about all this stuff, in part due to my dream experiences, but there was no way I could have gone around a store and picked it all up the way she did.

Nancy knew her sizes, and while she tried some stuff on, she got most of it right the first time. I wondered about this. If she didn’t remember things that didn’t come up in my pretend-play or dreams, like her parents, why would she know her sizes? But then I remembered a specific dream I had not long after our first dream-date, when we were freshmen in high school. There was a day she was proud of having graduated to a B-cup bra, and pulled down a sleeve to show me the new one she was wearing. I guess that implied awareness of her other sizes.

This memory reminded me of how weird it was I had dream-dates in the first place. Some of the first ones were like practice dates, where you and a close friend who you really don’t want to get involved romantically with go on a date so you both can practice how you’d act on a real date. I didn’t actually have a person like that in real life, but somehow this worked. Nancy gave me useful feedback that improved the real dates I went on later. In fact, I wouldn’t have had a problem getting my last girlfriend to marry me right out of college, except she didn’t want to move to Alaska.

When Nancy was done trying things on, we each picked up various other things we thought we needed, including condoms. If Nancy was real now, I figured she could get pregnant. Nancy grabbed tampons and panty liners. I hadn’t ever bought those but I understood the necessity of them.

Eventually we made it to the checkout and I paid for the cartload of clothes and other items. I could easily afford the few hundred bucks all the stuff cost. It was going to be harder to figure out where to put it in the house. Before we left the store, Nancy took the dress and other items to go with it from the bags and went into the women’s room at the front of the store to change. She returned with a bag containing all the stuff of mine she’d taken off.

After a stop at the post office where I picked up one package and the regular mail, it was time for lunch, and I drove to the burger joint nearby and we ate. She suggested going to the arcade afterward. Nancy knew the town as well as I did because a number of our dream-dates since I moved up here had taken place in the town. Other dreams were set back where we grew up, or near my college, or sometimes other places like Hollywood, New York, or London, not to mention the literally out-of-this-world dates. So she knew the one arcade in town; she’d been in there before. At least she’d been in the virtual equivalent in my dreams, but when I was dreaming of a place in the real world the dreams were usually pretty faithful to reality.

And I had been in there several times as well, but this was my first time with a companion, in real life, anyway. We spent a couple hours there playing two-player competitive and cooperative games I could only have enjoyed before with random strangers. And we went into the photo booth, kind of a relic now, but it still worked, two bucks to get a strip of four photos. I grabbed some more stuff at the food market before leaving town, as I always did. There was a food store in the camp, but everything cost about twice what it should. I made the long drive back home afterward listening to Nancy reminisce about various events from my dreams.

I made space for Nancy’s stuff by collapsing my clothes down. Instead of socks and underwear, thermals, shirts, and shorts in my four drawers, the thermal tops and thermal pants shared with the shirts and shorts, with some extras of each stashed with the underwear, and that gave the bottom drawer over completely to Nancy’s clothes. Her jeans hung in the closet with my pants. There were just enough empty hangers for her dress and my work jeans when they were washed. It would be tight when everything was in there.

I’d bought a bit of extra food, some of it not needing refrigeration, which was good, because I had trouble cramming all that we had bought in the tiny fridge, and ultimately decided a couple items that didn’t fit were tonight’s dinner.

We ate dinner, and then I let Nancy lead the way toward us having sex. The kind of tender, slow foreplay we did was something often absent from our more recent sexual dreams. We did that in our early dreams about sex, but more recently, it seemed like when we thought about sex we’d be instantly ready and then just do it in various positions for hours.

As Nancy opened a condom and prepared to roll it onto my erection, she commented, “You know, we’ve never had sex with a condom before.”

“I know. And I know why.”

“We were always in your dreams before, and I couldn’t get pregnant there.”

“Right. Well, you probably could have if we wanted it. Except you were just as likely the next dream to be playing a different role and the pregnancy forgotten.”

“Yeah. Are we going to lose that now that I’m here? The way we were sometimes rivals, sometimes platonic friends, sometimes lovers?”

“We got to be rivals in some of the video games today. I think we can still do that.”

Grabbing me by the dick, she said, “OK, enough talk.”

It was a challenge finding a comfortable position to have sex on the tiny bed which was really only made for one person, but we eventually did, and we stayed there afterward and fell asleep that way. And Nancy was in my dream again.

I woke up Sunday, July 2 in bed with the doll, my dick inside the Fleshlight.

“Huh,” I thought. “Did I imagine all that with Nancy? That she came to life and spent all day yesterday with me doing things? That I bought all those clothes for her?”

No, I quickly concluded. The clothes she had stripped off were still lying on the floor, intermingled with mine. Her other clothes were in my bottom dresser drawer or hung in the closet. I was wearing a condom, which I never did with the Fleshlight. I usually just washed it out afterward.

I remembered the photos we had taken, and searched for them. Yes, the photos existed, showing me with the young woman who had until yesterday only lived in my dreams and imagination. A straight photo, a silly one with tongues sticking out, one with us kissing, and one where we were giving each other rabbit ears.

So she really did come to life. But only for a day? Did I waste all that money on her clothes?

I kind of wasted the day away watching TV and stuff, though I did fill my bag with laundry, including Nancy’s stuff, and took it out to be washed. That laundry service was all we had for doing laundry here, but it was included with the camp fee along with the water, sewer, and TV. Electricity was billed separately.

I fell asleep fucking the doll again Sunday night, but it wasn’t Nancy I dreamed about. I was Victoria in the dream, and unlike most Victoria dreams, this time I was fucking a guy.

When I awoke, Victoria was there in the place of the doll. Remember when I said her story was for another time? I guess it’s “another time” now.

Victoria came along a bit later than Nancy, but not too much later. I had definitely been Victoria before my 6th birthday. I had my first real birthday party in real life when I was 6, with a guest list made of most of my kindergarten classmates, along with a few other neighborhood kids who weren’t too different in age. Naturally, Pansy didn’t attend. The following night’s dream featured Victoria’s birthday party with most of the same kids, plus Nancy. I know that wasn’t the first time I dreamed of being Victoria, but it’s the earliest one I distinctly remember. Hearing all my classmates sing “happy birthday, Victoria” was very memorable.

My best understanding of Victoria is that she’s the me that would have existed if I had been born a girl. When we were 6, if you could have put the two of us together, the only way you could tell us apart was by our clothes. Put Victoria in a boy’s T-shirt and shorts, and we’d look like identical twins. I knew, though. I knew when I was Victoria, without needing to check myself, and in fact I never did. It’s pretty ironic; I had hundreds of opportunities as Victoria to see what a girl’s private parts felt like, to touch them even, and I never did until that time Nancy and Jody played “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” The dreams before that one were not sexual in the least. They were just short snippets, individual scenes. Sometimes I was female in those scenes, and I knew it, and my friends in those scenes knew I was Victoria as well.

In fact, Nancy was actually the one who suggested we play that peeking game, and it changed the dreams ever after. They became longer and more complex, in addition to unlocking the possibility that they would be sexual. But just the possibility; for years they rarely involved any sort of actual sex or masturbation, or nudity beyond what I saw while showering. The long dreams soon spanned, as far as I could tell, an entire night’s sleep, and just that; after sixth grade I never needed an alarm clock because I’d always dream exactly until whenever I wanted to wake up. In some of my adventures, such a dream could span weeks of dream-time, but in the more down-to-earth type of dream, the time that passed within the dream was an entire day’s wakeful time.

When I was Victoria, those one-day dreams started out with me stripping out of a nightgown and showering. But then I’d get Victoria dressed and there was no more nudity after that in those dreams. Still, it was enough for me to notice her body as it developed. Jody and Victoria quickly ceased to look like twins, but still like brother and sister. These days, Victoria is five-six, 140 pounds, with the same coloration as me including the black-except-in-the-right-light hair, but curvy.

The first year after Nancy and I peeked at each other’s bodies, there were only a few more encounters in any way sexual in my dreams, all between Jody and Nancy. After that, Jody got into it with other characters. After I started high school, Victoria had sex too, but not in the way you’d think. Victoria was either having some form of sex with another woman, or with one of the characters who frequented my dreams who was not exactly human. In fact, though I’m familiar with the feeling of having something penislike in Victoria’s vagina, I can’t remember a time before last night when Victoria fucked a guy, that is, a regular male human being. Not that she would have had any trouble getting one if she wanted.

The continued appearances of Victoria in my dreams made me wonder about myself. It prompted a phase of self-reflection and experimentation. What does it mean that I dream of being a woman who has sex with other women and alien beings? At first, I didn’t know what to think, but it led me to learning in the real world the meanings of all the terms encompassed by LGBTQ. So did these dreams mean I was trans? And specifically a trans lesbian?

While this made me think about it, my explorations showed me I didn’t feel any desire to be a woman in the real world. It wasn’t that I was afraid of the hormones and surgery and all the other issues with transitioning to become a woman in real life. It was simply that I didn’t feel like I needed to be a woman in real life. I was comfortable as my male self. When I experimented by dressing my real-life body in women’s clothing, it felt wrong, even though I had no compunctions about dressing Victoria in similar clothing in the dreams. It was right for her. Nor did I feel wrong just being Victoria; that was just as right to me as when I was Jody. I could accept being either male or female, but trying to force one upon the other, nope, not gonna do it.

So I decided I wasn’t trans. I had learned a bunch of other terms as well, but I didn’t find one that fit me. At one point I thought genderfluid might apply, sometimes feeling male and sometimes feeling female, right? But when I looked into what that meant, I realized that wasn’t right either. Genderfluid is more like trans some of the time, in the sense where trans means you feel like you’re in the wrong body. I never feel like I am in the wrong body. I just feel comfortable in whichever body I am in at the time. It’s just the opposite of genderfluid; my mind always matches my body. I think there isn’t a word for that because people in the world don’t have bodies that change like that; it was only in my dreams. Whatever this was I gave up on figuring out, because I was enjoying just being normal. By junior year of high school I had completely abandoned the idea of being bi-trans, or genderfluid but the other way around, or whatever this is.

So in the real world, I was straight cis-male Jody. I had begun dating girls like any of the other straight guys were doing. But I felt like I knew girls better because of the Victoria dreams. I knew what it felt like to be a woman because I’d lived hundreds of hours as Victoria in dreams that felt as real as my life outside the dreams, save for the fact that I was in a different body. Even though Victoria didn’t date guys, I understood better how to treat a woman due to having been one in many very realistic dreams.

But it was only a portion of the dreams that were so realistic. Sometimes I was in exotic places. Sometimes I was in exotic bodies, non-human ones. But even when I was in one of the non-human bodies, if I was in a female one, I was Victoria, with all her knowledge and history, as if she’d just jumped in the make-me-a-Sea-Woman booth that day. But Sea Women are a story for another day. Today is about Victoria.

I started Monday, July 3 waking up lying on top of Victoria. When I got up off her, the feeling was so strange I almost fell out of the bed. In addition to the sensations I expected to feel in my penis and my body, I could also feel the penis pulling out of my vagina. Her vagina, but I felt it as a part of me. Somehow I was feeling from both my body, that is, Jody’s body, and from Victoria’s body at the same time. That was weird, on top of the fact that Victoria was here, outside the dream.

When I got up and walked across the room, Victoria remained in bed, motionless. I looked back at her and reasoned that, if I felt sensations coming from Victoria’s body, then maybe I was Victoria, too, and she was lying there because I had to move her body. Thinking about the feelings I had felt that came from her body, I tried to focus on being Victoria. I found her vision, and my real body stumbled as I tried to reconcile the two different points of view. But I got it together surprisingly quickly, and the two images combined into an almost complete view of the room with two points of focus. If you’ve never seen with two pairs of eyes pointing in different directions at the same time, you wouldn’t understand this, but imagine being able to see behind yourself at the same time you’re looking forward.

Victoria’s focus was up on the ceiling because she was lying on her back in bed. I tried to move her head to look at me, and I succeeded in moving it a little but the change in the combined vision made me dizzy and my real body almost fell over. So I stopped, stabilized myself, and then tried something less intense, moving one of Victoria’s arms.

That was better. Her arm was initially out of my view entirely, but as I raised it, it came into my real body’s view and then into Victoria’s view as well. I was able to rotate the hand and move the fingers and see that they moved like I expected them to. I put the arm down, and that was a shock as well, because it fell across Victoria’s breasts. The nipples are very sensitive, and I’d basically banged the whole arm into both of them at once. I moved the arm down so it rested on Victoria’s stomach instead.

Feeling a bit better prepared, now I turned Victoria’s head and managed to get it looking at my real body, so we were making eye contact. My combined view now encompassed everything in the room save for what was immediately behind each of my bodies.

Over the next 15 minutes or so, I gradually worked on more motions with Victoria’s body and got her to a position sitting on the edge of the bed. The next big step was standing. I was a bit unsteady at first, but by this point I was no longer having trouble keeping my real body balanced while doing these movements with Victoria. The balance in Victoria’s body was different, yet in a way that was familiar, because of all the times I’d been Victoria in dreams. I was quite familiar with the feeling of walking or running with Victoria’s breasts. Her balance was top-heavy compared to Jody’s.

Step by step, I slowly started walking Victoria toward me, and a couple minutes later she had crossed the six feet or so there was between us. I hugged Victoria and kissed her, which created more interesting sensations. I’d never been grabbed and kissed the way Victoria just was; when I was Victoria in romantic dreams, she always took the active role. If I’d been trans and straight, and had wanted to date a guy, then Victoria’s body would probably have been very excited by what she was now feeling. But I wasn’t, and instead, however much my real body enjoyed it, the only nice feeling I sensed from Victoria was that both of me were together.

Both of me needed the bathroom. I could feel that urge, twice. The two of us held hands as I walked us together for the first time, though it was only for a few steps. When I got there, I decided to get Victoria onto the toilet first. Then, the awkwardness was not in moving her body but in the tight space. At least there was always something to hold on to.

Despite all the time I’d been Victoria in dreams and all the things I’d done in those dreams, I’d never actually used the toilet as a woman before, because of one of those rules of dreams. I only feel like I need to use the bathroom in a dream when I need to use the bathroom in real life. I’d even gotten as far as getting Victoria sitting on a toilet once or twice before I woke up and took care of my business in real life. It’s very common for my dreams to end that way, and yet, they never ended early. Once I started having the all-night dreams, this would only happen when I wanted to get up anyway.

So I didn’t actually know how to pee as a girl, but when I tried to do with her body what I do to release the pee from my male body, it worked and the flow started. When Victoria could pee no more, I knew I needed to wipe her up. I knew what girls were supposed to do, even though I’d never done it; Victoria had learned all those things somehow, even if I didn’t experience when she learned them. I had learned them by “remembering” them during times I was Victoria.

I grabbed some toilet paper and wiped, but as I did I realized there was more than pee down there. It looked like I had come inside Victoria last night. “Shit,” I swore. I was going to have to start using condoms with the Fleshlight if I was going to keep making the doll into various women. Though if she went away at the end of the day like Nancy had, maybe it wouldn’t matter.

Using Jody’s body, I wetted a little of the toilet paper at the sink to help Victoria clean up. Once Victoria was clean, I took my turn, but I just stood to pee, with Victoria standing behind me, hanging on to my sides. I didn’t think there was any hope of me getting out of here on time if I tried to shower Victoria, but I left her sitting on the toilet again while I showered quickly.

Actually peeing from my real body, from both bodies, even, made me more certain this was real. I was really Victoria in real life, in addition to being Jody. Most guys’ reaction upon waking up in my situation would probably be “Woo-hoo! I can fuck her any time I want!” or “Oh, shit! I don’t know anything about being a woman.” But for me, it just seemed like the next stage in my development. While I did hope to have some sex in ways that both of my bodies enjoyed, I wasn’t worried about actually being Victoria, and my main thought during the shower was “Why did this have to happen right now, when I’m trying to get ready for work?”

After drying off, I got both of me back into the bedroom. Now I was in charge of getting Victoria dressed. Fortunately, this was an area where the dreams had provided actual experience. After I started having longer dreams, one common type of dream started out with me as Victoria, naked or in her pajamas, and I had to get dressed for school or work. Such dreams then went on with the rest of Victoria’s day.

This was pretty ironic. Saturday Nancy just had to wear whatever of my clothes, and I went out and bought clothes for her. Apart from what Nancy put on in the store, the first time any of them are going to be used, I was going to have to pick out and put on clothes myself. Even more fortunately, I discovered that Nancy’s clothes fit Victoria. Even her bra fit; I saw the tag on the one I picked out said 36D. Was Nancy really that big, a D cup? I knew it was right for Victoria, and indeed, it fit Victoria well, but I thought Nancy was smaller. Other than that, Nancy and Victoria were close to the same size, so I shrugged off the weirdness there. I had Victoria wear a new pair of Nancy’s panties and a short-sleeve pullover blouse and shorts. I put on my typical work clothes.

Next we made our way to the combined kitchen and dining room, which were at the other end of the small house. We passed through the entry area opposite the bathroom and then through what passed for a living room to our destination, and I carefully eased Victoria’s body into a chair at the table. I grabbed the cereal and milk and prepared it for both of us.

Using Victoria’s arm to feed her was easy enough, but I took turns feeding myself a spoonful and feeding Victoria one. I wasn’t sure I was yet up to doing that for both of us at the same time, but one could chew while I fed the other.

I checked my phone for messages. None, which meant I still had to head out to well 10 per previous plans. I needed to leave at 7:15 to get there by 8. It was now almost 7. What was I going to do with Victoria? I couldn’t take her with me. I’d be out there all day. All the other wives and girlfriends stayed in camp, or drove to town on their own or whatever. I decided to just lay her down in bed. That was the easiest way for me to make sure she didn’t fall or anything. I packed my lunch and got ready to go like I would any other day, ignoring Victoria.

I made it out to where I was supposed to be, and got on with my work. By the time the site lead called for coffee break a little after 10, and those of us working at the site lined up at the coffee pot, I realized I needed to tend to Victoria. She needed to pee, and was also thirsty. I managed to get her to the toilet before it was my turn to fill my coffee cup. Once I was sitting and drinking, I cleaned up Victoria, flushed, dressed, and got her to the kitchen to get some water.

At my lunch break, Victoria needed lunch too, and I was able to make her a sandwich. Afternoon coffee break was much like the morning one, but Victoria also needed to poop. This was another thing I’d never done in my dreams, but the muscle movement was the same. When I went to clean her up, I realized Victoria had been taught at some point, though I had no idea when, that women had to wipe from front to back to avoid getting poop in the vagina. Yuck! It made sense, though; I had gotten poop on my balls before, and while that was annoying to clean off, letting it get back inside the wrong hole was a whole other level of gross. Fortunately, the lack of male equipment made it easy to wipe that way.

Having Victoria here was certainly something I hadn’t planned for. If I’d thought things through, I would have realized that she would need the kind of care I was giving her during my work breaks, but I was rushing to get to work. Victoria was as real today as Nancy had been Saturday, and had the needs of a real person. Fortunately, when Nancy was here, I’d bought extra food, thinking I was going to have her here all the time.

I tended to Victoria once more just before leaving the well site, and laid her back in bed for my drive home. I arrived in the camp’s parking lot just before 5. Before I made it into my house, Pedro drove up beside me. Pedro was the housing manager at the camp. I don’t think he’d ever seen the doll, but since I’d never invited anyone in with it out where it was visible, he was the only person who might ever have seen the doll that had become Victoria today. But that wasn’t quite what he asked about.

“Hey, did I see your woman moving around in your house today?”

Stunned, after a moment I answered, “Yeah, probably.”

“Steve told me he saw you come home with her Saturday.”

“Is there a problem with it?”

“I was just wondering if you wanted to move up to one of the double-wides.”

“Oh,” I responded, realizing this was actually a good thing. “Yeah. That’s probably a good idea.”

They only offered the double-wide houses to couples. They only had so many of them. Some couples were straight couples, some were gay couples, but there were always two people. But the fact that at least two other men had seen Nancy and Victoria as a separate person from me was evidence that this was all real and not my hyperactive imagination or a hallucination. I hoped it wasn’t just an unusually long and detailed dream.

I went inside and called “Hey, Hon,” to Victoria, so that she would look independent from me, before bringing her to the door.

“They’re offering us a bigger house,” I said in her direction.

I had never before spoken as Victoria, not in real life. But I summoned her voice and said, “Oh, that’s nice.” She didn’t sound very excited, but I figured this was the minimal amount of interaction that would seem reasonable for a couple.

Pedro said to Victoria, “You want to come look at it?”

“No, I trust Jody.”

I didn’t want Victoria to look at it just because I didn’t want Pedro to see how unsteady I was trying to do things with both bodies at the same time. I was good with her body now when I wasn’t moving mine, though. I had Victoria go back inside and close the door. Pedro led me over to one of the double-wide mobile homes that was available. It was actually only 20 feet wide versus 12 for the one I had, but the name meant it was moved here in two pieces that had to be assembled on site. Not that we were moving them. Most of the time they left the same houses here and just rented them to the people who needed to work here, but it was possible to move them in and out when they needed more people working here, or in another part of the state. There were at least twenty extra utility hookups here that had never had houses. The remains of traffic cones that had been scratched and slit open by ice over multiple winters marked their locations.

The new house looked good. The bed was actually big enough for the two of us to lie on. The house looked clean and I didn’t see any problems with it, so I went with Pedro and signed new rental papers. The house was going to cost 50% more, the water/sewer service a third more, and the electricity was billed by usage rather than a flat rate, but would no doubt increase. He gave me a stack of moving boxes, and told me I could leave them by his office when we were done. Also, he provided a set of cheap sheets that fit the larger bed; they were standard “double” bed sheets, so I would be able to buy more at the store instead of the custom cut-down twin sheets the tiny bed in the other house needed. Why do we have such stupid names for bed sizes anyway? Two names that mean “two”, and they are both for smaller beds than the two names that mean one person.

I took the boxes back over to my old house. I tried to practice using both bodies at the same time, and I managed to have Victoria stand at a box helping to arrange things in it while Jody gathered stuff and brought it over to her. She also held open the door to let me carry boxes out to the truck. In an hour I had all our stuff moved over to the new house. This one was made for two people, so there was no shortage of storage space for clothes. Victoria, or Nancy, or whoever my companion was, had room for a whole wardrobe instead of just what I’d bought Saturday. Well, she did if that wardrobe was the size of mine, or only a little bigger. Women had more clothes, but would my women, perhaps present intermittently, need a larger wardrobe here, where there was nothing to do? Probably not more than the space available here, anyway.

I made dinner for the two of us a little later than we expected, but we enjoyed it. After dinner, I worked on putting away the things I’d brought over. To get more practice using Victoria’s body, I gave her the sheets, and then, using her body, I put them on the bed. I also put most of the things away using her body.

So now it was time for the big question. I had never had the opportunity to have sex with Victoria because we were always in separate dreams, so this was my first opportunity. I knew my body would enjoy sex with Victoria. But would Victoria’s body enjoy it? I wasn’t going to be that “woo-hoo” guy from my thoughts during this morning’s shower. If we were going to have sex, I was going to try to make sure both of my bodies enjoyed it.

Victoria had had various kinds of sex in dreams, including vaginal penetration in certain ways, but I could not remember a time, besides last night, when it was with a perfectly normal male human. I wasn’t even sure Victoria liked guys. Victoria had had lesbian sex with Nancy and other women, and whatever kind of sex was possible with many of the non-human characters. But I did know that she had been penetrated by some kind of organ, anyway, and enjoyed it as a sexual experience, in a way that my male body could not.

I put a brave face on Victoria and resolved to try it. About 8:00 we stripped, trying to be sexy about it like a striptease. My dick was hard as a rock at the end of this, but Victoria wasn’t dripping wet. In fact, it seemed like her body wasn’t excited at all. I went inside her mind and sought out wherever it was that held her feelings about this.

This was a surreal experience. I was navigating around inside her mind like it was a maze, and I was just as lost as if I was in an actual maze. But I learned a lot. I learned where in this maze things were organized. I had found some of these previously on instinct, such as her centers of sight, balance, and motor skills. I used those as landmarks as I encountered various sorts of memories, and her feelings. Emotions. Her sense of anger, which was absent. Her sense of friendship, which was strong. Her sense of boredom, which was active just a tiny bit. Her sense of envy, I think, which was active a little. She envied the way I had control of all of these in my own mind but was fumbling trying to find them in hers. By chance I stumbled across her sense of smell, which might be useful in what was coming.

Finally, I found her sense of love, which was strong, and her sense of lust, which was weak. But at least I would know if I was getting her interested. I had her put the condom on me, and that didn’t do anything for her, either.

What did help was the hands-on foreplay, especially clitoral stimulation. I got Victoria’s juices flowing, and felt the sexual stimulation rising in her mind. With her in that state, I put it in her. And it did feel good in the end. Both Jody and Victoria enjoyed the sex, but something about the experience just failed to satisfy Victoria. If I had to rate it, the experience was a 9 out of 10 for me, mainly because I couldn’t help Victoria enjoy it as much, and a 5 out of 10 for Victoria. After I came once, and I had gotten Victoria to her female orgasm three times, I got the impression that Victoria wasn’t interested in continuing. So I stopped, cleaned both of us up, and just went to sleep, the two of us actually able to lie without being pressed against each other on the larger bed.

I dreamed about Nancy again, but I woke up beside the doll on Tuesday, July 4. I had the day off for the holiday, and I spent most of it thinking about what had happened in recent days. I ate my meals alone, like happened pretty much every day before the last few.

While it was Independence Day, it wasn’t like we were in a city that would have a professional fireworks show. Also, this time of year it doesn’t get fully dark here until midnight because of how close we are to the Arctic Circle. Somebody did set off some fireworks, but it wasn’t all that exciting.

When I was getting ready for bed, I debated whether to fuck the doll tonight. I had had sex with either the doll or a girl it turned into several nights in a row now, and I didn’t feel like I was so addicted to sex to need it every night, despite how little there was to do here. But it seemed like fucking the doll was how I was making it happen, and I wanted to test fucking the doll with a condom, so I did that tonight.

The character in my dreams was not as common as Nancy or Victoria, but I was still quite familiar with her. Mona was a witch, a sorceress, whatever. A woman who did magic using a magic wand.

Mona had never been my sexual partner. I think she started showing up in my dreams when I was about 9, as a composite of several different magic-using characters I had heard of. Even though I sometimes used the word “witch” to describe Mona, she wasn’t a wicked witch. She was a witch because she did magic and followed some of the witch tropes like flying on a broomstick and wearing a pointy hat. In the dreams she appeared in, she was usually my protector against evil magic-users or whatever other danger I and my companions got ourselves into.

Mona was older than me; she was already an adult when I first dreamed of her. That of course did not prohibit us from having sex now that I was an adult, but still we never had. She pretty much only showed up in that one role, unlike Nancy who could show up in many different roles, and Victoria who was there in any dream in which I was, for whatever reason, female.

Despite all that, and despite not remembering a dream where we had sex last night, on Wednesday, July 5 I woke up with my condom-encased dick in Mona. This reassured me that what I was experiencing was real, as well as that it worked if I was wearing a condom. She looked the way she looked in the dreams: an imposing woman, five-eleven and perhaps 200 pounds, with a somewhat pinkish cast to her skin, and hair I’d assumed was dyed since it was the same bright red as the clothes she always wore.

Mona woke up with me, and she didn’t mind at all the position we were in.

“Ooh, Jody, I didn’t realize you felt that way about me!”

“I am not sure that I actually ever did, Mona. But if you enjoyed it, feel free to consider that a form of payment for all the times you protected me.”

“Er, um, maybe?” Mona didn’t seem like she really liked that idea.

“Sorry, it was a joke. I really don’t know how we ended up having sex, but if you liked it we can do it again.”

“I would take you up on that offer.”

“Just not now, because I have to get ready for work.”

I got up out of the bed, noticing that the plain white cotton sheets I’d put on it two days ago had turned into red satin sheets.

“Did you change the sheets, Mona?”

“Huh?”

“They were white when I went to bed.”

“Well, no, I didn’t do that.”

Mona searched the bed a bit before climbing out of it.

“In fact, I don’t seem to have a wand, so my magic will be pretty limited. I think I can still do this.”

She waved her hands around her naked body, and her usual outfit appeared on her, a typical witch’s robe and pointy hat, except they were red rather than black.

“Pretty good for no wand,” I replied. “In fact, really good for doing any magic at all in the real world.”

“The real world, oh, hmm,” Mona said, trailing off in thought.

“Do you understand my situation here?”

Mona concentrated for a moment and then replied, “You live and work in this cold wasteland, and there isn’t much to do here except watch entertainment programs and sex. That is why you continue to have detailed dreams about me and other characters you invented in your childhood.”

“Yes. And I’m going to work today and I need you to stay here and out of trouble. There’s food, a bathroom, and the entertainment you mentioned. Do not have sex with any of the other men here, nor even change their clothes. I’m not really sure what they will think if they see you. Some of them already know I live with a woman, at least some of the time, but I am pretty sure they don’t know that the woman I live with changes from day to day.”

“How many other women have you brought here?”

“So far, only Nancy and Victoria.”

Mona let out a deep laugh. “Victoria? Isn’t that you? Isn’t that just your name for yourself when you’re female?”

Mona was more aware of things than I realized. Of course Mona had come to Victoria’s rescue as often as she’d saved Jody, but those were always in separate dreams, on separate nights. But then, these characters didn’t always stay in separate dreams. I could be Victoria in dreams together with any of the other characters, and Nancy was in a lot of the dreams as well. And Nancy understood my dual nature. A lot of the characters probably knew about one another if they had the collective knowledge of all the dreams they had been in.

I responded, “Yes. It was pretty weird having her here with me at the same time. That never happened in the dreams, but I just had both bodies that day, and by the end of the day I was pretty good with moving them separately and together.”

“Why none of the others?”

“Because this just started happening. My world doesn’t have magic, or at least, it didn’t a week ago. Somehow, it’s now possible for the doll I sleep with to become someone I dreamed about during the night, and stay that way until I sleep again. I’m not aware of this happening to anyone else. At least, I haven’t seen it mentioned on the national or Fairbanks news.”

“Fairbanks?”

“Yes, that’s the nearest real city, but it’s pretty far. Too far for us to visit today. Probably too far for you to visit even if you can fly on a broom.”

“You know those are magical broomsticks, right? If you don’t have magic here, you wouldn’t have one of those, and I didn’t bring one.”

“I was just saying in case your limited wandless magic allowed you to summon one. You might be able to get to the town. It’s got a few thousand people and a couple dozen stores of various types, as opposed to this camp set up by the company, which has one store, one restaurant, the housing management office, a company office, and maybe 40 houses like this that one or two people live in, some of them vacant. That’s all. There’s miles and miles of nothing out there beyond the camp. So if you don’t know where the town is, don’t go without finding out. You’ll just get lost, though at least this time of year you won’t freeze to death.”

“OK, I get it. In any case, I don’t think I can summon anything from further than the closet, so I’m not going to be doing that.”

I went through my morning routine. Mona had already found the cereal and milk by the time I finished showering and dressing, and had it waiting on the table for me. I tried to think of when in all the dreams Mona would have encountered anything like my breakfast. I couldn’t remember eating breakfast with her, but maybe she saw me or one of the other characters eating breakfast. Or maybe, though a witch, she lives less different a life from regular people than I would think.

I showed Mona the TV’s remote control before I went to work, to keep her occupied. She had no problem using it. When I got home, Mona was still there watching something on TV.

“How was work, Jody?” she asked.

“Nobody got hurt,” I replied.

“Do people usually get hurt at your work?”

“No, but given how much went wrong today, I was surprised no one got hurt. None of those wrong things being my fault, I should add.”

I started making dinner, and Mona came over and was glad to help out. She knew surprisingly much about cooking in the real world for someone I would have thought always just waved her wand to make dinner.

While we were eating, Mona set a small red purse down on the table.

“Where did you get the purse?” I asked.

“Oh, one of your other women left it here. I wanted to go shop in your one store, but she didn’t leave any money in it. There was only a tampon and an empty wallet with a card with my picture on it.”

I replied, “Ah, it was Nancy’s purse, but I see you’ve made it yours. She bought that stuff Saturday. Can you show me the card?”

Mona retrieved it and showed me. It looked like a sample ID, but it had Mona’s name and picture.

“Remarkable! Mona, when they make wallets they put a card like this where the ID is supposed to go, to illustrate the function of that card holder. But it would normally just have an outline representing a generic person and a generic name, not your name and picture. Was it like this when you found the purse?”

“Yes.”

I showed her my Alaska driver’s license so she could see what a proper one looked like.

“OK. I can see the difference. Thanks. Also, thank you for having clothes here in my style.”

“Huh?”

She went over and opened the closet and the one drawer with Nancy’s clothes. All the clothes Nancy had bought had been replaced with the bright red of Mona’s outfit.

“Can you change it back?”

“I didn’t change it at all. The only magic I’ve done here was to summon an outfit from the closet and put it on my body.”

“Weird. Maybe you changed it without realizing when you arrived.”

Through the evening, I questioned Mona about how she knew the things she knew. She said she had a maid who cooked her meals, but she was capable and had cooked meals in the past, and some cooking shows she watched today reminded her of those skills. The other things all came from specific dreams I recalled after she mentioned them, including, in one dream, that I had mentioned my typical breakfast to her when in dream-time I’d been with her overnight, and she summoned it for me.

Mona was as eager for sex as I expected, so eager in fact that she didn’t strip. The robe had a belt holding it together, with a wide overlap, but with that removed, it was split all the way down the front. She reached between the two sides of the robe and pulled down the red panties which matched the rest of her outfit, and lay back onto my bed, pulling me with her. I didn’t refuse her. I only managed to stall her long enough for a condom, and she summoned that with her wandless magic. It was red. But as it got late, I closed my eyes and tried to pretend she was Nancy. Though Mona was smarter than I had expected, I needed someone with Nancy’s more common-sense smarts to help me make sense of all that was happening. If I fantasized I was having sex with her, maybe I’d dream about her, too.

It worked! On the morning of Thursday, July 6 Nancy was in bed with me.

She was surprised by the different house, so I had to explain what happened. We were both surprised by her clothing. Instead of Mona’s red robes, she was wearing a blue dress. She was surprised she was dressed at all. So then I had to explain everything that happened with Mona yesterday.

“And then I managed to dream about you when I was trying to do so, and you came today, rather than the doll being here for a day.”

“And why did you pick me?”

“Nancy, you are aware of how things work in the real world. Even though we are sometimes in magical places in dreams, we are more often just where I live. Where we lived, growing up, since I always imagined you lived nearby, even though I apparently never imagined your family. But you know there’s not magic here. There wasn’t, until last weekend when the doll became you for the first time.”

“I see. So you want me to try and understand how far this goes? If there is more to it than just the doll?”

“Yeah, I guess. I don’t expect you to be able to find out everything, but help me understand what you can. There’s more, with your clothes and the sheets changing. Nancy, what’s your bra size?”

“36C.”

“When the doll became Victoria, the bras you bought were 36D.”

I showed her where they were kept now, since she hadn’t been here since the move, and pulled one out.

“And now it is indeed a 36C. I didn’t check the size when Mona was here, but everything was red, including your purse.”

As I said this I noticed the purse sitting on the shelf in the bedroom where I left my wallet and keys and such. It was back to looking like Nancy’s purse, not Mona’s red one.

“Well that sounds like Mona. How much was red?”

“When Mona was here yesterday, your purse and all the clothes turned red. Our bedsheets, too. She claimed she didn’t do it, and that the only magic she was able to perform without her wand was to summon clothes from the closet and have them appear on her body. But I didn’t believe it, because something had to have changed the clothes. And now...”

I opened the closet and the other drawers with her clothes, and wasn’t exactly surprised at the result, having seen the purse had switched back.

“Everything’s back to normal.”

I picked up and opened the purse. Inside was the tampon and wallet, but now the ID had changed to a very realistic looking one.

“Well, not quite normal. Yesterday, this card looked like the sample ID card that comes in wallets when you buy them, but it had Mona’s name and picture on it. Now it looks like a real driver’s license for you. Did you ever put any sort of ID into the wallet?”

“No, I can’t remember doing so.”

I looked at it more closely. Nancy Smithson was her correct name. And the address was ... interesting.

“It looks like you did live near me, and apparently still live there, except I think that number doesn’t exist.”

I hadn’t been back to the old neighborhood in years, so I couldn’t be certain that was still true, but I pulled up the address on Google Maps.

“See, it takes you here, to the end of the street, because that’s as close as it can get. In Street View, you can see 1745 on one side of the street and 1746 on the other. The next houses on the street have smaller numbers. There’s no 1788. I lived at 1742, so I would know there was just the one house past mine and then the end of the street.”

“Huh. Maybe that’s why I can’t remember my family, because they were imaginary.”

“Well, you were my imaginary friend.”

“Not any more, though, right?”

“Right. At least one of the other guys saw you come home with me Saturday. You’re as real now as the wives some of the men here have. Just not as consistently real.”

I got myself ready for work, and Nancy had breakfast waiting for me when I was dressed. I pulled two twenties out of my wallet and handed them to her.

“Oh, you don’t need to pay me,” she said.

“It’s not pay. It’s just in case you need something. Mona wanted to check out the store here in the camp yesterday, but was disappointed to find there was no money in the purse. There isn’t much there to buy, anyway; just food and some essentials like your tampons at double the normal prices. And I bought enough food to last the two of us the whole week, and two of the days I was alone here, so there should be more than enough food already. But if there is some other essential item you forgot, the store might have it and you can buy it.”

“Ah, mad money. Thanks.”

I went over the rest of the things that happened. Nancy was aghast by one revelation.

“You had sex with Victoria!? Isn’t that like, worse than incest?”

“She’s not my sister. She’s ... well, me from a parallel universe, I guess. So I see what you mean, but she didn’t come from my parents. Let’s call them and ask.”

It was better to call them now rather than after work because of the time zones making it later in Florida, so I did.

“Hi Mom, Dad. I have my friend Nancy with me. Nancy, say hi to my parents Anthony and Sue.”

I handed her the phone and she said hi, and when they were done greeting her she handed it back.

“Nancy and I were trying to investigate my family history. You never had any other kids, did you? Or any siblings who might have kids that could be my cousins?”

They both confirmed they didn’t have other kids. Sue had a sister and Anthony had a brother but both died as children. They had no other siblings.

“Thanks. Bye.”

So I told Nancy, “There. I have no siblings and no first cousins. Me having sex with Victoria isn’t incest.”

Nancy still looked a bit skeptical, but I went to work, leaving Nancy to ponder the pile of observations I had collected for her.

She had a list of comments, questions, and ideas for me when I came home.

“First off, there’s no widespread thing reported on the Internet where dolls are changing into formerly fictional characters, people are performing real magic, or anything of that sort. If it’s happening outside of your house, it’s not happening enough to get reported.”

“OK,” I replied.

“Now, if I remember your summary correctly, you were fucking either the doll or the woman it had become as you went to sleep every night since this started except the night the doll was Victoria, and you dreamed of one of the female characters every night.”

“Yes. It’s been you in my dreams every night except the nights before the doll became Victoria and Mona. They were featured in the dreams those nights.”

“OK, then I think you have to be fucking, and you have to dream of someone other than who the doll currently is, if it’s already alive. In other words, you can’t have the same woman here two days in a row.”

I thought for a moment. “OK, that makes sense. I mean, I don’t see the reason for the weird restriction, but I think it matches my experience.”

Nancy continued, “All the things that changed belong to one of the women the doll became, in some way. The things I bought, even though you paid for them, you bought them for me. The sheets, you gave them to Victoria to put on the bed. Victoria and I are just used to normal sheets, and pretty normal clothes, but we know Mona has that serious red thing going on, so everything was red for her. ID can change for every person, and you know where I’m from and I got something realistic for it. Mona is from some other world where they probably don’t have ID, and she got something generic. And while my clothes are normal, did you notice what dress I am wearing?”

“Oh, yeah! That’s the one you wear in a lot of the dreams! You’ve worn it, or ones made from the same fabric, ever since you were a little girl, probably in half the dreams you appeared in.”

“Yes. I didn’t buy one of these, but something I bought turned into this after previously being red for Mona, and whatever Victoria would wear. Now, we can test this by packing this purse with items that might change. You said Mona wanted a magic wand. Let’s give her a fake one. Maybe it’ll be real when she gets here.”

She put a pencil into the purse.

“Nah, she might actually use a pencil. I can do better.”

I ran out to my truck for a moment and came back with an unused package of wooden chopsticks. This came with a meal I once got in town while on the run. I ate the food that time with a plastic fork and did not use the chopsticks, and the unused package had been sitting in the truck ever since. I opened the package and separated the chopsticks.

“A single chopstick,” I announced, giving one to Nancy to put into the purse. I put the other away in a kitchen drawer.

“Great! Any other ideas? The cash and my spare house key are already in here.”

Out of the junk drawer where I’d put the extra chopstick, I pulled an empty key ring. Empty, save for a little bear ornament.

“This was a gift one of my girlfriends in college gave me once. When I was dating her I had all my keys on it, but I moved them over to a key ring with a flashlight that the company gives everybody when they start working here. Useful, since for a few months of the year there is so little daylight that I leave the house and come back at the end of the day both in the dark. We might see what this ornament looks like for each woman.”

I handed it to Nancy, and she put the key on it and tucked it away in her purse.

“Good idea,” she said. “We can probably find more things in town next weekend.”

Nancy and I fucked in bed again that night, but I wasn’t sure who I should summon next. Summoning was how I thought of what was happening now after the experience with Mona. She summons things she owns and certain limited categories of things she can create with her magic, and I summon one woman each day with mine.

I knew I wanted Nancy back Saturday to do more shopping, but tomorrow was an open slot. I could try to bring back Mona again, but it didn’t seem critical to do that right away, and I thought it was more useful to get somebody else. Still, there were so many of these dream characters I hadn’t brought forth yet that I was unable to make a decision, and I just let my dreams wander naturally.

The character I dreamt of that night was one of the many not-quite-human species my wild childhood imagination had invented during the period after I had learned how sex works and was imagining other ways that it could work. Aries was not the ram from the zodiac, but a member of a species called the Sea Men. The pun on semen wasn’t intended at the time I named these people. They’re actually based on the seahorse!

Sea Men (and Sea Women) are a humanoid species with blue skin and some small fins that help them swim. They aren’t mermaids, in the traditional sense. They have two arms and two legs, and they have lungs, not gills. They live either on land near the sea, or near the surface of the water where they can still get air.

Sea Men impregnate Sea Women in the way people do, but that’s the end of where their reproduction resembles that of humans. Some hours after a Sea Woman gets impregnated, she lays an egg. But a lot of species lay eggs; what’s special is how she does it. Before she does so, her vagina grows outward. When it’s done, the uterus is in her pelvis and her cervix is aligned with the surface of her crotch. The entire vagina is outside the body, looking like a long, thick cock. That organ is actually an ovipositor, existing for one purpose only, to lay her egg. Once that’s done, the changes revert in about half the time it took for the organ to take that shape.

The egg is a little larger than a chicken’s egg, about the size of a duck’s egg. It has a leathery shell like a turtle’s egg. If they want to make a child with this egg, the egg is deposited into a sac on the Sea Man’s stomach. Within the environment of the sac, the eggshell dissolves over the course of a day and the embryo within attaches to the Sea Man’s navel, which acts like the placenta in humans, providing nutrients taken from the father’s bloodstream and removing wastes.

I never had a protracted dream covering an entire pregnancy, but I assumed the Sea Man’s gestation was similar to the human nine months. The child grows to that size, anyway. Rather than having to push the child out, though, Sea Men give birth simply when the fetus grows too large to remain in the sac and its head protrudes. The father places the child’s head on one of his breasts, which have developed in the female human style during the pregnancy. The consumption of father’s milk triggers the separation of the child from the father’s navel, and within a day or so of the head protruding, the father pulls the child out and into the world.

The Sea Women mothering these children have breasts, too; laying an egg causes them to develop, and either being around a pregnant Sea Man or continuing to lay eggs regularly causes them to start lactating. Both parents can feed the child after it is born, but the father also takes milk from the mother during the pregnancy to help with the child’s nutrition. Sea Men and Sea Women are as addicted to sex as humans are, simply letting their eggs fall onto the sea floor as a means of contraception, and as a result, many Sea Women have breasts and are lactating all the time.

In my dreams there is a whole civilization of Sea Men, and sometimes I’m one of them (either as Jody or as Victoria) living with them on the shore and in the water. Those dreams were often sexual, and in them I’ve played all the roles: Man fucking woman, woman being fucked, woman laying the egg, man having the egg laid in him, pregnant man, man giving birth. But initially, I knew only a single Sea Woman named Aries.

I started frequently encountering Aries in dreams just after I was first starting to feel sexual sensations and was trying to figure out my sexuality. I liked the sexual encounters with Nancy, but the other dreams like these made me wonder. In these early Aries dreams, Aries was living in a house with me, rather than at the shoreline, I was in my own human male body, and since I didn’t have the stomach sac, Aries was always trying to lay the egg in my ass or down my throat or hide it in my lunch box or some other such stunt.

Getting Aries poking me in the butt made me wonder if I was gay. I was curious what it would feel like in real life. I went so far as to acquire a dildo and a vibrator back then, so I could answer that curiosity. Ultimately, I decided that I was not gay, at least not in that way. Those toys did nothing for me and I stopped using them, in real life, anyway. Victoria used such toys in dreams sometimes; they worked for her.

Once I figured out I wasn’t gay, this became more like a game. The price for fucking Aries was having to play this evasion game with her afterward. Eventually, the egg came out of her, and I won if it didn’t end up going inside me. Of course, since I never went to the bathroom in dreams, if it went up my ass, it was stuck inside me for the rest of that dream. Usually, though, this happened near the end of the dream and I woke up shortly afterward with the need to poop. There was no actual egg to push out, though, because until very recently these dreams were only dreams and didn’t enter my reality.

Aries was in bed with me when I woke up Friday, July 7. In her typical style, before I left for work and after I had explained the situation here to her, Aries asked for sex without the condom so she could lay an egg today.

“Why? What do you plan on doing with the egg?”

“I promise, I just want to leave it with you as a gift. Maybe one of the other women will find a use for it.”

I decided it was a mistake telling Aries about the other women, but I can’t put that genie back in the bottle now.

“OK, but promise me you will hand me the egg when I get home, and it’s not going to be hidden in my food, nor attempted to be implanted inside me, nor inside any of my neighbors.”

“I promise, I will hand you the egg when you get home.”

I was still worried there was going to be some sort of trick, but we did a quickie before I got ready for work.

Remembering that I was trying to do research, I checked her purse. Sea Women didn’t even carry purses, as far as I could remember; they lived in a society very close to nature, eating fish from the sea. I’d never seen them use money, keys, or makeup. They didn’t have tampons since they didn’t menstruate. They didn’t seem to need the things human women might carry in their purses. So the purse was just the same purse, the money and chopstick hadn’t changed, the ornament on the key ring had become a fish, and the ID card was back to looking like a sample card, though it did have her picture and the name Aries printed on it. However, Aries had lived in a house with me some of the time, so she was at least familiar with some aspects of human society, and I explained the money and keys to her.

She had set out a bowl of cereal with milk for me when I got out of the shower. Of course, she didn’t have one, because the Sea Man diet mostly consisted of fish. My cereal tasted unusually sweet, so I asked Aries, “What did you put in my cereal?”

Her response was simply squeezing one of her breasts so that it squirted a bit of milk, which landed neatly in my cereal bowl. Of course, since Aries was always laying eggs, she was lactating all the time. I considered throwing it out, but I knew her milk was safe to drink, just different, and I went ahead and ate what she had prepared.

Seeing her still not eating, I told her, “I don’t have any fresh fish for you, but there is a pond nearby, and some of the men go out and catch fish there sometimes. There should be times during the day when no one is fishing and you can go catch some, in your way. If you decide to go out there, though, you can’t go naked. Um, let me see what you have to wear.”

Nancy hadn’t bought a bathing suit, but when I checked her clothes, everything that wasn’t cold-weather gear had been replaced with bathing suits. I found two parts of a bikini that matched and brought them to Aries, and held each one over the part it was meant to cover. Even though she didn’t normally wear clothes, she had been around humans in my dreams enough to understand. She put the garments on before I left for work.

Aries was true to her word and just handed me the egg when I got home.

“I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to do with this egg.”

“You could eat it. It wouldn’t be cannibalism for you.”

“Um, no. It’s an egg fathered by me. It’s equally as much cannibalism for me to eat it as it would be for you.”

“Oh, sorry.”

But then I had an idea. I wrapped the egg in paper on which I’d written DO NOT EAT.

“Here. I am giving this back to you. Everything belonging to the women is changing each time I bring a different woman here. Maybe for one of the other women, it will be something useful. Go put it in the fridge so it stays fresh until then.”

She came back with a plate with two fish on it. “I have another gift for you, one you shouldn’t have any qualms about.”

“Did you already eat dinner?” I asked her.

“Yes. Both fish are for you.”

“Well, I only need one fish this size for a meal, so I’ll save the other for tomorrow.”

I cooked and ate my fish. I’m sure Aries had simply eaten hers raw, because that was the way of her people.

Aries pleaded for sex without a condom in the evening, but this time I had to deny the request.

“I don’t know when during the night the change happens, and I do not want to risk impregnating one of the other women,” I told her.

“Awwww. But I understand.”

This time I focused on dreaming about Nancy. I wanted her to be the one to fill out more of a wardrobe for my women, and more belongings that might change for each one.

For the second time, I managed to control my dream and summon Nancy by plan on Saturday, July 8.

Nancy’s keychain ornament was a hippo. I thought that was weird until I remembered that was the game that Pansy wouldn’t play with me: Hungry Hungry Hippos. A little kids’ game about trying to control a plastic hippo and have it eat marbles in the middle of the gameboard before the other players’ hippos get them.

The other stuff in the purse was back to how it was for Nancy the last time, and her clothes were Nancy’s, too. When we checked it carefully, we saw none of it was the stuff we’d bought last Saturday; it was all things she had worn in dreams.

We also looked at the egg. It had changed into some other kind of egg, an ordinary white one, but without hatching it, we had no idea how to tell what. We decided to leave it around and see if it changed again for other women.

Having some more evidence to support Nancy’s ideas, when we went out shopping, Nancy decided we should buy the cheapest clothing available that fit her.

She explained, “It’s going to change to clothes appropriate to each other woman. After the change, when I’m here it ends up as the kind of thing I would wear, regardless of how it started. It only has to be something that could believably be mine.”

So we bought about twice as much clothing as the last time at about two-thirds of the total price. But there were more different types of clothing, and other things as well. Anything Nancy thought a typical woman would own that wasn’t too large or expensive, including some basic makeup. There was a lot more room for it in the larger house.

I did my post office and food shopping stops as well; I was likewise able to buy more food now because of the larger fridge in the new house, which was still small for a family refrigerator, but at the small end of the usual size range.

I was pleased with my apparent ability to control who I brought into the world each day by focusing on them as I went to bed. I wanted to get Mona back, as the most useful character to test our theories. Would the chopstick work as a wand for her? And what would the egg become?

Sunday, July 9 I succeeded in bringing her. As I expected, her entire wardrobe was a uniform red, all in rich fabrics and probably with any one item costing as much as everything we’d bought yesterday combined. Even things in the hamper were changed to her style; Mona day was never going to be laundry day! Her purse and ID were also changed as before. Her keychain ornament was some kind of sea monster.

When I showed her the wand, she was stunned.

“Yes, it’s really a magic wand. Not my wand; whatever magic is making these changes wasn’t powerful enough to duplicate it here, I suppose. But it’s a wand I can use to do some magic.”

She demonstrated by laying out breakfast for two on my dining table, not my cereal, but bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs, hash browns, the whole deal.

As we ate, Mona explained, “There are a few fundamental limits on my magic which all the magic-users where I come from are forced to abide by under a sort of magical law, which I won’t be exempt from here, even if I was able to have my usual wand. First off, I can’t make money. It would be too easy to destroy the value of it if I could. Also not substitutes for money like gold and gems. When you see me craft a gold tiara out of thin air, it’s not real gold. Also, I can’t use my magic to steal things. If I summon an existing item, it has to belong to me unless I have permission to use it from the owner. Apparently the clothes you keep here sort of implicitly belong to all the women your power brings here, though, so I can summon those.”

“What about the breakfast? Did you summon it from back home?”

“No, it’s possible for me to create some things. Food, in general, is one of the unrestricted categories I can always create.”

“So could you run a food company just by creating all the food magically?”

“Maybe, but it would be a pretty small food company. Even the magic I am allowed to cast uses up magical energy from a supply I have. The supply is large and replenishes over time, but it’s still limited. If I had my own wand, I could cast bigger spells using more of that magic in one spell, but it wouldn’t make any more total magic available.”

Since I didn’t actually open the fridge for breakfast, it was later when we looked at the egg. I wasn’t even sure it was still an egg, but Mona identified it as the egg of a sea dragon, a creature that exists in her world.

“Is that what your keychain ornament is?”

She found it in her purse.”

“Yes, this is a stylized, cutesy version of a sea dragon. In truth, they are generally dangerous wild animals.”

“Wait, did you save me from one once in one of the dreams?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Thank you for that.”

Mona returned to considering the egg. “Sea dragon eggs are highly valued. If you raise a sea dragon from the egg, it will be a loyal pet and fierce protector. But they have to be kept warm; even human body temperature is barely warm enough, and they’d prefer warmer. This one’s surely dead if it’s been in here overnight.”

“I take it, then, that they do not lay these eggs in the water.”

“Right. They live much of their lives in the water, but they hollow out nests in the sand at the peak of summer and lay one or two eggs there, which are warmed by the heat of the sun during the day and by the dragon’s body at night. And people try to sneak in and steal these eggs when the mother dragon’s out getting food during the day. But it’s dangerous, because it is hard to know when one of them is near but underwater. They can easily kill a man if they catch him, cook him alive, even, and without worry of hurting their eggs.”

“Oh, do sea dragons breathe fire?” That was not something I remembered.

“Steam, actually. Which makes them a lot safer to have them as pets; they aren’t likely to start fires. I assume this was some other egg for the other women, since I know you don’t have dragons in your world.”

“Aries laid the egg, and it just looked like an ordinary chicken’s egg for Nancy, but we couldn’t test it.”

She did something with her wand near the egg, but it seemed to have no effect and she frowned.

“I don’t think I have enough magical power with this wand to transport the egg home. So I’d have to find another way, in addition to you getting me a live one. But if you can help me with those two things, I would be deeply indebted to you and I’d be willing to do quite a lot for you with my magic, subject to its limits.”

So we spent much of the day trying to figure out Mona’s limits here more precisely. I did have sex with her, but we didn’t do it as I went to sleep because it was less useful to me to have a woman here on a day I was working when I couldn’t be with her most of the day (and quite inconvenient if she was Victoria).

I wasn’t especially interested in bringing women in during the week, but I did want to give Nancy more chances to do research for me. So after Monday, July 10 alone, that night I fucked the doll to bring Nancy back on Tuesday, July 11.

Nancy had the bright idea of videoing us in bed to see when the changes occurred. I tried to set it up during the day, but I realized I needed some kind of stand to do it properly. Also, even with the video I took, I realized it would be too big a file to hold 8 hours of continuous video on my phone. So I found a camera on Amazon designed to record time-lapse video, only one or two frames per second, and with a built-in stand, which would do what we wanted. With luck I could pick it up Saturday.

Another notable thing on Tuesday was that Nancy needed a tampon. I suppose that in itself wasn’t all that notable, except in learning that my summoned women can have periods just like any others. That said, I remembered characters in dreams having periods, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. Nancy had expected it, as she had picked those up during our shopping trip a week earlier and they got used for the first time today.

But she revealed the surprising fact that she remembered her time at home alone the days she wasn’t here the last week, though she didn’t remember any such time before that. Specifically, she remembered starting her period on Monday. Until now, she hadn’t remembered any specific event from any time I wasn’t dreaming about her, though it seemed like she implicitly knew some things that she should have known if she grew up at the same time as and down the street from me, even if her house was at an imaginary address on my street.

Tuesday night was even more surprising. I wasn’t fucking Nancy in bed, but I dreamed about her. Specifically, in the dream we were together in my old house, my parents’ house. My parents weren’t there; I don’t know why. It was just us. Nancy wanted to go home, and I followed her up the street. We left my house at 1742, went past my neighbors house at 1746, and then there was somehow one more house on the block I was sure wasn’t there in real life, which was incongruously numbered 1788.

Her parents weren’t there either. I went to look for them, and there simply wasn’t any room for them. Her house looked as big as mine on the outside, but inside there was only a living room, kitchen, bathroom, and one bedroom, Nancy’s. The rest of the house was inaccessible. But Nancy said this was the way she had always remembered it.

At this point Nancy felt the need to change her tampon, and after a moment she called me to come help her.

“Jody, I’m pretty sure this tampon is one I put in at your house. But the string’s been cut. There’s only a little piece of it left inside me.”

She sat at the edge of the toilet seat, legs spread wide, and with her hands holding herself open as well as she could. I could see it inside her, but indeed there was only the part of the string that was inside her.

“Can you push it out with your vaginal muscles?”

“I tried. It’s really wet and soggy and I couldn’t get it to move.”

She demonstrated this for me. It barely moved at all.

“Can you pull it out?” Nancy asked.

She held herself open as wide as she could, and I reached two fingers into her, grasped the cut end of the slick braided cord between my fingers, and tugged at it. It took a few tries, but once it got to the point that the main part of the tampon reached the edge of her body, it all came out in one pull.

“Well I never expected to have to remove your tampon.”

“But that’s a skill you should know,” Nancy pointed out. “Didn’t you ever do that as Victoria?”

“Sure, all the time. But I was her. I never removed another person’s tampon.”

“Right. I’m just glad I had someone here I’ve been intimate with. This could have been super embarrassing otherwise.”

We both washed our hands, and Nancy grabbed a fresh tampon and inserted it without help. Meanwhile, Nancy’s comment made me remember certain dreams. In high school, I had “day in the life” dreams, in which I experienced more or less a whole day from getting out of bed to going to bed again, once or twice a week, about half of them as Victoria and half as Jody. While bathroom functions were excluded, periods were definitely not, though those dreams didn’t fall during Victoria’s period every month.

And Victoria did have regular periods, sort of. When I was Victoria, if I was in my period or it was near, I always knew, though the other dreams that didn’t track the timeline so closely made it hard for me, outside the dreams, to remember when they were. Given that Nancy picked up tampons and panty liners and not the thicker pads, I assumed she used them the same way Victoria did, panty liners on the day the first spots were expected to appear and at the end if she wasn’t sure the period was completely over, and tampons for the main part of the period.

On the morning of Wednesday, July 12, I was in bed with the doll, as I expected since I failed to follow both the fucking rule and the different person rule Nancy suggested. I confirmed the events of the dream by finding the piece of cut tampon-string between the doll’s legs. I placed this next to Nancy’s purse to show her later, but the important thing was that I now knew how to help Mona!

But not quite right away. Wednesday night I dreamed of Nancy again, though the actual dream was unremarkable, and I brought her back into the world Thursday, July 13. She confirmed the events of Tuesday night’s dream; she had experienced it as I did.

She was still confused about her parents, and I got her talking about it.

“I know somebody raised me, fed me, and took me to and from school before I was old enough to walk there on my own, but I sure can’t remember what they looked like, their names, or anything else about them. Later on, when I was in middle school and high school, I remember doing everything on my own. I got up to my alarm clock, showered, dressed, ate breakfast, and walked to school on my own. Sometimes I met you coming out of your house, and we walked to school together. I have some vaguer memories of walking to school with Victoria as well; something is different about those memories, besides that Victoria’s in them, but I can’t explain what.”

“Yeah, I remember walking to school with you in dreams. Some of my dreams were more or less a repeat of the previous day, but you were often in them, and sometimes I was Victoria instead of Jody. I did everything on my own in those dreams, too. When that type of dream fell during Victoria’s period, I remember Victoria using tampons. I don’t actually remember my mom, or Victoria’s mom I suppose, teaching me how to use tampons or any of the other girl stuff, but Victoria knew it.”

“Same,” Nancy commented. “I know my mom must have taught me those things, but I can’t remember it happening. I never saw your mom either. Sometimes we walked home from school together and stopped at your house to play, but I can’t remember your parents ever appearing. We played until we were tired and either I ate with you, or I went home and ate alone.”

I added, “I think in those dreams earlier on, somebody made meals for me, but by high school, it was just like you. I made my own meals, but it wasn’t junk food. My parents in real life had shown me how to cook basic meals, but in the dreams, I cooked everything, the same stuff my mom made for me the previous real day.”

Nancy sighed. “I guess it’s different, having the real-life experience too. I never had that; your dreams were my real life.”

We didn’t have sex Thursday night, to help confirm that’s needed for my ability, and I dreamed of Aries again. She was in my family’s house, the one I’ve been in with Nancy recently. And I decided to explore. There was my bedroom, set up like it had been when I was in high school. And the living room, kitchen, and bathroom. I opened the door to what should have been my parents’ bedroom, and found an empty room. Completely empty, like when you just moved into a new house.

“Huh, my parents’ stuff should have been in here.”

“I’ve never seen your parents in these dreams,” Aries responded.

“Yeah, I somehow didn’t notice that until recently, Aries. But you know what happened the last time I was here?”

“Tell me!”

“Nancy was here, and we walked to her house, which is just two doors up the street. In real life, there’s no house there, and the house next door to mine is the last on the block.”

“Let’s go see if she’s there,” Aries suggested.

We took that short walk, and sure enough, Nancy’s house was there, and she was in it. She joined us and we looked around the neighborhood, and while the other houses were there, they seemed empty. There were lights in some windows, but we couldn’t see anything inside. They all had blinds, or curtains that obscured vision of anything in the house.

Also, we confirmed just how impossible the placement of Nancy’s house was. We went past Nancy’s house and turned the corner. From here, we could see Nancy’s house and the other street’s correct corner house facing the end of the block. Going down the other street behind mine, looking over the back fences between the first two houses, we could see my house and 1746, and not Nancy’s house. The lot for the first house on that side of the block wasn’t any longer than any of the other lots. It was just that the block itself was longer on my side, as if geometry had simply stopped working. From my street, if we did the same bit of looking over the back fences, between 1746 and Nancy’s house, the first two houses on the other side were visible, and between 1746 and my house, those same two houses were still visible! Before this gave us headaches, we went back to my house, and that was the last I remember from that dream.

In accordance with Nancy’s guess about how my power worked, Friday, July 14 I woke up with the doll, and Friday night I did use the doll, and I dreamed of Aries again on purpose to bring her into the doll.

Saturday, July 15, Aries was there, as I planned. At breakfast, I checked my messages and saw that Amazon claimed they were going to deliver my package to the post office by noon. I made Aries get dressed in a one-piece bathing suit, since it provided the most coverage of anything she had that wasn’t clearly meant for cold weather, so that she could go into town with me. It was bad enough that I would have the blue-skinned woman walking beside me; having her be almost naked as well might totally weird people out.

While Aries understood more of the human world than I would expect the average Sea Man would, those dreams with her in my world were almost exclusively at the house, and not going and doing other things, so I expected some of these would be new experiences for her. We went to the arcade to pass the time, and she didn’t do very well because unlike Nancy, this wasn’t really her thing. It was more of a time for me to show her how to play the games rather than competing with her.

I tried to take her clothes shopping, but clothes are really not her thing, either. She wears bathing suits only because she understands public nudity is not generally acceptable by humans. I got her to try some stuff on, but there was nothing she wanted to take home. We ate lunch, went to the post office (my package was there, yay) and I went shopping for food before going back home.

And at no point did anybody seem to think the blue-skinned, finned woman wearing a bathing suit walking along beside me was weird. It wasn’t that they didn’t see her. At one point in the arcade, she dropped a token, which rolled away a bit and a man picked it up and handed it back to her. When I tried clothes shopping, I got one of the employees to recommend something for her, and she was choosing things to go with her blue skin and even aquatic-themed prints. I let her pay for groceries, even though it just meant tapping the card on the terminal, and the cashier handed her the receipt. Everybody acted like Sea Men were just another race or kind of appearance some people have, alongside white, black, Chinese, albino, etc. I wouldn’t have been surprised if this happened in one of my dreams, but this was happening in the real world.

We came home and had sex before dinner so that she could lay an egg for Mona. And I asked her advice about keeping it alive.

“Normally, you’d want to have it literally under someone’s skin. That’s why we lay it directly into the sac. But you say I can’t do that because you don’t want it inside yourself and if I put it inside me it’ll go home with me and not to your next woman. So I think this is best.”

She put the egg between her breasts inside her bathing suit, and kept it there through the time we went to bed.

“That’s good. Mona said the sea dragon egg we’re converting this into also needs to be kept that warm.”

I set up the camera, and set it recording before we went to bed. And of course, I had to be fucking her, and dream about Mona to get the egg to her.

Mona arrived Sunday, July 16 wearing one of her red outfits in bed, since Aries had worn her suit to bed to help keep the egg in place. But she had the egg, and confirmed again it was a sea dragon egg, and alive.

I explained, “Aries kept the egg between her breasts to keep it warm, rather than inside her, because that’s the trick; something inside your body goes home with you. Nancy wore a tampon home that way. And only the part of it actually inside her went with her, so you need to make sure the egg is completely inside.”

“Got it. The egg needs to go inside me, both to keep warm and to go back with me.”

With some effort, she got the egg into her vagina and pushed it two knuckles deep.

“That looks painful,” I commented as she eased one after another of its “spikes” inside her. They were about the size of the pyramidal studs on punk-rockers’ leather jackets, but round rather than square.

“These rigid projections are smooth on the tips, and made of the same material as the rest of the leathery shell. They’re meant to be protection against predators eating the eggs. They’re perfectly safe as long as you don’t puncture them with something hard and sharp, like a tooth. They come out of the mother sea dragon through an orifice no bigger than this, and she never breaks them. It’s perfectly safe to handle this way.”

“What if you break one?”

“The fluid inside stings like hot peppers.”

“I guess no sex tonight, then.”

“Definitely not.”

I shut off the camera, and was going to review it after breakfast, but during breakfast I got an urgent call that I was needed at well 2. So I hurried through breakfast and got myself ready to go out there. I apologized to Mona but explained my work sometimes needs me, and told her I would expect to be back here for dinner.

So it wasn’t until after dinner that I finally got to review the video. And what it showed was that Aries was replaced by the doll as soon as I went to sleep. And she stayed the doll until just as we were waking up she became Mona. That was interesting, and might mean the egg was something else entirely all night long. It looked like during the night Aries’ bathing suit changed into some other clothes, maybe some of the ordinary ones Nancy had bought. And my body was entirely motionless as well, but it still looked like my body.

I visited Mona in the dream that night, at her home, which naturally was a castle as red as her clothes. She had extricated the egg from her body and now kept it in a glass incubator. In the dream (which I now understood to be as real as when she was summoned into the real world) she explained, “It needs to incubate for a couple weeks, and then after it hatches I will want to be here every day to train it. So please don’t summon me during that time. You can visit in dreams like this, as long as I stay in my world the next day. If whatever you ask in exchange for this favor can’t be done in the next two weeks, it should wait until the dragon is trained.”

“I probably won’t even decide on something before then, so I’ll take the extra time to come up with ideas.”

Monday, July 17, my bed-mate was just the doll again. I spent the day back out at well 2 again, but we resolved the problem that day and so they had me take Tuesday off. Since I felt like I had been neglecting her, I focused on dreaming about Victoria that night. Being Victoria had been awkward when I was working, and I’d had other priorities the last two weekends, so this was the first day that was convenient to bring her back since I’d figured out I had some control. It was going to be the first time I had a whole day to enjoy being Victoria.

Did I enjoy being Victoria? I had decided, some time ago, that I wasn’t trans, and I didn’t want to be a woman in real life, but I still had the dreams about being Victoria. But was it just that the fakeness of being cross-dressed that felt wrong to me? I know I didn’t mind being Victoria in the dreams. Bringing her today would give me a chance to see how real life compared to those dreams. That was my goal, to spend today figuring out if I enjoyed being Victoria. If I didn’t, I could let Victoria fade away and focus on bringing the other women into the real world.

The dream I had was oddly boring. Usually when I’m Victoria I’m doing something else in the dream and I just happen to be female, and the female version of me is known as Victoria. Even the first time I brought her into the real world, she was fucking a guy in the dream. This time, Victoria was just there in her house, the same house I’d visited in some recent dreams, except it was Victoria’s house. There were the same rooms in the same arrangement, but in her room there was a closet full of Victoria’s clothes, and certain other items in Jody’s house were replaced by items more appropriate for Victoria. And when I thought about it, I realized that the house was very much like many Victoria dreams in the past. I had needed to dress her many times, and only her clothes were present in those dreams.

In this night’s dream, Nancy was still in her house in the same non-existent location, but the dream wasn’t about her and I didn’t linger there. Aries was nowhere to be found; presumably she was back with her water-dwelling kin. But that was just it. There weren’t any other people. There wasn’t anything to do, really. In the previous dream, the man Victoria was fucking, who I am still not sure was Jody, had been there perhaps because I had just translated my activity in bed into the dream. When I just thought of being Victoria, that’s all I got. I guess if Victoria was bringing stuff back from my world to hers, I’d have it here.

But it made me wonder what would happen if I dreamed Victoria elsewhere. I’d had dreams in which she was a female of the three-gendered Pasthru species and she was still in a normal world, except one that had Pasthrus in it, but other times she was a Sea Woman and living among the Sea Women, or going on adventures in Mona’s magical world, when I was pretty certain this house wouldn’t be part of it. This also made me realize I haven’t dreamed of Pasthrus since this started. But that’s for another time. I wasn’t able to transform the dream, from within that dream, into one of these other places, so the dream ended without much happening.

But I awoke together with Victoria on Tuesday, July 18, as I did on one of the first days after this started happening.

“Good morning, Lovely,” I said to Victoria.

Shifting my focus, I replied coolly with her voice, “Good morning, Jody.”

And there it was, the weird relationship I had with myself. Victoria was a fine partner for Jody, but Victoria doesn’t have quite the same feelings for Jody.

But I wanted this to be Victoria’s day. I’d lived whole days as Victoria in dreams, but how would that compare with real life? Also, the dreams fit 16 hours of a day into 7 or 8 hours of a dream by skipping forward to the interesting parts. At least, the ones I had before very recently could do so. Today I was going to be living the whole thing. So I left Jody in bed, got Victoria up, and took her for a morning visit to the toilet. I know that in dreams when I lived a whole day as Victoria, she should have needed bathroom visits during the day, at least a few of them, but they were always skipped.

I didn’t have any of the trouble I had with her the first time, when manipulating her body in the real world was a new experience. I think that was mostly because I was trying to use both bodies at the same time. When I stopped to learn how to use Victoria’s alone, I figured it out quickly and built up to decent usage of the bodies together by the end of the day.

Next was the shower. This larger house had a shower that, well, it wasn’t made for two, but at least it was large enough I could have imagined Jody and Victoria in there together, soaping each other down. But I don’t think Victoria would want that. No, I took Victoria’s body into the shower and had a long, luxurious shower alone in there, exploring every inch of her body. Not that it was new to me; Victoria had showered in dreams many times before. But the only other time I brought her into the real world was on a work day, and I didn’t feel like I had the time to experiment with showering her before work. So while it was familiar in a way, it was also new because I was feeling her body in the real world. And it felt really nice. Even though I don’t think I would have wanted to be Victoria full-time, I felt comfortable being her, very comfortable. If I had been forced to live the rest of my life as Victoria, I wouldn’t be cursing the event that caused it. It would just be different.

Victoria dried off and I got Jody in front of the toilet, as I could now feel his need was strong. And as I did so, I realized I wasn’t having the slightest difficulty moving both bodies at once. It took me a moment to realize what I’d done. Similar to the way I delved into Victoria’s mind last night to explore her feelings about our sexual experience, I’d gone into her mind and told her to keep drying off the way I had been doing, and she did it. Was it really that easy?

When Jody was in the shower, I directed Victoria to get dressed in the same way, and effortlessly she walked into the bedroom and started looking through her wardrobe. There was a lot more of it, since the second shopping trip with Nancy was after the last time Victoria had been here, and it was the first time I was seeing some of it. Well, in the real world, anyway; every garment I looked at I could remember having seen in dreams before. Most of Victoria’s clothes were still simple and practical, but she had some nicer clothes, and for some reason I decided to dress her in her nicest dress. Or she did; I didn’t consciously pick it. The dress was one that meant she had to wear pantyhose with it, so I struggled with that for a bit, not because I was unfamiliar with them, but just due to the struggle every woman has with them; that had been difficult the few times I had done it in dreams, too. It was definitely easier to let her body do this; I probably would have ripped them doing this the way I had controlled her body during much of her first day here.

Jody took a more no-nonsense shower and was dry and coming into the bedroom while Victoria was still finishing putting her dress on, and he helped her with the zipper in back. I realized that if Victoria was wearing that, Jody had to wear something nice, too, and I’d been practical coming up here and basically had one good outfit which I rarely wore, there being little opportunity for dating here.

As I dressed Jody, and Victoria put on a little makeup, I wondered why I had done that. If this was Victoria’s day, and she didn’t want to date Jody, why did she choose an outfit that was going to make it look like we were out on a date? I wasn’t even sure what we were doing yet, but I sure as heck wasn’t going to spend my day as Jody and Victoria together just sitting around here. People were going to see us, and even though it was Tuesday during the day, we were going to appear to be on a date.

When I looked with my own eyes at Victoria, I saw my date. But when I looked through Victoria’s eyes at Jody, and looked in her mind for her impression of me, I saw a nicely dressed man, but not my date. Jody was someone Victoria could and would get to do anything for her. A servant? A slave? A plaything? Someone for her to manipulate? Was it really possible for Victoria to manipulate me in that way when I could control her every move? It had to be. Why, if she doesn’t see Jody as her date, is she setting up to go on a date with him? Because it certainly is a date: A woman dresses up nice, goes places and does social stuff with a man, eats dinner with him, and then maybe has sex with him... that’s exactly a date. I’ve been on dates with women, both in the real world and with Nancy in dreams. Victoria had also been on dates in dreams, though they were with Nancy rather than with a man. Even if I had only arranged to be with Victoria last night, and only just now arranged to be with her dressed this way, this was going to be a date.

I was uncertain what was happening, but I still wanted to live a day as Victoria, really being Victoria. If this is who she really is, I decided to cooperate in letting her be that person, even if it means I participate in my own manipulation. And even if Victoria’s mind doesn’t admit it, Victoria and I are going on our first date today.

We went to the dining table and Jody set up breakfast. Not that I felt like I couldn’t do that as Victoria, but because that is how this day is going to be. Jody is going to serve Victoria. Drive her into town and to the places she wants to go. None of it would look out of place if we were dating. We ate together, and Jody cleaned up afterward.

After breakfast, I gathered up my stuff, and Victoria’s, to prepare to go into town. I checked Victoria’s ID, which showed the name Victoria Davis on a state ID, not a driver’s license, with the address where I grew up. The keychain was back to the bear ornament it started out as.

We didn’t go to the arcade this time. While Victoria was probably just as proficient as I was at the games, and it might have been really interesting to see how we did in cooperative games, it wasn’t a place to go dressed like this. Instead, Victoria wanted to go to the spa. There was only one in the small town.

Because we had started out early, even with the time to get to town, the spa wasn’t open yet, so I stopped by the post office and picked up my mail, though there was only one thing since Saturday. When we got back to the spa, we were there when they first opened, and nobody else was waiting. Victoria got her nails done, and even Jody was made to look a little nicer, though with no polish.

We got lunch, and we strolled through the park together. Then we went to a movie at the town’s one theater. Because it was hard to have much of a special dinner in the camp, we ate dinner in the one sorta-nice restaurant in town before coming home.

I hoped this night was going to end with sex. I mentally nudged Victoria that way just as we got the door closed, after arriving home, just as I’d done things like nudge her to get dressed and to find out what she wanted to do in town. What would Victoria do?

I didn’t have to wait. Victoria started a striptease immediately, and Jody could only follow. Was Victoria that eager to have sex? The last time it seemed like Victoria enjoyed it, but more or less her body just tolerated what I was directing it to do. This time was different. She was leading the way to sex. Once I was stripped, Victoria pushed my body down onto the bed, and climbed on top. She really was that eager for sex!

What I realized was different was that when I had only nudged her mind toward it, and let her mind control the actual actions, she went about it totally differently from the way she had when I was controlling every muscle. She was in control. She was the dominant partner in the sex we were having tonight.

This was unlike anything I had done before, as Jody. When I had sex with the doll, naturally I had to lead, but when I had had sex with my girlfriends, or with Nancy in dreams, I was also the one leading in those instances. Nancy might suggest sex, but I took the active role in actually doing it, even when I was Victoria. The only experience I had had that was anywhere close to this was when I was playing keep-away from Aries when she wanted to lay an egg in me, but that was so unlike actual sex that it didn’t compare. I didn’t mind. My body was enjoying the different experience, and I felt intense feelings of enjoyment and satisfaction coming from Victoria. And lust. That part of her mind that was so weakly activated during our previous session was maxed out right now.

As I lay there passively enjoying what I’d set Victoria up to do, I put it all together. The thing I did today, letting Victoria’s mind choose activities, is exactly what she wants. It’s her personality, if it’s possible for her to have one distinct from my own. She wants to be in control. She has no problem having sex with a man, as long as she’s the one choosing how to do it and the one making it happen. My little mental nudge to have sex set her off doing what she already wanted to do tonight, and by not going any further than that, I had allowed her to enjoy it to the fullest.

And I never noticed this before because when I was being Victoria in the dreams, I always drove her body like I did the last time I had her here in real life. It didn’t cause a problem because I was only Victoria at those times, and I only had difficulty doing that when I was trying to drive two bodies that way at the same time. And that’s why Victoria only dated women, because that was me. Jody. I only like women, so that’s who I pursued, even when I was Victoria.

Did I know about Victoria’s personality subconsciously when I started down this path this morning? I decided that I did. Similar things happened in some of my dreams, where I learned real-life facts and skills from the dreams because another character in the dream knew them, or even Victoria herself knew them already when I was being her. Some of these were things I couldn’t possibly have learned in real life, like girl stuff that no real-life mother or girlfriend ever taught me... or I knew it before anyone tried to teach me.

I think these dreams are taking place in some shard of reality, an alternate reality that I am somehow able to access. Maybe several realities. But only so many of them, and that’s why the same characters keep coming back. And maybe somewhere out there, there’s a real Victoria with exactly such a forceful, dominant personality.

But did that explain how Victoria could be a Sea Woman or Nancy could be a Pasthru in some of the dreams? Are those different characters from the ones I’ve brought here or are they somehow the same? Do these different realities... intersect? I needed to find out.

I had time for all this daydreaming in Jody’s mind while Victoria was having fun riding me one way and then the other. I was still in control of Victoria’s body, but I had just let her operate on instinct, and her instinct said she would do anything sexually as long as she was in control. She even put it in her ass at one point. When, as Jody, I experimented with that kind of thing I ultimately determined I didn’t like it, but Victoria enjoyed it! And I also enjoyed the feelings her body got from it, though perhaps only because she was enjoying it so much. Jody enjoyed the sex, too, but Jody had never played such a passive role before, and it was a different experience. At least I knew now that I could be a couple with my other self, as long as she was in control.

The Victoria side of me was so much in control Tuesday night that I couldn’t think about anything else, and I arrived in the dream with her, on her bed in her version of my teenage bedroom, in the same position we’d been in, and that’s all the dream was. Hours and hours of ecstasy. And of course I never went limp. Dream sex. So Wednesday, July 19 I awoke with the doll on top of me.

I took a thorough shower and then went through a normal day at work Wednesday, and came home alone for the evening. I remembered that I wanted to explore the other species, and Pasthrus had come to mind multiple times recently, so that is what I dreamed of Wednesday night.

Pasthrus are a species that have three sexes, male, female, and emale. The male and female look like humans, including their sexual organs. The emales are the middle sex, and look a bit androgynous. The key part of them is their sexual organ, which is neither quite a penis nor quite a vagina. If you don’t look closely, you could mistake their sexual parts for male parts, but there are differences. The penis-like organ doesn’t sprout from the base of the pelvis, but actually hangs from the bottom of an otherwise male-looking scrotum. On the outside, it looks like a large penis, but in the back is an opening. The three genders get together for a single nested sex act with these organs in the way that you can probably imagine, and I did imagine it, before I ever encountered porn of bisexual three-way encounters among humans that superficially resemble this.

But definitely only superficially! The emale is unable to achieve an erection on eir own. (Emales use e/em/eir pronouns.) The penis inserted in back provides the stiffening to make the organ that then goes into the female vagina. At least, that’s what they do to get pregnant. The male ejaculation is required to activate the emale sex cells. This activation shortly afterwards triggers the emale ejaculation, which enters the vagina with some of the cells combined and some of the male and emale cells still trying to find each other. Only the ones that have achieved that first level of fertilization are able to fertilize the egg cell.

But they are a very sex-happy race and any two different genders, or two emales, can and often do get together for what they consider masturbation, because these incomplete sex acts are not capable of leading to pregnancy. With emale-female and emale-emale masturbation, a device that is effectively a dildo is required to stiffen the emale organ.

They have three of each chromosome in their cells rather than two, and XXX, XXY, or XYY sex chromosomes for the three genders. If you do the math, taking one chromosome at random from each of these, you’ll find that 2/9 of the children produced this way are XXX females, 2/9 are XYY males, and 5/9 of them are XXY emales. As a result, the emales are present in great excess. They often remain unmarried (a Pasthru marriage being three people of different genders, of course) and take jobs as servants, dangerous jobs, or ones that require long periods of isolation.

Incidentally, I did this math only after having encountered in my dreams the fact that there were excess emales in Pasthru society. This was another case of learning something in my dreams before I had a chance to learn it in real life. Heck, I don’t think I even knew about how the X and Y chromosomes work in humans when I first learned there were extra emales. After I’d learned about human sex chromosomes and the math behind them, during my next Pasthru dream I somehow knew about the Pasthru sex chromosomes, and after that was when I did the math.

The emales who find better-paying jobs are far more likely to get married, as they are usually expected to be the primary breadwinners of their families. Male and female Pasthrus are expected to be breeders, needing 4.5 children per family on average just to keep the population stable. In families where the male has a real job, they will usually hire an emale servant whose responsibilities include taking care of the children. It’s pretty much unheard of for female Pasthrus to continue working after marriage, and even if they did, they would quit before they started having children.

The emales are also the most sexually liberated gender, as they are the only ones capable of engaging in sexual acts with any other person. It’s accepted for male and female Pasthrus to participate in what Pasthrus call masturbation, either because their third partner is not present or because they haven’t found a third partner yet. However, homosexuality is strictly forbidden among females and males in their society, again, because they are expected to make children. Does it actually happen anyway? I don’t know. I’ve never seen it.

Wednesday night I dreamed of fucking a Nancy who was an emale, which was one way she commonly entered Pasthru dreams, though there were times I was among a whole society of them. And Thursday, July 20, I was face-to-face in bed with this Nancy, our joined organs between us and aimed toward our faces.

I did my morning routine with Nancy following a step behind me, and I had breakfast on the table for em when e arrived in typical emale attire. E was wearing an A-line dress, but one made for a completely flat-chested person.

“So, Nancy, I have to ask: How much of what’s been going on with me in the last few weeks do you remember?”

“All of it. I’ve been living my daily life the week since you last brought me here. I don’t recall when it was I became an emale, but it didn’t really matter there.”

“Because you live alone, apart from the occasional visitors.”

“Right. You came with Aries and we talked for a bit, and Victoria came alone another time, but only stayed briefly.”

“But nobody else. Do you ever see anybody else there?”

“I know I used to. I went to a school full of other kids. With you! You were in my school, Jody.”

“Of course. We did go to school together, in my dreams. Because of that you also know all the other kids I went to grade school with, because I naturally filled the dreams with them.”

“Most of the other kids got fuzzier in later years, when it was mostly you and Victoria and Aries and Mona, and often we were with the other Sea Men or Pasthrus or the Portal People, rather than your schoolmates.”

“And now I have drifted away from all those other kids, quite literally being isolated in the middle of nowhere, and the other kids are completely gone from my dreams. For over a year I have only dreamt of the people who, until this month, lived only in my dreams. And given how you have memory of the times between my dreams now, I think that you are more real than I used to think.”

“But you always wondered about it, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. There were times I learned things in dreams in a way that just didn’t make sense. I couldn’t believe I had subconsciously picked up all that info and just realized it in the dreams. It was hard for me to believe that I was encountering other people, for real, in my dreams, and learning things from them that I had not somehow learned in real life. But now it’s clear that that is exactly what happened, and is still happening. I had Victoria here with me the other day, and you understand that I am Victoria. When she’s here, if I do not will her body to get up out of bed, she will simply lie there all day.”

“Yes. I’ve never actually seen you two together, but I have understood for many years now that Victoria is your name for yourself when you’re female.”

“It was new to me, too, to be together with her. But despite what I just said, it feels like she has some will of her own. For instance, I can direct her to get dressed, and she chooses all her own clothes and puts them on without me having to lead her through every little step. Some of the things I did as Victoria surprised me.”

“Like what?”

“Well, you probably don’t remember Victoria ever dating any men.”

“I don’t remember her dating anyone but me, actually, but it’s probably just because I wasn’t there.”

“Probably. It turns out that she’s not lesbian, though. She’s dominant, sexually. The first time I had her here, when I looked at myself through her eyes while we had sex, it seemed like she didn’t really want me as a sexual partner. I thought it was that she didn’t like men, in the same way that as Jody I’m not gay. But that wasn’t it. That was me, driving her body the way I’d use this body. I don’t go for men, so Victoria didn’t in the dreams.”

“So what happened when you turned the reins over to Victoria?”

“I found out she’s perfectly happy dating me as long as she’s in control. I had a blast as Victoria, doing things Victoria would want to do. And we had great sex at the end of it, but with Victoria in control and Jody just passively lying there and enjoying it.”

Nancy laughed. “And how about the girl skills? You’ve told me you already know everything from being Victoria, but when you had to be Victoria in the real world for a whole day, how did that go?”

“Smooth as silk. When I was driving Victoria’s body the hard way, I knew how to do all the things, though I had to think about it. When I let Victoria do the things, it was just like you would do them, things you’ve done all your life. Victoria put on pantyhose, lipstick, eye shadow, and mascara, perfectly, and hardly thinking about it. All while Jody was showering, drying off, and getting dressed at the same time. I’ve done all of those things as Victoria in dreams before, but I had never done any of them in real life until the last time she was here. The only thing I didn’t do was put in a tampon, and that was just because it’s not her time. I’m not sure when her time is, but she’s only been here twice. I’ll figure it out.”

“I’m sure you will.”

“Crap, I’m late for work. Nancy, can you clean up?”

“No problem.”

In the evening, Nancy described more of the surreal experience she’s had recently outside of my dreams.

“I know, in the past, I lived a real life, but I don’t remember any specific bits of it except when you were there as Jody or Victoria. Since things changed recently, I remember more of it, but those memories are weird. I remember going to the store to buy food. But I don’t remember any other people. No other customers in the store, no cashiers. Did I use one of those self-checkouts? I don’t remember. Where did the money come from? Am I going to work at some kind of job? If so, I can’t remember any of that, either. Maybe there was really nobody there and I just walked out of the store without paying.”

“Mona remembers more about her world. There are sea dragons and a magical covenant that imposes specific limits on how she can use magic.”

“Oh, I remember a lot about the world. My world is your world, or at least a very near copy of it. There are no dragons, but there are giraffes and hippopotamuses and venus flytraps and lots of other pretty weird stuff, even if I have never seen any of those things in person. I remember going to the store, and coming home from the store. I drive a car, though I cannot remember ever having to do any maintenance on it besides stopping for gas once in a while. There were other cars on the road, but I can’t remember anything about their drivers, nor was I ever stuck in traffic or even stopped waiting for a car to go by so I could make a left turn.”

“Weird. But time in dreams is like that; boring bits get glossed over or skipped entirely.”

“So you’re saying I work a boring job?”

“Probably. What’s different is that the dreams are continuous now, even when I’m not dreaming them. I don’t know why. Before, you only remembered things that happened during specific times I was dreaming about you.”

“That seems like what’s happening, yes.”

Nancy and I had sex, or what Pasthrus might have called masturbation, in the evening. And I had an idea what to ask Mona for, and I wanted to not summon her for it, so Nancy and I didn’t go to sleep fucking.

In the dream, I was there with Mona, and I went straight to the point.

“What I’d like, if you can do it, is a portal between my home in Alaska and my dream-home in the world Nancy lives in. My home is two doors down from hers. Um, no, I shouldn’t call it a portal because of the Portal People. Let’s say a doorway.”

“Interesting idea. Doorways like you propose are one of the standard spells magic users learn here, but I’ve never heard of anyone casting one between different worlds! But then, the other magic users don’t know about your other worlds. I could try it, but there’s no chance I would be able to do that with the wand I have there. And no, I thought about smuggling this wand into your world, but it’s far too long.”

She held out her wand, which was much larger than the one created from a chopstick that fit in her purse in my world. It was about 15 inches long, and she pressed it against her body, showing it would have reached up from her crotch to the bottom of her lungs. It would have been impossible to bring into my world whole because it was too long to fit inside her, all the way inside her , unless she did surgery or a trick to make her swell up like she was pregnant. That was too much to ask, and I am not sure I could summon her that way. I imagined bringing only part of it would at best just ruin the wand, and at worst have dangerous magical side-effects. But it also wasn't what I meant to ask.

“No, I mean for you to create the doorway here, within the dream. One end of it is in a dream world, and I don’t know if you can make such a doorway, but I’d like you to try.”

“I can’t make such a doorway remotely. I have to be there at one end of it. But maybe I could if I make a doorway to your dream world first. It will let me confirm I have the right place.”

“Sure. Try that. I give you permission to make such a doorway.”

She waved her wand, and a doorway opened up in a wall near us. She peered in, and then beckoned me to follow her as she stepped through, and looked around.

“Yes, this is the place, as weird and boring as it looks. Now I give you permission to make a doorway from here to my real-world home in Alaska. Oh, I only rent that place; is that fine?”

“It’ll vanish as soon as you lose the legal right to be there. So don’t miss your rent or anything.”

Mona waved her wand again, but what appeared was a completely black rectangle, and the blackness was solid and impenetrable.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I think it’s because you’re sleeping over there. You cannot travel from the dream back to the waking world because you’re already in that world, and I cannot travel from your dream to that world either.”

“But will I be able to use the doorway when I’m awake?”

“I think you should be able to.”

I made one more request from Mona.

“Can you make a doorway to Victoria’s house? It’s basically this same house, but the bedroom has Victoria’s stuff in it.”

“It’s a different world, though. One that Victoria lives in and Jody does not. And I need Victoria’s permission.”

“But I’m Victoria, and I give you permission.”

Mona waved her wand a moment and shook her head. “Nope, you control Victoria’s body, but she’s a separate person from another world.”

“OK. I’m still trying to figure out how this works, but that helps, and makes some of the recent events make sense. But I give you the permission for this side of the doorway when Victoria can ask you to create it from the other side.”

We went back through the doorway that we could use, into Mona’s world. She started to take down the doorway from her castle into my dream-house, but I asked her to keep it. So instead, she created a door in the doorway, which she locked. The last bit of the dream was Mona telling me how the sea dragon egg was going to hatch soon, so I should start my period of not summoning her into my world. Maybe these doorways would give me a way to visit, though the locked door clearly meant she didn’t want me coming and going as I please.

I wasn’t fucking the doll, so when I awoke on Friday, July 21, the doll is all there was. Well, almost... because the doorway was there, and I could walk through it into my dream-house. It was just as I remembered it from the dreams, including last night’s. But I had to go to work, so I didn’t go exploring it much until the evening.

One of the interesting things about my dream-bedroom is that it is basically set up the way it was just before I went off to college, when I was 18. When I checked carefully, though, I discovered that none of the things I still owned were there. I could carry stuff either way across the doorway, but no one thing existed on both sides. The dream-bedroom was full of memories, things I had lost or discarded, and served as a way for me to get those things back.

Many of them I still had in college, but this was the last time they were in the real-life version of this house. Dad was 42 when I was born, and 61 during my freshman year of college when he had a heart attack. After going to Tallahassee initially, he ended up working with a specialist in Jacksonville during his recovery. That was a three-hour drive from home, and Mom moved to an apartment there. When Dad got out of the hospital, he lived with her and they never moved back home. To what I considered home, anyway. Mom told me to take what I wanted of my stuff or it was getting thrown out, and sold the house. Then I moved up to Alaska after college and ended up throwing a lot of it out anyway.

Dad’s better now, but still living with Mom in that apartment. I haven’t visited them since coming up here, in part due to how long it takes to get there and in part due to not having a bed there to sleep in. I could stay in a hotel, but it, well, doesn’t feel like home. This place was home, even if it’s deserted now. And now, it is attached to my home, effectively a part of my home once again.

I had another boring nothing dream of Victoria in her dream-house Friday night as a way of summoning her to be here all day Saturday, July 22. I could make the doorway into Victoria’s dream-house later. Now that I understood Victoria better, I wanted to experience her more.

I showered Victoria first, this time knowing I could simply instruct her to shower and then sit there in her mind enjoying the ride. She had less sensuous a shower than I had with her body last time, but I still felt every part of it. After that, instructing her to get dressed resulted in looking through her wardrobe, and Victoria selected some clothes and put them on, but it wasn’t a date outfit today. Victoria wore jeans and a simple pullover blouse that was only distinguished from my T-shirts by having scalloped sleeves and a little heart applique at the point of the V-neck. So I dressed myself similarly, and went to breakfast with her, a breakfast that Victoria set up.

Why was today so different? Maybe the whole point of the “date” last time was so I’d learn that important aspect of Victoria’s personality. Now we both knew she was the dominant member of our couple and that wasn’t needed.

I figured out pretty quickly, though, as Victoria cleaned up breakfast, that Victoria was curious about the doorway, and she wanted to get through the morning stuff as quickly as possible. She was still getting her way, but this new addition to my house had made her curious about its contents. Admittedly, I hadn’t explored it all myself, and I was curious whether anything would be different when I had Victoria with me. But the curiosity seemed to affect Victoria differently. So it wasn’t even 7 AM when I was following her through the doorway into my dream-house.

With both of me standing there, I could much more easily mentally compare the contents of Jody’s dream-bedroom, which I was looking at now, with the contents of Victoria’s dream-bedroom which I had looked at during the last dream and other dreams of the past. Victoria directed the session, going through my things, and thinking about what the corresponding thing looked like in her room.

Even though she had the same sort of things as me, it seemed like nothing was exactly the same. Unrealistically, the bed was perfectly made, but I had a blanket (what we call a comforter now) that had NFL team logos on it, while Victoria had one with butterflies. I had a comb and Victoria had a hair brush, both blue, interestingly. Most of the little-kid toys were not there, as we had already gotten rid of them by this time, though I could remember some of the ones Victoria had at earlier ages. At this age, I had boxes of some of the more advanced Lego sets that included gears and motors, while Victoria had bins of beads and cord she made bracelets with.

And when I looked for it, there was the dildo and vibrator I had experimented anally with, during the time I was trying to figure out my sexuality and explore everything. Mom had bought them for me when I confided this secret in her and asked for them. Pretty quickly I realized they didn’t do anything for me, but I kept them right where I found them now. I tossed them when I went to college, having decided that chapter of my life was over. My recollection from Victoria’s dreams was that she had multiple dildos and vibrators; I should check that in her dream world.

I spotted a picture of my fifth-grade class on the wall, the last year in elementary school and the last time we had such photos. Looking closely, I realized it was different from the real one, because Nancy was in it. I remembered a similar picture on Victoria’s wall, but I had not looked at it closely enough in the dream to notice who was in it.

Thinking back some more, I remembered a specific dream. Two separate but linked dreams, actually. Victoria had gone shopping with Nancy the weekend before photo day and we spent our allowance buying matching pink dresses with small white flowers on them to wear in the photo. The next time I had a real-worldish Victoria dream, I was getting Victoria ready for school on the morning of photo day, and I had to do all the things: shower, put on panties, bra (11-year-old Victoria had already outgrown an A cup and wore a B), stockings, the dress, my name necklace (matching one Victoria had given Nancy, except that Nancy had more colored beads on the sides of her name since it was shorter), and lipstick and blush, the only makeup Victoria wore then.

That was mere months after Nancy played “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” with Jody in another dream, and the shower during that dream was probably the first time I touched Victoria’s private parts. And somehow even then I didn’t even care. Victoria didn’t masturbate during that dream in the least. Those parts were just something that was there and had to be cleaned with the rest of me. Showering was just an obstacle on the way to dressing up and looking nice for the class photo that day. Surely, Victoria and Nancy should be in those dresses in the photo on her wall, but Victoria had not looked at it that closely during these recent dreams. In my dream world, Nancy wore another of her more typical dresses in the photo. I made a mental note to check that out.

Returning from my daydream to the dream world we were currently standing in, we spent a couple hours going through things, and then we felt the urge to go outside. Nancy seemed not to be home; maybe she was away working her boring job. But we went out to a store, and that’s where it got creepy. There were other people in the store, though it wasn’t crowded. But we couldn’t look at any of them. We couldn’t get a clear image of any faces but our own. And there was never anybody in our way, or standing near us. The entire checkout area was a blur except the self-checkouts, so I paid for our purchases there, and we walked back to the house.

When we went to go back through the doorway for lunch, the items I’d purchased wouldn’t come with us. I realized that was because of Mona’s magical restrictions. The things in Jody’s dream house belonged to me, in a sense, and I could take them through with me. But I’d paid for the new purchases with Jody’s fictional credit card in the dream world, which I’d grabbed on instinct when leaving Jody’s dream house, not having brought my real one in because of how much in a hurry Victoria was to see it. Allowing me to bring those things into the real world was tantamount to conjuring money, and it was prohibited. We could only use them in the dream world. When I checked later, I wasn’t able to bring my real-world credit card through the doorway into the dream world either. The prohibition worked both ways, perhaps.

“What about food?” I wondered. Any sort of food was allowed, according to Mona. We went to a grocery store and bought just enough to make lunch for the two of us, and those items came through with no difficulty. I wondered about eating at a restaurant in the dream world, but we probably wouldn’t get a waiter to notice us or we would have to look at a faceless waiter during the meal. What we did this time was probably best.

I wondered if I could skip the trip into town entirely. I wasn’t expecting any packages or important mail. My bills, apart from what I paid at the camp office for the rental of the house and its utilities, could be paid online. We went back out and bought more food, enough that we wanted a car to bring it back to the house. The car I’d had in high school and college was there; I’d sold it and bought another in Fairbanks rather than try to ship it all the way up here, also buying something I thought better suited for the environment here. But the old car worked in the dream world, and I had the same weird experience on the road that Nancy had described, where there were other cars but never any in my way. Dream traffic.

We filled the fridge. Somebody might wonder where we got some of the items, since they were not available in the store in the town near camp, but I wasn’t planning on sharing them with anybody except my summoned characters. This was saving me some time, and a bit of money, but I think getting a wider variety of food was more important than either.

Before it got too late in the day, while we were in the real world, I called my parents. I didn’t think it made any sense to try that in the dream world; even if I succeeded in contacting them, they probably wouldn’t remember it in the real world. That kind of thing works for Mona and Nancy, but I assume that is only because the dream world is their real world.

When I mentioned that Victoria was with me, my look-alike that was the reason I’d asked if they had any other kids the last time I called, Mom suggested we do it as a video call. So I got the app we used started and Mom set it up for them.

“Wow, she really does look like you!” Dad commented.

“Yeah, I can understand why Nancy thought she might be your sister,” Mom commented.

We didn’t talk long, because Dad was having some sort of health issue that didn’t allow him to talk for long. And I didn’t notice until after the call that Mom had mentioned Nancy. That was unexpected.

All the people in camp knew I had a woman living with me, but they conflated them all in their minds. When Nancy was here, they all acted as if Nancy had been living with me since the start of July. Even if she never left the house, guys I encountered at the work site or in camp might mention her. If I’d summoned Victoria, they’d mention her instead, and likewise for Aries and Mona. One co-worker or another had mentioned each one of them at least once when I knew they hadn’t seen her that day, and nobody had ever mentioned the name of someone not present that day. On the days no woman was here, they’d believe I had a woman here, but seemed to not remember her name, and I’d gotten some “your woman” references on those days. Mom was the first person to mention any of my women by name on a day she wasn’t here, and I wanted to figure out why, so I decided to make more of these calls, on different days, with different summoned characters.

We went out again afterwards to see what other interesting things we could do in our dream hometown. We ended up going to see a movie. In the same weird way, we couldn’t really interact with the people directly, and couldn’t buy a ticket. But nobody kept us from simply walking into one of the theaters, though we had to locate the movie we wanted on our own. Surprisingly, they were showing current films; I halfway expected it to be the ones from senior year of high school. I noted another thing to check later: Had we seen the real film, or just my impression of what would be in it?

Back in the real house, we ate dinner from the dream world food and had sex again, with Victoria still choosing how we did it but not needing to be quite as much in control.

There were more species from my dreams who I had not yet summoned. Some I just thought were not interesting. One species I actively avoided because I couldn’t see how doing so would be anything other than a disaster. That left one potentially interesting species, the portal people.

The portal people appeared in my dreams during my anal experimentation days, though what they did was not, strictly speaking, anal sex. Their shtick is that they had come up with a different solution to the sewage problem. Rather than a system of pipes and waste processing plants and controversy over where those let out, they had genetically engineered their bodies so that they did not need any of that, or even toilets.

They still produce bodily waste. They had engineered the disposal solution. Each person is born with a portal that allows them to dump some of their wastes into another dimension. When requesting the favor from Mona, I’d used the word “portal,” before changing it to “doorway” for clarity, because it was essentially the same thing, a wormhole connecting two different places that were in different universes. Well, maybe where the portal people sent stuff was another universe; I’d never explored it. But Mona knew about these people, and I didn’t want Mona to make a wormhole from my home to the sewage dimension, so I chose my words carefully.

A limitation in the design resulted in each person having only one portal. In men, the portal is in their ass, and they poop through it and into the sewage dimension. They literally poop in their pants and don’t get dirty because it never escapes their bodies.

Women’s portals are a little different. In the relaxed state, the portal covers the urethra and the vagina, and both urine and menstrual fluid go through it. When a woman is sexually excited, her vulva elongates and the portal moves upward along it. Her vagina becomes accessible below the portal, so that she can have sex. Likewise, when she gives birth, the portal is pushed out of the way along with the other organs and the child is born into the world, not into the portal.

The women of this species are also different in that they have an anal penis that they poop through. Is that weird? I don’t know how it feels, since I don’t get to use it in dreams even when I have one. But when portal women poop, or when portal men pee, they insert their penis into any other person’s portal. Those portals are two-sided, and entering from either side goes into the same other dimension. That’s how they get rid of the waste that doesn’t directly leave their body into a portal.

A portal person doesn’t have to link up with a person of the other gender; everybody has an accessible portal that can be used for either kind of waste. You can’t use your own portal this way, though, because the organs don’t reach. While women’s organs are closer together than men’s, they still can’t. In portal people, the anus is a bit further back, more in the position of a tail than an anus, and the other organs a bit further forward, which makes it more practical for two people to connect their organs this way while standing, and more difficult to connect your own two organs.

The resemblance of what portal people do to vaginal or anal sex was how they fit into my alternative-sexuality-exploring phase. I’d be a male portal person in dreams featuring other portal people, usually women, and they would poke their penises into my ass. Not that I could feel it much, because there was no feeling beyond the entrance. It disappeared into the other dimension rather than going any further inside me.

The portal people are very open about it. Using portals in this way is not sex, to them. Sex is still an intimate experience which involves significant foreplay to help the woman open up. Rape is impossible; if a woman does not want sex, her vagina is inaccessible behind the portal, and it cannot be forced open. Anal sex is absolutely impossible; you can only go into the portal.

A portal person might use the portal of a friend or a passing acquaintance or, if desperate, a stranger. The stranger would go along with it because it was a high crime to allow bodily wastes to spill into their world. And you might see two people do this right on the street. It isn’t a thing they feel they have to hide. All their pants and long skirts have front and back flies to make this work; with short skirts, they just lift them up to provide access. They don’t wear underwear, maybe because they don’t care if people see those parts sometimes, but still, their short skirts are never shorter than just above the knee. Skirts, of any length, might be worn by both female and male portal people; it is just a wardrobe choice and not a kind of gender expression.

Children do it too. Infants are fitted with a portable portal over their penis, which is loaned to them by the government. These portals are taken from corpses, as the portals still provide a connection to the other dimension after a person is dead. In normal cases, they do not take them, because the degree of cutting needed to remove the portal is considered desecration of a corpse. But in cases where a body is already mutilated, they do harvest the portals, so they are available in limited numbers. Because of this, they only use them until the children reach the age of about 2, at which point they have their equivalent to potty training, using a parent’s portal to deposit their wastes, or when they get a little older, the portals of their similarly aged friends.

They live in larger family groups which could include multiple married couples as well as unmarried people and children, so even when a wage-earner is out at a job, they still have multiple adults who can use each others’ portals. At work, they use a co-worker’s portal; in school, the children use one another’s.

But to a normal human, what they do every day and often in public looks like sex. I had dreams with both Jody and Victoria as portal people of their respective genders, both of them receiving from portal people of both genders who needed to use the restroom, despite Jody and Victoria’s inability to do so themselves because of the dream restriction.

Saturday night, I dreamed myself with Doris, a portal woman. Doris is a slender, short woman, 5’2”, 120 pounds, with light brown hair. She’s older than Mona, though I’m not sure how much older. I’m not sure if Jody was a portal person or a normal human male in the dream, but at the end of it, I needed to pee, and Doris allowed me to use her portal. And I woke up, because that rule still holds; needing to pee in the dream means needing to pee in real life.

So on the morning of Sunday, July 23, Doris was in bed with me, and I asked, “Doris, am I in your portal?”

“Yes. You aren’t in my vagina, so you must be in the portal.”

“OK, because I really do need to pee, as I did in the dream, and I’d love to take advantage of your portal to do so, the way I never get to do in dreams.”

“Go right ahead. I’m going to do it, too.”

So I did. I peed out a full bladder into her, and just as it always did with these people, it went somewhere else where it was never to be seen again. And she did too, though it was completely hidden away and it was only because she had said it that I knew she had peed at all.

As we got out of bed, I told my companion, “Can you do something for me, Doris?”

“Sure, what is it?”

“Inspect me and find out whether I have a portal. I normally don’t, but the way things are going now, I can’t be sure anymore.”

I turned around and bent over for her, and she inserted a finger into me. From the feeling, I already knew the answer.

“No, it’s just your anus.”

“OK, then, you’re in my world, and if you need to poop, you’ll have to use the toilet like I do.”

“You’ve brought me to your world before, so I am familiar with them.”

Yes, of course I had. My early dreams of these people went into their world, where everyone was a portal person, but later on, when I was over the anal fascination, they showed up along with other characters or alone. For example, I might have a Sea Woman laying an egg into someone’s portal and having it vanish into the mysterious cesspool on the other side. Those dreams typically occurred in my world, or one like it, and usually there was only one portal person in each of those dreams. That person would be forced to use our toilets for the waste that did not go directly into a portal, and Doris had appeared in that role a number of times.

Doris’s wardrobe was exactly as I remembered, with the double-fly clothes. There were indeed no underwear, but they’d been replaced with double-fly casual shorts with elastic waistbands. Those didn’t look like underwear, so the fact that she chose to wear one of those with nothing over it wouldn’t be strange to whoever I saw today.

When I came out of the shower, she was indeed pooping in the toilet, but in her way. She straddled the bowl, facing away from the tank, and with her shorts still on, with her penis sticking out the rear fly. And also, in the manner of her people, she didn’t need any privacy for this act.

“If you do that around any other people, make sure you do it alone, with the door closed. It’s part of our custom here, and will ensure you don’t shock people who’ve never seen an organ like yours.”

“Oh, right.”

“Though if we explore my dream world today, you might not see any other people close enough for it to matter.”

Doris had a confused look, and I explained about the doorway Mona had created for me, and what was on the other side. After breakfast, we went through briefly, and I explained in more detail.

“Notice how you can see people over there but can’t make them out clearly?”

“Yeah, what’s up with that?”

“I think those are representations of real people. They have to be here because the world depends on their existence, but they are not participating in the dream. You can’t interact directly with them.”

“Is this whole thing a dream? I thought we woke up in the real world.”

“Yes, we are real. The house where we woke up is real. But this is the world I come to in my dreams, one of them anyway. That’s what Mona’s doorway connects. We are limited in what we can bring back by rules that Mona’s magic operates under. One of those is that if I buy stuff with dream world money I cannot bring it back, except for certain categories like food.”

“OK. That’s pretty confusing, that you brought me out of a dream into the real world, and then we walked back through a doorway into another of your dreams, but while you are not dreaming.”

“Yes. I am still trying to understand some of it myself.”

We went back into the real world and I had a video call with my parents and introduced Doris. Telling them she was a portal person seemed to mean nothing to them, but I didn’t try to explain because I thought it was too much to explain on a short call. Since this is the first time I’ve brought a portal person here, I have no idea if the others will know about them. When I summon Aries, people of the world know that her species exists. But if you don’t see portal people doing their thing, there’s nothing to distinguish them from normal humans, and if there aren’t other portal people, then no one will see them doing their thing.

We spent the day in the dream world, with me reminiscing about places I remembered while growing up, and explaining some of them to Doris. And I tested out the interaction at a restaurant. Indeed, I could not get service in a sit-down restaurant, but I could place an order for fast food at one of the restaurants that have ordering kiosks and pick up a bag with my number printed on it when it came out. That was weird, because I couldn’t remember restaurants with ordering kiosks when I was in high school, but we found one. But time in the dream world is weird and sometimes seems inconsistent.

I went to bed that night without fucking Doris, and dreamed of Victoria visiting Mona’s castle, so that I could get Mona to set up the other doorway between Victoria’s dream world and Jody’s. Two doorways, actually, since she also made one from her castle into Victoria’s dream world, which she covered with a locked door once we were done, just as she’d done with the other.

When I asked Mona about that, she explained, “It’s not to keep you from visiting me, but to protect you and your dream world from unscrupulous people from my world. That place is tied intimately into your mind, and Jody’s mind, and there are wizards here who could do awful things with that sort of access. It’s in my castle, so I don’t expect intruders, but if one did get in and then through to your dream world, I might not notice. If you actually want to come visit me, just knock. The lock is magical; only I can open it. If you hear no response, it means I am not there. I’ll know who’s there, and open it for you or Jody and your party.”

“Thanks, Mona. Always looking out for us.”

So on Monday, July 24 I had only the doll, and I ventured into Victoria’s world to check a few things, including confirming she had the multiple dildos and vibrators I remembered, and that she and Nancy were in the 5th grade class picture, in the dresses they bought together in that dream. The room didn’t seem different from when I had been there as Victoria within dreams.

That night I dreamed of Nancy to bring her into the real world to let her explore the doorway. I explained this to her on the morning of Tuesday, July 25, and she happily accepted my request to go explore both my dream world and Victoria’s. And just as I was able to enter those worlds from this side, she could as well.

She spent all day in there, and summarized her findings over dinner.

“First off, there wasn’t much surprising to me. I’ve grown up in your dreams with either you or Victoria, and I’ve been in your house many times. Other than the weird absence of your parents and anything belonging to them, and likewise for her parents, there’s nothing weird there. Of course, they never appeared in your dreams, either. Things there look as I remember them.”

“That makes sense. Thanks.”

“I went outside your house as well, and things are fuzzier there. I didn’t spend as much time in the neighborhood. My house was there, but it was empty; naturally, I wasn’t there since I’m here.”

“So, do you think my summoning you here removed you from that world today?”

“Yes, I think that exactly.”

“Mona thought the same would happen, that she can’t be there and here at the same time.”

“I went out exploring quite some ways from your house, and eventually got lost. But when I decided I needed to try to find my way back, I found our neighborhood quickly. So quickly that I’m not sure I know how to find my way back to where I got lost.”

“Hmm.”

I was alone again Wednesday, July 26, but that night, I fucked the doll, intending to bring Nancy back. But, perhaps because of the way I’d recently been thinking that Victoria was romantic with Nancy and never with men in my dreams, I ended up dreaming of Nancy and Victoria. I realized the mistake while I was still in the dream, but I seemed powerless to change it at that point. I hoped it was Nancy I summoned, rather than Victoria.

We were just in Victoria’s house and enjoyed a night of intimacy. When I started having dreams like this early in high school, the lack of a penis to focus on led me to learn to explore all parts of our female bodies. It let me learn how to pleasure a woman and how those things felt to a woman. But now we were both experts at this, and achieved unimaginable heights of pleasure, especially within the dream where we had seemingly limitless stamina.

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

“Nancy?” I inquired.

He stirred and looked at himself.

“I have Nancy’s memories, so I must be Nancy. What did you do to me last night?” Nancy said.

“I didn’t mean to do it!” I protested. “I meant to be Jody in the dream and bring you into the doll, but I was Victoria by accident. I don’t know how that made you male. So take care of it!”

“Wait, is this a work day? Am I in your body? Am I going to have to do your job?”

“Crap!” I shouted.

I found my phone where I would normally leave it, but it had a different case from what I usually had on it, and when I checked, I had a text message.

Victoria, we need you to come out to well 17 in the morning.

Frank

After looking through other messages, I told Nancy, “Apparently, I need to do my job. It looks like we’re in a world today where Victoria got all the education Jody did and took the job Jody did. It probably means I’m the only woman working at the well site.”

“Oh. That’s also no longer just in your dreams.”

“Yeah.”

I had occasionally had dreams since I started the job in which Victoria was doing my job. They were the more recent version of the “day in the life” dreams I had had roughly since puberty, both as Jody and as Victoria. These dreams would start with me getting out of bed, showering, getting dressed, eating breakfast, going to school or work, going to classes or doing work, coming home, and then enjoying my evening. In school, these dreams often relived the classes from the previous day, and I think they helped me get ahead in school since they reinforced things I was learning.

The dreams crammed 16 hours of a waking day into 7 or 8 hours of sleep, so they skipped bits, but the important parts would be there. Of course, I never went to the bathroom in dreams, so if whoever I was did that, it was in a skipped bit. Thankfully, once I was working, the dreams skipped through the boring drive out there and back.

The biggest difference between those dreams and real life was my dream characters would show up in them. Nancy went to school with me through high school. In college, I’d have one of my characters in my dorm room instead of my actual roommate. Since I started working, I’d likewise have one of my characters living in the mobile home with me in the camp, often but not always Nancy, and these dreams would include a few hours out in the field, as me or Victoria, doing the same types of things I normally did, among the guys I usually worked with. Fortunately the guys weren’t hitting on me. At the end of any of those dreams, I’d get ready for bed, and then I’d have to go to the bathroom, and wake up and do it for real as Jody.

There was something indescribable that generally let me tell the dreams apart from reality. Nevertheless, these more realistic dreams were the reason why I checked in so many ways that I was in real life when the characters started being real, confirmations such being able to use the toilet and seeing stuff I bought with the characters present still being here another day when the characters weren’t present.

The lifelike dreams didn’t predict the future, but they could show me things that already existed that I didn’t know yet. Just like I learned what a girl’s private parts looked like in a dream before ever seeing them in real life, sometimes in at-work dreams I found problems with the equipment that were actually present, undiscovered, with the real-life equipment, and more than once I’d been hailed a hero for “finding” these problems the next day.

Today this felt real, and not like one of those dreams, but in any case I showered and got Victoria ready for work as I would normally do in a working-Victoria dream. There were male and female clothes in the closet and dresser, though there were some small differences from what I had seen recently. Victoria’s clothes included more heavyweight work pants and sturdy tailored women’s button-up shirts, the kind made to fit her figure. That made sense if she wore these things out into the oil fields all the time. Nancy followed me in getting ready and dressed in men’s clothes she found where my male clothes would normally have been, though they were a bit more casual than what I normally wore. Jody normally had some of those, but there were more of them in this world where he apparently stayed at the house most days.

Out of instinct, I’d grabbed the wallet and Nancy had grabbed the purse, but we both had second thoughts and opened them. Nancy showed me Victoria’s driver’s license.

“Well at least you’re allowed to drive here.”

I was still Victoria Davis, but now I had an Alaska driver’s license, not an ID from back home. Nancy handed me what we both realized was my purse. The wallet I exchanged for it contained an ID from back home with the same impossible address Nancy normally lived at and a picture matching Nancy’s appearance today, but the name was Nathan Smithson.

“The male me, of course,” Nancy stated. “I can’t remember ever dreaming of being male, myself. Heck, I don’t dream at all. I just show up in your dreams..”

“Nor do I remember dreaming of you as Nathan, even in the dreams when Victoria was working. I don’t know what’s going on now. The last month I’ve been bringing my dreams to life, but this is something else.”

I went back into my phone to figure out where well 17 was; I’d never been there. Fortunately, it was closer than the site I’d been going to, so whatever extra time this confusion had caused didn’t make me late. Though with being summoned to a new site by an overnight message, a little lateness probably would have been acceptable.

Next to where my purse was, I found my keys and a monthly dispenser of birth control pills I realized this version of Victoria must be taking daily. And behind the pill dispenser there was also a ring.

“Nancy, er, Nathan, are we engaged?” I asked.

He looked confused for a moment, and then turned and said confidently, “Oh, yes we are!”

That was weird, but it made me think. Had Victoria been engaged in all my at-work dreams? I couldn’t remember her putting on an engagement ring for the trip out to the wells. Maybe she didn’t have to be, if she was living with someone. We’d all pledged not to poach each others’ partners unless a couple formally declared they were breaking up, and that had never happened in my time here.

I told Nathan, “OK, well, do what you do and help me figure this out!”

I took today’s pill, and I was putting on the ring as Nathan came over to me with a small book.

“This appears to be Victoria’s diary.”

“Interesting,” I commented. “I don’t recall any memory of Victoria writing a diary before, in thousands of hours of her life over many years, even in the dreams when she did my job. Victoria never took birth control pills nor was she engaged, either.”

“But this alt-Victoria did. I wonder if anything else is different,” Nathan responded.

“Let’s go check her dream world.”

Unlike the way I’d set things up, the doorway from Alaska went directly into alt-Victoria’s dream world. Jody’s was accessible via another doorway from there. We went in briefly, and I noticed a few differences from other visits to Victoria’s dream world, including Nathan appearing in the class photo on the wall instead of Nancy. I did find another diary, obvious and out in the open, and older ones stashed in her desk. I handed Nathan the diaries as we returned to the real world, and I went out to the well site.

The work day went smoothly. I had the same status as Jody had had among his co-workers, but everybody remembered me as Victoria. With my experience as Victoria, I didn’t have any problems with the body. The restroom was only a porta-potty, so while I used it a couple times, there was no men’s room/women’s room issue. And the men avoided making a mess, knowing they’d need to use it again, so it wasn’t too bad.

Over dinner, Nathan explained a lot he’d figured out during the day.

“This Victoria grew up as the girl with the active imagination and dreams full of many different characters, including her male self Jody, her imaginary friend Nathan, her wizard friend Manuel, and a number who were not quite human. Both sets of diaries this Victoria kept describe characters with a lot in common with the ones you and I knew from Jody’s dreams, except some of them were gender-swapped. In the real-world diary from this year, she documented how her dream characters started coming to life, which appears to be at the same time it happened for you. It transformed her miserable life here, where she was getting hit on every day at work, into one where she was engaged to either me or Manuel on alternate days, and occasionally Jody on the weekend, but in any of those cases, her co-workers respected that as much as the versions you knew respected that the other men’s wives and girlfriends were off-limits.”

“In other words, they respected it fully,” I commented. “The code of conduct we all signed before even coming up here said we would lay off married and committed employees and their significant others, but single employees were fair game. If anybody’s violated the rule, they’ve managed to keep it secret so far. That was true for me working today as well. Heck, it was true in all the working-Victoria dreams as well, but in those dreams, while she wasn’t engaged, she’d been attached to someone ever since she started working here. In most of those dreams that was you... well, Nancy. But clearly, this other Victoria has a different history.”

“Right. Before she started using the power, Victoria was the only single female in the whole camp, so she was pursued relentlessly. But, just as you discovered for the Victoria you have summoned here previously, her nature made it impossible to like any of those men. She could only be with a man she chose to be with.”

“No doubt, the first day she brought one of the men from her dreams here, it changed the world to one where she was committed and the other men instantly laid off.”

“Pretty much. The first day, the propositions were reduced, but some of the men still didn’t know she had a partner. The second day, like you, she had only her Sybian.”

“It’s a Sybian! Oh, that makes sense.” That was another thing I had learned about only through dreams in which Victoria was in school and other girls were talking about it. At least in this case, there was a time I remembered Victoria learning it rather than the knowledge just showing up in her memory. One of those girls had this brand of ride-on vibrator. I explained to Nancy, “The way she’d use one of those was exactly how she had sex with me the day she was here and I let her control everything. I don’t remember the Victoria in my dreams ever owning one, but she knew of their existence.”

“She augmented it to look like a whole man like you did with your Fleshlight. The third day, she had Jody here, told all those who tried anything she was taken, and moved to the double-wide. She requested the next day off to get a ring, and managed to get me back here to go with her that day. And she has had one of the men here every day since then. She proposed to Manuel and Jody on their next visits with that same ring. Just as you’re living slightly parallel realities here depending on who’s with you, Victoria is living three parallel realities with me, Manuel, and Jody, engaged to each one of them in his reality, and she has shut out all the other characters. No Sea Men, Pasthrus, portal people, and definitely not the analogue of what you did today.”

“So the Victoria who wrote the diaries is exercising control over her dream summonings, as I sometimes do, but I have let them wander a bit, while she has from nearly the beginning summoned who she wanted every day.”

“Right,” Nathan agreed. “She had some dreams early on in which the same two characters were present on consecutive nights, and from getting those two appearing on alternate days in the real world, guessed the no-consecutive-repeat rule about a week after it started, and only spent her second day without a living male partner after she first activated the power.”

“And she has sex with her version of Jody?”

“Yeah, at least twice I recall her writing about doing that, apart from what she does to summon the next day’s guy, of course. So either she doesn’t think it’s incest either, or she doesn’t care.”

“So how did you know so confidently that we were engaged this morning?”

“Your question sparked a connection from me to Nathan’s memories. Just as you can sense some of Victoria’s personality when you are inhabiting her, by being in Nathan, or at least, his proxy, I was able to access his memories. What I got complemented things I read in the diaries, but they are very fragmentary. Maybe if I focus on specific things like being engaged I can get more, but some of the stories in the diaries didn’t spark anything.”

I paused for a moment to see if I could access this Victoria’s memories in the same way, but it didn’t work.

“I don’t think it’s the same for me. I can remember Victoria doing my job from dreams, but I can’t remember Victoria out there being hit on by guys, ever. And heck, all those dreams are from before we figured out the power; I haven’t had one since. The Victoria who wrote the diaries was always being hit on back then.”

“Hmm, you think your relationship to Victoria isn’t the same as the one between Nancy and Nathan? What I did felt the same to me as when I first started being able to access memories of Nancy with Victoria when I was with Jody; those are two different Nancys, but they are pretty much blended at this point from both of us reading each others’ memories.”

“So you think you’ll still have these memories when you’re in your normal body? Assuming, of course, that I can get us back to our normal bodies.”

“Given what I remember about Jody’s Nancy acquiring Victoria’s Nancy’s memories, I think the memories I’ve gone through should stay, assuming we can get back.”

I thought out loud, “OK, let me plan a little. I will assume, for now, that both Victorias are the same for summoning purposes, and both Nancys and Nathan are the same as well. I can test that later. They’re out from being here today, and Mona is out because she’s raising a pet sea dragon by now, so that means I need to choose someone else. Hey, wait! Alt-Victoria, as you called her, never gave Mona, er, Manuel a sea dragon because she never brought Aries here and wouldn’t have been able to fertilize her even if she did.”

“That is my understanding. Though she had all the same characters as you or their gender-swapped equivalents in her dreams growing up, she has only ever brought three men into the real world. Manuel never made doorways for her, or any of that.”

“So it’s interesting that she has greater control over the power, but perhaps less understanding of what it can do.”

“Indeed,” Nathan said.

I went to bed in a sexual position with Nathan. Since he was Nancy, my first dream-world sexual partner ever, he was happy to have sex with me. But I screwed up again. I meant to summon Doris much like I did last time, but I ended up going into their world in the dream. While I was with Doris there, I was in a world where everyone was a portal person, even me. I worried how badly this was going to mess things up.

It started out looking OK. On Friday, July 28, I was Jody, in bed with Doris, and I was in her portal, and used it, like last time. I didn’t have her check me, and went straight to my shower. Somehow I didn’t even notice the missing toilet. It was only when I was trying to get dressed that I realized there was a problem. I couldn’t find any underwear, and when I looked at my pants, I knew what had happened.

“These are my pants. They are men’s jeans; I know the difference between men’s and women’s jeans. And yet they have an extra fly in back. That can only mean one thing.”

I had one hand between my legs with one finger in my butt when Doris came out of the shower.

“Are you a portal person today too, Jody?”

“Yes, I just confirmed it.”

“Cool! I don’t need to go now, though.”

“I need to figure out how extensive it is before I go to work, Doris. My dream yesterday put me in an entirely different world, and I’m afraid this one did too.”

I turned on the TV, and flipped through the channels, past the ones just showing news and talk shows and into the ones that had reruns of old TV series all day, and I found what I was looking for. A show where portal people were being portal people and someone was going to the bathroom through someone else’s portal. They didn’t even completely hide the penis.

Doris set up breakfast while I went on Amazon. There were no underwear available there, men’s or women’s, and all the pants and the skirts longer than knee-length had double flies, usually mentioned as a feature. At Home Depot, you could not buy a toilet. And it finally dawned on me that there was no toilet in my house, either.

“It’s confirmed. I’ve made the entire world be populated with portal people today who live the way you’re used to. So I have to expect the guys will be pissing through other guys’ portals today.”

“And since you don’t have a toilet here, I’m sure I can find one of the other guys’ wives to use if I need to go, or make myself available to them.”

We had breakfast, and I was still needed at well 17 (though they were expecting Jody today) so I had a bit more time, and I pointed out to Doris, “That house, that one, and that one are occupied by gay men who both work at the wells. This one, that one, and the two directly behind ours will have wives or girlfriends who will be here today unless they go to town for supplies. The other double-wides are empty. And Pedro will be at the rental office when he’s not doing other work around the camp; you can find the office with a sign on it over that way.

On the way out of the camp, I passed the rental office and there was a sign attached to the side of the railing of the steps leading to the door. It read “For emergency use only” and something was hanging from it. My mind didn’t process what it was until I came to the office trailer at well 17 and saw the same thing. It was one of the portable portals they put on babies’ penises before they are potty trained. They had them in case somebody needed to go and nobody else was around, or in the camp when everybody was asleep. I had never dreamed of a place like this within the portal world, but it made total sense that they would have this in such an isolated place. And of course they were just hanging there out in the open, because that was their way.

There were five men on the site that day, and I think each man’s portal was used at least once. It was a little weird to me, but I had encountered it enough in dreams to be used to it, and it was mainly weird because I never got to actually piss into a portal myself in the dreams and had only actually used Doris’s the other time I brought her here, and once this morning. But it wasn’t weird at all to the other men, who, in their minds, had grown up always doing it that way.

Doris confirmed in the evening that she’d met all the other women in the camp, and they’d spent much of the day in two of the married couples’ houses.

“I didn’t let anyone else in here, because your dream world has rooms where there should not be any rooms.”

“Crap!” I said. “This is why Mona covered her ends of the doorways. Not to keep me out, but to keep visitors from wandering through. I may need to find something to cover that doorway with.”

When we went to bed, I told Doris, “I need to sleep with my penis in your portal. We could fuck, but I know your people aren’t like some of the more promiscuous ones I bring around here, and it takes a lot of foreplay and some real desire on your part to get to that point.”

“Yes, just use my portal. And I understand. You want to bring one of your other companions here tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” I replied.

I did what I said, but the way Doris had spoken, it actually seemed like she would have been willing to open up her vagina for me. As I was heading to sleep, I pondered the idea; did she really know me well enough for that? Many of the dreams with Doris had been with groups of people, often off in her world where all the people were portal people. But there were some dreams with Doris where it was just the two of us alone, in my house or elsewhere. One, two, three... crap! I think there were at least ten of them. I don’t think I considered those dates because she was older, but if she did, she thought we’d been on at least ten dates, and she was probably more than ready for sex. I guess that made her a cougar. Was that also one of my interests, one I had never recognized? Was that why I so willingly had sex with Mona?

I don’t think so. I think when I first dreamed of Doris, the point was that she was an experienced woman who could show me how the thing they did which was not sex worked. But I pushed these thoughts out of my head. I had something more important to try tonight.

I knew I could summon Doris in a way that my penis was in her portal when she arrived, but was that also intimate enough contact for my power to trigger? That was what I needed to answer tonight, so I blocked her out of my mind by thinking of someone else.

Determined not to screw up this time, I focused on dreaming about Jody and Victoria on a date and got just that. We were in Victoria’s dreamworld, but the doorway was there into mine, and the other covered ones to Mona’s were there too.

We didn’t actually do much, but I used the time to see how far into Victoria’s past I could see this way. And it was what wasn’t there that stood out. There were memories, and more memories of Victoria’s than I could ever remember exploring before. I could actually follow my Victoria back a bit further now in her mind, before I could remember ever having dreamed of being Victoria, though not all the way back to when I first invented Nancy before we had even started school. But this Victoria, the one who I grew up being in dreams, was not, no way, no how, the same as alt-Victoria that I brought into the world the other day. Even if she had some of the same personality traits, it was clear that she followed a different path.

Even early on, things were different. This Victoria went to elementary school and even kindergarten with Nancy and with many of the same kids I did. Pansy was not there, because Nancy had been invented to replace her, to be the friend Pansy had refused to be. The other Victoria we knew only from her diaries had never known either Nancy or Pansy; she had invented Nathan to replace a boy named Peter who spurned her at a similarly young age, and in her dreams she went to school with Nathan. Peter and Nathan were never characters in my life or my dreams.

Alt-Victoria had excelled in school the way I had, gone to college and gotten the same degree I did, and took the same job I did. The Victoria who lived in my dreams all those years did attend those classes, but not consistently. Some of those dreams that covered a day in Victoria’s life, which included time at school if it was a school day, included her going to classes, but they were much more likely to focus on Victoria socializing at lunch than actually learning. On going to and leaving classes rather than on the content of the classes. The exceptions, and there were many of them, were when I had difficulty learning something. In those cases I’d get a complete, detailed repeat of the class session, study session, or whatever was appropriate. The rest of the day, for all I knew Victoria slept through her classes. She did take a full load of classes and I could remember her being in every class I was, at least to enter or leave the classroom, since the start of middle school when I started having that sort of hourly class schedule. But I rarely saw her turning in homework, taking exams, or getting grades.

While trying to explore her school life in the dreamworld, the older she got, the more likely all the real faces were blurred and the only people I could see clearly were the ones solely present in my dreams and the few closest real-life friends I had classes with. Watching Victoria’s memories in college was even more difficult. She never went to class at all except when I needed a refresher on something. She spent plenty of time with Nancy, and sometimes with the other characters, doing stuff on campus. Anything but learning. Somehow she did my job in some dreams, but I didn’t see how she could possibly have gotten hired.

How is it that there are two different Victorias? I certainly didn’t figure out an answer to this before the dream ended and I was lying in bed on the morning of Saturday, July 29, both of me, Jody and Victoria. So that was confirmed; using Doris’s portal was intimate enough to summon someone I dreamed about.

The other times I had Victoria here, we rarely talked to each other. I thought certain thoughts as Victoria or as Jody but even when I seemed to be running Victoria on autopilot, my consciousness was still in both bodies and I knew what we both were thinking whenever I wasn’t intentionally blocking Victoria out to focus on something important, such as driving. The words Victoria said her first day in Pedro’s presence, the words when I woke up with her for the second time, and a few things she said to other people on our outing in town are the only ones I ever uttered with her mouth in real life before today. But today I thought that having a dialogue might help.

“Victoria, before we awoke, I was thinking about the fact that there were occasional dreams of teenage Victoria in school. They weren’t the norm, but they were important because by that time you were going to school with certain specific girls who I never encountered except in those dreams. Do you remember them?”

“I’m trying to remember. I do know the girls you are talking about, but they are hard to recall. I think one of them was named Jessica and she was my closest friend from the group.”

“Yes, Jessica was one of them. Who was it who told you what a Sybian is?”

“Oh, that was Kimmy!”

“They had a third girl they were often with and when you were with the group, the four of you often ate lunch at a table together and shared gossip, which I sometimes found out was also circulating at my school, but I heard it in the dreams first.”

“Cleo! She was actually named Cleopatra but never wanted to be called by that full name, unlike Kimmy who didn’t mind being called Kimberly. Cleo was the mistress of gossip.”

“Now I want you to think about the memories you had that include any of this group.”

“I had several classes with Jessica and Kimmy. Cleo was forbidden from taking classes with any of the rest of us after she got called out for talking in class too often.”

“Good. Keep thinking about those classes. Did you graduate from high school?”

“I think I did. Oh, yes, the four of us have a picture together in the high school yearbook!”

Victoria felt certain her yearbook was here for some reason, so after breakfast, we searched her dream-bedroom for it. I noted that the room was back to being hers, and not alt-Victoria’s; Nancy was present in the class photo rather than Nathan. We found the yearbook among many other things in her closet.

My yearbook wasn’t in my dream-realm, because I had kept it with me. However, when I realized just how tiny the houses here were, it was part of what I stashed in a storage locker in town, so I resolved to go get it today. For that matter, I didn’t need to do that anymore; I had a whole empty room in my dreamworld house where my parents’ stuff was supposed to go, not to mention other rooms and a whole castle in Mona’s world that I could use, so I decided to bring all that stuff back here and shut down the storage locker rental. Before we left, I measured the doorways, using some pencil marks since I only had a regular ruler, not a tape measure. It wasn’t like I was doing regular home-improvement stuff up here!

I drove us to town, and we cleaned out my storage locker. Elsewhere in town I found some vertical art panels I could hang on the wall which were big enough to each completely cover one doorway. They wouldn’t be an exact fit, and wouldn’t fit inside the doorway like a door, but they’d cover them. I checked the mail and did some other errands, and we came home for lunch.

Victoria’s dream-yearbook was weird; many of the photos were blurred just like the people in town. But when we put the two together and leafed through them, the photos cleared up, and in most cases matched photo for photo. Of course, Victoria wasn’t in mine and I wasn’t in hers. Victoria was in photos in places in her yearbook where I was in mine. Where there were other real people with her, they were also in the photos with me, except Pansy in my yearbook was replaced by Nancy in hers, because hers was a dreamworld yearbook and mine was from the real world.

Where Jessica, Kimmy, and Cleo were in pictures in her yearbook, they were in place of three boys, Jeremy, Tim, and Arturo, who had been close friends of mine in high school. So somehow, in addition to the changes with Victoria and Nancy, three other boys had been turned to girls in her world.

“I guess that makes sense, if they were your friends. It doesn’t look like any of them were attached to any boy, but those friends of mine didn’t have girlfriends, either. Jeremy and Arturo came out, just within our group, as a gay couple our junior year, and I already suspected it before that, though they were still in the closet to everyone else.”

“I wonder if Jessica and Cleo were a lesbian couple. Kimmy was the one with the Sybian; maybe she preferred that to guys.”

It was getting increasingly weird talking to my other body, though only for me, as nobody else would know. I spent a good long time exploring Victoria’s memories for more about this group, and anything that might have followed, but didn’t get much. No indication that Jessica and Cleo were lesbians. I saw more of Victoria’s high school classes than I ever remembered from dreams, but there was still nothing more from college.

After a break for dinner, I let Victoria take over for sex. While she bounced on top of me, I thought about how today and last Saturday’s summoning of Victoria had differed from the previous one. It no longer seemed like Victoria was trying to manipulate me. If she was doing it, she was being extremely subtle about it and I didn’t sense it when I looked into her mind. Instead, she and I had found common interests in learning more about how my ability works and about her past.

That night, to test the theory that my Victoria and alt-Victoria were different characters, I tried to bring back alt-Victoria and Nathan by dreaming about Victoria and Nancy, and I did dream about them, but I ended up on Sunday, July 30 as Jody in bed with Nancy. Did that fail because Victoria was here yesterday? Did that mean alt-Victoria was the same as my Victoria after all?

I posed the question to Nancy after catching her up on recent events.

Nancy pointed out. “Remember, alt-Victoria dreamed of Nathan as an imaginary friend, rather than Nancy. But Nancy is in your Victoria’s yearbook, rather than Nathan, so I think the two Victorias must be different. Your Victoria never developed the ability to bring fictional characters from her memory to life by having sex with a doll.”

“But she doesn’t have sex with a doll!” I protested. “If she did, she might have the power, too.”

“Maybe. Hmm, we can’t even test it, because Victoria doesn’t get to sleep in this world. You already proved with the camera that the moment you fall asleep, your partner turns back into the doll. And none of us have ever fallen asleep, not fully, while you’re awake. Even when you left Victoria lying in bed the first day you summoned her, she was awake the whole time.”

“That’s it! That’s the difference. Alt-Victoria exists as a real person in some other world. She actually has the power, and a version of Jody existed only in her mind in that world until she developed the power. My Victoria is just a pale imitation of her.”

“Do you think you were actually alt-Victoria the other day? Or transported yourself to her world?”

“Maybe. But it’s also possible I just got a more faithful imitation. It’s hard for me to know, though. She’s never pulled the real me into her world, unless it was that day, because I’d know.”

“But she has more control over who she summons. She never summoned the real you, because she knows exactly how to summon her version of you.”

“Right. So either I screwed things up the other day for her, too, or I was just a more faithful copy of her than the Victoria I usually summon is.”

“We’ll only know when we next see her diary. But that’s another point to consider. Those diaries were only here and in Victoria’s dream-bedroom the day you were alt-Victoria.”

“If you really brought her here, she might have memories of the experience. The doorways. The discussion we had about alternate selves and multiple universes.”

“I doubt it. I remember being alt-Victoria in this world, but I don’t remember being Jody for a day over in her world, one where she never made doorways. I did get to access alt-Victoria’s dreams through the doorway that day. But yes, when we see her diaries again is when we’ll be able to answer the question of whether I affected her life.”

“Speaking of which, you’ve covered the doorway over.”

“Yeah, I think I did a pretty good job. I had to buy everything including the screwdriver, but the hinges are hidden behind the panels so you wouldn’t even know they are hinged.”

I opened up the panel to show the doorway behind it, and pushed open the panel on the other side. I had installed one in my home in Alaska covering the doorway into my dream-bedroom, two in my dream-bedroom covering both the doorway to Victoria’s and the doorway to the real world, and one in Victoria’s dream-bedroom covering the doorway to Jody’s dream-bedroom. It was now possible to be in any of the rooms without knowing there were magical doorways into other worlds, if you didn’t open them. I didn’t do anything for the doorways into Mona’s world, since they had locked doors that looked like regular doors.

We went through into both dreamworlds, and just like we expected, Nancy’s house was dark and empty in both. It was Nancy who noticed the difference.

“Usually when I come into these dreamworlds, I feel like a foreigner in Victoria’s dreamworld. Today it’s happening in your dreamworld.”

After thinking about it a bit, I suggested, “Maybe you’re Victoria’s Nancy rather than mine.”

Nancy responded, “Yes! That’s it exactly. We’ve read so much of each others’ memories that we are essentially identical now, but it’s still possible for me to tell the difference between us. Today, I have the full run of memories of Victoria growing up with me and I have to delve into what I think of as the other side of me to access memories of being with Jody. I have to do what I usually do to access Victoria memories to access Jody ones.”

“In past summonings I have dreamed about you with Jody, but this time I dreamed about you with Victoria. When I dreamed about that before, I got alt-Victoria and Nathan. But Victoria wasn’t eligible to come today, so I got you.”

“That makes sense,” Nancy acknowledged.

“I’m still curious about this world,” I said. “The yearbooks suggested that the blurred faces were because I didn’t know who the people were, and when I figured out who they were, I could see them. But that’s not something I remember happening in the dreams.”

“But did you have anyone in your dreams you didn’t know?”

“That is a good question, and I am trying to think of a time when I did.”

I realized that usually I didn’t, because they simply weren’t in the dream. Even though I had dreams with real people in them, and sometimes a lot of people, they were the people I knew. My friends, my teachers, and even my enemies, such as bullies at school. I knew who they were, and if I looked them in the face in the dream, I saw their real faces. If they weren’t important, I didn’t look at them at all.

After a few minutes’ thought, I told her, “I’m not sure that I ever did. Let’s test the other theory, and go to the high school, where I should be able to find one of the teachers. Some of the ones I knew should still be there.”

We started walking there, and I let Nancy lead the way while I kept thinking about any time I might have seen the blurred faces in my dreams, and failed. Then we arrived at the school way too soon.

“Huh? Here already?”

“Yeah, here we are,” Nancy replied.

“But it’s more than a mile to the school. It should have taken a lot longer to get here. It’s only been about three minutes... I think.”

“Maybe it’s like the dreams,” Nancy commented. “Time can speed up and skip the boring parts.”

“Even when you are trying to make use of the time,” I muttered, somewhat upset at the way it worked.

We went inside, with nobody stopping us from entering even though I know it’s not like that today. Together we went down the hall and found the room for our high school history teacher, Mr. Rubio. We walked in and stood at the back of the room. Nobody noticed, and Mr. Rubio went on talking. I could see his face. I walked around to the side of the room where I could get a view of the students, and they were all faceless. I beckoned Nancy over so she could see the same thing.

“I’m going to call this idea confirmed,” Nancy said. “We can see a face when we locate someone we know, and any other people we happen to see who we don’t know just look faceless.”

We walked out of the classroom, none of the people inside ever having seemed to notice us.

“Come to think of it, this is Sunday. Why is there a class in session at all?” I commented.

“And it’s summer. There’s a class because you wanted there to be one so we could see Mr. Rubio,” Nancy replied. “In the dream, it’s whatever time you want it to be.”

“Right. Just like in actual dreams. That explains why, when Victoria and I went to go see a movie in the dream world, they were showing current ones, not ones from when I was in high school. I wanted to see a current movie and I did. You said it right, it’s whatever time and whatever year I want it to be here.”

We went back home, picking up some food on the way because Victoria and I got too distracted yesterday to do it, and had dinner and a little sex in the evening.

This reminded me to research that movie Victoria and I watched in the dreamworld. It did appear that we saw the right movie. The major plot points were all right.

I was inspired the next week to experiment further with who I could summon.

I tried to bring Tracy Shanks on Monday, July 31. She was my last girlfriend before coming up to Alaska, the one who broke up with me rather than move here to live with me. But it did not work. I’m guessing this means I can’t summon real people.

I was going to take this opportunity to wash the doll components. Since the time I first created it, I would take the doll apart and wash all the pieces in one of the bags with the laundry service every few weeks to remove all the sweat and worse that got into them, usually just when I noticed the smell. Since I had a woman here instead of the doll most days, and I was thinking about how it had been more than a month since I washed it, I thought to do it today. But it didn’t smell in the least. Either the transformations themselves were cleaning it, or when the summoned characters took showers that was cleaning the doll as well. I guess it’s something I no longer need to worry about.

Tuesday, August 1 I brought Kimmy here. She’s one of Victoria’s high school friends, and she might be real in alt-Victoria’s world. She’s not a real part of this world, though, just like Victoria and both Nancys. Maybe that is it; Tracy is here somewhere on this world and I can’t bring another of her, or kidnap the real one. If that’s right, it might mean bringing back someone who is dead might work, but I had not experienced the death of a young friend and the idea of bringing an old dead person wasn’t appealing at all.

Kimmy was the artistic one out of Victoria’s group of friends, and I had her do some things for me while I worked. I dug out my birth certificate and handed her my Social Security card, and provided her with paper, scissors, and what pens and drawing supplies I had, and I asked her to draw imitations of the documents for herself, with her own information. When I got home, I found the documents she produced were pretty reasonable looking, but you could still tell she had drawn them rather than them being the original documents. The intent was, like the ID, to make something realistic enough that it’ll turn real for the women I summon, or as real as any of them gets. I gave her an envelope and had her fold up the birth certificate like mine was, and she put both documents away in her purse, not her real purse, of course, but the purse all my women shared.

By dreaming of him specifically, I brought Nathan on Wednesday, August 2, without turning myself into alt-Victoria, though it meant I arrived fucking him in the ass and did the same in bed that night. He didn’t really like that, but agreed it was worth doing it. “For science!” he said. His documents looked very real. He had the same address at birth as on his ID card now, which was the same as Nancy’s, and some Social Security number in the same range as mine, so it could have been issued around the same time and place as mine. I couldn’t determine if they were really valid, but they looked real enough at a glance. And his never-seen parents were listed as John and Jane Smithson. Might as well have been John and Jane Doe, I thought.

I couldn’t turn Nathan into Nancy the next day, Thursday, August 3, though; they’re the same character, even though one is male.

After the success with Nathan, on Friday, August 4, I tried summoning alt-Victoria by dreaming about her explicitly, together with another male character, Glen, a portal person known to live in Doris’s group-family in some of my dreams. That worked; Glen arrived fucking me, and I was the Victoria who had to work here.

More specifically, Glen had arrived fucking me in my ass. I immediately noticed that Alt-Victoria had a tampon in today. I assumed this was just how alt-Victoria dealt with periods, and that anal sex was fine for activating the power.

I knew from my experience as Victoria in those lifelike dreams that I’d have to change my tampon immediately after getting up, so I did. It was the first time I had inserted a tampon into a body I was using in real life, but all that experience in dreams made this no trouble at all. I did it as if I’d been doing it for years. Well, while I had been doing it for more than a decade, it was only in dreams, in only some of which I was female, human, and in a realistic enough setting to do so.

The birth control pills also confirmed Victoria was in her period. She was on the 5th of 7 days of the inactive pills that let menstruation happen. Of course, apart from my other visit as alt-Victoria, I’d never taken birth control pills before, but Victoria had friends in high school who were sexually active enough that they did, and from them, via Victoria, I understood how this kind of birth control worked.

I checked that alt-Victoria’s phone, purse, etc. were here and all things agreed that I wasn’t just my Victoria. She had one tampon in her purse already and I added a second to be safe. I also checked that Victoria had a Social Security card and birth certificate where I kept mine. Her Social Security number differed from mine only in the last two digits.

Her birth certificate was surprising, though. Same birthplace as me, but rather than my parents Anthony and Sue Davis, she was born to Fred and Rue Davis. And Rue’s maiden name was the same as my mother’s, Resnick. This meant that Victoria was born to my parents’ siblings who died childless in this universe, but in some other universe where they not only lived, but also married.

This also meant that Nancy was right about one thing: Victoria is not just my cousin, but my double first cousin through both parents, if the people from the other universe are equivalent to the ones here, and us having sex probably is incest, by almost all definitions. Oops. At least, alt-Victoria is my double first cousin, but I can’t imagine my Victoria being any further removed from me. We’ll definitely make sure not to have any children together.

Glen’s birth certificate was in the envelope under his wallet, and it looked realistic enough, but was different and listed a fictional place that must exist in his world. He had some identification cards as well, but they likewise listed places that don’t exist in my world.

It was a cooler day today, and I wanted a light jacket. When I looked for one in Victoria’s closet, I found she had a denim jacket. It was a woman’s denim jacket, clearly, due to the extra space in front for her chest. It had buttons at the bottom on each side that let the waist of the jacket be taken in, and these were already set to take it in one inch of a possible two inches on each side, which made it tight around her waist. The jacket had a fleece lining, and a paisley print fabric was sewn over the shoulder pieces. It was just long enough to cover the waistband of her jeans when she wore jeans that came up to her waist, rather than low-rise jeans. It was exactly the kind of thing I could have imagined buying if I had been shopping for a Victoria who went out into the oil fields, practical while still a bit fashionable. It wasn’t something my Victoria had ever worn in dreams, nor had I seen it in her wardrobe here before, but I already knew that this version of Victoria had some different clothes.

I took a moment to assign Glen a task to read the recent entries in alt-Victoria’s diary, particularly as to what happened 8 days earlier. Was it a normal day for Victoria? Was it crazy? Did I interrupt her life by summoning her that day? Did the creation of the diary in this copy of her world stop the flow of entries into the diary, turning it into something I would have to update myself? He didn’t know everything to the degree that Nancy did, but the life alt-Victoria was living according to the diary we’d read before was simple to explain. With that done, I went to work.

The work day went fine, and after I got home, Glen confirmed there was no interruption in alt-Victoria’s life whatsoever according to her diary entries. In particular, Thursday, July 27th was a normal day for her and there was nothing to indicate the actions I performed that day. Also, he reported that alt-Victoria had planned her weddings, plural, to happen Friday to Sunday, September 15-17, with her parents. She was going to let each one of her three summoned men go through the wedding ceremony with her.

Once he finished that brief report, I practically dragged Glen through the doorway into Victoria’s dream world. The last time I had alt-Victoria here, I saw how Victoria’s dream-bedroom had clearly become the one belonging to this Victoria rather than the one I was used to. So I wanted to explore the rest of that dream world. Glen hadn’t been here before, but I explained things to him as needed, which also forced me to think through them again.

It had seemed like on past visits to the dream world, time changed to whatever time it needed to be for me to do what I wanted. So today I wanted to experiment with that. Could I go look at this Victoria living her life in this world, in high school and college? The answer was, yes and no.

By intending to walk to school at a particular date and time, I could in fact arrive there at that time in the dream world, and see a bunch of familiar faces among the crowd of blurred ones. But not Victoria’s own. A different phenomenon happened any time I entered a scene I should have been in: I took her place. When I did this, I remembered Victoria being in the scene, and without actually walking over to it, I jumped over to where Victoria should have been. Like at the lunch table with her cohort. Or in her seat in class. I could actually interact with other real people when I did this, but only in ways consistent with what Victoria would have been doing at the time. Trying to do otherwise, in effect breaking the fourth wall, caused me to pop out of the scene and I’d be back out in the hallway or wherever I was before joining the scene.

And I could see and recognize a lot of the faces. With over 1000 kids in the high school, naturally I did not know all of them and most of the ones I had only seen in the yearbook weren’t remarkable enough for me to remember them. But there were many I did.

Once I felt I had proved that, I jumped to the senior prom in high school. It turned out that Victoria went with one of the nerds. Not the smart nerds, a category that encompassed Jody and this Victoria, but the socially inept kind of nerds. Except that he wasn’t. Larry was that kind of nerd in my world, but he seemed considerably less so here. Given Victoria’s controlling personality, my guess is that she dated him for a while and trained him to look less inept. One thing that was clear was that Larry was following Victoria’s lead, rather than the other way around, though he managed to do it without looking awkward doing so.

This fit precisely with the picture of Victoria I’d developed. She’d found a guy who either couldn’t get dates, or was too timid to ask, and definitely would never have tried to date a hottie like Victoria, and turned him into the kind of guy she could enjoy being with and enjoy dating. I’m sure plenty of other guys were jealous of Larry, but Victoria had probably turned down those guys already and they very likely didn’t understand why she enjoyed Larry.

Next I tried a much more ambitious time-space jump to look at Victoria in college. Larry wasn’t around, so I assume he didn’t get into this college and she started over with somebody else. By jumping to likely date spots at dances, I found Victoria there with a guy several times, and with a girl once as well, but I didn’t know them and they were faceless. I am not even sure it was the same guy each time. It was hard for me to stick in these moments, face-to-face with someone I couldn’t focus on, so I didn’t get very long with any of them.

Maybe someday I’d figure out who Victoria’s college dates were, but I felt myself getting tired, and before I simply fell asleep right there, I used the walking trick to get us back to Victoria’s dream-house and through the doorways into my current actual house.

For Saturday, August 5, I brought Aries back with a specific idea in mind. After breakfast, and after asking Aries to put on one of her bikinis, I called my parents and set up another video call.

As soon as Aries came into the frame, before I even had a chance to introduce her to my parents, Mom exclaimed, “What the hell is that!”

“I can explain, Mom,” I said.

But Dad interrupted with, “Told you so.”

“Told me what?” I asked.

“I told your mother here that you would develop my power and she didn’t believe me.”

“You have the power, too?”

“Yes, but I only ever summoned your mother with it. Both of your mothers, actually.”

“Say what now?”

“I assume the blue-skinned person behind you is someone from one of your very active dreams, the ones that were so realistic that we had to explain to you what normal people’s dreams are like, as perhaps are the women you have had with you on other calls.”

“OK, yes. All of that is true. But what’s this about you summoning my mother, and two of them?”

“Do you have time for a story?”

“Sure.”

“In high school, I dated a girl named Sue. I also dated her twin sister Rue, but only because they tricked me. Rue had been dating some other boy, and, well, maybe Sue should tell this part.”

Mom added, “Us sisters each had gotten the idea somehow that our sister’s date was better than our own, so one day we tricked them by setting up dates with both of them on the same night and switching places. It didn’t work, though. Both men figured out during the night that we’d done it. Rue’s date Mike was so upset about discovering that he was with Sue that he broke up with Rue. But Anthony was more forgiving, and kept dating Sue.”

Dad continued the story, “But Sue came to me and explained that she wanted to let Rue date me for real since their trick had caused Rue to lose her boyfriend, and with advance knowledge that I would be dating her, I agreed. I kept dating the both of them through the rest of high school, on separate dates, until early in my senior year, when their family was involved in a bad car accident. Their mother survived with loss of her legs below the knees, but the girls were both killed, along with their father.”

If I hadn’t already hypothesized bringing someone back from the dead with my power, it would sound crazy that he said this with her sitting beside him. But now a lot of this was becoming clearer.

Dad continued, “My parents and Rue and Sue’s mother all knew the two girls were sharing me, so they understood why I was suffering double grief over this, though it might have been just as hard for me to go on dating the survivor if only one of them had died. I didn’t date for the rest of high school nor for years afterward. I was too afraid to get into another relationship and to have her stolen from me through some other horrible accident. Even when I did date, the memories and grief kept me from establishing a long-term relationship.”

After what I took to be a brief sob, he went on, “The girls and I had only barely started having sex. Together, we agreed I’d take turns doing it with them, but there were barely any turns. After their deaths, I masturbated thinking about them, but it was only much later, when I went so far as to construct a replica of Sue’s body and fell asleep on it one night that I learned what I could do... that I could bring Sue back.”

Mom and Dad hugged for a bit, I think with more of a sob, before Dad continued his story.

“She only came back for a day, but after being gone for a day she came back again. I was overjoyed, and for weeks I was having her alive with me every other day. One night, Rue appeared in my dreams along with Sue. The next day, when I expected to be alone, Rue appeared alive with me. I kept dreaming about the both of them, and Rue and Sue appeared in the world on alternate days. I realized I could have them both, on alternate days, and I’ve been doing that ever since, with the only interruption being when I had the heart attack. To the rest of the world, this is Sue, as I had them both use that name, for continuity, but it’s really Sue and Rue alternately.”

“How did you manage after the heart attack?”

“Sue and Rue were still in my dreams, but they didn’t come into the real world. I didn’t really get them back until I was out of the hospital. I told you some lie to cover, but the truth was that by the time I got out, nobody remembered Sue being with me, except probably you. A social worker set me up with an apartment, since I still had months of medical appointments there, and they arranged a trip for me to go get my stuff and car. I was mobile enough to walk around and throw stuff into boxes that someone carried for me, or point out heavier stuff I wanted. That included Sue’s stuff and the doll, which was lying there on my bed, barely recognizable to me after decades of not seeing it, but somehow looking as good as new. The next night I brought Sue back in the apartment, and went back to the switching after that.”

I asked Mom, “How did you keep things straight with the two of you switching places all the time?”

“We spend hours together in his dream every night, and we always share all the important details of the day.”

“And one of you gave birth to me?”

Mom spoke up, “It was Sue. And I’m actually Rue, so I cannot tell you about the actual birth, but I can tell you only Sue was pregnant. I wore padding during the later months whenever I left the house so it would look like Sue was pregnant all the time.”

Dad added, “Sue’s water broke one morning as we woke up, and I rushed her to the hospital and she had a relatively easy birth, and nobody ever knew there was any difference compared with any other mother.”

I excused myself and grabbed my birth certificate. I looked for Aries’ as well, but I didn’t see one.

“My birth certificate still says Sue is my mother. When my women swap in and out, other things change with them, primarily but not exclusively with things they own.”

Mom chimed in, “Your birth certificate probably always says Sue because we were both using the name at the time, and in fact still do. Except for you two and Anthony, and my mother, nobody else knows Rue is ever alive. My other official documents say Rue on the days I’m here, but our marriage certificate always says Sue.”

Dad said, “I first noticed this happening with the newspaper article I saved about the accident. It had said that both children died, but when I had Sue here, it changed to say she survived. And when I had Rue here, the article said she survived.”

Now Rue continued, “After he noticed that, we went to my family’s grave site and saw the same thing there. My father’s grave, and my sister’s. Or my grave when my sister’s here. I very hesitantly made contact with my mother, who scolded me for not calling in so long. We kept in touch regularly after that, both of us, whoever was here, and she acted like it was normal for whichever of us was here to be the one alive whenever we did. Both me and Sue asked her to send my official documents to where Anthony was living, but we only ever received one set. They change back and forth depending on who’s here.”

I took this as a good point to start telling my own story.

“I’ve noticed this behavior with stuff changing between my summonings, but I’ve been summoning several very different people, so the changes are larger. For instance, Mona, who you haven’t met yet, always dresses all in red, and so all the clothes I bought for Nancy, which later became Victoria’s clothes, became Mona’s clothes when I summoned her, all in the same bright red color.”

“Just how many women have you been summoning?” Dad asked.

“Some of them were experiments to test the limits of my power, but excluding those, and Mona, I think you’ve met them all on our calls.”

“What is she?” Mom asked. “The other women looked normal.”

“Aries is a Sea Woman, an aquatic species that spends a significant amount of time in the water. When I asked you about dreams, it was not just because I started having longer and more realistic dreams like I told you. That happened, but I also had dreams where I was with these people. Sometimes I was among a whole society of them, either as me or as one of them, and sometimes I was in the normal world and Aries was with me.”

“All of these women are from your dreams?” Dad asked.

“Yes. I tried summoning my last real-world girlfriend from college, but that didn’t work. I guess it would have worked if she was dead.”

“Tell us about the other women.”

“Nancy was my imaginary friend starting when I was 4. After I got into school and had lots more real friends, I accepted that she was imaginary and stopped pretending to play with her in real life, but she never left my dreams.”

“Oh, I remember that,” Rue said. “I remember you having imaginary play-dates with her when you couldn’t get any of your real friends to play.”

“Next is Victoria, the one who looks like me. She is actually me.”

“Huh?” Dad said.

But Rue replied, “Your trans self.”

“Yes. Not too long after I created Nancy, I started appearing in dreams as a female version of myself, and that version was named Victoria.”

Rue and Dad both broke out laughing, so I stopped, not understanding what they thought was so funny. When she was able, Rue explained, “Sue always wanted a boy and wanted to name him Jody, but I wanted a girl and to name her Victoria. Sue was the one carrying the child, so I guess it’s good she got her way, but Anthony was still going to name the kid Victoria if she came out as a girl. I don’t think I ever told you that, so I think it’s pretty funny you chose that name.”

“The dreams chose it. I didn’t consciously name any of the characters except Nancy, who I had invented as an imaginary friend during times I was awake before she started appearing in dreams, and I don’t know where the name Nancy came from, either. The others appeared in dreams before I ever otherwise imagined them, and all the characters were already named when they did.”

“Interesting,” Dad said.

“And that wasn’t the only bit of knowledge that seemed to come from nowhere in dreams. These dreams where I was female were very detailed. Sometimes Victoria had to shower and dress herself. I got to know my female body really well, before I ever even started dating, and that made me think I was trans, enough to eventually test out the idea in the real world.”

Rue replied, “I let you borrow some of my clothes to test out the idea, and one day I made you up to look passably female and you went out for a day with me on errands. But you decided you weren’t actually trans, despite the dreams.”

Dad said, “Huh. I don’t remember that.”

“It was during the summer. You were working. Sue and I mentioned it in our dream sessions. Sue was actually the one who took dressed-up Jody with her that one day, but we share our experiences so much that I ‘remember’ most of the things Sue did and vice versa, and we both helped Jody dress up. Jody insisted I call her Victoria while she was dressed that way, including many days it was just at the house with the two of us there. Jody did it three weeks straight Monday to Friday, but after the day out with Sue, decided it just didn’t work, and only did it a few times after that. By the end of that summer Jody gave up on the idea completely.”

“Huh, OK. My memory used to be really good, but since my health issues started, I’ve forgotten a lot. I apologize for forgetting this.”

“There was another time Jody thought he was gay and I got him a dildo and a vibrator for his butt, but that didn’t work out...”

Dad interrupted, “OK, I don’t need to hear any more about that. But I do remember that Jody had another woman. Jody, tell us about her.”

“Doris is another non-human, though her species looks human. Both Doris and Aries have some sexual quirks to their bodies.”

“OK, I don’t need to hear about that, either,” Dad interrupted.

“I understand. TMI.”

Dad looked confused.

“It stands for too much information. People from my generation use that term to stop someone speaking about subjects that are uncomfortable for them, like you just did. But I guess the other important thing I wanted to ask you about is why you two are not affected.”

“Affected by what?” Rue asked.

“Up here, the guys all know I live with a woman, but they don’t remember the different women. They only remember whoever I currently have, even to the point of sometimes mentioning her name, as if she’d been around all the time. A few of the men have used multiple names on different, correct days and I can’t recall anybody I ever gave the names to getting it wrong, even when they haven’t actually seen or been told who I have that day. If I haven’t given the name, either they just say ‘your woman’ or they say they’ve forgotten her name. And Aries does not provoke reactions like you had at the start of this call, Mom.”

“Really?” she asked.

“People might stare a little, but they only treat her the way someone would treat someone of another race. People seeing her for the first time might react the way someone does the first time they see one of those Indian women with the dot on her forehead, as if they’ve heard of people like that but it’s their first time to see one.”

“Oh, and my reaction was... not like that.”

“I’m not sure if you aren’t affected because of the distance, or for some other reason. But I know you never show up in my dreams, or in my dream world.”

“Dreams, dream world, what’s the difference?” Dad asked.

“Oh, that brings me to Mona. Mona is another character who showed up in my dreams since I was little, and she started out as sorta my fairy godmother. A full-sized human, not a fairy, though, but she’s a woman who does magic and protects me or comes to my rescue in dreams.”

“She does actual magic?”

“Yes. You think what we both do by bringing dead people or fictional people into the real world isn’t magic?”

“Sure, what we do is magic of a sort, son. Go ahead and explain how she relates to your dreams and dream world.”

“Mona does a different kind of magic, so she can do things we do not do, but she also has limitations. By dream world, I mean the place that I most commonly visit in my dreams. It looks like the house I grew up in, mostly, though I can explore beyond the house. I realized it was important for understanding my ability, and after doing a big favor for Mona, what I asked in return was that she set up a doorway for me so I can visit the dream world while awake.”

I spent a good while explaining some of the things I’d figured out about my dream world: How real people I don’t know are blurred. How I can manipulate time within the dream world. How things I owned but discarded in the past are present there. And most importantly, how there is no trace of either of them or their belongings within the house.

“Yikes, you are light-years beyond me! I guess I have a dream-world but I never really investigated it. It’s just a place where I hang out with Rue and Sue while I sleep. Give me some time to think about all this. Call back tomorrow.”

I wasn’t surprised my father wanted to end the call. It was by far the longest call we’d ever had. The call gave me a lot to think about. Aries and I went into my dream world and found Nancy, and we talked for a bit. We walked back to my house, and that’s when we made another discovery. Nancy could walk through the doorway into my house in Alaska, but not the doorway into Victoria’s dream world. For her, it was the same solid black wall we saw when we were in the dream.

“I know you could enter both dream worlds when I summoned you. Maybe it’s because there’s another you over there,” I suggested.

“That makes sense,” Nancy agreed.

Aries and I went into Victoria’s dream world to confirm, and indeed there was another Nancy. We got that Nancy into Victoria’s bedroom. She couldn’t come through the doorway into Jody’s dream world either. After seeing that, we all agreed I had the right explanation.

I commented, “It’s too bad there was so little room in my home in Alaska that I didn’t have room to put two doorways there. It’ll make it harder to let Victoria’s Nancy enter the real world.”

We continued the discussion with me and Aries relaying ideas between the two Nancys.

My Nancy said, “It must be that when you summon me into the doll, it removes me from both dream worlds, because then I can enter both worlds. And I’ve never found myself in either world. But other people you’ve summoned can come visit me in the dream world. Both Victoria and Aries have done so.”

I replied, “Mona also confirmed that when I summoned her, she was removed from her world for the day. Mona has a maid I’ve never seen within the castle who mentioned her absence to her when she was back the next day. That was why she didn’t want to be summoned while training her sea dragon.”

It was Victoria’s Nancy who at one point suggested, “Maybe we can’t see your parents in the dream because your father has the power and your mother is an artifact of the power. The two instances of the power cannot interact in the dream world.”

I relayed the idea to my Nancy, who suggested my interaction with alt-Victoria as a counterexample.

“But did I ever really interact with alt-Victoria? Her diary suggests otherwise. I think I only copied her.”

“So why couldn’t you copy your parents?”

“How could I? Copying them and bringing them into the doll requires first being able to see them in dreams, and I can’t even do that. And we already know I can’t summon living people, anyway. There’s also the this-world versus other-world thing there, too.”

Nancy conceded, “OK, I guess there’s nothing that prevents other-me’s idea from being right.”

Aries went out into the pond and caught fresh fish for lunch, one for each of us. After lunch, Aries wanted to visit Mona in her world, or specifically, she wanted to visit the sea dragon. Nancy wanted to go, too, but there was a debate over which Nancy would go. Ultimately, I decided to take my Nancy, but while we were gone Victoria’s Nancy would see if she could cross over. Not stay, though, because we didn’t want to trap Nancy in Mona’s world.

Aries stripped off her bikini and threw it back into my house. It was clear she was more comfortable without it, and she knew Mona didn’t care about nudity. And then the three of us went up to Mona’s door and knocked. It wasn’t long before Mona opened the door and invited us through into her world.

“How wonderful to see you again, Jody. And Nancy, and Aries. You have the whole crew here today!” she said.

I replied, “Aries is actually summoned. We just brought Nancy in from my dream world.”

“Well I gave you the power to arrange meetings like this. I’m not going to be surprised when you use it.”

“I hope your little sea dragon is doing well.”

“Oh, he is. Let me introduce you all to him.”

She led the way through several rooms. As we reached a door, she handed each of us a bundle of gear. As Mona demonstrated for the rest of us, there were shin guards, armored overshoes that shrank down to fit tightly around our other shoes when Mona tapped them with her wand, and heavy leather gloves with thin metal banding. For Aries, who didn’t have any other shoes on, there were three layers of socks to provide cushioning for her feet against the inner layer of the overshoes.

Mona explained, “Bruno doesn’t have any steam at this age, but he’s starting to develop teeth and I’m still training him not to bite people, so be careful. The gloves and pads are sturdy enough to take anything he can deliver now.”

Then she opened the door and led us to an enclosed area outside with a pond and a beach around it. The little sea dragon, about the size of a small dog, was sitting at the water’s edge and he looked excited to see Mona. As we approached, he got afraid of the rest of us and swam out into the water, almost to the other side.

“Aw, little Bruno is scared of you. Bruno, come here and meet your parents.”

He looked up at Mona upon the command, but didn’t immediately make a move. Mona turned back for a moment and grabbed some lawn chairs that were folded and stored in a rack near where we went outside. She handed one to each of us, then led us over to the beach, where a similar chair was already set up. We unfolded and sat in the chairs she provided, and she sat in the other chair.

Only after she sat down did Bruno swim back across the pond to us, eventually waddling up on the far side of Mona. She petted the animal on the head. I eyed the animal warily, but he seemed determined to stay on the far side of Mona from all the rest of us for now.

“Jody, I want to thank you again for helping me get Bruno. I would have had to pay quite a lot to get one of these here the usual way. And that way is essentially from what you’d think of as a poacher, so your gift is wonderful in several ways.”

“Mona, you’ve helped me immensely with the doorways. I really feel like I’m starting to get a handle on just what I can do with my power.”

We sat and talked a bit more, Mona explaining how we should touch Bruno if he decided to approach us, and other behavior of baby sea dragons in general and of Bruno specifically. Eventually, Bruno did approach us... well, he approached Aries. He backed away if either Nancy or I approached, so we let him be with Aries. After about 5 minutes in which Aries got to pet him and actually cuddle with him more than even Mona thought was safe, but during which time Bruno never attempted to bite Aries, the little sea dragon went back out into the water. So that was our cue to leave.

Before we left Mona’s world entirely, she asked me, “The people you’ve summoned from your and Victoria’s dream worlds can get through the doorways back into the worlds they come from, right?”

“Yes. But today, non-summoned Nancy from my dream world couldn’t go into Victoria’s, or vice versa. I had both of them in their respective dream worlds before bringing my Nancy with me here, and Victoria’s Nancy is supposed to be confirming whether she can cross over while my Nancy is here.”

“That seems like a plausible idea. But there shouldn’t be any reason I can’t come back through the door into my world while summoned, so you’re free to summon me now. I can still come be with Bruno part of the day.”

When we got back into the dream worlds, Victoria’s Nancy confirmed she could enter my dream world while we were in Mona’s world. And now that we were back, she saw a black wall in the doorway once again. I gave Mona that answer at her door before she once again locked the door magically.

The two Nancys, Aries, and I, mentally tired from spending so long figuring out what was really happening with my ability, fell into an orgy, with Aries and I occasionally switching between the two Nancys by crossing the doorway they couldn’t between their two dream worlds. We took a break to eat dinner from dream world food, because Aries didn’t want to get dressed again even with the bikini to go catch more fish. We continued our sexual activity all night afterward. Eventually I sent the two Nancys home, and Aries and I went to bed, exhausted in every way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, you’ve never...”

Nathan paused for a moment in thought before continuing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I fed it to Bruno.”

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

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

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

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

On Tuesday, August 8, I summoned Victoria. It was the first time I’d had my Victoria here on a work day since the first time I brought her here accidentally, and the intent was to see how well my ability to just briefly direct her mind to do things allowed her to do useful stuff while I was working.

This allowed her to tend to her morning bathroom needs and shower with minimal interaction from me. While doing that, she discovered that she was in her period now. It was bound to happen eventually. Of course, that was easily handled, but as we ate breakfast it got me thinking. Four weeks earlier was July 11th, eight days after I had summoned Victoria for the very first time, and seven days before I summoned her again. If she was having periods on a normal cycle regardless of which days of the cycle she was here, I would have missed her previous period within that gap. I was pretty sure now that the other characters all had lives that went on every day while they weren’t here. Of course, Victoria was not there in her dream world on the days I didn’t summon her, so it was possible that she still lived only on days I summoned her, and that this was her first real-world period.

While trying to work this out, I drew a calendar on the first page of a lined, 3-hole-punched notepad, going back to Friday, June 30, the night when falling asleep in the doll allowed me to discover my ability.

Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
					June 30 nobody	July 1 Nancy
July 2 nobody	July 3 Victoria	July 4 nobody	July 5 Mona	July 6 Nancy	July 7 Aries	July 8 Nancy
July 9 Mona	July 10 nobody	July 11 Nancy	July 12 nobody	July 13 Nancy	July 14 nobody	July 15 Aries
July 16 Mona	July 17 nobody	July 18 Victoria	July 19 nobody	July 20 Nancy (emale)	July 21 nobody	July 22 Victoria
July 23 Doris	July 24 nobody	July 25 Nancy	July 26 nobody	July 27 alt-Victoria Nathan	July 28 Doris portal world	July 29 Victoria
July 30 Nancy (Victoria’s)	July 31 nobody	August 1 Kimmy	August 2 Nathan	August 3 nobody	August 4 alt-Victoria Glen	August 5 Aries
August 6 alt-Victoria Nathan Sea World	August 7 Aries	August 8 Victoria

Before I left for work, I managed to remember who I had summoned every day since this started and filled out the calendar. I wrote Monday, July 3 at the top of the second page. I left Victoria with the instruction to write down every event she remembered from that day, the first day she was here, and when she was through, to do the same for the other days I summoned her, starting each day on a new page. Eventually I’d add my own notes and get the other characters to write things up as well, and I’d have my own diary, of sorts. I found a binder I could reuse in my dream world and started it by tearing the calendar page off the pad and putting it in the binder. Maybe I’d make monthly pages like this and find some dividers.

I wasn’t sure how well that was going to work, but it turned out to work very well. During my work breaks I focused more intently on being Victoria and helped think of other incidents from those days. By the time I got home, I had a good record of the events of those four days, from her perspective, and a fifth page for today which was mostly just about her period and doing the writing.

After dinner from dream-world food, I rewarded Victoria by letting her choose the evening’s activity, but it was just sex her way.

On Wednesday, August 9, I summoned Nancy and gave her the same assignment. I was surprised to find myself fucking her in the ass when we awoke, but she explained that she was in her period and pulled down the tampon string she’d tucked inside her. It was interesting to note that she could smuggle it out of the dream world, but it was my magic, not Mona’s, so her restriction didn’t apply. I could, in theory, have one of my characters bring a wad of money or diamonds or something inside a condom in a body cavity like that, similar to the way that I had helped Mona take a sea dragon egg back with her, but that wasn’t why I was doing this.

I started bringing the women in basically out of loneliness, but I now find myself becoming very attached to these characters, women I know better than any of the girlfriends I had in high school or college due to having spent hundreds of nights with them in my dreams. Alt-Victoria did this because having the men there relieved her from being hit on by the guys she works with. Making money off it isn’t a consideration for either of us. Even the extent to which I’d taken food from the dream world was to get more variety than I could here, or for convenience of not driving the two-hour round trip to town, rather than the monetary savings.

Nancy had been here a lot of times, and wasn’t able to finish all of her pages, so when I summoned Mona on Thursday, August 10, that morning I took Nancy’s pages through into my dream world so she could continue updating them. The page for July 30th went into Victoria’s dream world to that Nancy, who was the one here that day and would best remember it. Also, I called my parents before work, briefly, to introduce Mona to them in a quick video call, but that’s all I did with them.

Friday, August 11 I summoned Aries and gave her a turn at writing up her part, and in the evening collected the pages from the Nancys in the dream worlds. And all these evenings I took time to write up the days when I didn’t have someone here with me, or had a different character, and my part of each day as well. By the end of Friday evening, while there were still some gaps, I had a log of at least the basic events that had occurred each day to help me better keep track of what was going on.

Saturday, August 12 I brought Nancy back for the promised call with my parents. In part that was so they could see Nancy, the only one of my regular summonees who they had not seen. And in part it was because she was the brightest and most familiar with the things that had been happening around me. If my parents came up with any interesting questions or information, I thought Nancy was the best one to be able to act on it.

With the assistance of my newly compiled log of events of the past six weeks, I described in various levels of detail, to the extent my parents were comfortable hearing some of it, all the different summonings and the ways I had changed the world for one day. They especially enjoyed hearing about the world of the Sea Men, though I kept the discussion of sex down to a minimum.

They were intrigued by the idea that there was an alt-Victoria, one who grew up in my place and used her power to summon male versions of some of my characters. But again, this was the first they had heard of anything of the sort.

They confirmed they had not encountered portal people or Sea Men apart from my calls, and had no knowledge of my father’s dead brother being alive. Even if they had been affected by my changes to the world, they wouldn’t remember it now, when I had restored the normal state of the world. But they remembered Aries and her unusual appearance, and all the other women I had shown them, while the men in camp conflated all of those into one person. This, along with my mother’s initial reaction to Aries, confirmed they weren’t affected by my changes to the world, but what happened to them when I did that? Was I wrong about what was happening? Am I actually traveling to the other worlds?

We ultimately concluded the only way I was going to find out was to try contacting them from other worlds. Would I get a copy of them like I apparently got of alt-Victoria? Would I get a different version of them who had grown up in that world? Would they be completely missing like in my dreams? When I was alt-Victoria if I called their number would Fred Davis be there instead of Anthony? The only thing that seemed certain is that if I called them from one of those worlds, the ones in the real world would not know I’d called.

After we ended the call and ate lunch, Nancy and I went to visit Mona.

“Are you here to see Aries?”

“Huh?” Nancy and I said in unison.

“She’s out playing with Bruno.”

“How did she get here?” I asked.

“The other day she came to visit me and asked me to create a doorway to her realm so she could come visit Bruno more often. And Bruno loves her, and the time he spends with her is helping Bruno get more used to being around people, so I made it.”

She pointed at something behind me. When I turned to look, I could see she now had three doorways side-by-side with matching doors. She had placed signs reading “Jody,” “Victoria,” and “Aries” above them.

“Does Aries come here every day now?”

“Yes. Either through your door or through hers.”

“Well, we were just visiting, but we might as well go visit Aries as well.”

Mona led us out there, and didn’t require us to wear the protective gear this time but brought a set with her. We saw Aries and Bruno playing in the water, splashing each other and swimming around. When we approached, Aries got out of the water to meet us, and Bruno waddled up behind her.

“I saw you two having a good time out there,” I told Aries.

“Bruno has fully adapted to being around me and I’m encouraging him to meet others as well. Bruno, come meet my friends.”

Aries lay down on the sand facing us in a position that put Bruno on the same side of her as us, and she patted the ground in front of her and close to us. I knelt down to pet the sea dragon. Bruno hesitated for a moment but waddled over to where I could pet him on the head. Bruno pulled his head away from the first touch, instead nuzzling it between Aries’ breasts for a moment, and then it looked like he sucked on one of her nipples for a moment. Aries put one hand between Bruno’s mouth and her breast.

“Not until you let them pet you,” she said, pointing toward us.

“Did Bruno take a bit of your milk?” I asked, uncertain whether that was what I really saw.

“Yes,” Aries replied.

Mona added, “I saw him do it for the first time yesterday, and I’m really surprised by the behavior. Sea dragons do not nurse from their mothers; they do not have breasts and do not produce milk. The young at first take food their mothers have already killed and pre-chewed.”

“And I don’t want him to get used to that because Mona won’t be able to feed him that way, but I’m allowing him to take small sips only as a reward. I’ve also been catching some of the fish from the pond and feeding him bits of them.”

Mona responded, “Well, if I really want to, I can enchant my breasts to lactate, but I’ve got plenty of reasons not to do that. It’s not natural for him and he’s already too big to live just off the milk one person can produce, in addition to the situations I wouldn’t want to be baring my breasts in.”

Aries was still covering her breast and pointing toward me with her other hand, and Bruno reluctantly let me pet him. I stepped back to let Nancy have a turn petting him as well. When Nancy stood up as well, Aries uncovered her breast and the little sea dragon came over and took about a 15-second draw from one breast before Aries cut him off again. At this point he turned back to me, hopeful he could get some more milk if he let me pet him again. I gave him a longer pet and Nancy did too, and by the time we were done, Mona had summoned a fish in front of Aries and she fed him part of the fish instead of her milk. We continued this way for a while until Bruno had had enough of that sort of attention and went back into the pond, and we all decided it was time to leave him there.

I was surprised by Aries’ behavior. I was used to her being a fun-loving jokester, but just now she sounded like a responsible adult. Was that because she felt a motherly instinct toward Bruno? If Bruno could treat her as his mother, then that could work the other way as well, even though his egg’s transformation had caused him to become a pet rather than a Sea Man-human hybrid child. At least, I think that’s what would have been in the egg. I’ve never seen one of those, to my knowledge, but I have guessed such a being could exist ever since Aries and I started having sex in my dreams and that sex led her to produce eggs.

Mona handed Aries a towel as we re-entered the castle, and we went back to the room with the doors. There, I asked Aries, “Mona told me she made a doorway to your world, but where does it go? Does it just open into a free-standing arch? You don’t have houses there.”

“Oh, we have houses, but they are smaller than yours.”

Mona opened the door and Aries led me and Nancy through it into her house. The house was similar to the tiny city houses I’d seen in the dream world of alt-Victoria the Sea Woman, but they were scattered haphazardly in an area with dirt and a bit of sand, and sparse grass. As in those houses, one wall of the house had a large window with a TV behind it, and an inner wall separated a space holding this TV from a tiny kitchen dedicated to preserving fish, and other storage space. The doorway was in this inner wall. And there was one of those chairs that resembled lawn chairs with white webbing.

When I asked her about it, Aries replied, “Oh, that’s made of fish bone.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, we don’t make it here, but somehow they bind individual bones together into long filaments and weave them together. There’s a place we drop the bones of any fish we eat. They aren’t worth much, but neither is the salt. One of the regular delivery people buys cartons of fish bones for about what we sell the salt for and takes them back on his delivery truck.”

In the distance I could see the sea on one side, after a bit of a drop-off in elevation. There weren’t any paved roads or sidewalks, but there was a sort of a path that ran between the houses where there was no grass which was worn by foot traffic. Aries led Nancy and me down this path a bit to where another path branched off and led to a stone staircase cut into the land that led down to the seaside area that was familiar from my dreams. The reason I’d never seen any houses was that the houses were up on a cliff two stories high and recessed enough from the edge that none of them were visible from the shore.

Much like the people in the Sea Man work camp, they spent a lot of their free time down by the shore, and slept there as well, and so this had been where my dreams had always come. After we went down the stairs, Aries pointed out the play and sleeping area on one side. In the other direction, down near the shoreline, there was a long row of evaporators that used solar heating and electrical heating as backup on cloudy days to separate salt from seawater, making both drinking water and salt for preserving fish.

“The people who live and work here mostly eat fresh fish. Preserved fish are for people who have to drive into inland cities, and to trade, along with excess salt, for the goods that we need but don’t manufacture here,” Aries explained.

Back up the stairs, Aries showed me where there was a road, and a place where some cars and trucks were parked, a bit further inland from the area with the homes. A separate truck was full of tanks for transporting live fish which were used to replenish other cities’ supplies, again in exchange for whatever they make there.

Aries mentioned, but didn’t show me, that another area had a small school, a place where infants are cared for, and other facilities. And they have a sort of money, but never use it in the seaside town except in transactions with outsiders; the townsfolk live like one big family with a family business. If I had ever bothered to ask Aries about how Sea Men lived, rather than assuming I had seen it all in my dreams, she could have told me everything. It still didn’t explain everything in the life of alt-Victoria the Sea Woman, but I had a lot of gaps in my knowledge about human alt-Victoria as well.

“Thanks, Aries, for the tour. Which of those jobs do you do?”

“Oh, I’m part of the regular crew. We catch and preserve fish, collect salt from the evaporators and carry it up to the truck, care for the preschool kids, and do odd jobs around here as needed, like cleaning the beach of any junk that washes ashore. It works well with me sometimes being away for your summonings, though with the doorway, I can get back here now if needed. The schoolteachers, truck drivers, salt team leads and a couple other people with unique jobs are the only ones who have the same jobs all the time.”

“Salt team leads?”

“Two people each morning and two each evening gather others to help them with the salt. Each evaporator fills a big bucket with salt, and we have waxed cardboard containers that are stored flat but open up like so.”

She held her hands to indicate something about the size of the salt packages I’d seen in the work camp of alt-Victoria the Sea Woman. It must be a standard size for them even though it was way bigger than most humans would need today. But if you salted a lot of your food to preserve it, it made sense.

“If an evaporator’s working at full capacity, it can fill its bucket in 12 hours, which is also a full container. We empty them all out and stack them near the base of the stairs, then each of us carries two containers at a time up the stairs and load them on the truck, and leave a few for those of us salting fish. We don’t have to move the water; it flows into an underground reservoir and pumps bring it up to the houses.”

“I guess as leads they’re responsible for making sure that job gets done on time and the evaporators don’t stop working because they are full of salt.”

“Pretty much.”

“How long have you been doing that?”

“About five years. Before that I was a trainee, so I’d do some of those same things but with someone watching over me and helping me do it right, and before that I was in school rather than working.”

It sounded like the same length of time I’d been in college and working in Alaska, and made me assume she was the same age as me, that Sea Men mature at the same rate as humans, and that she went to school up to the same age we finish high school. I thanked her again and she helped me find her house again to leave.

I went back through Mona’s castle to get back into my own home. As I went, I looked at my phone, but unsurprisingly I was unable to get a cell phone signal either in Aries’ world or in Mona’s. If I wanted to make calls from these worlds, I would have to do it from a phone that belonged there.

I spent the rest of the day with Nancy trying to fill in gaps in our journal, as well as writing up today’s entry.

To start testing what would happen if I tried calling my parents on days I brought myself to other worlds, on Sunday, August 13 I summoned Doris and brought myself to the portal world.

I wasn’t expecting a whole lot here. When I was here before, I learned that everybody used each others’ portals and there were no toilets, and that they kept spare portals for people to use in emergencies at each site in case you needed to go while nobody was there.

The main thing was calling home. I hadn’t yet learned that my father had the same ability as me the last time I was in this world, and didn’t think to call him that day. Today I did, and the number wasn’t active. There was one of those recorded messages telling me it wasn’t an active number.

I decided to explore my dream world, which was clearly a portal person dream world. I found Portal Nancy there in her house in the usual location. Back in my dream-bedroom, I went to the doorway to Mona’s castle and knocked. After a bit, Mona seemed to open the door hesitantly.

“Hello, Jody. Which Jody are you?”

Understanding what she must have meant, I replied, “Portal person Jody. And you’ve probably met Doris at some point.”

“Yes. Hello, Doris. Come on in, both of you.”

When I did, I was surprised to find myself in a hallway instead of in the room with the other doorways, though I could see that room nearby.

Mona explained, “Recently, more doorways have started showing up here, ones I do not remember creating. I didn’t explore them before because I had no idea who might be opening more doorways here, or how they could. But I think it was your power doing it.”

There was a blank sign above the door and Mona pointed her wand at it, making it read “Portal Jody”. The other doorways in this hallway also had blank signs.

“So you’re the same Mona fully-human Jody visits, and not a portal person?”

“Correct. We aren’t portal people here.”

I had hoped to see the portal version of her world, but it seemed there wasn’t one. A normal Aries was there too, a Sea Woman and not a portal person. After I was done visiting Aries, I made a weird request of Mona.

“Mona, I’m trying to figure something out. The portal people send all their waste somewhere through the portals. Can you help me figure out where it goes?”

“You want me to poke my wand into your ass-portal to find out?”

“Um, yeah. I know that’s weird, but you’re a good friend.”

I unzipped my rear fly to give her access. She poked her wand through, several times, trying different spells.

“I still don’t know,” Mona explained. “It’s not any of the other places I’m aware of. It’s not in your world, in mine, in Doris’s, or in Aries’. I’m pretty sure it’s not in Victoria’s or the other Victoria’s, either, because even if they’re different, they resemble your world. This is some other place, either another planet or literally another dimension. The only life within the range I can detect there consists of penises poking through portals, so they are all temporary and partial.

“Thanks, Mona. Even though you couldn’t figure it out, just knowing it’s that much of a different place is helpful. I don’t know how the portal people got access to this place, but it shows they’re really sending the stuff far away. Doris, you don’t know, do you?”

“No. The portals were set up in my people’s world long before I was born. and wherever they lead to isn’t something people are generally taught. I’m sure someone knows, but I don’t know how we’d find them.”

“Hmm. Maybe, from your world, we can find out.”

We went back into my mobile home in the Alaska of her world. It was still Alaska. Doris’s world is much like mine, except for this one big change with the way they go to the bathroom, or the lack of such a place. There was an internet, but I didn’t have any success finding the information on it. And it wasn’t like I could go to a library and check it out; we were an hour’s drive from a small town, and that was a small town. If I couldn’t find it on the Internet, I wasn’t going to find it in whatever passed for a library there. Even finding it in Fairbanks seemed a longshot, and any further than that was definitely too far to travel. But Mona had the ability to get into the camp now via the doorways, and she could potentially teleport me further, or make more doorways, but it was still just a shot in the dark.

I asked, and Mona explained what she could do. She couldn’t make a permanent doorway in some random spot, but she could teleport us there. I suggested New York City as a place with good libraries, and Mona teleported us there. Or, at least, what in my world was called New York City. It was called Liberty here, but the city was more or less the same.

Doris, Mona, and I spent a couple hours in that city’s largest public library. The naming led us to briefly digress into researching that. After the American Revolution in this world there was a revolt against anything British or English. Most of the cities and the colonies had been named after people and places in Britain, and so everything got renamed. Some of them still had English names, but they were named after people on the American side of the war. Even the language was called American rather than English, though it seemed to be the same. Lots of other places named later on also got different names, so even though most of the same places existed, it looked like a foreign world.

Getting back to our search about the history of the portals, we actually found a book that described the genetic engineering behind it. Which, I realized, was another mystery. If they were at the same point in time as my world, how had they developed genetic engineering more than a century ago? We didn’t even know about DNA then!

As far as we could tell, it was a miracle. Or aliens. Or magic. That book described the genetic engineering and how the genome was changed using historical DNA from the 19th century, but also explained that nobody knew how it was done even today. But other books explained that it happened in 1883, seemingly all at once. Everybody suddenly had new organs and knew they were meant to be used to dispose of their wastes cleanly. At that time many people still did not have indoor toilets, and it obsoleted that technology before it ever took hold. Using portals to dispose of human waste was seen as so much of an improvement over toilets, outhouses, and other things people had used then that people quickly began to universally use them. The generation born at the start of the 20th century was raised with the idea that portals are the only proper way to do that, that it was right to help a stranger with that need if he or she had no acquaintance to provide the help, and that it was not in any way sex. Laws were enacted everywhere by 1920 banning any other method.

The first book explained the changes that were made and how some of them functioned, but that information had been reverse-engineered after the people of this world had figured out DNA. Reverse genetic engineering. As far as I could tell, nobody in this world knew where the stuff was going or how the specific genes added to the human genome created portals to get there.

I had hoped to solve a minor mystery, but I had only turned it into a bigger one. We decided the answer was not here to be found, and Mona brought us back to my home in the camp and she went back into her world. She did one last thing before leaving: She opened the door from Portal Victoria’s dream world into her castle and labeled the sign above that door.

On Monday, August 14, I tried to summon Aries and bring myself to the world of the Sea Men again, but as Jody this time. It didn’t quite work, though. I arrived in the world, but I was sleeping alone on the beach and the doll was just a doll, in my house. I decided that this answered one of my questions about the power in one of the ways I thought might be true. I could not summon Aries today because I was trying to summon her into a world where she already exists, even though that was some distance from here. This made me wonder whether I could do the opposite, summon a real-world person if I brought her into a different world where she doesn’t exist.

I did the call home in the morning, and again found my parents unreachable. So that settled that question quickly.

I went for a morning swim to catch fish. I caught two, one to eat and one to be preserved, because during my swim I realized I knew how to preserve fish and it would be normal for me to do this. I started the curing process in the morning; I would finish it later after the salt had time to do its work. And of course I took a previously preserved fish to work with me as my lunch.

I checked through messages on my phone to confirm where I was supposed to work and how I was supposed to dress, going way back to when I first started. Weirdly, I found messages sent to Victoria. Why would those exist in this world? It was the same as it was for alt-Victoria, though, and the clothes were almost identical between the sexes since they were only meant to be protective.

Work was similar to normal, apart from everybody being blue-skinned Sea Men and there being women among the team. I got to know who each person was and what they looked like as Sea Men, or Sea Women. Just as in alt-Victoria’s version of this world, some of them were female. It seemed about the same number of them, though I was sure it was not exactly the same people.

After work, I went into Mona’s world and she labeled two more doorways. I found Aries, and let her know about my failure to summon her into her own world’s Alaska. She remembered me being with her in the dream... but at the same time, she knew that I wasn’t with her in the evening and she slept alongside other men. Was I with her in her dream? Every time I think I’ve got this thing figured out, I just run into more questions.

I went back to my mobile home, caught and ate my evening fish, and wrote up the day’s activities.

Tuesday, August 15 I turned myself into alt-Victoria with Nathan again, but in the human world. This was a way of not having to worry about the non-existence of condoms in the world of the Sea Men, since alt-Victoria was on birth control.

I started off with the obligatory call. Once again, I could not reach my parents.

This was my fourth time as alt-Victoria, and the third on a working day in her version of the normal human world. Going to work as her was now familiar not just from the dreams but from having done it in real life.

I basically asked Nathan to just research whatever he could. He had access to my journal, alt-Victoria’s current diary (which still showed her summoning Nathan, Manuel, or her version of Jody every day without interruption and never traveling to other worlds), her historical diaries, both our dream worlds, and even Mona and Aries.

He wasn’t able to figure out much, actually, but he found other evidence I hadn’t noticed or considered to support some of my theories as to what was going on. But he filled in some missing details from the other days he was here that Nancy and I hadn’t written into the journal.

Nathan also noticed one thing I’d missed. Yesterday, I had failed to summon Aries into the world she lives in, but a couple weeks ago, and again just two days ago, I had summoned Doris and brought myself into the world of the portal people. Something was different between the two. Was it that Aries’ world was somehow more distinct than Doris’s world? I didn’t think it really was; the people are more visually different, but both have fundamental differences from regular humans and both worlds have significant differences as a result. Maybe it was because there was a doorway from Aries’ world to Mona’s, and so indirectly to the real world. Did that cause Aries to exist all the time while Doris did not? It was something to ponder.

The next night I dreamed of myself in Mona’s world with Mona, but we got separated and then I got stuck avoiding monsters and evil wizards and Mona had to come find me and save me, the kind of dream that was much more common in my childhood than in later times. Wednesday, August 16 I awoke in Mona’s world, in a bed with the doll, in a bedroom whose color scheme told me I was somewhere in her castle. I used the attached bathroom to confirm that I was really awake and not still in the dream.

Soon a woman arrived who was obviously Mona’s maid, wearing a red version of a traditional French maid uniform. I’d heard about this maid before but never seen her. She introduced herself as Cecilia and provided me with clothes, which I was grateful for as I arrived naked. Of course, since they were from Mona’s castle they were all red silk, but there was a shirt, long pants, underwear, and even slippers that appeared to be covered in silk except for the soles, something I could have imagined Mona wearing as casual wear.

Cecilia didn’t seem the least embarrassed at my nudity, but she practically ordered me to shower and get dressed, then left me alone for the task. I did that, and when I exited the bathroom, she was waiting to lead me to breakfast which was already served at a table where Mona was also eating.

This was the first time since the advent of my power that I’d woken up somewhere that wasn’t in some version of the camp in Alaska, and I wondered what was happening there today. But Mona explained to me that in her world, there wasn’t a there. Alaska and the other places I know don’t exist in her world. She used a quick spell to make a rotating holographic globe of her world appear. Our location was marked with a glowing dot, but it didn’t really mean anything to me because none of the landforms looked familiar.

I didn’t have my phone there to call my parents. But the doorways were still there, and I confirmed, again, that I wasn’t dreaming by walking through them into my real world. And my real world had a phone, and I could call my parents from it, as long as I stayed in that world. It didn’t work in the dream worlds or in Mona’s.

What I did see on my real-world phone was that I was being paged to a problem at another well site, which answered my question about what was happening in the real world. I decided I’d better attend to it. I thanked Mona for her help, and told her I’d be back in the evening.

There was no way I was going out to the well dressed like this, so I changed clothes into ones more appropriate from my real-world supply. I confirmed where I was going, and headed out for a challenging day of problem-solving. By the end of the day we had a plan for getting this well safely producing again and tomorrow we would see it implemented. Others would see to getting what we needed here overnight. I drove back to the camp, switched back into the clothes from Mona’s castle, and went back there to spend the evening with her.

I had sex with Mona, but since she wasn’t the doll, I went to bed where I started, with the doll, to prepare for my next day. Thinking about the worlds I’d dreamed of, I realized there was just one left to visit, the world of the Pasthrus.

I had summoned Nancy as an emale once, but that was in the real world. I knew that in the Pasthru world, it was almost exclusively emales who worked jobs, especially in as remote a place as mine, so I figured I needed to be the emale. I had been an emale before in dreams, as the middle person in a group having sex, and I was still Jody, so I figured it was possible. The emale has a penis, even if that penis has a vagina of sorts within it, and eir body has the male shape. So I focused on myself as an emale and Nancy as a female Pasthru in a world full of Pasthrus.

I succeeded! I dreamed of what I intended and awoke Thursday, August 17 as an emale Jody with a female Nancy. I had the stiffener dildo within me that made it possible for us to have the kind of 2-person sex considered masturbation among their species. I removed and cleaned the dildo during my morning routine.

I got the call out of the way. No parents.

Clothing as an emale was easy. The section of my wardrobe I could tell belonged to emale Jody included dresses and skirts made for my breastless, hipless body, as well as pants, but for going out to the work site, there was really no difference between emale Jody’s wardrobe and regular human Jody’s.

I tasked Nancy with learning all that she could.

“Keep an eye on the people remaining in the camp. Verify online what we expect to see is what we actually have. Pasthrus form 3-member marriages, but it’s likely most of the ones in the camp who have partners have only one partner. It’s also likely that almost all the workers are emale, due both to the bias toward having emales be the wage-earners, and for the excess emales provided by Pasthru genetics to be most likely to take jobs in remote locations like this.”

I was still at the well site I went to troubleshoot yesterday. The same guys who were there yesterday were there today. Because of the clothing style worn out to the wells, I couldn’t tell if there were some males among the emales, but there were definitely no females.

When I returned, Nancy reported, “Within those who didn’t leave the camp for work today, and apart from those like Pedro who work jobs in the camp, I counted 3 females, one likely emale, one likely male, and 3 more who were either males or emales but I couldn’t tell.

This was a couple more than the number of people there would have been left in the camp during the day in my usual world, but maybe right in the Pasthru world where people had more kids in general to help fuel the 3-person groups needed to get married and produce children. Nancy also gave me a report of the ways the Pasthru world is different from the human one.

“Everything is changed. Every TV show where people get married or families have kids changed to have three people in the marriage. Some whole shows were replaced. The roles have changed. Leading men, for many types of character, are emales. You’re much more likely to see male and female characters in shows that focus on family life; in these cases the emales are sometimes token characters who only appear briefly. Any characters who are committed singles, whether they are male or female in our world, are emale; female ones just turn into emales with feminine clothing and behavior.”

She showed me a video she had bookmarked of a wedding, where first the emale is asked to accept the other two as eir spouses, then the male, and then the female. Then a whole series of wedding photos. Males and females getting married tended to look like brides and grooms here, but emales had several different styles. One style was a dress matching the bride’s, but of course cut for the emale’s shape. It had a straight hem at the heel and no train, no veil or headpiece, and was usually in a solid color rather than white. It was also possible for the emale to wear a shorter version of that dress. There were also emales who matched the groom, except in a color other than black. Some emales wore red, blue, or green. I saw a yellow one and also a purple one. It just seemed to be personal preference, but usually the groom wore a tie and the bride had some decoration on the gown both matching the emale’s color.

“The words king and queen don’t mean what you think.”

“What do they mean?”

“The king is the ruler, and was traditionally always an emale. Even today, in places where they still have hereditary kingdoms, it’s usually an emale, but it’s possible for a male or female heir to become king, usually only if there’s no emale heir within a level of parentage considered for selecting the heir. A queen is a spouse or consort of the king, so usually a male or female married to the emale king or one e’s essentially engaged to, especially in cases where e hasn’t gotten someone of the other sex yet.”

I laughed, “So a male royal married to the emale king is a queen.”

“Yep. When they get married, it’s the king and eir two queens.”

“Do they have bigger beds?”

“Yes. The size anomalously called twin in our world is called single. The size we sometimes call full and sometimes call double is always called double. There’s a size almost 50% wider than double called triple, and it’s the standard bed for married triples. There are also queen and king beds which are wider than those sizes from our world.”

I looked back at the bed we woke up on, a standard “double” and apparently still that.

“They didn’t plan for married triples up here, did they? I didn’t see a still larger house size.”

“I don’t think there are any houses here made for three people. Those extra people in camp are all attached to different workers.”

“That makes sense. Triples are expected to have kids, right? Just having one other person with you as a companion is a much more acceptable thing if staying unmarried.”

Nancy replied, “Yes. Pasthru society expects triples who stay together to marry in a pretty short time, and then to have children. The people here wouldn’t; everybody here knows having children is the last thing anybody should do up here. But their friends and relatives who know they’re in a triple and don’t understand the desolation would expect it.”

When Nancy didn’t have anything more, I thanked her for doing the research. When we went to bed, I rewarded her by letting her choose how we had sex, and she wanted to do 69. That wasn’t something I’d thought of, but it would be a good test to find out whether that counted as sex for the purpose of transforming the doll. It was a weird experience for me, and I wasn’t certain I could keep my mouth on her sex as we went to sleep, but Nancy still had my dildo-stiffened emale dick in her mouth as I fell asleep.

I focused on being in my dream house during the dream so that I could get back to the real world again, and since I wanted to bring Victoria here Saturday, I chose to be with Aries. It was a typical Aries dream that involved the egg evasion game.

When I awoke on Friday, August 18, I was with Aries, and she immediately pulled her face away from my dick and spat gobs of come back onto it.

“Jody, don’t do that again.”

“I’m sorry. It was Nancy’s idea.”

As we both went to the bathroom to clean up, Aries said, “I don’t like the taste of come. Or at least, not yours. I’m trying to imagine the taste of Sea Man come, which I feel like I should know, but it’s evading my memory.”

“Strange. But Nancy also has gaps in her memory for events that occurred before I started bringing you all into the real world, if they didn’t occur in one of my dreams.”

“Wait, am I really just one of your dream characters? I thought I was real!” Aries exclaimed as she started crying.

I hugged her and said, “I don’t know, Aries. I am still trying to figure this out, too.”

I led her back into the bedroom, pulled out one of her bikinis, and said, “Why don’t you go catch yourself a fish for breakfast?”

That cheered her up, and in two minutes she was dressed (if you could call it that) and out the door.

After I showered and dressed, I found that Aries had brought a fish for me as well, which I cooked and ate quickly, even though it took most of the remaining time I had before work. I did take a moment to call my parents, just as a phone call without video.

“Yes, I visited those worlds where my summoned people are from over the last five days. I tried to call you from each world but it only worked the time I stepped through one of the doorways back into my real world. Either you’re not there at all in the other worlds, or you have a different phone number there that I don’t know.”

“If I had a different phone number I’d probably be a different person, so it probably wouldn’t matter,” Dad replied.

“Right. It seems like my other-world counterparts should have parents, but they might not be you.”

After work I had an idea.

I asked Aries, “Do your people keep birth records? I know that in dreams when I was a Sea Man in your world, I was in different dreams impregnated with an egg, and had a newborn leave my sac. When I was Victoria as a Sea Woman, I know she impregnated one of the Sea Men with her egg. As far as I know, those dreams and all the other ones I had where I was in your world took place in your village that is now connected by a doorway. I want to see if the dreams were real and we already have kids over here that we don’t know about.”

“I’m pretty sure we do have those records. Somebody near the school tracks them.”

I went with Aries through the series of doorways we needed to follow to reach her home town. She led me past the regular homes and the school, to the infant care area. One of the Sea Women there said they did, and she led us to a small building nearby where she produced a binder with a few pages listing the people. There were columns for name, sire, mother, father, sex at birth (that’s how the column was labeled), date of birth, and notes. Father was just a line through the box for most entries, which she confirmed meant the father was the same as the sire. When it was filled in, it was different from the sire. The notes were also blank for most entries.

The first page was old and yellowed, and some of the dates were decades ago. This would have been among the later records, so I focused more on the other pages, but I didn’t spot my name or Victoria’s anywhere among them. I did notice that almost all the last names were Trout, including in the record for Aries. I didn’t remember her having a last name before, but maybe if you lived in a town where everybody was one big family you just didn’t use it.

“Is this all?” I asked.

She replied, “It feels to me like we should have older records than these, but for some reason we only have these going back as far as the oldest people now alive. But I’m confident the records are complete for this time period.”

Aries asked, pointing at me, “Did you ever have any record of him parenting a child here? Or a woman named Victoria who looks like him?”

“No,” she replied confidently. “Though cross-breeds with humans are possible, we’ve never had any here within the memories that have been passed down to those of us who care for the children. There aren’t even any children whose fathers departed. These records where children were fathered by men other than their sires were due to infertility, or so that people with jobs that pregnancy makes difficult could have children.”

That explained the columns. The sires mated to make the eggs, while the fathers were the ones in whom they were implanted and eventually birthed. “Departed” was one of the entries in the notes column for a few people. It apparently literally meant moved out, as there was also “deceased” written there more recently in many of the older records, and in a couple more recent ones. There were also a few people who had evidently arrived from other towns. The death, departure, and arrival dates were given next to those indications in the notes column.

“Not even if he was a Sea Man then?” Aries asked, but the woman treated it as if it was a joke, much as any human would if you told them somebody used to belong to a different species.

I thanked the woman and we left.

“Maybe we should try this again when I am a Sea Man. Maybe she’ll have different memories then,” I told Aries.

I decided we didn’t need a condom if I was going to go to the Sea World tomorrow, but thinking about it made me realize I was being silly. Even though Sea World itself didn’t have condoms, I had access to several other worlds all the time, and some of them wouldn’t change. While condoms purchased in the dream worlds might not come through into my world, things that didn’t originate there were fine to bring back, and had survived overnighting there without being turned into anything else. I took some condoms from the copious supply I had in the real world and wrote R on each one with a sharpie (for “real”), and I stashed a few in my dream world, Victoria’s dream world, and Mona’s world.

And as I planned, on Saturday, August 19 I awoke with Victoria as natives in the Sea World, on the beach by the pond in the camp. It was Saturday, so much like when I was here as alt-Victoria, most of the people were still sleeping when we awoke.

After a usual breakfast of a fresh fish each, we went to the other pond to pee. Victoria birthed an egg as well, and I had to poop and sat in the weird chair built into the railing to do so. Only once I was sitting in it did I notice there was a small nozzle in the wall at the edge of the pond supporting this railing, and a pedal situated for the right foot of someone in the chair. It was a manually powered bidet. I had heard of but never seen a bidet, but the spray of water it produced seemed a natural way of cleaning yourself for an aquatic species like this, and it worked. In fact, it worked well with the way water slid off our skins, leaving us both clean and quickly dry.

When I got back to the house, I investigated the toilet there that I had never used. It also had a built-in bidet, though it was electrically powered and didn’t require me to pump it with my foot. We went through the doorways into Aries’ village. People there were awake, and a group of them, including Aries, were hauling containers of salt up the stairs.

When they were done, we went with her back to the child care area. There were different people there. This time a Sea Man with breasts met us. Unlike in the work camp, people here had children. The building I was in and ones near it were built to raise those children. So it was natural that there were men with breasts. All the people working here had breasts; I assumed wet nurse duty was part of the job. He showed us the records of births, arrivals, departures, and deaths. They seemed no different. There were no children born to Jody or Victoria. The handful of exceptional records of people who had died, departed, arrived, or were fathered and sired by different Sea Men, which were few enough that I remembered them all, were unchanged.

I was sure I was called Jody and Victoria in those dreams. Maybe there was another similar looking town, but there was no reason why that should be. Also, I realized this was different from the dream worlds in another way. I was sitting here looking at and speaking with a stranger, someone I’d only just met now and didn’t remember from dreams. In the dream worlds this person would have been faceless and I wouldn’t have been able to engage with him to ask to look at the records. Mona’s world was also like this, I realized. I first met the maid Cecilia there in a recent visit.

Even though my dreams might be separate from reality in these worlds, Mona remembered the dreams, and so did Aries. And Mona created the doorways within dreams and they existed in my reality permanently after that, and somehow, even in the other worlds. Did these worlds exist, somehow, in reality, before I ventured into them in my dreams? If they were, why were there still areas where they were incomplete, like records of Sea Men from the past?

I didn’t have answers for these questions, but I felt the most likely answer was that these worlds didn’t exist before I invented them in my dreams, but visiting them in dreams and in real life had forced more and more gaps to be filled in. It was like the way when I had forced my summoned characters to have identity cards and such, information was invented where needed, even if it didn’t fully make sense, like Nancy’s house being in a spot that defied geometry and Victoria having parents who died childless.

Since Aries was done working for now, she came with us when we went back into Mona’s world to visit Bruno the sea dragon. I was curious how he was going to react to three Sea Men since as far as I knew he had only ever seen Aries among the species.

Bruno was excited, to say the least, and while he let us all pet him, he still recognized Aries as his best friend and/or mother. He tried to suckle from Aries’ breasts, but not from Victoria’s, even though as an egg-layer her breasts were equally ready to produce milk. It inspired me try the milk myself. The sweet taste was like I remembered Aries’ milk tasting, but the best part of the experience was the orgasmic feeling in Victoria’s body. Aries was giving up a lot to train Bruno and not simply have a session of absolute bliss by letting him drain her dry each time she came here.

Aries went back to be with her people, and Victoria and I went back to the camp in Alaska. While I had figured out who some of the people were during my previous day working here, it wasn’t like we all worked at the same well site, so I got a chance to meet the others. I wasn’t too surprised that some of those engaging in sexual activity invited us to join in, and we did at times.

These were definitely not dream worlds, but they must be separate worlds of their own, with even Jody’s different from alt-Victoria’s due to the different people. Although I’d seen my co-workers believe alternate versions of what I experienced when I switched among worlds or summonees, there was no way the two Sea Women I fucked tonight in their vaginas, ones whose male equivalents in my world weren’t gay or trans in the least, were going to be able to remember the experience at all.

Later in the evening, Victoria laid another egg into the pond; I don’t know whose it was. But when I went into the dream worlds, there weren’t any condoms there. Of course, the Sea Man dream worlds were different from the human ones. I should have realized that when I stashed them recently. But I was able to get the ones from Mona’s world, stash some in the Sea Man dream worlds, and take one to use tonight as Victoria and I lay down together to sleep and to get back to the real world. And as our naked bodies hugged, in my mind I made an important decision.

What I had decided was that alt-Victoria had had one idea right.

I knew I wouldn’t be living in Alaska forever. In fact, the company had said I would only be here for a few years unless I specifically asked to stay permanently, and I hadn’t done so in the two-plus years I’d been here. Most of the others living in the camp had cycled out and been replaced since I’d been here.

But the last month and a half changed things for me. When the women were just in my dreams, they could be flings or dating coaches or whatever and they complemented my real-life dates with women. Having my women be in the real world, the women I’ve grown up with, some of them since kindergarten, and having them so devoted to me, there’s no question. These are the women I want to spend the rest of my life with.

For Sunday, August 20, I kept the dream simple, just me and Nancy in my usual dream house. I’d had more than enough time in weird other worlds lately and I wanted to get back to some normalcy. And indeed I woke up in my usual home in the camp in Alaska on my usual bed. Not a bed in Mona’s castle. Not on the Sea Men beach. Not in the world of the portal people or Pasthrus. The regular human world.

In the morning, we discussed my ideas about what was really going on with my power and the other worlds.

“I think that all these other worlds started out purely as figments of my imagination, but using my power to summon people from there and to go there myself has made them become real in some sense. When I visited these places in my dreams, things were not consistent from one dream to the next. The dreams that took place in the real world, in other words in my and Victoria’s dream worlds, stayed consistent with developments in the real world, usually, apart from different unreal characters being present.”

“You’re going to have to elaborate, Jody, because I’m not in all your dreams and things are even more fragmented for me.”

“I had dreams where I was in the world of the Sea Men, as a Sea Man, with you sometimes accompanying me as a Sea Woman, though more often it was Aries. Sometimes I had an egg implanted into me, and at least once I gave birth to a child in the Sea Man way.”

“I don’t remember seeing you as a pregnant Sea Man, but I remember Sea Men giving birth like that. Sea Man birth isn’t anything like human birth. The baby grows basically on the outside of your body, so there’s no need to force it through a narrow birth canal. It just grows until it outgrows the sac and its head emerges. But I remember seeing the end of that once, when the baby separates, which is what they consider the birth.”

“Yes. And that took place in the little coastal village where Aries grew up. But when I went back there recently, even as a Sea Man, I found that they don’t have any record of the child. The record-keepers noted that the records seemed incomplete and that they should have more older records, but they believed they had records for all the people who had lived there during the lifetimes of the people still alive, even if they had died or left town. And the dream was only 10 years ago at the most; I was in high school. There should be a living child there or a record of one dying, but there’s not, because the dreams in that era weren’t consistent.”

“And now they are?”

“I’m not sure that every detail is consistent, but I’m pretty sure if I was to do that now, first I’d have to have an egg implanted, and then I’d have to wait the right amount of time, and then I’d have to go there on the right day to experience the baby separating and being born. It’s definitely true in Mona’s castle, and I’ve been leaving things behind or taking things I am allowed to take from the dream worlds and the presence or absence of the items persists.”

“Right. I’ve had two periods since you started having the power, and they’re documented here in the journal. July 11 and August 9, 29 days apart. Correct to lie within two consecutive periods of a normal woman.”

“And Victoria was in her period on August 8th, and wasn’t here near your other period so I missed it. You two are synchronized?”

Nancy went deep into thought, and I did too, trying to recall any time Victoria and Nancy had discussed their periods.

Nancy responded, “I can’t recall. I know Victoria had her first one before mine. I think in high school they weren’t synchronized, and more recently I can’t remember.”

“You know what, it doesn’t matter. If my theory is right, there isn’t enough continuity between then and when you first started being summoned for it to matter whether you were having them at the same time or not in high school. Your memories before the past couple months are only times I dreamed of you and what’s been backfilled when recent events forced a particular history to exist for you.”

“Huh. I think you’re right. I remember having periods, but they were too irregular. I’ve had...” Nancy paused for a second as if counting them in her head. “Maybe 15 or 20 periods since they started. But I’m 25. I’ve been having periods for almost 13 years. I should have had more than 150. Either there was no continuity until recently, or I simply can’t remember about 90% of my life.”

“Yeah, forget it. I have something much more important in mind for today, anyway.”

I drove into town, and among my stops was the one jewelry store there. Nancy is smart, so she figured out why I was there as soon as I parked, but pretended surprise when I bought the 1-carat diamond solitaire engagement ring. Very traditional, and well within my budget as we were getting paid heaps to work and live out here in the middle of nowhere. And it was going to get multiple use.

Back out in my truck, I explained to Nancy, “I’m going to ask you to marry me, but you have to realize it’s not exclusive. Victoria and the others are going to be here in your place some days, and just like alt-Victoria engaged herself to all three of her men, I’m going to treat all of you equally on the days you are here.

“And what if one of them refuses?” Nancy asked.

“I highly doubt that. Even Mona was eager for sex with me. The other-worlders will understand it only applies when they are here. But if someone does refuse, then I work on whatever she needs.”

“Well, I accept, even if I have to share you,” Nancy said, grabbing my head in both hands and pulling me to her for a kiss.

When she finally let me go, she added, “I hope you know how long I’ve wanted this.”

“How long is that?”

Nancy looked puzzled for a moment, and finally said, “As long as I can remember. Back before we had sex or even had seen each other naked, I knew you were the boy for me.”

“Back then I was the only boy you really got to do anything with. You didn’t really have a life outside of my dreams until less than two months ago.”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter! I love you. I’ve always loved you!”

I kissed her again, and took care of other business in town and then drove us home.

At home, I called my parents, and set up a video call.

“Mom, Dad, I’m calling today to let you know I’ve asked Nancy to marry me.”

Nancy held up her ring.

Dad said, “I’m happy for you, son. But how’s that going to work for your other women?”

“It doesn’t matter. Remember when I explained that one of the other worlds I can visit is one where I grew up female and named Victoria, and used the power to summon men, male versions of some of the characters from my dreams?”

“Yes. I have trouble understanding how that can happen, but you told me.”

“That version, who Nancy named alt-Victoria, got engaged to all three of the men she regularly summons within the first week after she started summoning them.”

“Huh. Isn’t that confusing for her co-workers?”

“They don’t know, because each time she summons one, she changes the world to one where, for everybody else, she’s always been with that man. The same happens for me and the women, though it’s a bit more complicated. It’s only you two, because you have the power and because she’s summoned by the power, who aren’t affected by it.”

Before he could reply, Dad had a coughing fit, and Mom said, “This is wonderful, son, but I have to take care of him. Do call.” And she hung up the call.

“Is he going to be OK?” Nancy asked.

“Yeah. He has some health issues but nothing immediately life-threatening,” I told Nancy.

“You know, it’s going to be awkward if you and one of your other wives come through to visit me.”

“We’ll have to establish some ground rules.”

“Or rather, we will,” Nancy countered. “Me and your other wives.”

“When I’m in the real world, whoever I summoned on a particular day has priority, because everybody else will think that woman is my wife. When I’m in one of the other worlds, anything you all can agree on applies. If you can’t agree, then again the summoned woman has priority.”

“And when we’re in a dream, and nobody’s summoned?”

“Uhhhh. Crap! My dreams are real enough now that you all have free will within them, don’t you?”

When we tried to go through the doorways to set up a conference with the other women, we found Nancy’s ring wouldn’t come. A consequence of the rule against Mona creating wealth with her magic, no doubt. So she took it off and left it behind in my house. In Mona’s world we found Aries there with Bruno, but she came out of the water, followed by the little sea dragon, when she saw that we wanted to talk.

“Mona, Aries, I want you to know that I proposed to Nancy today.”

“Awwww, you picked her over me?” Aries said with a pout.

“And me?” Mona said, but she seemed less serious about it.

“No, it’s not like that. When one of you is summoned, the other people, apart from my parents, are going to think you’ve been there all the time. I’m proposing to all of you, and hope to marry each of you in a separate ceremony, and the people in the real world will think I’m married to whoever I’ve summoned every day.”

“So each of us will have you on the days you’ve summoned us?” Mona asked. “What about when we’re together like this?”

“Nancy pointed out we’ll all have to have some kind of agreement.”

Aries asked, “Would we all share you? Or would you just treat one of us as your wife in each place?”

“What I agreed with Nancy is this: In the real world, because the other people will remember me as being married to who I’ve summoned that day, whoever I’ve summoned gets precedence. Everywhere else, you all have to agree on something.”

Mona then asked, “Wait, you’re talking about marrying us in your real world, right? What about marrying me here, too?

“I suppose I could, if you want.”

“It would allow you to be married to me for the purposes of magical contracts and inheritance.”

“Uhhhh...”

“It means that if I have any magical possessions that grant abilities or privileges to their owners, or I’m subject to any heritable spells, the magic will recognize you as my heir, instead of one of my cousins.”

“OK, what magical possessions, heritable spells, and all that do you have?”

“I think only the castle and perpetual spells I’ve cast.”

“The castle itself is magical?”

“Castle Galbreath is the source of my power.”

“Oh, so that’s how you have this fabulous castle when your magic doesn’t let you use it to create wealth.”

“Well, no, not really. There’s a source of magical power on the grounds of the castle, and that magic is accessible to me and me only. The castle just comes with it because it’s built here, but it was built in the days before the covenant limited the use of magic.”

“So if we marry and you die, I’ll inherit your magical power?”

“Yes, if we do not have a child who reaches adulthood first. It’s not the only way for me to choose an heir, and I’m not expecting to die anytime soon, but I do need to choose one. There’s nobody else alive in my direct line, so the magic will find an heir, but it could be just some random commoner. They’d have to bring everybody in the realm here to test them for sensitivity to the magic. I’d rather choose you; you at least know some of what my magic is capable of.”

“No other obligations? Sounds like a good deal.”

Mona responded, “Well, if I marry you here, then I want first priority anytime we’re here, the same as in the real world when I’m summoned. That doesn’t mean I won’t let the rest of you have time with Jody, but when I want him I can kick you out. In the other worlds, I don’t care.”

Aries replied, “Then I should marry you in my world, too, and have first privilege there. It doesn’t mean the same thing in my world, though. I’ve learned about your marriage from time I spent in your world, but in my world, there is only a promise. It’s actually more like your engagement than marriage. There’s no exclusivity of sex implied; the promise is that the couple will try to have a child together and won’t have children with anybody else until they have that child or break it off. Inheritance goes to children, but not to spouses nor to anybody else who had children together.”

“Um, Aries, I’m not sure about whether I want my Sea Man version to carry your child. I definitely can’t do it while still working in the camp. And this version of me can’t, period.”

“We could pay someone else to carry it.”

“Oh, right, I remember entries like that in your birth records, where the sire is different from the father. And Sea Man Jody has money, presumably comparable to what I have. Then I guess that’s good, too. But why pay? I thought your people didn’t really use money in the village.”

“If you stay in the village, sure. But if you want to leave the village, you’ll have to have money or a way of earning money. Someone who wants to leave might do this to earn some money to get them started.”

I nodded.

Nancy, who had been silent for quite a while, said, “I’m not even sure if we could get someone to marry us in my world, a dream world. But I’d like to have priority there.”

Mona then asked, “What about Victoria’s dream world?”

“Wouldn’t Victoria have precedence there?” Nancy asked.

“I guess that makes sense, if you’re marrying her too,” Aries replied.

“Yeah, I summon her enough that I should. But she would only be here if I summoned her, or if we’re in a dream together. There’s also alt-Victoria, and when I’m her, we get her version of Victoria’s dream world. But I’m not planning weddings for her. She’s already planning those, to her version of Jody and to Nathan and Manuel, which will happen before I can even plan our weddings.”

Mona said, “You’ve got to summon me as Manuel one of these days. I don’t have any memories of being him.”

Aries interjected, “Do we need to have rules for when you’re her, too? Alt-Victoria, I mean. Even if we aren’t marrying her, you’re still you inside her.”

I replied, “Maybe. I know things I do as her seem independent from the version of her world described in her diary, so maybe we should treat that as me being dressed up as her. I think alt-Victoria’s summoned male partner gets precedence, but if alt-Victoria goes into one of the dream worlds, then the same rules apply there, and in alt-Victoria’s dream world, Nathan gets priority.”

“Wait, does Nathan live in alt-Victoria’s dream world?” Aries asked.

“Hmm, I don’t think we ever checked, but he should. His picture is on her wall in place of Nancy’s,” I responded.”

“And regular Victoria?”

“While I do experience being Victoria while she’s here, ever since I figured out how to direct her mind to control her body, I’ve been controlling her as little as possible. Especially so for sex, because she enjoys it much more if her mind controls how it’s happening. And she doesn’t like it when you come on too strongly, either, but enjoys being the one to initiate things. Let’s say I won’t force my Victoria to have sex with any person and if she chooses to do something that doesn’t violate the rules, she’s free to do it.”

Nancy summarized. “So Victoria gets complete precedence in her dream world. And in the real world, too, since she will only be there when summoned. If Victoria is not there, let’s say Victoria’s Nancy gets priority.”

“That seems fair,” I commented. “It’s more involved to summon her, so I will do it less often.”

“Any other situation where these rules don’t provide a resolution is neutral ground. All of us wives get priority over anyone else for sex with you, but if two of us want it, we work something out,” Mona added.

“What about the other women? Doris, Kimmy, Cleo, Jessica, ...” Nancy said. She continued to name other women who had appeared in my dreams or in Victoria’s, even though she knew I’d never summoned them with the power, even as I and others spoke over her.

I said, “I’m not marrying them explicitly. If I summon them, they get precedence in the real world only because others will see them as my partner, and since I’m almost always going to have sex with them at night in order to summon someone else. Otherwise, they get no such privileges.”

Aries objected loudly, “Wait, why do you get to have sex with whoever you want if you summon them?”

“So that I can bring somebody else the next day. But I plan on bringing one of my wives most days. Others are for experiments, or special tasks. They’ll happen even less often than I’ve done so far.”

“And how many times is that?”

“Um, the journal is in my house.”

Nancy stopped the whole party from going over there. “No need. I remember it all from all the time I spent helping assemble the greatest part of it. You summoned Doris three times, two of those times in order to reach the portal world, and Kimmy once. And as alt-Victoria you summoned Glen once, and my Nathan form three times, but those don’t count since alt-Victoria is not part of this marriage. So, really four out of 47 days.”

Aries was still upset. “One out of every 12 days? That’s barely less than you’ve summoned each of us.”

Mona made another suggestion to placate Aries. “If two of us wives are together without Jody, or when Jody is having sex with someone else, we can do whatever we can agree on.”

“Fair enough,” Aries replied. “So the summoned person gets priority with Jody and vice versa in the real world, and each of us and Victoria with him in the world of ours connected by these doorways. Any other situation is neutral ground. Agreed.”

“Agreed,” Nancy added.

“Agreed,” Mona and I said together.

All three of the women came together to kiss me and one another. I think everybody kissed everybody. I’m not sure any of these women had ever actually done anything sexual with either of the other women here, but they’d just opened the door to doing so, and so the kisses made sense.

“Now I’m going to formally propose to each of you, with the same ring, on upcoming days.”

Mona commented, “You mean in the real world? If we’re getting married here, I want to have a ring here and not only when you’ve summoned me.”

Aries said, “We don’t actually have that ring tradition among my people. But I’ll enjoy it if you give me one.”

“OK, if I’m marrying you all I guess I can get each one of you a ring in your respective worlds. Nancy, since I’ve already given you your real ring, let’s go into your dream world and get you one there.”

“You should wait until after you propose to me to see what my ring turns into and get me one to match,” Mona commented.

“The ring’s going to change? Oh, of course it would. Fine. But it’s time for me to be with just Nancy. You’ll get your turns soon.”

The others accepted this. Mona led us to the door into my dream world, and closed it behind me and Nancy, but Aries was so close behind Mona I wondered if she was going to jump her as soon as the door closed. I’m sure I’ll find out later.

“OK, Nancy, let’s see how I can buy you a ring here,” I said, picking up my dream-world wallet that contained the only way I could buy her anything here. I wasn’t sure it would work and we’d get someone to serve us to buy it, but Nancy led me to a jewelry store where Arturo, one of my friends from high school, was working. We had no problem talking with him.

I asked, “So, Nancy, what kind of ring would you like? I’m not sure how far my dream-world money goes, but at the same time, I’m not sure if there even is a limit.”

“Oh, nothing too fancy. Most of the people aren’t even going to notice, after all. Just something like the one you got me in the real world.”

So we picked one out and because it was the dream world, it fit perfectly with no resizing needed. We walked back to Nancy’s house, which felt a little weird to her since I’d summoned her and she was the real-world version of Nancy, but I proposed to her again and gave her the ring, which she then left behind there as we returned to the real world.

I decided I should propose to the women in the order I’d met them, so on Monday, August 21 I summoned Victoria.

Waking up and living a day as both Jody and Victoria was old hat to me now. But I realized this was another day where I had to let Victoria control things. I’m sure Victoria would love to marry me, but I have to do it right. I can’t simply ask her, “Will you marry me?” and then with her mouth say, “Yes.”

I hadn’t actually planned this out, and now that I was here with her this morning I was trying to figure out the right way to do it. Ultimately, I decided that the way that would most please Victoria would be to let her ask the question, and I placed the open ring box in the middle of the breakfast table while she was showering.

I let the Victoria side of me choose her clothing, as I always did now, and she came to the breakfast table in a kind of sexy dress. The clothing is still very weird to me. All of it was picked up on a few trips to town, mostly by Nancy, but it changes with the different women and so there are things in there I’ve never seen, except perhaps in dreams. Letting Victoria pick her clothes accentuates that unknown factor. I am sometimes surprised by what she pulls out of the closet, but she never has trouble choosing.

I basically tried to let that same autopilot run Victoria as she came to the table. Neither of us said anything until we were done eating. Normally we don’t really need to say anything, since we know what the other is thinking, but today was special.

Victoria started the conversation by grabbing the box, turning it toward me, and saying, “This.”

“Yes. You know what it means.”

“You proposed to Nancy.”

This was why she’d chosen the sexy dress today. Just as I could read her thoughts, my surface thoughts were evident to her, and I’d thought about the engagement extensively this morning.

“Yes,” I answered.

“And you don’t want that to be exclusive. You feel free to be married to someone else when Nancy is not here.”

“Yes. The world will only see me as married to one woman at a time.”

“Then I guess I have no choice. When I’m here, you must be mine. So Jody, will you marry me?”

“Yes, Victoria.”

“I’d give you the ring, but I’m sure it won’t fit; it’s meant to go on my finger.”

As Jody, I took the ring from the box and put it on her finger.

“We’re engaged now.”

“Yes,” Victoria said, and she leaned in for a kiss.

I had carefully avoided doing that, letting Victoria lead, because it was the way she liked things. But then I joined her in the kiss across the table. Victoria soon stood and took two steps around the table, maintaining the kiss, to get closer to me, and then I stood and she was holding me tight, our faces pressed against each other. It was as deep and intimate a kiss as I’d ever had. Nancy’s had been quick, but Victoria probed into me as if wanting to feel every bit of my insides. I couldn’t even get my tongue into her mouth, so settled for letting my tongue embrace hers as well as I could. Only once she had seemingly had more of her tongue inside me than I thought was humanly possible to put past the lips did she withdraw and let me do the same to her. She did things with her tongue around mine far beyond what I’d been able to do to hers in the first half of this kiss. But after all, it was from her, when I was in Victoria’s body in dreams, kissing Nancy, kissing Aries, and even kissing Sea Men that I had learned how to kiss. I don’t know who taught Victoria in the first place, but she did it better than any other human I had encountered.

Finally, we drew apart to catch our breath, and the moment was over. I let Victoria enjoy the next few minutes as I cleaned up from breakfast and finished getting ready for work. Before I left, I tried to give her as much free rein as possible. The last time I’d summoned her on a work day, I’d given her the task of writing down journal entries for the time she was summoned, along with tending to her own needs as far as the bathroom, eating, and such. This time the proposal was the only reason I had brought her here, and I basically told her to do what she wanted.

During my lunch break I checked up on her, and I found her shopping online. She was ordering parts to make her own doll. I looked inside her mind to try and understand her motivation for this. It wasn’t that she thought she could animate it, but rather, that when I summoned her on a day I needed to work, which would be more often now that I was trying to bring one of my future wives in every day, there wasn’t much for her to do.

I decided this was OK. This cost money, but I had money, and I thought it was fine if she wanted to spend this amount of it. It was going to be more of an issue what we did with the doll when we wanted to sleep in the bed, but I’d find space. She ordered a Sybian, a male bodysuit, and other parts similar to what I’d used to finish off the limbs on the doll that her body would turn back into overnight. She didn’t order the cheap electric blanket that provided both stuffing and heat to the body, as we both knew those were readily available in town and I’d have to drive to town to receive the delivery anyway, but she wrote it on a post-it along with “pick up orders” as a mini shopping list.

After dinner, I let her have sex with me in her way, and that lasted longer than I would have expected. Between the engagement and the doll order, she was very happy with me. We cleaned up, and didn’t have any more sex until it was time for bed and for me to change her into my next future wife.

Mona was the next of the women who I met, so I ended up in one of those dreams where she has to save me from misadventures, and on Tuesday, August 22, I woke up in bed with her.

At least proposing to Mona would take the normal style; I could just do it. And she was right about the ring changing; I guess someone who had benefited from a Sea Man egg being changed into that of a sea dragon would think about that. The diamond was changed to an equally large ruby, and the gold of the ring into red gold. I didn’t even realize red gold was a thing, but apparently it’s an alloy of 75% gold and 25% copper. Though the red gold wasn’t nearly as bright a red as most of what Mona wore, the ruby was, and the ring fit into her color scheme as well as any jewelry could.

It was at the breakfast table where I brought out the ring. “Mona, will you marry me?”

“Of course I will,” Mona said, holding out her hand for me to place the ring on it.

Mona was not as forward as Victoria with the kiss that followed, but she waited there clearly anticipating it. I had to press my lips against hers and slowly part her lips by pressing my tongue between them. I probed repeatedly, encouraging her to reciprocate the tongue action. She eventually did, and it was equally an exciting kiss as Victoria’s had been, but in a totally different way, much more tentative, with just the tips of the tongues going back and forth rather than first Victoria and then me extending our tongues as far as was possible.

I left for work, knowing Mona needed no help.

In the evening, she was explaining more about her castle and how she came to inherit her magic from a lineage of magical people that goes back millennia, and how the castle was built by hundreds of people enslaved by the unrestrained magical power of those ancient times.

“There are equally many magical people alive today as there were back then, well, minus one that I’ll tell you about sometime, and each of them has a huge castle of a home built way back then in the same way as mine. The only reason we have them is that legacy; the magic would never provide someone that kind of power today, but it allows me to live comfortably.”

“So what about Cecilia? How do you afford her?”

“Oh, she’s a person I helped with magic.”

“Right, you do that kind of thing. But the price for saving her was slavery?”

“She’s not enslaved. Well, kind of like indentured servitude in your world.”

“In the early days of my country, indentured servitude was used to pay off debts the servants had no other way to pay, so they were virtually slaves.”

“Sorry. It’s the way things are done in my world. She agreed to serve me for a period of time, but she entered into a magical contract voluntarily and when that contract expires she will leave and have no further obligation. If she leaves sooner, the contract will take away the help I gave her.”

“How long?”

“Seven years, the traditional period of servitude for major magics, and she has about two years left.”

“OK. I was worried it was like sharecropping, which theoretically paid the workers, but often so little they could just pay their current expenses and not their debts. While theoretically free, they remained trapped in a system rigged against them, sometimes their whole lives. Practices of that entire era are considered abhorrent today.”

“Oh, by all the magic, no, I wouldn’t do that. Nobody would accept that here.”

“What kind of help did you give her?”

“I helped her change her body.”

“What was wrong with her body?”

“It was male. She was transgender and I helped her get a female body.”

“Ah. It makes sense now. Mona, do you think I’m transgender?”

“Jody, I’ve never been able to figure out what you are, but I don’t think you’re transgender. If you’re willing, follow me to the castle and let me cast a magical scan on your body.”

“Uh, what’s the price for it?”

“Totally free. No money, no servitude. I’m curious about this too and I’m doing it to satisfy my own curiosity.”

“OK. Is it going to hurt?”

“Maybe it’ll tickle a little. And it might get you aroused because of the places this scan has to go.”

I was promising to marry her, so if she did something that might arouse me, that wasn’t an issue!

“OK, I guess. Let’s do it.”

We went through the doorways and through the castle. She led me into what seemed to be a magical library, a room whose walls were completely lined with large books. She pulled out one, read a bit, and then put it away and pulled out another book, read some more, and finally said she was ready.

“I need you to stand there,” she said, pointing to a particular spot on the floor.

There was a circle burnt into the floor, and I worried what I was getting myself into, but I stood there. She cast more magic that added more circles and other designs around me, and eventually a glowing blue wall of magical workings in the air above the circle around me. The blue changed to green, and it tickled a bit, but as the green became more intense, I indeed felt aroused. Without me touching my dick at all, it became rock-hard, and I came, but the white spurts hit the magical wall and fell inside the innermost circle. The books and other things here were protected by that.

The green changed to red, and it tickled again, differently. As the red got more intense, a weird sensation passed through me as if touching every cell in my body. I felt aroused, but differently. Even though I did not have the parts, I swear it felt like when Victoria was aroused. After several minutes, the red wall vanished, along with all the extra lines on the floor. And Mona went back to reading in the book.

When she stopped reading and looked at me once more, I asked, “So what’s the verdict?”

“I don’t know, exactly. It seems like you’re strongly male and strongly female. The book doesn’t cover that possibility.”

“What does it say?”

“Most people have a strong gender identity matching their body. They don’t experience any gender issues, and we call them cisgender; they are happy with their body. Some people also have a weak or moderate version of the other gender. Those people still don’t have any gender issues. In a few people, it’s reversed. They have a strong version of the other gender and a moderate, weak, or absent version of their body’s gender. These people are transgender, though the ones where the body’s gender is moderate sometimes suppress their strong gender and stay closeted their entire lives, possibly having a successful relationship nevertheless. A few people have moderate versions of both genders. If they are of about equal strength, they’re what’s called genderfluid. Are you aware of that term?”

“Yes. At one point I thought I was genderfluid, but when I learned more about what it meant, I realized it didn’t really apply to me.”

“In genderfluid people, the genders are expressed about equally strongly. Various influences, such as hormonal fluctuations, differences in the environment, and the presence of people they care about of one gender or the other can cause either gender to be expressed more strongly at times, giving them the sense of being transgender only some of the time.”

“OK. That sounds like my understanding of the term.”

“There are also people with one moderate and one weak or absent gender. They will usually be the same as people with one strong gender, either cisgender or transgender, but they care less strongly about it. The cisgenders usually don’t have any gender issues, they just have less of a libido and may be more passive sexually. The transgenders among these are the ones who most need help; they know their body feels wrong but they don’t feel it strongly enough to try to do anything about it. Usually they simply never end up doing anything sexually, though sometimes they end up with a dominant partner. Finally, a few people have weak or absent versions of both genders. These people end up nonbinary, agender, asexual, or aromantic. They don’t want to be either male nor female, so they suppress their body’s gender as much as possible without adopting the other.”

“And you say I’m strong in both genders?”

“Yes, that’s what the scan said. There shouldn’t be enough room in your gender center for that, but somehow there is for you. So there’s nothing written about it because it doesn’t usually happen. I’d love to scan Victoria, and also alt-Victoria.”

“Sure, I can come back other days and let you have a go with my other versions.”

On Wednesday, August 23, I awoke in bed with Aries, the last of the women I wanted to propose to. She was last because I didn’t encounter her until I had started puberty, unlike the others.

The ring had transformed again. It was back to regular gold, but the diamond had been replaced by a huge pearl.

At breakfast, I pulled out the ring, and Aries exclaimed, “Yes, yes, I’ll marry you, Jody!” before I even asked the question.

“What if I was just going to ask if you had ever seen a pearl this big?”

“Do you want an egg up your ass?”

“Er, will you marry me, Aries?”

“Yes,” she said, simply, and pulled me to her for a long, complicated kiss. Somehow, in almost two months of doing this, I had never kissed Aries in the real world, not a deep, passionate kiss, though I had done it in dreams in the past.

Sea Man tongues are... different. More flexible. Humans can make their tongues narrower and longer to stick them out of their mouths, but Sea Man tongues also get thinner from top to bottom, which lets them get even longer, and makes them more flexible. When the tongue is at rest in the mouth, it looks the same, but ask Aries to stick her tongue out and you might think she was a frog. This provided a kiss that was sometimes deep and sometimes playful, with the tip wrapped completely around my tongue, and I could not fully reciprocate the action. But I did my best.

I went to work and let Aries do whatever, though I expected her to visit Mona and Bruno. We had fish for dinner, but Aries had kept hers alive in a bucket of water so that she could eat it freshly killed once I had cooked mine. It would have been disconcerting to see someone eat a fish that way if I had not done it myself in the past. But apparently she meant for it to be romantic for us to eat together in our separate ways.

On Thursday, August 24, since I had gotten through all the proposals, I brought Victoria back. After breakfast, I led her through into Mona’s world, and asked Mona to run her test on Victoria, instructing Victoria to do what Mona asked and that she was free to do whatever when the tests were through.

I peeked into her mind at lunch and during my afternoon break and it was clear “whatever” was sex. When I got home, she was still over there, and since Mona didn’t answer the door, I had Victoria tell her that I was at the door. Mona arrived in what I was sure was meant to be a bathrobe shortly after that, red like all her other clothes, and led me back to where Victoria, Aries, and Nancy were engaged in an orgy on her big red bed. There were two writhing, probably magically animated double-ended dildos, neither in use, one beside the women on the bed and one that had fallen to the floor.

Rather than join in, though, Mona pulled Victoria out of the orgy, and they sat with me to explain the results of the scan today.

“Jody, Victoria has as strong a female identity as you do. In fact, I’m pretty sure her female identity is identical to the one I scanned in you. The difference is she has almost no male identity. I would say none, but there’s a faint echo of one. I think I might be picking up yours through her, though, and I wonder if when I scanned you the other day, when Victoria was not summoned, if I was detecting hers within you, somehow. It would explain how you had two identities stronger than should be possible to exist together in one person.”

“Do you think mine would be different now while Victoria is here?”

“That’s exactly what I think.”

“Well, I’m free.”

“Just let me wash up first.”

She went into the attached bathroom and I could hear her showering. Clearly she had been part of the orgy. She came out and put on one of her red witch outfits, then led me to the library where she had performed the ritual before. It was different from the first ritual only in that when the green curtain of symbols changed to the red, I didn’t feel anything.

“Yes, confirmed,” she said when it was done. “You have your male gender identity and a faint echo of Victoria’s through your connection to her.”

“It explains why I could never understand what it meant that I dreamed of being Victoria. I’m not transgender or genderfluid, but something else.”

“I’m going to call it bigender, though whether you have two bodies because of the two genders or two genders because of the two bodies isn’t clear to me.”

Mona led me back to her bedroom, where Victoria had once again joined in the orgy. “Playtime is over,” I silently told Victoria through the connection I had to her mind.

Victoria disentangled herself from the other two and stood beside me as if to follow. But her scent was strong.

“Mona, you don’t mind if Victoria uses your shower, I hope.”

“Go ahead.”

Although I had retracted the “do whatever” instruction in telling her playtime was over, she still had the instruction that let her attend to bodily needs which I had managed to make a standing instruction active all the time, so asking about the shower was enough to get her to do it. The others were stopping, too, and Nancy helped sort out everyone’s clothes, leaving me with the pile Victoria had worn to get here, presumably during the scanning ritual, and not again since then, judging by the lack of similar smell in the clothes. I handed them to her when she emerged from the bathroom, figuring they were clean enough to wear to get back to my house. Nancy and Aries went in to shower together when Victoria came out. At least, I hoped it was just to shower, but I didn’t stick around to find out. Those two could get home on their own.

I made dinner for Victoria and me, and I spent the time afterward having the weird sort of mental conversation only the two of us could have. I could “speak” by suggesting ideas in Victoria’s mind, and she didn’t really have to respond, because I knew how to look at what her mind was thinking about. As much as I had let her go on autopilot today, she was still a part of me, and only independent to the extent I willed it. But she was in that orgy almost as much as I thought today, so most of the answers just made me get hard. And I really didn’t think more sex was what her body needed at this moment.

At least they had stopped for lunch. They all lined up next to each other under the covers, naked, when Mona paged Cecilia to bring them lunch, and she brought in two trays with two meals each, including a raw fish for Aries.

I wondered why Mona hadn’t simply made the food with magic, but this prompted Victoria to recall another part of this memory in which Mona provided the answer. Mona had created it, but it was simply Cecilia’s job to serve it. Cecilia prepared Mona’s regular meals from scratch using ingredients Mona created using magic, in order to get higher quality meals than Mona was capable of making with magic, but she wasn’t prepared for the three extra guests and so used magic to make their food.

The agreement I had made with my future wives allowed them to have sex with each other, but I didn’t expect all of them to get together in a big orgy practically as soon as that was possible. I was trying to figure out if this was a mistake. Was it the doorways that were a mistake? They were really useful; I wouldn’t want to lose them.

Maybe it was OK. It was their equivalent to the rule that I could pick any one person each day and have sex with that one exclusively in the real world, even if it wasn’t one of my wives. And while Victoria has had sex with Nancy and Aries before, it was probably new to the other pairings and they wanted to try it.

But I’ve actually moved beyond that. I’m arranging myself in sexual contact with them at bedtime just to bring another person the next day, rather than because I want to have sex, and when I do have sex it’s usually at another time.

I did have sex with Victoria later, but I did it gently. I felt like I’d missed out. She was so tired from hours and hours of sex that she didn’t object to me driving at that point. I just did it until the point that I came once in the condom, though, and then stayed in that position to sleep.

On Friday, August 25, I brought Nancy. I wanted her to think about the new information Mona had given me about myself.

She was still lying in bed when I went to start my shower, but she got up and showered when I was done. Once I had breakfast set up, she came to the table, dressed plainly in a T-shirt and shorts.

“Jody, I want to apologize for what the group did yesterday.”

“You don’t need to apologize.”

“I do. I think we all do. You gave us permission to do that, but it wasn’t reasonable for all of your fiancées to get together and have an orgy that went on for hours.”

“OK. Apology accepted. I thought about it too, and I wondered if you all did it because I’d given you permission and because it was new to some of you. I’m pretty sure Mona never had sex with any of you before, and I’m not sure you ever did anything with Aries.”

“With Aries, no. With Sea Men, when you brought me into dreams in their world, yes.”

“How did it start?”

“Victoria came and got me. Well, no, she got the Nancy from her dream world, but I remember it like it was me. They went into Mona’s world, and Aries was already there. Victoria asked Mona for permission for the three of them to have sex on her big bed. And Mona said ‘Not without me,’ and led the way, stripping as she went.”

“Oh, right, Victoria’s Nancy. Is she OK with this? I didn’t ask her specifically, and that’s my fault.”

“Yeah. She is jealous of the fact that you bought me a ring in the dream world and not her.”

“Oops. I’ll make sure to get her one.”

“Thanks,” Nancy replied.

“What I really wanted to ask you about today was what happened before that. When I summoned Mona the other day, she explained to me about Cecilia’s situation.”

“The maid? I met her for the first time when she served us lunch yesterday. Er, the other me met her.”

“I wondered how Mona was paying to have Cecilia work there and Mona explained that Cecilia was transgender, and her employment there was part of a contract to pay for her gender change.”

“A magical gender change, I suppose. I didn’t realize Mona could do that.”

“She probably has to have the target’s permission, but apparently she can. She described it as a major magic. Cecilia is 5 years into a 7 year contract to pay for it.”

Nancy responded, “Geez, 7 years, that’s a lot, but not totally unreasonable, I suppose, for a gender change that is instant and complete. And she gets room and board, I guess.”

“Yeah, though not like that costs Mona anything.”

“Right. She owns that big castle and magics up all the food.”

“Anyway, I asked Mona if I was transgender. And Mona thought I wasn’t but did a magical scan to check. Apparently, they have sophisticated gender magic. The way her magic sees it, each person can have a male gender identity, a female one, or both, and they can be different strengths. The combinations of these with male or female bodies lead to all the various genders like cis and trans and genderfluid and nonbinary.”

“Wow. I mean, I guess that makes sense, but I don’t know that anybody from our world has figured it out to such an extent.”

“When she scanned me when Victoria wasn’t summoned, she saw a strong male identity and a strong female identity. She said usually that’s not possible, that there’s not enough space in a person’s gender identity for that. The genderfluid people have equally strong male and female identities but they are not as strong as mine. So I sent Victoria to her yesterday morning to get scanned, and when I pulled Mona away in the evening she scanned me again.”

“And...” Nancy said, impatiently.

“When we are both present, I have the strong male identity and Victoria has the strong female one and we each show a slight trace of the other due to our connection. And that’s also how I have room for the two strong identities because when Victoria isn’t summoned, she’s within me, somehow.”

“But you’ve always felt that, haven’t you? That a part of you is Victoria?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t think it was so literal. Anyway, I brought you here today to think about that. Apply your smarts. Tell me if I am missing something.”

“Think about what? Gah!”

Nancy was a bit flustered by the request but I left her with it nevertheless. When I returned from work, she gave me a summary over dinner.

“I spent a bunch of time in Mona’s world researching. Nobody here has anything useful to say about it because they don’t understand the concept. They do understand that some people feel like they have a person of the other gender inside them, but they don’t understand it the way Mona does. They can’t differentiate what makes you special from people who simply have a stronger identity for the opposite gender to their body.”

“That makes sense.”

“I confirmed what Mona says about there not being room for two strong gender identities within a person, but that’s all I could do. They have never seen a case like yours, with two people linked like that, and they have a lot of weird magical stuff.”

“OK, well, you tried. It still helps knowing I’m unique even in the world where they can identify more of what makes me unique.”

“And even though Victoria’s Nancy had enough sex yesterday to make her sore, and I remember the sex, my body didn’t,” Nancy said as she started stripping.

We took breaks. It wasn’t one long sexual encounter until bedtime.

I had multiple reasons to bring Victoria back on Saturday, August 26, so I did.

She was in fact still a little sore from the long session of sex Thursday, and it was clear she wasn’t going to be trying anything like that again, but all her packages for the doll had arrived. Even though she didn’t want it now, I drove us to town and picked up the packages and the other mail, and shopped for other items including condoms and tampons. I bought one of the cheap electric blankets like the one that fell apart during my first year here whose components I had later used to stuff my doll. Not food, though. I didn’t buy food in town anymore because in the dream worlds I could buy food on shorter trips, it didn’t cost me any actual money, and I had a much greater variety available.

When we got back it was lunchtime, and before I put Victoria to work assembling her new toy, I took her into her dream world. As always, we didn’t need to speak to each other. I brought up the memory I found in her head of her Nancy being jealous the other Nancy had a ring in the dream world. Victoria’s Nancy hadn’t even had the experience of me proposing to her, though she remembered me proposing to the other Nancy.

At the same time, though, Victoria wondered why her Nancy should be engaged to me, since she was Victoria’s lover, not mine. But the superposition of the two Nancys had caused all of my Nancy’s memories to get scrambled with hers, and so we were here. Maybe Victoria should propose to her. They had same-sex marriage in my world now; they should have it in this one, too.

We went out and got the ring, a match for the one Victoria now had in the real world. By the time we got back to Nancy’s house with it, we had decided to propose to her together. Once Nancy let us in, we went no further than her living room. I used Victoria’s mouth to say the first part.

“Nancy, I know this is kind of weird, but I also noticed how left out you felt the other day.”

Victoria and I knelt down beside each other, and she pulled out the ring.

Together, we said, “Nancy, will you marry us?”

“Oh, yes! Yes! This is amazing, Victoria, and Jody, you too! Um, yeah, you’re right that it’s weird, but it feels right.”

I said, “I think that if you do have a wedding ceremony, it’ll be here, and you’ll marry Victoria, provided we can find a way to set it up. But when you are together with me and the others, you can be considered my wife on par with them. When Victoria’s in the real world, she’s going to be marrying me, and she can’t marry you, too, in the same shard of reality, which is the only one in which she exists besides here. Not officially marry, anyway.”

“That... makes sense,” Nancy responded. “Yeah, there are several reasons we should do it that way.”

Nancy stepped close to Victoria. She knew the same way to act around Victoria that I had learned; she didn’t initiate a kiss, but left herself open to one. Victoria grabbed her in a tight hug and kissed Nancy with a deep, passionate kiss. Afterwards, Nancy gave me a mere peck on the cheek.

With that done, we picked up some food and returned to the real world. I put the food away, and Victoria knew she had to open the packages and assemble her doll. Once I was done with my chore, I sat down and watched Victoria, both with my eyes and also from inside her head. Victoria had apparently learned to sew from her mother exactly as well as I had, just enough to make this job possible. Those memories are what I saw running through her head as she was trying to figure out how to get started.

Victoria began by ripping the stitches that held the two sides of the blanket together with the seam ripper from my sewing kit until those sides and the heating element were three separate pieces. That much was easy. She seemed a little uncertain how to get it all together, though, so when I could tell she was looking for the help, I directed to her my thoughts about how I’d assembled my doll, as well as my memories of alt-Victoria’s doll. I also came over to her work area and helped hold things for her.

Pretty soon, she had one blanket surface cut into pieces and mostly stuffed into the legs of the doll, almost all the other blanket surface in the torso, and the arms filled with leftover bits. The heating element ran all throughout, with the plug end hanging out of a leg. The Sybian in the middle made it almost three separate pieces, which made having the bodysuit to hold it together even more essential than in my doll. Once this much of it was assembled, a strategically cut hole allowed attaching the vibrating phallus to the device, with a lot of reinforcing stitches to keep the rest of the suit from ripping. Where I had used a bra and wads of padding to give my doll breasts, Victoria used stitches drawn tight across the chest to outline a six-pack and pecs.

Victoria finished putting it together, plugged in both the heating element and the Sybian, and turned it all on, but I could tell she was not ready to actually try it. I mentally told her she didn’t need to push herself to use it now, and she turned it off and just collapsed onto the bed beside it. It reminded me of the first time I summoned her and had to move every bit of her body myself. What Victoria wanted most was rest and I let her have it.

It was only just before bed that she got up again to pee and strip for bed. I moved the new doll to a spot on the floor where it was out of the way, and put on my condom myself. And I put it in her when we went to bed, but I didn’t move it around any. I personally didn’t feel any more soreness from her, but she was apprehensive about it. I think it scared her that it was possible to have too much sex.

On Sunday, August 27, I awoke in bed with Aries. I didn’t pay any attention to the doll as I walked past it to the bathroom, but before I made it back, I heard her exclaim, “Oh, did you make this for me?”

“No, it’s Vic-” I started to say, but at this moment I re-entered the bedroom and saw the doll on the floor was in a blue bodysuit the color of Aries’ skin rather than a “nude” one designed to look like a white human. As I got closer, I saw that it even had fins... well, narrow pockets that the fins could fit into if a Sea Man wore the suit, not that I could ever imagine a Sea Man doing so. And instead of the chest having stitching to imitate pecs and abs, there was an extra layer sewn on the front to imitate a Sea Man’s sac.

“Victoria made it for her personal use but I guess it’s yours today.”

I didn’t rush to breakfast because I knew Aries would get a fish for me, and of course she did. After breakfast, I made Aries put on a bikini when I called my parents, a different, dry one and not the one that was still dripping in the bathroom.

“I got engaged to all the women,” I explained to my parents.

“All of them?”

“Well, to Nancy, Victoria, Mona, and Aries. I decided those are going to be the main ones.”

Mom asked, “Not the other one, I think her name was Doris?”

“No. I’m not as attached to her, though I might still bring her around from time to time.”

Dad asked, “How’s that working?”

“They wanted rules. It’s more complicated than just the one I summon being my wife that day because of the doorways.”

“Doorways?” Dad asked.

“Remember Mona, the one who can do magic with some limits?”

“Yes.”

“I had her create permanent doorways to connect to my dream world and Victoria’s dream world.”

“Oh, I think you mentioned them on one of our other calls but I couldn’t stay on the call to hear more about them. So go ahead.”

“Victoria is only here when I summon her, but Nancy is a character in my dreams and Victoria’s dreams. She lives in those worlds connected by the doorways when I haven’t summoned her.”

“She’s in both worlds?” Mom asked.

“Yeah, actually, there are two versions of Nancy, one who grew up as my friend and one who grew up as Victoria’s. But they share memories to a large extent. I know there are really two of them, though; I’ve had them sit where I can see both of them through one of the doorways, and talk with both of them as part of the same conversation. Mona’s magic doesn’t allow them to get into the same world, but otherwise they can cross the doorways.”

“So your characters don’t stay in their own worlds now.”

“Right. And Aries, the blue-skinned woman, asked Mona to make a doorway to her home one day. So on days I have summoned Victoria, it’s possible for all four of them to get together.”

“That must be chaos,” Dad commented.

“The rules they wanted included that when I was in one of their worlds, that person would have priority for sex and whatnot, and Mona wants to really marry me in her world. In the real world, it’s who I’ve summoned, even if it’s not one of my wives, though I’ve promised them the others will only be for experiments from now on. They wanted a concession that when two of them were together without me that they could have lesbian sex, and I figured sure, why not.”

My parents both broke out in big laughs, anticipating how it turned out.

“Yeah, you guessed it,” I continued when they could hear me again. “The first time I summoned Victoria on a work day, the four of them ended up in an hours-long orgy.”

Another big laugh ensued.

“Nancy and Victoria were sore for days afterward. I’m not sure about the others. But I think they know now to be more restrained in their activity.”

“Was it a new thing for some of them?” Dad asked.

“Yeah, I know Victoria has gotten it on with Nancy and Aries separately in the past, but it was the first time for the other pairings.”

“I’m sure they’ll do it again, but for shorter periods,” Mom commented.

“Well, I wanted to talk about a couple other things. Remember how I said Victoria is only here when I summon her? Mona thinks she’s literally within me. People in Mona’s world have used magic to gain a greater understanding of gender, how some people are transgender or genderfluid or nonbinary. Mona detected in me a gender configuration that her people don’t think is possible. Later, she figured out it was because Victoria is literally inside me, and when she’s summoned, that turns into a full male gender for me and a full female gender for her.”

“That’s why you figured out you weren’t really transgender when I helped you experiment with that as a teenager,” Mom responded.

“Pretty much. Mona said the balance she saw within me is similar to some genderfluid people where either gender might overrule the other on some days, but my genders are stronger. Usually there’s not room for two such strong genders in a person. It works because there are really two of me and the female gender is in Victoria.”

“Can all these women of yours get out into the real world together at once?”

“They haven’t, but it should be possible. Hang on.”

I went and got Nancy and Mona and brought them through, so they were all with me on the call.

“Yep, looks like it works.”

“Do you think Mona could make a doorway here and let you all visit us?” Mom asked.

“All of us? Is your place big enough for that?”

“I think we can manage Thanksgiving dinner for 7 if you can help us rearrange a little. But no, you can’t sleep over.”

“OK, but if we have the doorway everyone can sleep in their own homes. And Victoria has to be summoned, so she’ll have to be the one summoned on Thanksgiving Day.”

“Yes, that’s the idea,” Mom continued.

Mona said, “You have to give me permission, but doing it over the phone should work, and then I can make a doorway that looks like a regular door within your apartment. You want to try right now?”

“Sure,” Dad said. “I give you permission to make a doorway into my apartment from Jody’s place.”

“And I give you permission for the end here,” I told her. I moved some furniture to free up a space for it here. It would work as a temporary thing.

Quickly Mona created the doorway there, and we all walked through. There were lots of handshakes and hugs.

“Amazing,” Dad said.

“Hey, what if I get married here?”

Mom replied, “Oh, that’d be nice. But which one are you going to marry while you’re here?”

“Why not marry all of them? I can stay through the weekend and summon a different one each day.”

“Sure. There are a lot of little wedding chapels around here. We could reserve a different one for you each day.”

Dad asked, “Are you going to bring your co-workers down for it?”

“Nah. Two of the guys, including one who no longer works up here, have gotten married while working here, but they both did it back where their families lived. They gave us copies of the invitation so we’d know, but nobody expected us to fly off and attend. And the guys here don’t know about the business with doorways and the other worlds.”

“Are you going to give them four different invitations?”

“That’s one of the things I need to figure out. I probably just need one, and it’ll change to put in the name of whoever I have summoned each day.”

“Sounds like a plan, then. Keep in touch as you figure out the details.”

I and my crew all went back through the doorway into my home, and Mona removed it. We didn’t want anyone barging in on my parents, and Mona could easily recreate it when needed.

Mona went back to her world, reminding me that I still owed her a ring there. Aries played around on Victoria’s doll that had become hers. Nancy and I spent the day brainstorming things we would need to do and how they’d probably interact with my power. We were definitely going to have four ceremonies so each woman could experience it, but we probably only needed one ‘real’ one that other people would be invited to, and where the marriage would be registered. At the others, just my family including the other women not summoned that day would attend.

It was already the end of August, so I had three months to try and plan out these weddings.

I confirmed the vacation time first. We technically only had Thanksgiving Day as a holiday, but so many people used vacation time around it that all the wells were usually set to simply shut down if anything went wrong, and there was mainly a skeleton crew monitoring them.

I continued summoning one of my fiancées each day, though it barely seemed necessary. I summoned Victoria every second or third day, since she wasn’t present except when I did, while the others lived in their own worlds and could meet up through the doorways any day.

My parents and my fiancées did a lot of the planning, either providing me with locations and sources for things we needed, or fully setting up deals only needing my approval. We located a place that printed wedding invitations (which these days I assume was nothing but a printer with fancy paper and fancy ink) and a bridal shop for Victoria’s dress. I wasn’t going to know until I had the dress home with me overnight whether it changed to a fit and style for the other women, but I expected it would. All their other clothes changed!

I had appointments at both stores on Saturday, September 2 and summoned Victoria on that day to be there for both, and we made the trip into town. At the print shop, after looking through a catalog of invitation styles, they gave us samples in two of the styles, with our real names and planned wedding date but the name and address of the shop in place of where we would actually get married, for us to consider.

The bridal shop did not have a very wide selection, but it was for a small town, after all. But knowing how things changed, we weren’t even sure if Victoria would get married in the same dress we were getting. We picked one Victoria liked and was available in a good size and they measured her to tailor it properly. Good size, in this case, meant it fit over her breasts; the rest could be taken up.

The sample invitations changed to have the names of all my other women on them during the week, so I was sure they’d work as we guessed. At some point Mona had acquired a last name, though I was sure she didn’t have one when I first summoned her in early July, or at least she had an ID that didn’t show it. Mona’s last name was simply Galbreath, the name of the castle, which made sense when there were a limited number of sources of magic in the world that all had fabulous castles built on top of them. She was the heir and current owner of the Galbreath magic and all that went with it, and if I inherited it from her I would probably go as Jody Galbreath in her world. Aries’ last name was indeed Trout, as I remembered seeing in the birth records in her village.

I summoned the other women throughout the week and Victoria on Tuesday, September 5, exactly 4 weeks after her previous period, and she was in her period again. This confirmed that, even though unlike the others she wasn’t accessible somewhere and didn’t have memories of the other days, she still lived those days, and was having periods on the same schedule as if she lived continuously.

We made appointments the following Saturday, September 9 to place the final order for the invitations and pick up Victoria’s dress. By this point, my parents had arranged for wedding chapels for Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, and so we had a location to print on the real invitations.

On Thursday, we had the largest chapel available near where I grew up, so I could invite all my high school friends. The other days, we’d be in small places that were each a short drive from their apartment in Jacksonville. They’d also decided on a place for a reception after the Thursday wedding, which naturally included Thanksgiving dinner. This avoided having to rearrange my parents’ small apartment to fit in seating for 7. While Mona could have magicked up the food, we were doing this for real, with real catering, which would look normal to everybody involved.

The dress fit properly along with all the accessories. We paid for it and took it back with us. We also got the wedding bands, which Nancy had placed an order for one day that she was summoned. And the invitation printing place was in fact just a fancy printer, and after the other stops we went back there and picked up 150 invitations. I didn’t expect nearly so many people to attend, but we were having it in my home town and a lot of my high school friends would be there. Only a couple dozen of the invitations were going to people I knew lived elsewhere.

Back home, I hung up the dress in a section I set aside in the closet where it wouldn’t get rumpled or crushed by other clothes. We removed some of the clothes that the weather was now too chilly for and placed them in dream-world storage.

Both Nancys had ordered wedding bands in their dream worlds, too, from the same jewelers who we bought the engagement rings from, and Victoria and I went there later in the day to get those. This was when we found out Victoria’s Nancy was planning a polyamorous three-way wedding in her dream world in which she would marry both Victoria and me. I had each Nancy hold onto the bands for her own wedding. Both Nancys were planning their weddings in each dream world the Saturday after my Thanksgiving trip with the other weddings, but at different times.

Sunday, September 10 I summoned Aries, in large part to have her try on the dress. And when we looked at the dress together, it was a completely different dress. It was shorter in front, just going past her knees, and the lace over parts of the dress was blue, matching the color of her skin, with a pattern that resembled fish scales. The train was shorter as well, and entirely different; it basically looked like a mermaid tail. I was glad it hadn’t turned into a bikini or disappeared entirely.

All the accessories that went with it, the bra, panties, and the single garter that is for no purpose other than being removed publicly afterward, were also blue. I can’t say Aries was excited to see it; the wedding is just not as important an event in her culture as it is for the others. But when I explained that I wanted her to try everything on to make sure they fit, she did, putting them on right there in front of me and neither seeking nor expecting privacy in doing so. And of course they fit.

She also took me into her world to go ring shopping. We knew Mona’s magic would not let us take real jewelry through it, so it had to be acquired there. They didn’t make jewelry in the fishing village, but she found a ring online like the one she wanted, somewhat like what the real-world engagement ring turned into for her. We followed the site’s instructions for measuring Aries’ ring size. I took down all the information to use later, when I was fully in the Sea World, to order the ring to be shipped to her.

Monday, September 11, I summoned Victoria and myself into the Sea Man world and I ordered the ring for Aries that day. The dress looked similar to the way it did for Aries, though it was tailored to fit Victoria. I expected this to apply only today because Victoria was a Sea Woman today, and when I go back into the real world it’ll look like a normal wedding dress.

This left Mona’s ring, and I asked her about it on Tuesday, September 12 when I summoned her.

“Mona, I know your magic won’t let me take wealth through the doorways, and I have nothing in your world with which to buy a ring.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. I am not as rich as the sorcerer-kings of old, but I can afford to buy the ring. After I saw the beautiful ring that the one you bought for Nancy turned into when you summoned me, I ordered one like it. They had to custom make it, though, and I’m expecting to get it Friday, along with wedding bands in the same red gold. Visit me, say, this time next week and I’ll give it to you to propose to me there. Don’t summon me, though. It’s supposed to happen entirely within my world.”

“Sure. That sounds good. Both Nancys are planning weddings in their dream worlds Saturday, December 2, the weekend after our real world weddings. Do you want to do yours the day after?”

“Maybe the same day,” Mona suggested. “You’ll have Victoria summoned that day, right?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I don’t need to be summoned because I’m real there when you don’t summon me. Victoria can be my maid of honor. And I can arrange with Nancy to stagger our times.”

“OK. It’ll be a little crazy, but as long as you all work it out. Oh, and we still have a bit of unfinished business with summoning you as Manuel so you can start to get his memories.”

“Don’t do it Friday or next Tuesday. Otherwise, whenever.”

Mona tried on her fully red wedding dress with equally red accessories, and of course everything fit. The dress (back to the usual white) also fit Nancy when I summoned her on Wednesday, September 13.

It was Thursday, September 14, when I finally got around to summoning Manuel with myself as alt-Victoria. This was mainly for Mona to learn about Manuel, through the memory-sharing feature these people with multiple versions seem to have, but I’d completely forgotten that this was when alt-Victoria was getting married. Her diary entries the last couple weeks were furious with notes and plans for it. She shipped ahead both her wedding dress and a second doll she had made and tested to confirm she could convert as well as the original. She had taken yesterday and today off work, had driven to Fairbanks and flown to Seattle yesterday, stayed in a hotel, and was making the rest of the journey today. This travel time was why I hadn’t visited my parents since I’d been up here until the idea of Mona transporting us there in an instant was brought up.

Fortunately, that wasn’t happening in my copy of her world. I was working like normal and my truck was waiting for me in the parking lot here. And the wedding dress (my wedding dress, of course) was still in the closet, not having been shipped ahead. So I let Manuel familiarize Mona with memories from alt-Victoria’s version of him by thinking through those memories while I went to work.

In the evening, Manuel asked me if I was the same size as the other Victoria.

I thought for a moment and answered, “I think so.”

I looked in my wardrobe and checked several garments that had size tags.

“Yes. All the same sizes. Do you want me to strip so you can measure me?”

“No need,” he said.

He did a quick bit of magic that apparently measured me while I was still dressed.

“Done. Mona will remember the sizes this magic has informed me of. Mona has already arranged for Victoria’s maid of honor dress and just needs to send the sizes over. Summon her on the same day you come to propose to me with the ring in my world, and she can try the dress on, too.”

I summoned Aries on Friday, September 15 and she told me her ring order was expected to be delivered the next day. I had put her email address on the delivery notifications since I wasn’t going to be in the Sea Man world after the day I placed the order and wouldn’t see the notifications in Sea Man Jody’s email.

Starting on Saturday, September 16 I summoned Victoria every other day. We were at this point gathering addresses for guests at our wedding. I was worried that the different summonings could have far-reaching and unexpected consequences on the world, so, since the wedding was going to be on a Victoria summoning day, I gathered addresses only on days Victoria was summoned. Presumably, if any of them did change, the addresses on my envelopes would change to match, and somehow or other the invitations would get to the right place.

Because the wedding was where I grew up, friends I had known in high school and before were the majority of the invitation list. People I knew in college were also invited, though I expected few of them to show up. Even Pansy was invited, though I figured there was no chance in hell that she would come. We discovered that people unique to Victoria’s dreams were not here. Apparently, summoning her did not also bring those people into existence.

In the evening, I went through the doorways into Aries’ world and found her sitting in her little house. She probably would usually be out on the beach, but she was there on this day for the same reason I was there. She let me open the package with her ring in it, and I knelt with it and asked, “Will you marry me?”

Aries said, “Yes,” and kissed me with another of those abnormally deep kisses only her species could deliver.

And then she said, “And so we’re married.”

“Huh?” I asked, confused.

“Remember, we don’t have formal weddings here. The promise is all we have. This is a promise for us to eventually have a child together, even if someone else carries it for us.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember now. I’m not promising to have that child soon, but sure, eventually.”

“Of course. People who want to have the child right away don’t bother with this kind of promise.”

Remembering what I knew about Sea Man biology, I replied, “Right. The initial sex and the egg implantation can all happen within one day.”

On the evening of Wednesday, September 20, a day I had summoned Victoria, I went to visit Mona. I formally proposed to get married to her in her world, and Victoria tried on her maid of honor dress for the wedding in that world, which fit perfectly.

“Mona, this is strange. We’ve arranged for Victoria to be the maid of honor at our wedding here, but I still don’t know who’s going to fill that role at my real world weddings.”

“Nancy is,” Mona replied. “Except at Nancy’s weddings, I will be. Nancy and I, respectively, won’t be summoned on those days, but coming through doorways from our own worlds, so we are each getting dresses made in our own worlds. And we’re wearing the same one each time. Too complicated otherwise.”

I agreed, “Yeah, not much point. Aries didn’t want something special?”

“Aries left it completely up to us, since this kind of wedding is foreign to her species.”

“Wait, what is Aries wearing when she’s attending the real-world weddings as a guest?” I asked, afraid the answer was “nothing.”

“I had a normal dress made for her here that she will wear to each wedding. She said she would wear it only for the actual ceremonies, though. She’s wearing a bikini at your parents’ place.”

“Sure, that’s fine; they know about her now.”

Mona continued, “We haven’t figured out all the male roles yet.”

“Er, am I going to have a best man and a father of the bride at each of these weddings?”

“Fortunately, no. We decided at the small weddings in your real world we do not need those roles, except Aries uniquely among us has a living father available and we will be bringing him through along with her mother to attend her wedding.”

“Appropriately clothed, I hope.”

“Yes, both will be appropriately clothed for your world. I’ve been into Aries’ world to explain your whole wedding tradition to them. As for your main wedding, Nancy asked your father to serve as the father of the bride, since he’s the closest counterpart we have available for Victoria’s father, and he agreed. But you still need a best man.”

“I’ll work on that.”

“If the same person exists in the dream worlds, you can invite him to take the role in Nancy’s dream world weddings, too.”

“Oh, those are going to be real weddings with guests?”

“Yeah, both Nancys are inviting practically the whole high school class.”

“That is going to be one crazy day,” I replied.

So when I got back to the real world, I had three best men to figure out. It was too late to call Florida, but I emailed Arturo and Jeremy about it. Tim didn’t live there anymore, and I didn’t expect him to attend even though he had been a close friend. Arturo and Jeremy were a gay married couple now, but that didn’t preclude one of them from being my best man. If one of them accepted, I would ask the same one in my dream world. That left Victoria’s dream world, where those guys had been replaced by women, and I needed to find someone else.

I went with Victoria into her dream world, and tried looking up who was still around. Eventually we considered Larry, who was a nerd in my world, but in alt-Victoria’s world she had trained him how to act socially and not look like a klutz or like he was scared to be around other people. But my Victoria hadn’t done that, as far as I knew. When we looked through her memory together, we found Larry was as socially inept in her world as in mine.

But that was in high school. When we looked him up in her world, today, we found that Kimmy had married him. Kimmy, the artistic female counterpart to my world’s Tim, had become a professional artist, and unlike Tim, she still lived in my home town. Larry modeled for her work. He had a career in technology that he worked Monday to Friday, but evenings and weekends, he posed for her wearing whatever she needed for any particular piece of art. And so there were hundreds of paintings and drawings of Larry in every state of dress from a tuxedo to nude, though she sometimes painted other faces on them, usually for specific commissions.

In the dream world we weren’t as limited by time, so we showed up at her studio at 7 PM even though it was 9 in my world now and too late, in the time zone that it would normally have been, there, to visit. And Larry was happy to do it. Furthermore, since Victoria was also a part of this wedding, and Kimmy was one of her best friends, Kimmy agreed to be a bridesmaid for Victoria. She wasn’t put off at all by the weird three-way wedding that Victoria’s Nancy had set up after Victoria and I had proposed to her together.

With that done, we went back to the real world and Victoria was hungry for sex so I let her have her way with me until bedtime.

When Victoria was here on Friday, September 22, we finished getting the addresses for most of the planned invitees; there were a few others we were waiting on email responses for. Also, Jeremy had agreed to be my best man in Victoria’s real-world wedding. We invited the version of him in my dream world to do the same via another personal visit there, and he agreed there as well.

On the morning of Sunday, September 24, we addressed a couple more invitations based on emails, and took a stack of over 100 invitations to town to mail them. The post office was closed, but mailboxes were available. It was now under two months to the wedding, and we’d made most of the arrangements through a whirlwind month of planning.

After this, we relaxed more. Saturday, September 30, with Victoria present I took another smaller stack of invitations off to be mailed. And then we waited for the replies to come in. As expected, more than half of the people declined, but by mid-October we had 51 guests from the invitations and another 62 family members, plus my family party of 7, and I had numbers to give the caterer. Both dream-world weddings had similar numbers, too, but fortunately they were being paid for with the same imaginary money that bought everything else there.

As one of the few magic users, Mona was a bit of a celebrity in her world, so there were thousands of people who wanted to attend her wedding, but she had only invited 200 people and their families and most of them had accepted. So it was going to be a pretty large group. The wedding was going to happen on the castle grounds, and Mona was going to supply everything herself and only hire someone to marry us.

Unlike the other weddings, Mona was going to provide the food for this wedding via magic, but it was in her own domain and the preparation was easier. On one of my visits to her castle, she led me to a section I’d never seen, a big empty space with rows of tables and chairs set up, the tables set for a huge banquet, many of the dishes already being full of food, but with visible magical barriers over them.

“To keep from overexerting myself, I’m filling these in stages. It was easy to assemble the tables and chairs from where they had been put away, and to set out all the place settings, but creating this much food is more than I can do at once. I’m filling about 40 plates at a time and covering them with a magical time-stop spell that I will drop all at once when they are served. Everybody will have food as fresh as if I had made it just then, and they will see the illusion of the whole thing, tables, chairs, plates, and food appearing all at once.”

I commented, “So real magic is a bit like stage magic in my world. It looks more impressive when you prepare in advance and deceive a bit about what you’re actually doing.”

“Oh, I suppose so. Tell me more about your stage magic.”

That led to a long discussion and even a visit to a stage magic show in my dream world (by time-walking to when and where one was occurring) to illustrate to Mona. I didn’t know how all the tricks were performed, but I knew that the performers used a variety of techniques, including hidden objects and distractions to misdirect viewers’ attention away from where stuff was really happening in order to make things appear to be created by magic. In the end she fully agreed with my statement that had led to this diversion.

Also, once our planning was complete, I took the time to be alt-Victoria again with Manuel on Saturday, October 28. Alt-Victoria was in her period, which the journal confirmed was consistent with the only other time I’d seen it happen for her, and it also matched her birth control pills.

As with my other occasions living a day in her life, the time I was her while she was supposed to be traveling to her parents’ place for her weddings had not interfered with her activities in her world at all. She had managed to make her weddings work without using any of Manuel’s magic, since she had never figured out the tricks I had used to allow Mona to create doorways and greatly expand the capability of her magic in the real world by letting her bring her usual wand. She had another two-day journey to get back to the work camp from there, so the entire trip took a week.

She even had a video of the wedding to her version of Jody, which was her main wedding, as I was doing with my Victoria. I guess I wasn’t surprised that in her world, all of Victoria’s friends were there and the ones from my world who were absent or had been replaced in Victoria’s dreams were not. There wasn’t any way for my Victoria to watch this directly, but I watched it all and replayed it for her in our minds when I summoned her Monday, October 30.

On Wednesday, November 1, I became alt-Victoria again, accompanied by Manuel. I offered to let him do the gender scan on her. I thought he would take me back into his castle. Or Mona’s castle, whatever was there. But he looked at the doorway back to his world and shook his head.

He told me, “Never go through that door. Don’t even knock.”

But he remembered the spell from Mona’s memories of casting it three times already, and he could do the scan with the chopstick-turned-wand as long as he had a place to draw a spell diagram. We went into my dream world and tacked down a bedsheet on the floor. He drew the spell diagram on that, and it worked just as well as the one in Mona’s library. Manuel confirmed the result was like Jody’s when Victoria wasn’t summoned, with both strong genders in there, though there were aspects of them that were different, unlike the way Jody and Victoria separately seemed to have the same gender identities that were combined in Jody at other times.

On Wednesday, November 22, my first vacation day from work, Mona was summoned, though it was mainly because she was the most important person of the day. She set up the doorway again between my home and my parents’ apartment, and we did the final checks on logistics for the events that would start tomorrow. Since I had rented the wedding site, that allowed Mona to create another temporary doorway directly there which our party would use, and yet another, after we had seen the last guests off the site, for us to get back.

We verified that everyone’s clothes were ready, the sole exception being that Victoria’s wedding dress currently looked like Mona’s. The other clothing was owned by the wearers in their respective worlds and didn’t change with my daily summonings, and that was all good to go.

We confirmed with the catering staff that our Thanksgiving dinner for 119 was going to be ready at 3. That number had fluctuated as we got both late acceptances and cancellations and ended up just one below where it started. The attendees were asked to be in their seats by 2, though we didn’t plan to start the march until 2:10 to allow for any late arrivers.

We confirmed Jeremy was ready as best man. He and Arturo were going to arrive early; the hall would already be set up then, and Arturo could just take a seat, but Jeremy needed to be ready to be part of the procession.

With this all worked out in the afternoon, we spent the evening at my parents’ apartment, mostly with them quizzing the women how things worked in their worlds. And as planned, my group all went back through the doorway and slept in our respective worlds, except Mona with me so I could prepare the next summoning. We went to bed early, in our time zone, in order to get up early, in the morning in my parents’ time zone. It didn’t really make much difference for me getting to sleep, because we were well into the time of the year when there wasn’t much sunlight, and it had already been dark for hours. For that matter, the midnight sun in summers had attuned me to going to sleep in the evening light as well.

The dream that night was of me as Victoria, as it needed to be. I was in her dream world and I was trying to check all the stuff for the wedding that was still a week away there, even though it was Nancy who set most of it up and was responsible for the checking. I avoided actually going to visit Nancy to avoid the possibility of messing up the summoning.

Despite that bout of worry, it worked, and Thursday, November 23 Victoria was with me in bed in the morning. We showered and both put on the undergarments we would wear for the ceremony but just put normal clothes on over them for now to avoid any chance of ruining the wedding clothes before the event.

We gathered Nancy, Mona, and Aries and went through the doorway into my parents’ apartment where breakfast was served for everyone but Aries, who had brought a freshly caught fish which she ate standing, out of sight of my parents. My parents preferred not seeing her eat the whole raw fish.

It had been a lot easier to set up the table for 6 rather than 7 in my parents’ apartment, and having Aries stand for this meal was a compromise we had decided on last night. Aries was fine with it since it allowed her to eat her preferred food, though she had agreed to eat regular Thanksgiving food for the feast this afternoon.

Mona set up the doorway into the wedding hall, and Nancy and Victoria and I carried our respective wedding clothes through it and into the dressing rooms where we would set up before the ceremony began. We confirmed all other arrangements on site before going back to my parents’ place, including the sign that directed my guests to use both sides of the hall since the bride had only a few guests with reserved seating.

My parents relaxed. When I gave a signal for everybody to get ready, they changed in their own bedroom into the clothes they would wear for the wedding. At that time Mona and Aries went back into Mona’s world to put on the clothes they would wear during the wedding as well, and then we all went through to the wedding site.

Since things were going smoothly, there was a lot of hurry up and wait at this point. Mona summoned some snacks so that we would not have grumbling stomachs during the ceremony. Jeremy and Arturo showed up, and those of us in the wedding party went to our respective dressing rooms to get ready. At this point, I had by prior agreement stopped looking in on Victoria in any way, physically or mentally. She had enough direction and self-guidance to get through the ceremony, and it allowed us to partially honor the tradition of the bride and groom not seeing each other before the ceremony, even though practicality prevented us from extending that through the entire morning.

There was still a lot of waiting. Dad, Jeremy, and I waited in the men’s dressing room as we heard the growing numbers of arriving guests. Eventually it was time, and we entered the hall on our cues.

It was beautiful. I was glad we had set this up. The other ceremonies on the next three days were going to be simpler, but Mona and both Nancys would get their own large ceremonies in their respective worlds the next weekend, and Aries didn’t have any expectation of a fancy wedding. Our wedding party was small, so before long we all arrived at our positions at the front, me and Victoria in the center, with Jeremy as my best man on my side, Nancy as maid of honor next to Victoria, and Mona as a bridesmaid next to her.

My father took his seat on Victoria’s side, serving as father of the bride, next to Aries, who we did not have march as part of the wedding party to reduce the number of stares at the blue woman. We had informed Jeremy and Arturo about Aries in advance. She also had an elaborate hat that concealed her blue skin from the people behind her. My mother had the seat across the aisle from my father, and Jeremy’s husband Arturo also sat in the front row in a reserved seat. Behind both reserved rows were dozens of faces I remembered from years ago.

We had not gone in for long and elaborate vows. It didn’t make sense, when Victoria and I were already entangled tighter than any words could tie us. It was only through my work to figure out how to activate Victoria’s free will that she wasn’t simply my puppet. But the ceremony was still a procession and took time, time that we had carefully planned out. Eventually, Victoria and I said our “I do”s, put on rings, and kissed to cheers and camera flashes from my assembled friends and family.

It was nearly 3 by then, so we proceeded to the feast that had been set up in the adjacent reception hall. My family and Jeremy and Arturo sat at the head table, though we had changed the order so that my father could sit next to my mother on my side, and we hid Aries down at the end where we hoped her skin would be less noticed. Some people did notice, but whispers about “the tattooed woman” told us how she appeared to them.

Grace was said and we ate, and Aries actually enjoyed the turkey dinner. There was a bit of dancing, but we had limited this; we didn’t want it to go on too long, and it was already going to be getting dark before my parents started their drive back as it was. We did the other silly traditions like tossing the bouquet and me removing Victoria’s garter with my teeth, a garter that, as usual, wasn’t actually holding anything in place and was worn solely for this purpose.

And the gifts! Victoria and I had intentionally not done the registry thing because I didn’t have a lot of space in my home in Alaska and definitely didn’t need a whole new set of household appliances. Some people brought those anyway, while others brought jewelry, gag gifts, or just gave cash. Because it was a doorway between two places in the real world, I actually was able to take gifts and money back through, but I gave some of the appliances to my parents and donated some to local charities.

We spent awhile sorting that out after the guests were gone. Victoria and I signed the documents making us legally married. Those of us who had changed clothes got back into our regular clothes, and we took everything through to Alaska and/or Mona’s world. Mona took down the temporary doorway to the wedding hall. When everything was squared away, we were so exhausted that we didn’t do more and just said good night and prepared for the next day.

For Friday, November 24, I summoned Nancy. Apart from Victoria being first for the main wedding, we had decided to do the other small weddings in the order I met the women, as I did with the proposals. Victoria wasn’t there, so Aries had a seat at the table in my parents’ home, and there was a lot less prep, as we weren’t inviting other guests. And Aries ate their food, after apparently deciding the Thanksgiving feast wasn’t so bad, though I wasn’t surprised she enjoyed the meat more than other food.

That was not to say that there was no prep. We still got dressed up, this time with Nancy in the bridal gown that was virtually identical to Victoria’s apart from being a cup size smaller in the bust. Mona was her maid of honor and we did not bother with the other wedding party roles and just let the rest of the people sit and watch.

Mona made a doorway for us to cross through, even though it wasn’t very far, since we were in their town now. It was also a smaller hall, and we all dressed and went through the doorway in the clothes for the ceremony.

We again had short vows. Nancy, though independent from me, relied on me for her existence in a way not identical to Victoria, but similar in ways, and we had been lifelong companions. We put on rings, the same ones Victoria and I had worn the day before. We did not have a reception afterward, but we still kept up traditions, Nancy intentionally throwing the bouquet directly to Mona, as she was to marry me in another ceremony tomorrow, and Nancy had worn the garter as part of her outfit so I would have to remove it.

Nancy and I were already legally married; the document Victoria and I had signed the day before now bore Nancy’s name in place of hers. So that was another step we could skip. It provided further confirmation to what we already expected that people were going to see me as married to whoever I summoned each day.

The six of us went back to my parents’ apartment where, after some of us changed clothes, Mona served us a feast of a meal, including a fresh fish for Aries. And we had some time to chat about things, with Nancy sitting with me and hugging me as much as any bride should have done with her new husband. She really enjoyed finally being married to the man she’d treated as a boyfriend since before we were old enough to have the slightest idea about sex.

Saturday, November 25 was Mona’s turn to marry me. It was at a different site, and Nancy was the maid of honor this time, but it ran much the same as Nancy’s. Mona had customized the vows, adding bits from different versions and taking out any parts she worried might be magically binding for her. We were going to do the magically binding marriage in her world a week from today.

Our wedding bands were made of red gold today, even mine. Mona tossed the bouquet to Aries, and I still had to remove her garter, which naturally was as red as the rest of her outfit. And we went back to my parents’ place again to eat.

Sunday, November 26 was finally Aries’ turn. She had the unusual blue wedding dress with a shorter skirt and the fish-tail train. She was summoned into the world and so there was no need to even attempt to hide her, as the rest of the people, apart from my parents, were changed in a way that they thought her aquatic species was part of the normal population of the world.

We also brought Aries’ parents through for the ceremony, and her father walked her up the aisle in what he had learned was our wedding tradition. We said our vows, which were the shortest of all the ceremonies since her people did not believe in the exclusion of sexual behavior to married couples in any way. We had made sure that the vows encouraged us to multiply, which wasn’t even in most of the standard vows, but was the only thing the marriage meant to Sea Men. And I got to experience one of those deep kisses from her long tongue, though nobody else realized what was happening inside my mouth.

Aries did not throw the bouquet, since there were no unmarried women left at the ceremony, but she still had me remove the garter. When I got up under her dress I found that she wasn’t wearing any underwear, despite matching panties having been part of the outfit. Aries had pushed out her organ the inch or so I now understood was normal for the females of her species when they went to pee. Whether she had to go or not, I didn’t know, but she didn’t get me wet, just poked me in the cheek with the organ while I was there. I took this as a typical Aries prank and tried to ignore it.

After we went back to my parents’ place, Aries’ parents went back through the doorway immediately, Mona going with them to help them get back to their own world. When Mona returned, we ate together. When we were done, we went back through the doorway, everybody carefully gathering all their belongings, as Mona removed the doorway to the place when we were done.

The wedding dress went into storage in Victoria’s dream world. Some of the gifts from Victoria’s wedding that we had kept went there too. $200 in cash from gifts went into the purse my summoned wives shared. And unlike the last few nights, we did not need to get up quite so early for the time zones in the morning, so Aries and I stayed up later, to my usual hour, late enough for us to have sex and then for her to lay the egg before we slept.

I summoned Victoria on Monday, November 27, a day I had taken off work, so that the whole group of us could be together, much of it in Mona’s world. Every pair of us had sex at some point, though it was not as much of an orgy as that one day had been. Instead, it was for individual couples to demonstrate their love in front of the others.

At some point I had noticed panty liners stuck to two of the pairs of panties on the floor. Everybody was naked at that point, but they weren’t Mona’s red panties, and Aries didn’t use them, so I knew they had to belong to Victoria and Nancy. Indeed, Victoria started her period before the day was over, which she confirmed mentally to me after obviously having read my thought about this. When I checked the journal later, I saw the date was in sync with her other occurrences. It was a good thing that didn’t happen on her wedding day! I kicked myself for not having checked the date in advance.

But I saw no reason to keep this secret, and asked, “Mona, how do women in your world handle menstrual periods?”

“I personally use a spell. It’s a cervical block that works as contraception too. I feel it when it starts to collect, and after 4 days I drop the spell on the toilet and let it all run out, then re-cast the spell.”

“And the people who can’t use magic?”

“They use disposable products to catch it, like these,” Mona replied, casting a spell that caused images of products to appear that looked like the tampons and pads of my world.

Mona continued, “They are on the always-creatable list like food, and I create them for Cecilia. There’s a supply in her bathroom if someone needs them.”

I let Victoria answer that. “I had one in my purse, so I’m good. But Jody and I were buying these in the real world because we were uncertain how dream-world products would work.”

“I think ones you get in the dream world would be fine, too. All health and medical supplies are on that list. That’s actually one of the ways I make money, well, not for tampons, but drugs. Having them be creatable by magic limits how expensive they can get, because someone can simply come ask me to make a case of them. One of the main ways I make money is by making drugs this way that are complicated to make without magic, or there’s simply not enough demand for them but there’s still some demand.”

“So the idea I had about making a business out of magicking up food wasn’t too far off the mark. I just had the wrong target.”

“Yes.”

When the people working in Alaska that day were back from that work, Victoria and I went out in the camp together and she and I showed off our wedding bands. Many congratulations were given.

The rest of the week was back to normal. I worked, and each woman was summoned to, among other things, fill out the journal entries for our respective wedding days. I summoned Aries on Friday, December 1. She was to be the go-between, to travel between the worlds to confirm with Mona and both Nancys that all the final plans for the other weddings the following day were set, and she was happy with that role. In the evening she confirmed that Mona and Nancy had handled everything and we were ready to go for the big day.

That night I had a weird dream. In the dream, I was Victoria, and we were back at the weddings of the previous week, but it was Victoria who got married to Nancy, to Mona, and to Aries in consecutive ceremonies. Of course, my parents weren’t there, like in all my dreams, but we went to what should have been their apartment afterward. Aries wanted to consummate our marriages, and her ovipositor was fully out, though I had no idea when she had had time to have sex with a man during the day. Then it turned out that Nancy and Mona were Pasthru emales, and I was worried that the group was going to impregnate me somehow. We got as far as the four of us nesting our organs when all of that evaporated and Victoria was there alone, and then I woke up.

A nightmare. A dream that suggested a scenario with dreadful consequences that should have been impossible, even for the weirdness of the dream worlds. The real Aries wouldn’t have requested “consummating our wedding” because they didn’t even have weddings like that in her world, and what they did have was a promise to have children eventually, not immediately after the wedding.

I had such nightmares occasionally, a few times a year, though I had not had one for a long time, since before I discovered this power several months ago. Fortunately, nothing went wrong with the summoning and on Saturday, December 2 I awoke in bed with Victoria the way I had intended.

There was a lot to do in order for me to participate in three weddings today. The first wedding was in Mona’s world. Victoria and I showered quickly. I dressed in my tux, while Victoria put on ordinary clothes and went and retrieved my Nancy, who was also in plain clothes. Mona had both of their dresses, so we went through the doorway to her realm and Mona led Victoria and Nancy to get dressed. Cecilia was there, too, and she showed me the wedding venue.

We were getting married on the grounds outside the castle, but within an area they had fenced off. Hundreds of chairs were set up in rows facing away from the castle, divided in two by a long aisle. Most of these seats were still empty. The main external entrance to the castle opened right into the aisle dividing the seating area in two. At the opposite end of the aisle was a small stage about a foot off the ground that ensured all the attendees would be able to see what was happening.

Some distance beyond this, the fence enclosing the area was easily 8 feet tall, and there were several turnstiles in it. Not the kind of turnstiles at most subway entrances, where you could cheat and hop over or under them if nobody was there to stop you. These were more like revolving doors, but with two quadrants open and two closed. Each person had to enter separately and it looked like they were being scanned or something as they entered.

Cecilia explained, “Mona sent out individual passes coded to each guest and each of their family members or plus-ones that unlock the turnstiles, but only for the person matching each pass. This way we don’t have to have someone out there manning each turnstile.”

“I should have expected nothing less from Mona.”

“Also look over this way.”

Cecilia pointed out for me another area off to the right, separated by a low fence from the seating area. It was empty, but there were some spots outlined on the ground.

“When the ceremony ends, you’ll walk back up the aisle, then along the castle wall to a gate in this fence, through this area to the long outlined space at the front. Once the wedding party is all there, Mona will summon all the food tables and chairs into the outlined areas and remove the intervening fence, allowing the guests through. When it’s over, the guests leave through the turnstiles and you head back into the castle to your next appointment.”

We still had a while before the wedding, but clearly some of the guests had wanted to make sure they were not late. A couple dozen were already seated, and a few more were walking toward the seats from the turnstiles, but there were not yet lines waiting to get through the turnstiles.

I waited in the castle by this window overlooking the wedding site as Cecilia explained more things to me, but after about 20 minutes, Cecilia left briefly. She soon returned with Victoria and Nancy. Cecilia was also carrying a crown, an actual crown like a king would wear, and told me I was expected to wear this during the ceremony. She helped clip it to my hair in several places so that there was no chance it would fall off. I had never personally thought about bobby pins being used to hold on headgear, but I sensed from Victoria that it was something familiar to her, something she’d learned, somehow, and I might have known if I had only had any reason to ever think about it. Cecilia also provided me with the ring to put on Mona’s finger when we reached that part in the ceremony.

Cecilia then lined us up in the order we would enter, but told us to wait as she left us there again. While she was gone, we saw musicians, a full orchestra, exit from the door below us and go off to the left of the audience for the wedding. Cecilia must have gone to cue them to head out. I saw Aries go out with them. She was apparently not marching in the procession, but went up the left aisle and sat in one of the reserved seats in the front row. Aries wore the dress she wore for the other weddings in which she was not getting married, but without the hat.

Cecilia returned about the time the musicians were set up and some were tuning or testing their instruments, but that only lasted a couple minutes before they started playing. I didn’t recognize the song. When they switched to a second song, Cecilia told us to follow her and we went downstairs, to the door going out to the wedding site, maintaining our order. A man was already waiting at the door and Cecilia introduced him.

“This is Hubert, the wedding officiant. When the next song begins, you’ll start marching out, slowly, one at a time,” she explained, demonstrating the marching pace matching the slow beat of the music, which we all practiced. “Hubert will go first, then Jody, but I’ll cue each one of you to start.”

After a brief break, the band started the next song, and it was not the wedding march I knew, but it had the same tempo as the music that had been playing before. She sent Hubert out, and waited until he reached his position in front of the audience before sending me out. I tried to match the pace I had seen him march and the one I had briefly practiced. It was a little slower than the pace I’d just followed in the weddings in my world. When I got to the front, the officiant pointed to an X that was taped on the stage. There was an X for each person.

As I assumed my position, Nancy began marching out. She was assigned the spot beside me, what would normally have been my best man. Well, I didn’t have any men I knew in this world. She worked if gender wasn’t an issue. Victoria was next, and she was placed in the maid of honor position, as I knew was intended.

The band paused and changed music again. But it was not “Here Comes the Bride.” It sounded more like “My Country, Tis of Thee,” though a couple notes were different. When I whispered that to Nancy, she responded by saying that the song has the same melody as “God Save the Queen,” though again, a couple notes were different. Maybe it was this world’s version of that song.

It might as well have been “God Save the Queen” because Mona came out of the castle wearing a crown, as I fully expected, given the one I was wearing. Mona’s dress somewhat resembled the one she got married in in my world, but with many little jewels, outlining the shapes of her breasts and trailing in several lines below them, nearly to the floor. She took her place opposite me at the front.

The vows were very long, and clearly either customized for our wedding or special because a magic user was being married. They included that we were gathered here “upon this site of magical power” and that we were to be wedded “in the presence of magic.” There was a long bit that I had to uphold my vow to support and love her to retain my right to inherit this magic, and if I acted to prevent the succession of a child or other heir, that would also void my right to the magic. But Mona had said the magic itself chooses the heir, and this ceremony was a way of nominating me as the heir in a way satisfying the magic. When I thought about that, I realized that the rest of the vow was simply stating a list of conditions magical inheritance was discovered to have obeyed in the past.

Finally we got to say our “I do”s and put rings on each others’ fingers. Hubert declared us husband and wife, and I felt the magical contract as it fell upon me. I can’t explain what I felt, but there was an actual tangible feeling of something touching me all throughout my body as the wedding became official and turned me from a nobody from another world into the first heir for Mona’s magic. Mona and I kissed, the deepest and fullest kiss I had ever gotten from her, which still didn’t compare with kisses from some of the others, but it clearly was enough for our loudly cheering audience.

When the band started again, I knew it was time to start the march out, and Mona and I were first. We followed the path that Cecilia had directed for us, and while they let us march the whole aisle before the others followed, afterward one person joined the march at every fourth beat of the music, Aries joining at the tail of the line, and Cecilia following her when we passed the entrance to the castle.

When we had all arrived at the designated spot, Mona summoned all the tables and chairs and food for the reception at once, and then removed the intervening wall that we’d just walked around. The other guests then walked over casually. The people in each row walked more or less in a line, but those lines weren’t fully aligned with the tables, so there was some merging, and some groups who were attending together moved about to find a table where they could sit together. It was neither entirely orderly nor complete chaos. Some people held up hands next to empty seats to let the last few people find them.

Our officiant then spoke some sort of a blessing which was not the grace I was used to, as it honored the magic rather than the Lord, but it seemed to serve the same purpose. At its completion, Mona cast one more bit of magic to drop the seals over all the meals, and that was the signal for everyone to start eating. As we ate, I asked Mona about the vows and blessing honoring the magic.

“The blessing is the standard one in this world. But you’re right about the vows being special. Only weddings involving magic users or those involving someone within about the top ten positions in line to inherit magic go through all that detail about the magic. The regular wedding vows still satisfy the magic, but when there’s the slightest likelihood of the wedding being relevant for magical inheritance, we use those longer vows, and those weddings are held on the grounds of the magical site when possible.”

There was dancing when the meal was done, and they had traditions which were different from the ones of my world about the throwing of the bouquet and the removal of the garter. Mona had rehearsed all of these with me earlier in the week when I last summoned her. For example, I was spared ever having to stick my head under Mona’s dress, but there was a dance where we simulated sex while fully clothed.

After we had been done eating for long enough to give everyone else time to do so as well, on a signal from our officiant, we stood and marched as a group back into the castle. This signaled the end of the reception, and there were a handful of people who acted as ushers, who had been mixed into the crowd but now directed everyone out to the turnstiles to exit. I didn’t see any more, as we did not stick around.

Cecilia led me to the bedroom where I once awoke upon dreaming myself into this world, which was now designated as my room permanently, and I left the crown there, as well as the wedding band I could not take through Mona’s doorways. Then she took me back to the area with the doors out of this world, where Victoria, Nancy, and Aries were waiting. Mona joined us after a bit, having replaced her wedding dress with a less elaborate one, and having left her crown and ring behind as well.

The next wedding was in my dream world, so our group followed in a line out of my dream-house. Nancy had already loaded everything we would need in her car. She drove, and I followed in mine with the rest of the group. Mona did not use magic to take us over there this time, though she could have. It was only about a ten minute drive.

The wedding with Nancy was a normal one, with a guest count similar to the large one I had had with Victoria at Thanksgiving, normal wedding songs, and normal traditions afterward. Jeremy showed up as my best man, as I’d arranged, with his husband Arturo sitting in the family row. Mona was Nancy’s maid of honor and Aries again tried to be inconspicuous. She had picked up the headgear that helped to hide her skin at some point. I suppose the meal I ate in Mona’s world at about 10 AM my time was my breakfast, so the one at the reception from this wedding counted as lunch.

Nancy threw the bouquet intentionally to Victoria, who was a part of the wedding happening in her own dream world a few hours from now, so that was appropriate. And I had to remove Nancy’s garter; I had already removed one garter from this Nancy’s leg, but this was another world, and this version of the wedding guests had not seen it.

We drove back to our homes in this world, and Nancy stayed in hers. I left another wedding band behind in my dream bedroom as I led the rest of the group through the doorway into Victoria’s dream world. That world’s Nancy was ready to repeat what the rest of us had just done, but Victoria was part of it this time. In her dream bedroom, Victoria changed into her wedding dress that we had stashed here after the weddings a week ago.

We took another car ride, though this one was to a different wedding hall, one I could best describe as looking eclectic. The wedding was here because Nancy had found someone who performed polyamorous weddings to marry the three of us. I had initially suggested that Nancy would marry Victoria in this wedding, but after Victoria and I proposed together to Nancy, she had found somebody who performed these very nontraditional weddings who would marry the three of us, though it was going to be Victoria and Nancy signing the marriage license at the end.

Victoria and I marched together and stood in the groom’s position for this wedding, and Larry and Kimmy stood on our side as my best man and Victoria’s bridesmaid, respectively. This Nancy had Mona as her maid of honor again, but this time Aries stood as a bridesmaid.

The guest count was smaller, but besides that, the guests were just different. It wasn’t just that people in Victoria’s dreams had replaced ones from mine. Among these guests, unusual clothing, tattoos, and body piercings were common. I suppose the polyamorous wedding invitation had encouraged people to attend who might have skipped ordinary weddings, though part of it was that Victoria’s Nancy had gone out of her way to invite people like that who I hadn’t even thought to invite to my real-world weddings. Aries did not stand out as the weirdest looking person there, even when her position as a bridesmaid drew attention to her.

The vows were designed so that both Victoria and I were marrying Nancy and she was marrying both of us. Victoria and I were not asked to marry each other, not that we would have cared if we had been asked to marry each other again. Heck, it was the third time I was marrying Nancy, though the first time for Victoria’s Nancy. But this was how we had proposed, and Nancy had set up the wedding to match.

After eating what I supposed was now my dinner, at a typical dinner time, we had the dancing and other traditions. Victoria and Nancy each threw a bouquet at random into the crowd of unmarried women, and I removed a garter from Nancy followed by Nancy removing one from Victoria.

After we left, a party was held in Victoria’s and my dream bedrooms so that both Nancys could participate. Everybody was naked, and each couple married today had sex so that the others could see, as much as possible; Mona and I went into both rooms during our act so that both Nancys could see us.

Being involved in seven weddings in ten days was a lot, and the three in one day had tired me out, so as soon as we were done with this I sent everybody to their various homes. Victoria was the one summoned today, and came to my bed for just the minimal joining to let me bring someone else into the real world.

Having just married both Nancys, she was the focal point of my dream the next night, though I kept seeing Nancy change between my Nancy and a version of Victoria’s Nancy who had the most outrageous of the tattoos and piercings of the guests at her wedding. On Sunday, December 3, it was my Nancy who I found in bed with me.

“Did we really just do all that?” I asked her as we woke up together.

“Yes,” Nancy replied. “The six of us, that is you, me, Victoria, Victoria’s version of me, Mona, and Aries, did just marry in various combinations in seven weddings since Thanksgiving Day, in four different worlds. And since the proposal in Aries’ world counted as a marriage as far as they are concerned, you can say you got married eight times, though that one was a while ago.”

We ate a normal breakfast and then made the rounds into all the different worlds, starting in my dream world.

“You know, now that we are married, I shouldn’t have to come get you in order to allow you into the other worlds. I should give you a key to my dream house so you can come and go as you please.”

“That would be wonderful, Jody!”

“I just have to make a duplicate, because this is the only one I have. Do you know where such a place in your world is staffed by someone we know, so that we can interact with him?”

“There’s a key duplicating vending machine at the grocery store.”

“That’ll work.”

Pretty soon Nancy had her key.

“I’m going to make one for Victoria’s Nancy, too. Or rather, Victoria should do that the next time she’s here, because I shouldn’t presume. You two just be careful not to block each other, because I know the doorways don’t let you be in the same world at the same time.”

“Sure, we’ll figure out some way to deal with that.”

I briefly went into Victoria’s dream world, found the Nancy there, and told her about the thing with the key. She agreed it was for the best not to do that while Victoria wasn’t around.

After I rejoined my Nancy, we went into Mona’s world.

“I’m very happy to see you, husband.”

I kissed her in response to that.

Mona continued, “Now that you’re first in line to inherit my magic, the people of this world are going to want to see you more.”

“More? As in, ever? Apart from those at the wedding, I think the number of residents of your world I’ve seen can be counted on one hand.”

“Right. But they know. That we married was worldwide news.”

“We aren’t actually king and queen of anything, are we?”

“Not like in the old days. The magic users of ancient times were treated like kings and queens of their domains, regions stretching well beyond the actual magical property, though it varied depending on how much of their power they were willing to spend to control it. Today, the domain extends only to the edge of the magic-generating property, but I am the ruler of it, and you could say I am a queen in that way. One of the old compromises that is still in effect is that the magical properties are outside of any country, effectively tiny countries of our own. They cannot tax us, nor enforce their laws on us. While we may no longer be able to turn our enemies into newts, we can still do quite unpleasant things to people within the magical property itself.”

“Like what, exactly?”

“One of my wards causes anyone entering the property with hostile intent to be stricken with intense itchiness.”

“Ha ha! And you can only cast this type of ward within the property itself?”

“It depends on what the ward does. Some effects are allowed by covenant anywhere, but others only within the property. Besides that, there is also a limit based on magical power. Within the property, the magic drawn to maintain it is negligible, while keeping such a ward up outside the property draws an amount of magic proportional to the distance from the property and the size of the ward. Even extending an area-effect ward to twice the radius of the property would represent a significant drain on my magic. It’s because the spells are practically free here that I can keep such magic going indefinitely.”

“That makes sense.”

“It’s why even in the days of unrestrained magic, there were still free people outside the scope of the magic users. Performing powerful magic on people outside the realm was expensive in proportion to the distance from the realm, so the magic users had their dominions and the rest of the world was free.”

“How exactly did that change? You said there was a magical covenant imposed, but how did that happen?”

“One of the magic users died without a direct heir, but the magic finds someone. Eventually the heir was found to be a strong supporter of the non-magical people. He spent years studying magic in order to figure out how to impose permanent limits on it. He finally did, casting a temporary spell that prevented anyone from making money with magic for one day, and that led to a complicated negotiation. The magic users agreed to the rules in the covenant, and not to use their magic to try to gain control of lands outside their domains, and the non-magical countries agreed to treat each magical domain as a small separate country of its own, among other things.”

“And what happened to the guy who gained control of that realm, in the end? Was he an outcast among the magic users?”

“The one who gained control of that realm sacrificed its power and his own life to impose the covenant. That was the cost to cast a spell of that strength which affected the entire world and was irrevocable, even by his heirs: The entire output of power from that property, indefinitely, and his own soul, which became a part of the spell itself. Magical scholars never figured out whether his heir never inherited the magic because there was nothing left to inherit or because he never actually died, also being permanently kept alive within the spell itself. There was literally no way to tell the difference. The property still exists, but it’s a wasteland, a desert within which nothing will grow and it gives anyone who enters such an eerie feeling that nobody is willing to stay there long.”

“How big is the magical property? Are they all the same size?”

“They vary somewhat, but they aren’t much different from mine. Remember where the turnstiles were at the wedding? The boundary is about the width of this room beyond them. It’s marked with survey markers installed way back then because when the governments agreed they were not claiming this land they wanted to understand exactly what they were not claiming.”

“That sounds like a government to me! And yes, I guess that’s not very much land if it extends beyond the castle that far all the way around. You could walk the whole border in an hour. You couldn’t even pretend to be a country and wouldn’t have any power to stand as one if it wasn’t for the magic.”

“Certainly.”

“So how are the people going to see more of me? Do you do public addresses where you invite the people to come up outside the gate and you speak to them?”

“No. We do television appearances.”

“Oh, of course.”

“They’re coming here on Saturday the 16th for one and I’d love it if you could be here for it.”

“I’ll put it on my calendar. If you do those when I’m working, I won’t be able to join, but I’ll try to attend if they happen while I’m not.” As a second thought, I added, “Actually, I’ve been wondering about that.”

“About working?”

“Yes. I’m trying to figure out why I still work. I guess I need to maintain a connection to the real world somewhere, and it’s the only way to visit my parents, but assuming I get a place to keep a doorway, I wonder if I could simply live in the other worlds full time.”

“Does your power work here?”

“Well, one day I transported myself here with the power, and I slept here that night and activated the power to get back to my world. So it works here at least that much.”

“Yes, I remember where you appeared, and I wasn’t sure why it was in that particular room, but I decided to mark that one as yours.”

“How many bedrooms are there in the castle?”

“About 20.”

“Does that make a lot of work for Cecilia to clean?”

“Actually, no, because of the standing magic. One of the standing spells on the castle keeps any unused rooms from getting dirty and keeps the contents from aging. Even though nobody may have used most of those rooms in any real way for more than a century, they’re ready for use at any time.”

“Is there a lot of standing magic on the castle?”

“Yes, quite a lot. There are wards that let me know when anybody enters or leaves, by any means. There is a spell that regulates the temperature. There are several different spells that defend the castle itself; one protects it from eroding, one deflects impacts, and one, which has specific holes where needed, prevents it from being set on fire.”

“And you can modify them when you need to, like putting a hole in the fire suppression ward when you want to light candles on a birthday cake or something?”

“Right. Those modifications cost magical power, but the standing spell draws so little I can’t measure it. All the standing spells together draw about as much power as it would take for me to make enough food to feed myself.”

“What about the doorways?”

“The doorways with one end here are as cheap as other standing magic. The ones connecting your two dream worlds together and to your real world seem to be a special case. Because neither end is anchored here, they should be drawing a steady level of power based on their distance, but that distance isn’t measurable in any conventional sense. I know they are drawing power, but it’s coming from another source, or a different dimension, or something. When stuff goes through the doorways, it draws actual power comparable to teleporting the stuff, or in some cases comparable to creating it. I think if you buy something in your dream worlds with dream world money and bring it through, it counts as creating it.”

“Right. I can’t bring some kinds of things from the dream world through at all, and what you classified as wealth can’t go through the doorways in either direction. I’ve mostly only been doing that for food. So that’s roughly equivalent to you creating that food with your magic, and in ordinary amounts like me and my current summoned wife each day would eat, it’s not much.”

“Correct.”

“Well, I think what I’ll do is next weekend I’ll try bringing myself here both days, and if I am able to do that, bringing myself with one wife in my special bedroom Saturday and another wife Sunday, then I can probably live here indefinitely. But I don’t know about the other mes. My Sea Man version also works in Alaska, as does alt-Victoria. I’m not sure how changing my routine affects them, though so far, nothing at all seems to affect alt-Victoria. And alt-Victoria even has a Sea Man version, though the two versions don’t know about each other, nor that a version of me with the power exists, as far as I can tell.”

“I’m afraid that is beyond me. That’s your magic, not mine.”

“Well I thought of some stuff I want to talk to Aries about.”

“She’s not here now, but I can let you into her world through her doorway to go look for her.”

“Speaking of these doorways, I was wondering if it was possible to give me and the other women keys to them? I gave Nancy a key to my house so she can reach the doorway into the real world.”

“Hmm, it would take some work. There aren’t any sort of standard locking mechanisms on these doors; they’re locked magically. I’m casting magic, a very tiny bit of magic, every time I open one of the doors, and it resets after the door is closed again. But I might be able to imbue an artifact with the ability to unlock them. There’s one thing, though. They’re all locked the same way. If I made a key like that it would open all the doors from here, unless I modify the spells to be different.”

“Well that’s fine for me. I think it would be fine to give the other women as well. I think the ability of any of us to get anywhere outweighs the potential problem of Aries visiting one of the worlds to pull a prank. If the others all feel that’s OK, go ahead and make them.”

Mona let me and Nancy through the door into Aries’ world, and we found Aries lying on the beach. She wasn’t even having sex; she was just relaxing, alone, with her head propped up on one arm, staring out at the water. The way she was lying there, with her breasts against the sand and her legs together with feet crossed, combined with her blue skin and small fins, made me think of a mermaid, and with the aquatic nature of this species, that’s not too far off.

“Hi, Aries.”

“Hey, Jody! What brings you here?”

I noticed that she ignored Nancy. Aries also raised her butt slightly and wiggled it as if to invite me for sex.

“I wanted to talk to you a little about your species.”

“Come on, you can talk from behind me.”

That confirmed I wasn’t imagining the first invitation. I was going to decline, but Nancy said, “Go ahead. It’s her domain.”

She started stripping to match Aries, so I did as well, folding my clothes neatly on top of my shoes, and straddled the blue woman’s body. I was already hard from seeing her naked body and easily slid into her. Nancy lay down at right angles to Aries where the two of them could kiss. This was perhaps why Nancy so readily agreed; getting to kiss Aries was no small thing.

Once we established a good rhythm, I explained, “I was trying to figure out why certain people in the Sea Man Alaska oil well work camp are female when their counterparts in my world are male.”

Aries pulled away from the kiss with Nancy to answer, though she went back into it after every answer.

“Are these people who were always female, or have you only known them to be female on specific days when you went there?”

“Um, I’ve only seen the Sea Man version of the camp on a few days when my summonings took me there.”

“Sea Men can change.”

I froze in place. “Like change sex?”

“Yes. I have only seen it once, here, but it’s part of what we all learn. Two Sea Women fell in love and one of them changed to male so that they could have a child together. We rarely form monogamous relationships, but we don’t have children willy-nilly either. Couples form who love each other, and that love is often life-long even if one or both members also have children with other people. If two of my people of the same sex feel they want to have a child together, one of them will change. Which one depends on details of their relationship. That’s the most common way we change.”

Resuming my motion, I continued, “OK. That would explain some of them. Some of the guys in the human work camp are gay and formed gay couples. Those couples were together in the Sea Man version of the camp but one person in each couple was female. But among the other guys, the ones who are single, about a fourth of them were female in the Sea Man camp and they were out on the beach in separate groups each with 2 to 4 men.”

“We’re taught that if a group of us living together are wildly out of gender balance, then some of them will spontaneously change. We try to mix genders in work groups so that that doesn’t happen. Consider the child care team. They have to be able to breast-feed the infants. Any women can do that after they lay their first egg, but the men only gain that ability when they become pregnant, so once they do, they usually join that team for a couple years.”

“Ah, right. On my second visit there to see the records a man with breasts helped me.”

I thought some more.

“The reason why my human camp was all male was... well, several reasons. It was partly because men are more likely to pursue engineering degrees, partly because the other jobs there include physical labor men are better suited for, and partly because men are more willing to go out into such an extreme environment. Alt-Victoria has a Sea Woman version in the camp also, and in her version, the singles who turned to women were different. If it’s random who changes, or affected by subtle things, that could explain why different people changed.”

“That’s possible, Jody. Supposedly, when people change to equalize the groups, certain people who would be happier as the other sex are more likely to change, but if there aren’t people like that, it could be random, and that’s what the mixed work groups are meant to avoid, people changing randomly who don’t want to change.”

“Do you think it’s possible that my Sea Man form or alt-Victoria’s would change?”

“You, with how gender-confused you were growing up because of the dreams with you as Victoria? Certainly.”

“They both did. Sea Man Jody and Sea Woman alt-Victoria both changed after they started working in the camp. They both have messages from when they first started working there referring to them by the opposite names. I thought I’d broken history with my complicated summonings when I saw the wrong names in both of their message histories, but what you said today explains it. Since they both dreamed of their opposite-sex self with the other name, it’s natural they took that name after changing.”

“Wait, alt-Victoria changed too? Wasn’t her human version the only woman working on the wells in the camp?”

“Yes. And yes.”

“That doesn’t seem right that the only woman there would change, even if others also changed to become women.”

“What if she couldn’t stand having sex with any of the guys?”

“Uh, maybe?”

“Alt-Victoria made her doll because she has the same sexual inclination as my Victoria, but even stronger. She can only enjoy sex if she chooses the guy, and is put off by any guys coming on to her. I’m assuming her Sea Woman version is the same way. What if they all came on to her, making all of them undesirable, before she had a chance to choose one?”

Aries closed her eyes and shook her head while thinking.

“That is pretty far off from the typical Sea Woman mindset, but if she did feel that way, I could imagine her changing, even if it went against the gender ratio.”

“I bet that’s what happened. Sea Men usually are pretty open with sex. It’s implanting eggs that’s serious business because it leads to real pregnancy.”

“Right. You have learned something about us, even if you missed one important thing.”

“Thanks for the lesson, Aries.”

At that moment I came inside Aries, ensuring she would have to lay an egg later tonight.

“And thank you both for visiting, for the sex, and for the kisses.”

I learned a lot in one day. Also, I made note of the idea I had with Mona for future plans.

For the time being, though, I was thinking about Christmas travel. I had arranged the vacation time, and before it got too late in the day today, I called my parents to basically let them know when I would be there. We would do it the way we did at Thanksgiving, sleeping in my world but the group of us coming through and visiting during the day.