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

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

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

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

"Mike?" she says.

"Yeah," I say.

"Come on back."

---

Chapter Six
Old World, New Home

Chapter 7

For a while, as I snuggled in my old bed, I thought of the absurdity of going out on a double date with my mother. That was followed by the other absurdity of me giving her one of my skirts. I had a little chuckle as I went to sleep, in my own bed and in my family home.

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

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

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

...Right?

We find coffee in the secondary lab's small cupboard — a jar of instant, two mugs that have been here since before I started, a coffee maker that might never have been used. The courtyard outside is gray with early light. We are both still in yesterday's clothes.

A slightly nervous Dido entered the Witness Box. Being on the floor of the court was a very different experience from sitting in the public gallery.

“Please repeat the words on the card,” said the Bailiff.

***Sexual Scenes Between Lovers***

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

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

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

...Right?

The Dead Pixel Society

© 2026 Zoe Taylor

P.E. is bad enough, but at Clarity Prep, there's also the joy of the colorfully labelled New Experience Day, and today's lesson is Fencing, or as Lewis/Aria thinks of it, 'being a lopsided tripod with a sword.' Still, she manages to make a new friend in a senior fencing student and further the goal of repairing The Beige Beast in the process. And soon she'll get to actually see what the girls' dorms actually look like, too. En garde!

Chapter 5

I was looking out of the window as Sally and Jerry were talking. This was a whole new world for me. Every view was new and different. They continued and I listened with half an ear.

“There’s a lot of new things to learn. It’s pretty exciting.”

“I’m told that it gets more like work, the longer you do it.”

“As I said, Jerry. We’ve both worked in retail. We’re not afraid of work. All I hope is that others treat us well.”

Chapter Five: Reflection

The annual planning folders are on my desk when I arrive - Dave's doing, the account list already pulled, the prior year actuals flagged for comparison. October means the revenue forecast, account by account, the coming year projected against the current year's performance. I open the first folder and start working.

The loose shirt manages the morning. Not perfectly - when I lean forward to pull a folder from the stack the fabric shifts slightly - but nothing that evident. The jacket stays on the chair.

Surprise, I'm alive. Someone has given me a quick kick, and I realized I hadn't posted much of anything here in years... again. I'll try once again to correct that problem. For now, please enjoy this one.

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

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

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

...Right?