Hmm, any idea why my three new stories I've personally written haven't appeared in the category section? -- Alex Warlorn August 25 2009

:You need to create a category: Xanadu tag. The universe template simply displays the puzzle piece picture in the upper corner. --[[User:Lloyd Brunnel|Lloyd Brunnel]] 23:27, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

THEY DO! -- Alex Warlorn 25 August 2009

{{Green|No need to shout.}} --[[User:Concerned Reader|Concerned Reader]] 03:20, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

As shown by recent edits I've done, they did not contain the Xanadu category. I'll add the tag to the others that carry your byline, Alex, but I'll leave the exercise of adding it to the others up to you. -- [[User:ShadowWolf|ShadowWolf]] 12:09, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

I've noticed Empathy and Errand of Mercy were removed from the Xanadu archive. Can I ask why they were? Alex Warlorn 2011 January 20th

:I am really fond of the Xanadu setting. I recently posted a story in it. I am working on a continuation of the story, but it involves some big events. Not setting breaking in my opinion, but enough that I wanted to ask for permission/advice. I want my story character to welll uhmmm Purchase the Death Valley National Park and turn it into a sanctuary for Xanadu victims among other things. Is this too big of an event for the setting?[[User:JoharaGuardian|JoharaGuardian]] 02:18, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

Eric Winters and Project X respectively handle that IMHO (for those who do and don't want their talents at the government's service). I'm not the originator of the series so I can't say with absolute. Though it does feel kinda over the top. And Sly Fox himself rents out his apartments for free for Xanadu victim simply too weird to function in society. -- 2011 May 15

:There are approximately 15,000 victims not counting secondary transformations. Plenty of room to accommodated more victims that don't want government help or who blame Eric Winters for their plight. Of course offering sanctuary to victims is really a secondary purpose. I want to recreate a alien environment within the park based on my characters home world and such. Es ship is kind of a doomsday vault of information for the recreation of Kuhyce society. I chose the most remote inhospitable location in the US. Of course the Sahara desert would work, but I wanted it to be in the US.[[User:JoharaGuardian|JoharaGuardian]] 05:53, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm not the originator either, though I really like the setting. I can't see the U.S. Govt. agreeing to this for any amount of money. However, purchasing a large tract of desert land somewhere in the U.S. might be plausible. But, think how suspicious the Govt. would be of any Xanadu survivors it doesn't have control over. If I were one of those survivors, it would certainly sound better than a FEMA trailer park. Not a good location at all for Merfolk, though ;-). Alveric 11:07am EDT, 05/16/2011

Yeah, I'm sure that buying a large area of public national park land in the US for development would be, at the least, complicated. For the most part, it would be a non-starter. That doesn't mean that you couldn't do something like that in the US. There are huge areas of private, or at least available, land all over the US. I can think of one that wasn't even all that long ago a vacation spot but is now a ghost town: The Salton Sea in Southern California. If someone wanted to turn that into a refuge, I imagine that you could do it with enough money, there is already a basic infrastructure there, and even a large body of (salt) water. It would make more sense than Death Valley. --[[User:Eirik|Eirik]] 17:38, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

:Death Valley was chosen due to its remoteness, it's limited native vegetation, and well just seemed like a place to start. The idea wasn't to build a refuge as much as xenoform the area to be more like parts of the Kyhyce home world. Including turning much of the Valley into a lake and creating a barrier to thicken the atmosphere and introducing plants and animals from the Kyhyce homeworld. Basically turning the desert into a lake a forest land. Admittedly grandiose, but hey with all these powerful people in Xanadu it seemed a good idea to have something big happen. lol

Yeh, if you're talking about literally thermoforming a section of land of almost any size, you're going to have to go somewhere where the government isn't going to tie you up in environmental impact statements for the next three decades... --[[User:Eirik|Eirik]] 21:30, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

2011-03-04T18:36:33Z

Eirik: Created page with '{{my stories|name=Eirik|category=Eirik}} Category:Story Category:Eirik Category:Animal {{DEFAULTSORT:Long After}} {{title|name=Long After|user=Eirik|author=Eirik}} …'

{{my stories|name=Eirik|category=Eirik}}

[[Category:Story]] [[Category:Eirik]] [[Category:Animal]] {{DEFAULTSORT:Long After}}
{{title|name=Long After|user=Eirik|author=Eirik}}

"I know that you’ve heard the tale," I said as I set down the mug of beer in front of me, "Everyone has, or at least versions of it. None of them are accurate, of course, but they get the basic facts about right. So far as the story goes."

I looked at the few men around me, most of them travelers looking to trade with the nomads of the Cons Vale. None of them bade me to stop, and my blood fueled with some of the worst beer I had ever tasted, I started to tell the story.

**

First of all, she wasn’t a princess. Every story gets that wrong. Helen wasn’t even of noble birth. That isn’t to say she wasn’t rich, she was the second daughter of William Macomb, easily one of the wealthiest shopkeepers and money lenders in the five kingdoms. And that’s not to say she wasn’t beautiful. She was more beautiful than you could imagine.

This is precisely why she was kidnapped and transformed as she was. It was also why I was able to save her.
When the Wizard Hew rode into town on an impossibly beautiful mare wearing a lavishly decorative bridle, I knew something was wrong. Hew, for all his power, had always been an impoverished soul. He earned using his talents, as most men and women with magical skills did, but he was prone to gamble and enact schemes of petty revenge on those he felt wronged him. He could easily have commanded a kings ransom for his services when Helen went missing to help find her, but he didn’t even show up in town until several months had passed.

I had never known Helen, not really. I was just a clerk in her fathers' store. Like most of the young men in the city, I had secretly loved her from afar. And like most young men, I had made a study of her. When she came through the store, I watched her every move, every mannerism. I knew her every habit, every tick, from the way she chewed her lip when she was nervous, to the way she tossed her head back to get a lose strand of hair out of her eyes.

And that morning as I stood at the shop window, I watched the Wizard Hew sit smugly on top of that mare, that mare that was as far from his station as Helen was from mine. I watched the mare move with an uncommon grace and smoothness. I watched her toss her head back to move a bit of forelock out of her eye.

I’m not sure what came over me at that point. The bards tell it better than I ever could, ascribing motives to me like purity of heart, or true love, or even the soul of a champion. Of course, in those stories I’m usually depicted as a knight in shining armor, a prince from a distant land, or my favorite, a king in disguise as a lowly commoner in order to learn about his people.

In any event, I pieced a few things together in my mind, some bits that I knew about magic, and some bits I’d learned over the years about the Wizard Hew. I ran to the back of the shop and found what I needed, a silver carving knife, then ran into the street.

Again, the bards tell it better. There was a great battle in the streets, there was a game of subterfuge, we parried with swords, words or spells in the streets, and sometimes with all three. There was a grand unveiling...

No, I was nothing to Hew, just another peasant in a sea of them. If he paid me any attention at all in that moment, it was to gently move his horse so as not to step on me. In that moment, before he could react, I reached up and slipped the blade cleanly though the ornate bridle around the horses head.

The bards would say, and they have, that in that moment the horse transformed into a beautiful woman, dressed in the finest fashions. At that moment, she threw her arms around me and pledged her unending love to me.

Of course, the only part of that which happened is that she transformed back into a human, but a scared, dirty and naked human, kneeling in the street and partly covered in tack. Hew never had a chance to enact any revenge, he had fallen and hit his head on the cobblestone road, knocking him out. Scared as she was, Helen recognized me and what I had done and allowed me to scurry her off the street and into one of her fathers' stores where she could be covered by a blanket.

Hew’s trial, by angry mob, was short. He was never a loved man, in fact he was loathed by most of the city, tolerated only because he doled out his meager talents to gain favor at the right time. Enough people saw what had happened on the street to start a frenzy. By the time the kings men were able to get things under control, Hew was dead.

His motives were never clear. Macomb hadn’t known, or at least never admitted if he did, that the horse was his daughter. He claimed never to have received a ransom demand. He did admit to have the occasional dealings with Hew, as the largest shopkeeper in the town it would have been strange if he didn’t, but nothing that should have inspired this type of revenge.

But as I said, Hew was apt to go for petty revenge.

The bridle, which turned out to be a magic artifact thought lost from the reign of King Marris IV, was deemed harmless after I had cut it. In fact, five other horses in the city transformed back once I broke the curse. All had crossed paths with Hew. The bridle first went to Macomb, then later to me as a relic of my adventure.

"You.. you saved me." They were the first words Helen ever said to me. It made my heart soar. "How can I thank you?"

I said nothing, my mind was a swirl with what had just happened. I opened my mouth to say something graceful, something noble, but came up with just a slight stammer.

She smiled, standing up wearing only the blanket that I'd wrapped her in, and kissed me on the cheek.
In truth, that would have been enough reward for me.

A few night later, her father threw a massive celebration at his home just outside the city walls. Of course, even though I was nothing but a clerk and had even acted as a servant at these functions before, I was considered the guest of honor. Macomb had me dressed by his finest tailor and sat me next to his daughter at the celebration.

I watched Helen as closely as I could without making it obvious. I'd seen Helen in social situations like this before and she was always the life of the party. But tonight she seemed a bit nervous, trapped. She picked at her food, eating only the carrots and radishes that dressed her plate.

At the right moment, I reached out and gently touched her on the arm. She jumped slightly, but not enough that anyone would have noticed. "Miss Macomb…" I started.

She looked at me and smiled, "I think of anyone here, you've earned the right to call me Helen."
"Helen," I said, "I'm sorry, I'm feeling a little…" I started, not sure how to continue the sentence.
"Overwhelmed?" she asked with some relief, as if I'd read her mind. When I nodded, she stood and took me by the arm, "Please, come with me."

She took me out on the back porch, where there were few people standing in the cool evening air. She took a deep breath and visibly relaxed. "Is that better?" she asked.

I smiled, "It is, how are you feeling?"

She looked away, "I'm not sure."

Impulsively, she leaned in and kissed me.

It was a whirlwind romance. Less than a year after I rescued her from Hew, we were wed.

And that’s where the stories all end, with a happily ever after. And while I would never stop to correct a bard, I would venture to say that none of them know what happened next.

It would be wrong to say that I didn't know something was wrong even before we were married. Though our brief courtship, it was clear that she was a different person. Before she was transformed, she seemed to revel in the city life, spending hours in her fathers' stores looking for the latest fashions from the capital. After her rescue, she tried to slip back into that life, but she wasn't comfortable in it anymore.

She seemed hemmed in by crowds and startled easily. I wasn't the only one to notice, though I tried hard not to care. She slowly reduced her circle of friends until she was spending her time with only me.

She confided in me shortly before our marriage that she had grown to dislike the city. I spoke with her father about it, and he agreed after some time to purchase a large farm for us outside the city. Helen was delighted at the news, and I was for her. Most had expected her to simply turn the farm into some kind of manor house with large gardens that grew nothing but parties for the moneyed class. She wouldn't have been the first to do so, and no one would have blamed her.

Some took it as strange when she instead expressed an interest in raising horses. The young woman who had spent the better part of a year living as a horse, some though, should get away from them. With her fathers' money and connections, Helen threw herself into the stables. She went on a buying spree, buying exclusively Condirs. She claimed that she loved them because they were versatile horses, used all over the five kingdoms for everything from riding to pulling carts. I knew little of horses, but as soon as I saw her first acquisition I realized that she had spent her time as a horse trapped as one of these.

She started working in the stables from the first day, doing as much work as she could to have an excuse to be around her horses. She hired little help, and only then when she absolutely needed it. She trusted me to manage the home and financial affairs, and herself to raise the herd.

In time, she was spending far more time with the horses than with me.

"I understand them," she confided in me after a time, "I have a connection that no one else does. They are more complex animals that anyone could know, yet most people see them just as beasts to be tied to a wagon."

The situation was odd to me. I never felt that Helen didn't care for me, but I came to realize soon that she was far more comfortable with the horses than she was with me or any humans for that matter. We began to grow apart to the point where she stayed nearly all the time at the stables. I'd found her sleeping more than once in an empty stall, or standing idly in a pasture watching her horses. I had the feeling that wasn't enough for her.

"Have you heard of the Cons Vale?" she asked one day.

I admitted that I had, though knew very little about it. It was nominally a kingdom far to the north made up of nomads. It was perfect horse country, where many of them ran wild. The Cons were legendary horsemen, and Condirs were thought to have originated on those plains.

"Have you ever thought about throwing this away and going there? Spending your life just on the grassland?" she asked wistfully. "Maybe joining a tribe?"

I didn't pursue the conversation anymore, but it never strayed far from my mind. It was never far from hers, either. She asked her father to import tapestries done by the nomads which she hung all over the house. The work was rough but had a strange beauty about it that fit with that legendary land. It also, according to her, smelled ever so slightly like horses.

You can see now why the bards never bother with this part of the story. After the song ends, you're too presume that we had a good life, with many children, growing old together. In truth, we had no children, and for that I'm glad. Children would have made the last part of the story more… complicated.

A couple of years passed. Helen and I never really grew any closer in that time, but we never really grew apart, either. And much to her fathers delight, we were even beginning to earn our own coin on this horse breeding folly. One morning when Helen was out working with her growing herd, I heard a knock on the door. I opened it to find a young women, dressed nearly in rags. Her beauty, while not up to Helens level, was still remarkable. "Are you the man that rescued Helen Macomb?" she asked.

"I am," I said warily, noting that, as usual, my name had been lost in the stories. It would not be the first time that someone had heard the rapidly spreading stories about me and begged me to go on a quest either with them or for them.

Instead, she smiled, "I understand that you might still have the bridle, the one that transformed your wife?"
I didn't answer that one. The fewer who knew that the better. "Why do you ask?"

"I was one of Hews' victims. I used to be his maid, but when he needed money he transformed me and sold me," she said in a remarkably calm way. There was no anger in her voice, she was only stating a fact.

"I'm sorry," I said, "but you don't have to worry about him any longer."

She nodded and teared up. I bid her to come in and sit in the front room. She sat down and wiped her eyes, "I'm sorry, it's just that…" she struggled to compose herself, "I'm ashamed."

"Of what?"

"I miss it," she said after a long pause. "I miss it so much." Before I could ask her to clarify, she looked at me, "Do you know how long I was a horse?" she asked. "Almost ten years," she said. "I was a horse for nearly as long as I was a human." She struggled to compose herself even more, "It leaves an imprint on you, on your soul. I think about it every day." She steeled herself. "I want to be that horse again."

"You want to go back?" I asked, slightly aghast. "You want to go back to being an unthinking beast of burden again?"

She smiled a little, "Who told you we were unthinking? I remembered being human the entire time that I was a horse, but simply couldn't express it. The magic makes you act like a horse, even when you don't want to. And at first I struggled against it, but after a time…" she shrugged.

I didn't like where this conversation was going. "I'm sorry, but the bridle was destroyed when I cut it. That's why you changed back.""

"Do you still have it?" she asked, "Can I see it?"

I decided after a while that it was harmless enough, so I retrieved it from a closet and handed it to her. She smiled like a child who had found a lost toy, even hugging it to her breast for a moment. She then looked it over and found where the silver knife had severed the ornate leather. "When I was a horse before, I was a magnificent specimen. I'm sure that your wife would find me a wonderful addition to your stable."

If I could have, I would have stopped her. She bound the cut edged of the leather together with a small clip, then slipped the harness over her head and put the bit in her mouth.

I had managed to take two steps toward her before the bulk of a suddenly appearing black mare slammed into me and shoved me to the floor.

Stunned, I looked up at the horse that moments before had been a confused young woman. I thought quickly about getting a knife to cut the bridle again, but stopped when I looked into the eyes of the mare and saw a certain kind of peace that hadn't been there before.

"You… you really want this, don't you?" I asked. She nodded vigorously. With trembling hands, I slipped the bridle off her head and looked at it. The clip she had used to repair it bore the seal of King Marris IV, and was made of pewter. It didn't look strong, but it did the job. Gingerly, I tugged at it, but found that it was deceptively tight and wouldn't budge.

With some difficulty, I managed to get the mare out of the house. I explained her sudden appearance to Helen as a surprise gift. I watched the new mare for some time before I decided that she was really happy.

You want to know how I can prove that I'm not as smart as the Bards stories imply? It never occurred to me, not for days, that there was something wrong with a young woman showing up at my door, a young peasant women, with a bit of magical trickery that fixed the Bridle of Marris IV. I never had a chance to ask her where she got it, and once she was transformed and happy, I simply didn't think of it again.

At least not until a unit of the Royal Guard appeared at my door.

"Have you seen Princess Justine?" he asked. "She went missing during a royal hunt several days ago and hasn't been seen since."

It clicked for me then. Like any subject of the King, I was aware of Justine. Macomb had tied many times to have her banned from his stores. She had a legendary reputation, even among nobles used to such behavior, for being spoiled. Nevertheless, she had multiple suitors vying for her hand and her fathers' kingdom. I had never seen her, but had certainly heard her described. I knew at that moment that I had, of course, seen the princess. She was currently grazing out in the pasture.

I couldn't very well tell the soldiers that, though.

The royal guards searched the property anyway, as I suspect they were doing all over the countryside, but came up empty handed. Through the entire process, the Captain of the guard talked to me.

"You're the husband of Helen Macomb, aren't you?" he asked.

I nodded nervously, noting again that my name was apparently lost to history. "Yes, I am."

He glanced around the room as if there was a hidden partition somewhere, "Is she around? Perhaps she has seen something of the Princess."

"She spends much of her time with the horses," I answered honestly. "If she's not out at the stable, then she's probably riding in the forest."

The Captain nodded, "Of course, her love for her horse is legendary around here," he said, leaving the reason up in the air. He shuffled a foot, "I understand from asking around that you still have it."

"It?" I asked, even though I knew what he meant. I could feel sweat beading up on my forehead.

"The bridle," he asked in a slightly annoyed tone.

"Oh, yes," I said thinking quickly but not clearly, "No. Helen decided that she didn't want it around anymore, so we disposed of it. Burned it. In the fireplace. Last Spring Solstice Festival."

"Yes, of course," the Captain said, but he didn't seem to convinced.

At that point, one of the soldiers returned. "Captain, nothing to report on the property. All the outbuildings have been searched. Nothing but horses." He glanced at me, "A neighbor reported that the wife headed out toward Flint Glen this morning on horseback. It's a routine ride for her, and she should be back by this evening."

The Captains suspicion seemed to lift, slightly. "How many horses did you count?"

"Twenty," he said.

The moment they left, I retrieved the same silver knife from the closet I had used to break the curse before and tried to sever the leather of the bridle again, but the knife wouldn't cut the leather, not even a nick. I tried to pry off the pewter clasp that Justine had put over the cut mark, but to no avail.

Still holding both artifacts, I ran out to the pasture and grabbed the mare by the halter, "What did you do?" I asked, nearly in tears. "You tricked me into letting you live out some stupid fantasy, now your fathers guard is sniffing around and probably think I've picked up where Hew left off!"

The horse tried to look placid, but I could see worry creep into her eyes. Then it dawned on me, "You heard the stories, didn't you? You thought what happened to Helen was romantic. Nobel? Did you think that a handsome prince was going to rescue you?"

Slowly, the horse nodded.

"And what was going to happen to me? My wife? After the King has had me beheaded for witchcraft!" I held up the bridle, "I have news for you, Princess. Whatever magic you used to fix this thing has made it impossible to cut!"

I stalked off, ignoring her cries of fear behind me. She was a confused, spoiled young woman in a bad situation, but she had made mine all the worse.

I almost walked right into Helen, who had returned earlier than expected and heard the entire exchange. "What have you done?" she asked. Then she fingered the bridle. "It's fixed?" She looked at the scared mare, "She… fixed it?"

I felt my knees buckle and she guided me gently over to a nearby bench. I spilled the story about the real origin of the mare.

After hearing the story, she leaned back and closed her eyes. "Oh, Junstine. I should have known." She shook her head, "I knew her, before I was transformed. I told her all about my experiences. That's why she knew I was never fully transformed into a horse in mind." She looked at me, "Why didn't you tell me?" she asked.

I looked her right in the eye, "I was afraid. I was afraid that you loved your horses more than you loved me, That if you found out the bridle was fixed, you would rather be one of them than my wife."

Helen looked at me with wide, brown eyes, watering slightly, not responding. Deep down, we both knew it was true. "Justine is headstrong, but not stupid. She would have left something behind pointing to this farm. She wouldn't want to risk still being a horse a year from now." She tossed her head back to move a stray bit of hair from her eyes. "The Kings men are going to be here soon, aren't they?"

I looked down at my feet, "The Captain seemed suspicious. If you're right, I suspect he'll be back before nightfall, the morning at the latest."

She seemed thoughtful, "Maybe you can't cut the bridle because it's not being worn. That's how you did it before."

Helen put her arms around me and gave me a gentle kiss. "I have an idea, if it works, then we turn the Princess back and hopefully she convinces her father not to hurt you."

I already knew what her idea was, and I didn't like it. "And if it doesn't? The clasp she used seems to make it impossible to cut."

Helen smiled, "I have a different idea for that."

We put her plan in motion immediately. We could have tested Helens theory on Justine, but if it worked, then the chances were that the bridle would finally be destroyed and she would never have this chance again.
We packed quickly for a long overland trip, then she went to the stable and took the bridle. "Give me a few minutes before you try to cut it," she asked. She slipped the harness over her head, and in an instant she was again the fine, white mare again. She nuzzled me gently, then spun on her hooves and took off across the pasture.

She spend more time than we'd agreed running though the fields, letting the wind take her tale and mane, before she returned to the fence, breathing hard. She nuzzled me again, then looked at the knife.

It was with some regret that I tried to cut the bridle. My heart started to race as the silver started to actually make the tiniest of cuts in the leather. With a flick of my wrist, I could cut the leather as easily as I had before. I then looked into her eyes.

Helen had everything she wanted now, except one thing. I like to think that I thought long and hard, but in truth, I really didn't.

"Forget it," I said to her, tossing the knife aside. "Let's go." I wasted no more time. I put the loaded saddlebags on the Princess, then saddled up Helen and we fled overland for the Cons Vale.

**

I took another drink and looked at my companions. None seemed to believe me, nor should they. It was too fantastic a story.

"So what happened to the Princess?" asked one man who was just a little too drunk.

I smiled as I drank the last of my beer, "After a few weeks, we didn't need a pack animal anymore. I sold her to a potato farmer to pull his cart to market. Let her suitors be an elderly draft and a donkey."

I paid the barkeep with my last coins, then went to the stable and retrieved my white mare.

We rode out of the town, the last bit of civilization before the Cons Vale and it's nearly endless pasture, home to nothing but horses and a nearly unknown nomadic horse people. We rode though the night, keeping to the narrow cart trail, until the morning light peeked above the distant mountains.

I stripped Helen of all the tack and left it hidden under some brush. Perhaps someday someone would find it and know what happened, but not before we were long gone.

I walked over the mare and put a hand on her face, "Are you sure? This is the last chance. We could try and find a wizard to break the bridle."

Her gazed left mine and shifted to the river just barely visible in distance. I knew she wouldn't change her mind, so I slipped the bridle over my head and put the bit into my mouth.

2008-03-22T05:35:55Z

Eirik: small addition

Reverberations

{{my stories|name=Eirik|category=Eirik}}
{{WIP}}
[[Category:Story]] [[Category:Eirik]] [[Category:Anthropomorphic]] [[Category:Paradise]] {{DEFAULTSORT:Reverberations}}
{{title|name=Reverberations|user=Eirik|author=Eirik}}

Dusty sat on the hall floor and slowly, rhythmically tapped his antlers backward into the wall. One slow tap, pull forward, another slow tap.

"Mr. Hollows!" hissed Ela as she turned the corner and saw what he was doing. "Stop doing that!"

He looked up at her, "What?"

She reached down and helped him to his feet, "What do you think normals are seeing when you do that?"

He quickly turned his head down the hall, accidentally hitting his left antler against the doorframe. "Damn it," he muttered. "Sorry about that."

She unlocked her office and let him in. "Since you're not in any of my classes, and you're clearly distracted, I assume you're here about T.A.?"

He took a seat across from her and sighed. Their kiss had been a couple days before, and he was still conflicted about what was happening. "I suppose I am," he admitted. "I'm worried about her, and I'm not sure who to talk with. I'm worried she's moved too far, too fast."

"That's not a question that I can answer," she admitted. "Personally, I think it's a good thing, at least for the most part."

"For the most part?"

She shrugged, "This isn't some kind of well defined science. She's in a strange place right now, as are you." She absently started logging into her computer. "She's moving a lot faster than most of the gender changed. I don't know any, but what I've been hearing is that most spend years getting adapted, if they ever do. For her, it's like she's trying to break a record."

"That's what I'm afraid of," admitted Dusty.

Ela nodded. "Every situation is unique. A lot of people in her position over the last decade had no one they could be normal with, no one they could confide in, no one..." she trailed off.

"What?" he asked.

"Well, no one they could be their new gender with."

Dusty felt his mouth hang open, "But..."

"You care for her, don't you?" she asked.

He nodded vigorously, "I do. I'm just afraid that I've pushed her into this. I don't want her to be with me because of something I did."

"Tim is going to have to adapt eventually. The chances that she'll change again are almost zero now, and if the changes keep occurring, especially at the accelerate rate we're seeing, it won't be long before she'll have to be a woman."

"Wait, she might change again? You said it couldn't happen."

She looked crossly at him, "I know about as much as you do about this. We might all change back tomorrow."

"You didn't answer my question."

There was a long pause, "She might. I've asked a few people about it, and there is some precedent for a change after skipping a year, but it's on the odds of winning the lottery. There are maybe a dozen documented cases." She allowed herself a smile, "I'm an economics professor, I can assure you those are long odds."

"I need to tell her that," he said. "She's changing herself, as much as she can. What if she changes again in August?"

Ela regarded him carefully, "Are you trying to get out of your relationship?" she asked seriously.

Dusty shook his head vigorously, so much he knocked an antler hard into a bookcase. "No!"

Ela cut him off, "If you're trying to find an excuse to break it off right now, you're not the young man I assumed you were."

"I'm not trying to break it off!" he said, more loudly than he intended. "I just don't want to do anything we may regret later."

Ela eyed him carefully. "Have you?"

{{separator|j}}

"This is nice," said Tim. After the party, she had resolved to start preparing herself for the day that she wouldn't have to hide anymore. She still had to maintain appearances, she couldn't start wearing a dress in public, but she could start doing things in private.

Sheila opened the glass door and pulled out the bracelet, handing it to Tim. "I didn't make this one, came from my supplier." It was a simple costume bit of fake silver with cubic zirconium.

"$20?" asked Tim incredulously. She wasn't used to buying this stuff. Without thinking, she started to try it on.

Sheila grabbed it off her arm and glared at her. "Remember where we are, Tim," she hissed.

Tim regarded the fox for a moment, then nodded carefully. She looked around the mall. There weren't many people there, and no one seemed to notice anything amiss. "Sorry, I should know better."

"I know this is all new for you, but I'm the one that will have to explain the weird guy that was hanging around trying stuff on," she said in a whisper. "I swear, you've been dealing with this for the last year and half. I've had a couple months. You know better." She put the bracelet back in the case. "Tell you what, pick out a few pieces that you like and I'll bring them by your place."

Tim nodded and looked over the case a bit more. "I think she's more into this style," she said more loudly for the benefit of passers-by.

Shelia grinned thinly, "Staying with the silver? She doesn't like gold?"

"She really doesn't own any, so I'm not sure," Tim said honestly. She looked over the case, using her tail to point out a few pieces to Sheila.

The fox made mental notes, but eventually stopped Tims' browsing. "I'm not wheeling the whole cart over."

Tim smiled and noted the women running the next kiosk taking too much interest in her browsing, "Sorry. I'm not used to shopping for my girlfriend." She picked a bracelet off a display and handed it to Sheila, "I'll take that for now. When can you stop by"

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Dusty stopped at the supermarket on the way back from class. He'd realized shortly after he'd grown his own personal coat rack that transportation was going to be a pain in the tail. On campus it was a non issue, but even taking the bus was tough because just getting though the doors without looking like a circus contortionist was impossible. With the help of his parents, who still had no idea that their son looked a lot like the head mounted on the game room wall, he'd bought an older Saab convertible to get around. It wasn't what he'd really wanted, and he still wasn't sure what he was going to do in the rain, but it got him around.

He closed the top and sighed. Once a few car engineers were transformed, he hoped someone would make a bubble top car.

He walked into the store and grabbed a cart. The conversation with Ela was still in his head. He really had no idea who else to talk with. Trinidad was out because nothing said to the sea lion would be kept secret. It just wasn't in his nature. Even on the special online forums, there was almost no one in his position, in Tim's position. Transgendered were rare, and most of the ones out there were trying to stay in current relationships. He'd found none that were willing to publicly admit they were in this situation.

He filled his cart with stuff from the produce section, the went for the meat department. Tim's meat really threw off their food budget.

The truth was, the two of them hadn't done anything that couldn't be taken back. Tim wasn't ready for that, and the closer Tim got the colder Dustys' hooves got. He cared for her, deeply, but the time of year to make choices like this was lousy. He turned a corner and knocked a box of crackers with the edge of his antlers. He pretended not to notice, since bending down to get it was likely to cause more stuff to get knocked over.

The antlers, in a way, were his problem. Or what they represented. His hormones were in overdrive and would be for a couple months. There was no way he could hope to think clearly, and he couldn't afford to destroy his relationship with Tim.

He paused at the small florist near the checkout, picked a single red rose, and went to pay. He'd take it slow, but he did want to move forward. He only hoped Tim would do the same.

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Sheila was at the apartment a couple of hours later with a small bag filled with fake silver and gold. "I grabbed that stuff you liked, and a few other things."

Tim smiled, "Thanks," she said as she showed her in.

They settled on the couch and she dumped out the bag. "Where are your roommates?"

"Trinidad wanted to go for a swim, so I guess he's at the beach. Dusty should actually be home any minute." She picked up some of the gold and held it against her black fur. "I don't know, I still think I prefer the silver."

Sheila nodded and separated out some of the other stuff, "How are you handling this?"

Tim didn't look at her, "Fine, I guess." She set down what she was holding and looked at Shelia, "This feels right, it really does." She fingered a pair of earring, but wasn't looking at them. "What do you think of Tina?"

"Who's Tina?"

Tim looked at her, "For me. I don't think I can't keep the name Tim forever."

Sheila laughed, "You do not look like a Tina to me, not at all." She looked the jaguar up and down from head to toe, "I'm not sure what to call you. Didn't Lisa call you Tea'? Like the actress? Seems a bit more exotic."

Tim considered it. Lisa had called her that since their first meeting. She was a nice woman, but the concept of a gender changed seemed to shake her a bit. She compensated by pretending it hadn't happened. It had annoyed Tim for a while, but the more feminine she got, the less it bothered her. After a little though, she shook her head, "I don't know yet. I kind of like it."

They continued to go thorough the various pieces that Sheila had brought with her, eventually settling on just a few. "You're going to have a lifetime to figure out your style. Just in time for it to change again," she added with a smirk.

Using a mirror, Tim tried to put a set of earrings on, but couldn't figure out a way for them to look natural with her ear shape. "I suppose that keeps you in business."

Sheila nodded while adding things up, "Don't you know it." She flashed over her calculator and came up with a total. "Usually, this haul would run you about seventy five, but I suspect I'll be seeing you a lot, so I'll knock it down to sixty."

Tim sighed, "This is going to become expensive, isn't it?"

"Wait until you start getting the real stuff," she replied. She looked over the silver costume jewelry that Tim was trying on, "You really were a guy just a year ago?"

She nodded, "Good old-fashion, heterosexual, red-blooded American boy," she said as she struggled with a necklace clasp. "Strange what being turned so completely into this will do."

"Living with Dusty probably helped," she said. "Maybe it's pheromones, but since he shed his velvet he even makes my heart skip a beat."

Tim looked at her, she'd never considered that living with Dusty might have accelerated her change of heart. "He's not your type?"

She shook her head, "Not really. Believe it or not, I'm still into unchanged guys. I guess that won't last." She starting putting away the other pieces of jewelry, "I had a boyfriend when this happened, but broke up with him when I changed."

"Why's that?"

"Partly it was because I was scared, it was before Lisa spotted me and took me into the fold. Partly it was because he was a jackass when I was sick. I hope that's what he turns into," she muttered a bit angrily.

Dusty opened the front door, twisting his head as he walked though, carrying several bags of food. He spied the two of them on the couch, "Hi ladies," he said with a smile, hiding his nervousness. "What's going on?"

Sheila held up her bag of samples, "Just getting your girl some accessories," she said.

He set the bags in the kitchen and looked at Tim. She was still wearing male clothes, but decked out in silver jewelry she looked like a slightly tomboyish woman. She stood up and they hugged, "How was your day?" she asked.

"Fine, I have a project for my conservation class coming up. The professor there is going to flip when he finally changes. I think he's already half animal." He reached back and slipped the rose out of a bag. "For you," he said quietly. Tim took the flower and stared at it. She was so quiet that Dusty started to think that he'd done something wrong. She looked at him with tears welling in her eyes, kissed him, then ran to her room and shut the door.

Dusty started to follow, but Sheila stopped him. "I'll talk to her," she said.

"What happened? I thought she'd be happy," the moose asked with concern in his voice.

"You've never given her flowers before, right?" she asked.

He shook his head, "We haven't really been an item until a couple days ago," he pointed out.

"I suspect until that moment, she didn't fully realize how much she'd changed."

"You think she didn't like the rose?" he asked.

Sheila smiled, "No, I suspect she loved it, and it scared the hell out of her."

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Tim sat on the edge of the bed and let the tears flow down her cheek. "What is wrong with me?" she whispered quietly to the empty room.

There was a light knock at the door and Sheila came in, "Want some company, honey?" Tim shook her head no, but the fox came in anyway. She sat down at the end of the bed next to her and put her arm over Tims shoulder. "Scared you, didn't it?"

Tim nodded, "Yeah. I mean, I decided I was going to be a woman, but he gave me the flower…" she trailed off for a moment and caught her breath. "In high school, I was the one that gave flowers. They never did anything for me. I could smell them, look at them. They were just plants." She closed her eyes, "Now? Dusty gives me one red rose…"

"And you felt like melting into his arms? Like he was the center of your universe?" Sheila asked with a grin.

Tim nodded. "I guess I felt like that before, Halloween certainly. But I was in control then."

Sheila chuckled. "Dusty is a moose, I suspect he's going to take charge this time of year." She smiled and patted her on the back, "You're a jaguar, you can take charge the rest of the year."

"I guess it's just that I have to keep all this bottled up all day. I can't act like I love him outside this apartment. I can't act like a woman outside this place. The only reason I dressed up for Halloween like a woman is because everyone else would see me as a guy in a costume." She reached over and picked a fashion magazine off her nightstand. "I've been looking at this stuff. When I was a guy, I'd have been looking at the women, now I'm getting fashion tips, and getting excited about it!"

Sheila didn't know what to say. They both knew that Tim was on virtually uncharted territory. "Maybe you need to be more like a woman inside these walls," she suggested.

Tim considered it. It had been one of the reasons she was buying the jewelry to begin with. "I guess so."

The fox stood up and went to Tims' closet. "We'll need to start getting you some correct clothes," she said pulling out the white dress from Halloween, "And this doesn’t' count. You can't wear this around the house nightly. You need some causal stuff. Bedtime stuff, too."

"I can't just go shopping…"

Sheila cut him off. "Rupert Manassas manages a clothing boutique downtown. He's already told me that he's been waiting to hear from you. He'll let you in after hours to try stuff on. Just bring your checkbook."

Tim sighed, "Okay, lets do that this weekend, maybe late Saturday night?"

"I'll talk to him. He's a funny little chipmunk, too. You haven't really talked to him, but before he changed he was a big guy, about six foot five. He's a small little thing now."

Tim winced, "That's gotta hurt."

"He hasn't been thrilled, but he changed the year before you. He's used to it, even if people talk two feet over his head."

"I hadn't thought about that," she said. "I really haven't talked with him."

"One more thing, your name," she said a little dangerously.

"I'm still thinking about it," she protested weakly.

Sheila sighed, "I know, and you still need to be Tim outside these walls, and T.A. when you're with a group of us in public. But if you're going to be a woman inside here, I think you need to decide on something."

They talked back and forth a bit longer, and she was feeling better about things. Finally, she walked out with Sheila in tow to find Dusty still standing nervously near the kitchen. Trinidad had come home while she was in the bedroom and was beside him, looking about as concerned as his perpetually happy expression would take him. They had obviously been talking.

"Guys, I've been talking to Sheila and I've made a choice. When I'm here, inside this place, I'm not going to be Tim anymore. I've decided I want you two to call me Tea'."

Dusty looked stunned, but happy. Trinidad didn't waste a moment, practically leaping forward, grabbing her in a hug and kissing her all over her muzzle. "Congratulations!" he exclaimed. "It's a beautiful, bouncy girl!"

Dusty finally got over the shock and stepped over, tapping him dangerously on the shoulder and huffing loudly though his nose. "Flippers. Off. Her. Ass."

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After Sheila left, Tea' and Dusty went into his room to talk about things.

"You're sure about this?" he asked her, not for the first time.

She nodded and idly played with one of his antlers. "If you'd told me I'd be in this position a couple years ago, I'd have thought you were nuts. But the fact is, for whatever reason, it's clear the universe wants me to be a girl. If the universe wants that, who am I to argue?" She shrugged, "If the universe decides it's made a mistake, I'll change back this summer."

Dusty looked surprised, "You knew it was possible?" he asked.

She smirked, "One of the first things I looked up a when I didn't change," she admitted. "I know it can happen, just the chances are so low as to be nothing." She pulled down hard on his antler and kissed him before letting go, "I really think the universe wanted us, maybe needed us, to be together. If I change male, maybe you'll be the woman next time."

"What does all this mean for now?"

"I'm going to be Tea' Anders when I'm home, and Tim to everyone else. At least until things go upside down and we can't hide it anymore. We just need to be careful, and don't invite anyone over without telling me. Eventually, I'm going to need to tell my family. That should be an interesting conversation." She kissed him again, "And maybe we can talk about other things down the road."

Dusty huffed again, clearing his nostrils. "Tim… Tea'," he corrected, "this is a lousy time of the year for me to think clearly. The more I think of you as a woman, the closer we get, the more I'm afraid I'll do something we both regret."

She smiled and lightly scratched one of his antlers with a claw, "Dusty, believe me, you won't be able to try something I'm not ready for. You may be stronger, but I've got more pointy bits."

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Tea' primped herself in the mirror for a few minutes. She'd bought a lot more stuff than she'd intended, but Rupert had been a big help. He'd been working in women's clothes for so long that it was second nature to him, even with her black fur and tail.

He'd already had a great deal set aside before she'd even gotten to the store with Sheila.
"I had you sized up the first time we met," he said, "Obviously I don't know your style, but I doubt you do, either."

The three of them had spent hours in the darkened store, until well after midnight. For the most part, Rupert had been right on cue. He'd selected clothes for her that were nice, but not overly feminine. "You're not going to want to be in low cut dressed everyday," he had said. "Start slow. You'll have to find what you think looks good on your body, and what's comfortable with that fur." They had more or less stuck with casual stuff that she could wear around the apartment.

Night clothes were a bit different. The store was certainly no Victoria's Secret, but there was a selection of things that Tea' had a difficult time picturing herself wearing. They'd started with a very feminine white robe made of a thin, silky material. She'd picked up a few shapeless night shirts just to keep her covered.

At Sheilas insistence, she'd also tried on something a bit more risqué. "Eventually, you know, you're going to want to show this to Dusty." Tea' had felt her ears burn, but she had to admit that she was right.

They did choose a couple of light summer dresses that she was surprised to like. Standing in front of the mirror, she'd been shocked at how she looked in a yellow sundress. Tea' had felt only a singe pang of embarrassment before it passed.

Tea' was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, primping that yellow dress. She looked fabulous in it and she knew it. She heard Dusty come out of his room and stop. He leaned against the wall, his head cocked at an odd angle because of the antlers, and smiled, "You look gorgeous," he said with a smile. "You can't wear that tonight, you know."

Tea' smiled and sighed, "I know, we have time so I thought I'd try it out, dream a little." She sauntered out of the bathroom and put her arms around him, "I wanted to give you a sneak preview of the years to come."

He snorted, then kissed her. "You change, and I'll keep working on my time machine."

Tea' went back into her room and shut the door. The three of them were going to a party given by a group that Trinidad was a part of, some service club that Tea' couldn't even name. It was a pretty open affair, they were all allowed to invite a few people. Tea' hadn't really wanted to go, but it was hard to say no to the sea lion. The hardest part was going to be ignoring that he and Dusty were together.

She slipped into her regular clothes and fixed her fur. She really wasn't all that interested in going tonight, but at least she could try and have a good time.

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The party was already in full swing when they got there. It was at a house a few miles from the university, and when they arrived it was already crowded. The music was pounding pretty loud, to the point where neither Dusty or Tea' could hear themselves thing.

Dusty waited a moment before getting out. His instincts were already on edge and he could feel the fur rising on his neck. This place was not exactly his idea of a good time, not anymore. He got out of the car and sighed, "This is going to be a long night, isn't it?"

He started to put his arm around Tea', but she deftly stepped back and glared at him, "Remember?" she hissed. Dusty sighed again. He'd rather have been back at the apartment, watching a movie with her laying against him.

Trinidad grabbed the moose by the arm, "Come on, big boy, lets have some fun!" he said with way too much joy. "Just watch that rack of yours on their lighting!"

They got into the place and immediately the three of them got separated. He'd tried to stay close to Tea', but the lights were dim and his eyes were a bit weak in the dark. He made his way over to the only well lit area, where someone had a keg tapped. He was still underage, he wouldn't be 21 for another year, but he hoped the alcohol would take the edge off the noise. He downed one, and another. By the time he'd been there an hour, never having moved from that spot, he couldn't have said how many he'd drunk.

He scanned the crowd looking for his girl as he drank but had a hard time finding her. Trinidad stood out, but his barking laugh was so over the top that it was easy to track him. Tea' blended in.

He finally spotted her near the far corner talking to a guy. They were both smiling and laughing. He struggled to pick up their voices over the sound of the music, but all that did was succeed in making him feel disoriented. It wasn't long after that he felt a migraine starting to build under his antlers.

Bleary eyed, he started to imagine what the two were saying. He was trying to take her away from him. This man, this rival, wanted her. Wanted her as much as Dusty did. He felt an unfamiliar rage start to build up. His breathing became faster, deeper. Slowly, his vision began to tunnel, and all he could see was the man that was trying to take his mate.

Dusty dropped his cup and started across the crowded room with rage in his eyes.

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Hours later, Dusty was still sitting on the emergency room bed. The doctor had managed to stop his bleeding, but he'd needed a few stitches on his arm and shoulder.

He heard the familiar sound of claws on tile coming down the hall slowly, deliberately. Finally, Tea' walked into the room and regarded him silently for a few seconds before getting a chair and sitting down near him. "What was that about?" she asked. Tea' glanced around and noted the doctor had stepped out. "If I hadn't stopped you, you might have killed him."

"I know," he said quietly.

She was silent for a few more moments, and he wouldn’t meet her gaze. "You do realize he didn't even know? He thought I was Tim. We were talking about football."

Dusty slowly nodded his lowered head, but said nothing.

Tea' sighed, "Dusty, I love you, but you scared me tonight. For just a moment, you were more moose than man. I'm surprised you didn't try and take him down with your antlers." She reached over and held his hand, "I was afraid I was going to have to go feral to take you down."

"What's going to happen?" he asked still staring at the floor.

"Nothing, I imagine. Everyone at the party thought you were drunk." She sighed, "Good thing most of them were, too. No one seems have realized that your cuts had nothing to do with that glass coffee table I pushed you into." She paused a moment, "By the way, you're paying for the table."

"I mean with us?" he asked, finally looking at her out of the corner of his eye. "Do you still love me?"

She was shocked at the question, "I still love you, you big stupid lug. Whatever happens, I'll be there for you."

He closed his eyes and let his head hand low. He'd screwed up tonight, he knew that even through the haze of beer and hormones. He knew Tea' would stay by his side, at least for now. It was clear that he'd fallen pretty far in her eyes in just a few moments.

He turned out to be very lucky, given the circumstances.

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It was a while before things got back to semi-normal around the apartment.

Tea' continued to dress as a woman when she got home, but stayed more to herself than before. She and Dusty could both feel it. He'd stepped way over a line at the party, getting so possessive of her that she wasn't comfortable.

She was barely ready to be a woman, a girlfriend. She wasn't ready to be his property even for a short time.

They parted company over Thanksgiving break having not resolved this between them. Tea' was reluctant to let go of him, but even though they left to visit their families on good terms, he could tell that he didn't have much time to make things right.

Dusty had arrived back in Lake Tahoe for the break still in turmoil. He'd run things over in his head a million times, but the simple fact was that his hormones were raging this time of year.

It hadn't hurt, of course, that he'd been drunk at the time.

He pulled up to the house and sighed. It was going to be the second holiday that he couldn't be completely himself. The antlers made even sitting at a crowded holiday table a challenge. At least this year he heard that the gathering would be smaller than years past, just his parents, his brother and sister.

He walked in the door and set down his suitcase, "I'm home!" he yelled.

He could smell his mothers cooking from outside, and she emerged from the kitchen with a big smile on her face, "Dusty!" she said straight into his neck, "Welcome home!"

He hugged her, "Anyone else here?"

"Your brother is, but he went out with friends. Ellen is supposed to be in tonight."

Dusty nodded and after some more small talk took his bag up to his room. The bed was just a twin, way too small for his new body, but he wasn't about to tell his parents that. The previous year he'd been able to give up the bed to a relative and sleep on the floor. This year he'd just have to hide his size.

He unpacked and sat on the bed. All the way up to Tahoe, he'd debated telling Art. His older brother had always been a good sounding board for him, but this situation was beyond him. How could he explain that some of his problem came from being part animal?

He heard Art come in through the front door, then run up the stairs. "I thought you'd be here by now," he said coming though the door.

Dusty was unsurprised to see that he was still fully human. He'd hoped that his brother might have changed over the summer. "Yeah, got tired of eating my own cooking."

"I thought you had a girlfriend," he asked with a big smile.

Dusty was a bit taken aback. He'd taken care not to mention Tea' to anyone in the family. "How'd you know?"

His smirk got bigger, "I didn't, but I figured you'd find someone in college."

Dusty put his head in his hands, "Lord, don't tell anyone, please?"

Art sat down and looked concerned, "What's wrong? This is a good thing, isn't it?"

"It's complicated," he said quickly. "Very complicated."

Art was unconvinced. "It's only complicated if she's ugly, pregnant or a guy."

Dusty looked at him with narrowed eyes, "Thanks for the lesson in women," he said warily.

His brother hadn't expected the reaction, "Wait, she's not pregnant, is she? Or a guy?"

"Stop it, Art. I can't explain what's going on. There are things…" his voice trailed off.

"What things?" Art asked a bit louder.

Dusty felt a familiar rage building up. "Can you just drop it?" he said with his teeth clenched. "I'm not ready to talk about it."

Art didn't respond, but playfully swung one of the pillows at his brother. Dusty hadn't expected it and didn't have time to duck before it hit him in the antler and slipped out of his brothers hand. "Jesus!" he screamed and leapt up from the bed.

Dusty grabbed the pillow and threw it aside, but his brother was already backed against the far wall. "What the hell?" he screamed again. "Who are you? What are you?"

Art was still looking at his neck, so he the field hadn't totally collapsed, but he'd clearly seen something. "What? I'm your brother," he said trying to play a little dumb.

"The hell you are," he spat, "I saw… I saw some kind of animal for a second!"

"Art, I'm still Dusty," he said quietly. He let out a long breath, "But I've been hiding this for a year and a half."

It took a good two hours to convince his brother that not only was he still the same Dusty, but that he was also part animal, and a moose at that. Dusty in the end decided to ram his head into the drywall, leaving a deep antler mark on the wall. His brother had blinked a few times when he saw it, and even more at the dust that outlined his brothers antlers.

Even once it was cleaned off, he seemed to have a headache. "I can sort of see you now," he said now looking into his brothers eyes. "It's like a ghost of hovering over you." He finally sat down heavily, "So I'm going to be a moose someday?"

Dusty shrugged, "Maybe, but my sense of it is that it's random. So far, all I can say for sure is that you'll be a mammal. Like I said, there's a small chance you won't even stay male."

Art leaned back on the bed and closed his eyes, then opened them again and looked, "I still see the ghost," he admitted.

"We might have lowered the field for you a bit, you might see others now." He sighed, "Hold on, let me show you something." He reached over and pulled his wallet out and flipped to a picture of himself, Tea' and Trinidad at the beach. "What do you see here?"

"It's you and your roommates," he said, then blinked. "Crap, my head hurts. Wait, one of them is a seal, and the others a panther?"

"Close, sea lion and a black jaguar."

He blinked again then squinted at the tiny photo. Only belatedly did Dusty remember Tea' was topless in it, "Wait, this isn't right, this jaguar looks like…" He looked at his brother and rolled his eyes, "So, she's gorgeous, not pregnant, but she's a guy?"

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Tea' sat quietly and looked out the window of the train, her head leaned against the glass. Her thoughts were still a swirl, and now that she could spend a few days away from Dusty she could take some time and collect them.

"Miss, is this seat taken?"

Startled, she looked up and spotted a young female skunk. "Uh, no. I'm T.A.," she said pointedly.

The skunk looked startled slightly as she sat down, "Sorry," she said under her breath, "I didn't…"

Tea' waved her off, "Don’t worry about it." She sighed. She'd hoped that this trip would be quiet and give her chance to think. "Sorry, I've got a lot on my mind. I won't be much of a seatmate."

The skunk smiled and shrugged, "Don't worry about it. I just feel more comfortable traveling with another one." She pulled out a laptop, "I'm Kate, by the way. I'm heading down to San Diego from Tacoma to visit my boyfriend. He's in the Navy. I just saw you on the platform and sought you out."

"I guess it makes it easier if I step on your tail." The skunk looked a little wide eyed at that, which told Tea' that perhaps she was touching on something that had happened. "Is your boyfriend Changed?" she asked, changing the subject.

She shook her head, "No, and he doesn't know, either." She fingered her very bushy tail, "I'm honestly not sure how he can't see this." She smiled, "If he doesn't figure it out soon, I'm going to spray him right in the face. That should lower the veil for him."

Despite her mood, Tea' giggled at that, "It would do something, that's for sure." She sighed, "Sometimes I wish I could hide all this from my boyfriend," she said before she realized it.

Kate looked a bit surprised. "But you said…"

She nodded, wishing that she'd kept her muzzle shut. "Yeah, it's complicated. We met on the day we both changed in 2005. He never knew me before. I mean, he knows what I was, just never knew me then." She shrugged, "It's complex."

"What is he?"

"Moose."

She shuddered a little, "That's gotta be tough this time of year," she said quietly.

Tea' cocked her head, "What do you mean?"

"I'm a vet at the Point Defiance Zoo," she said by way of explanation. "We don't have any American moose there, but we've got similar animals. They can get aggressive when they want to mate." She shrugged, "We both know we all picked up a few instincts. It's hard enough when you're like me, a good solid startle and I can spray. But your…" she trailed off and lowered her voice, "boyfriend? He has to deal with a hormone dump for a couple months of the year. That can't be easy to deal with. He must be close to losing his mind."

Tea' leaned against the window and looked at the skunk. "I know, it's already happened a couple times."

Kate looked a little concerned, "He's got to outweigh you by a bit, has he…?"

Tea' laughed it off, "Nothing I can't handle," she said letting her finger tip claws show.

The train lurched out of the station, and Tea' and Kate spent much of the next few hours talking. The pair of them became fast friends on the train. She'd found in the last year that there was a sort of shared intimacy with other Changed. Since there were so few and far between, and they almost all had unique shared experiences, it was easy to find common ground in a hurry.

Tea' almost didn't realize she was talking about her relationship with Dusty until she was deep into it. She quickly told this near total stranger more than she'd told Sheila or Ela, more than she'd done with anyone. There was a certain freedom in finding a willing ear that wasn't part of the same social group. "He scared me that night," she'd said after describing the incident at the party just a couple weeks before. "I love the guy, I really do, but how bad is this going to get?"

"Until the antlers drop? Probably no worse than that, but you said he was drunk at the time, right? Does he do that a lot?"

"No," she admitted, "That was the first time he'd done that. He's promised it would be the last."

Kate chuckled, "Yeah, right. Men lie about that stuff, so wait until he proves it."

Tea' raised an eyebrow, "Remember who you're talking with," she reminded.

She waved a hand, "Bah, doesn't matter." She looked around, aware her voice was getting a little high. The noise of the train was drowning out their conversation. "Did you ever have a girl like you to try and keep?"

"So, because I'm beautiful, guys will lie to me?"

"I don't know, are you naïve enough to think that every man you'll ever meet will be truthful with you?"

She sighed, defeated. "I don't think Dusty is like that. We were friends before we were an item."

"From what you've said, he was possessive of you from the first few months, even if it was at a low level. Maybe it helped that you two weren't similar species, he didn't go too far. You think that's gotten better?"

"No," she admitted. She let the conversation die for a few moments before looking back at the passing scenery. She thought about him driving to Lake Tahoe alone, and wished she'd stayed by his side. "But I don't know if I care."

Kate sighed and sat back. "You need to decide if you do. He is now what he is, and even in this nuts universe he's likely to stay that way for good. If you can't deal with that, then now is the time to get out, before you two settle down together."

"What about you and your Navy boy?" she asked, turning the tables. "He doesn't even know what's going on. You going to settle down before you know what he'll become? Without telling him?"

"I don't know," she said honestly. "I'm going to wait at least until August to decide. If he doesn't change, then maybe it'll be time to tell him." She folded her arms and looked defiantly at Tea', "That doesn't change what we're talking about, though. You need to decide what your next step is. To be fair to both of you, you should decide before too long."

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There were more than a few moments over the Thanksgiving holiday that Dusty wished he was on a train, going anywhere.

Art had absorbed the idea that his brother was now half moose far better than he'd expected, to the point where he couldn't stop staring at or needling him. Once his sister Ellen arrived that evening, they gathered in the living room for a family photo, he made a point to position his brother under the massive moose head that hung over the fireplace. "Perfect," he said with a quiet smile earning a glare from Dusty and slightly bewildered looks from the family.

On Thanksgiving, they gathered to watch a football game while his mother and sister prepared dinner. For a while, things were normal until a crowd shot caught a horse morph in the stands. Art winced, his headache returning, but looked significantly at his brother. Dusty just nodded slightly. When they were alone, he whispered, "Am I seeing as many as I think, or am I missing some?"

Dusty shrugged, "I haven't seen all that many. A few in the crowd, but none of the players or coaches." He pointed at the screen as a shot showed a massive buffalo sitting in a wheelchair in a handicapped spot. "Smart move, if he's not really hurt. The seats are probably too small for that form."

"I wonder how I'd look as a buffalo?" his brother asked a little wistfully.

"Buffalo?" came his fathers voice from behind them, "You thinking of taking up a new team? What's wrong with the Patriots?"

The brothers exchanged looks, then changed the subject in a hurry.

Thanksgiving dinner was mostly normal, but Dusty had to force himself to take as much turkey as he usually would. It wasn't that he couldn't eat it, but meat hadn't really interested him since he'd changed. He found himself thankful that no one noticed that he'd took seconds and thirds of the stuffing and cranberry sauce without the extra meat.

A bigger problem was his brother, who kept trying to speak to his real eyes instead of his ghost human ones. "What's on the wall?" his mother had finally asked. Dusty kept nodding his chin down to remind him.

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"What are you talking about? You've got a job and a girl in Fresno."

Art shook his head, "I'm an auto mechanic, it's not like I can't find a job in San Luis Obispo."

"What about your girlfriend?" he's asked, only realizing now that they hadn't spoken of her since Art had arrived.

"Yeah, that was my big news for you, we broke up. Left my stuff out on the lawn. Your news was a bit bigger, though. There isn't much in Fresno for me."

"Why?" he asked, "What purpose would you coming out and staying with me serve?"

He closed his eyes, "Dusty, the world is changing, has been for years according to you. I think I'd like to find out as much as I can before things change for me."

"There are changed groups all over, and they usually let Knowns in. The bigger the network the better. I can hook you up with one in Fresno, I'm sure."

He got a sly smile on his face, "Ok, I'm also curious about your new girl. I'd like to meet him…"

"Her," Dusty corrected gruffly.

"Her, of course." He got a little more serious, "Besides, I think that you're getting into some dangerous territory with her. What about if all this comes to an end next year? From what you said, she could turn back into Tim Anders."

Dusty shrugged, "We'll deal with that later, if that happens."

"And in the meantime?" he asked quietly.

Dusty glared now, "It's not really any of your business, Art. Tea' is as much a young woman as anyone, right down to her DNA. This isn't as strange as it sounds."

"Yeah, my half-moose brother is dating a woman who was a guy a year and a half ago, and is, by the way, half jaguar. She's a knock out, but almost everyone sees her as a twenty year old guy named Tim. Oh, and they both live with a hyperactive sea lion."

In spite of his mood, Dusty smiled, "See? What's so odd about all that?"

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Tea' returned on the train on Sunday morning after a surprisingly uneventful vacation. No one noticed a thing during her stay, and none of her immediate family had changed. She thought, several times, about trying to tell her family what was happening. She tried telling them that they had a daughter now, but the time wasn't right.

Her parents were open minded, but it would be a lot to absorb. She really hoped that one of them would change before she had to.

Her trip back had been quiet. She'd thought about calling Dusty the entire time, but she didn't want to until she saw him in person. Her conversation with Kate was still ringing in her ears even days later. She understood where the skunk was coming from, possessive men were a problem. If Dusty turned out to be more than just a little instinctive, then she could have real issues with him later.

She spotted him waiting in the parking lot of the train station before the train even stopped. He was sitting in his car, top down despite the cool weather, and waiting patiently. Somehow, he'd managed to find a pair of sunglasses that fit his odd shaped head. She could tell that he was eagerly scanning the train for her return.

She got off lugging her bag, and despite his vigilance managed to sneak up on him. "How was your vacation?"

He jumped in his seat, but looked back and smiled, "Better, now that you're back." He clearly wanted to make some display, but they were both mindful of their surroundings.

She tossed her luggage in the car and he took off for the apartment. "How was your trip home?"

"Uneventful," she admitted, "Though I met a nice Changed on the train. She's a zookeeper or vet or something up in Washington state, a skunk," she added as an afterthought.

"That's good," he said absently. "I should warn you, I brought someone home, my brother."

"Art?" she asked a little surprised and even disappointed. "Where is he staying? How long?"

He sighed, "In our place, hopefully not long. He wants to move to SLO."

"Really?" she said, surprised. She never met Art, but she'd talked on the phone. He was always a nice guy if a bit of a slacker. "What brought that on?"

Dusty stared out the windshield. "He knows."

Tea' absorbed that. "He… crap. How much?"

He didn't meet her gaze, "Everything. He can see through the field, too. At least a little. Gives him a headache, though."

"Damn, how did that happen?"

Dusty related the tale, "It was an accident," he said finally. "But I had to tell him or I think he was going to shoot me."

"Ela is going to kill you, you know."

Dusty nodded, "I know. I'm bigger, I can take her."

They pulled into the car port and climbed out. Dusty went in first, and Tea' could hear Trinidads' barking laugh from the porch. "Break it up, you two!" he said with a smile.

Tea' slinked in behind, unsure what to expect. She spotted Art off to the side, and their eyes locked. Art actually winced slightly and started to rub his head. "You ok?" she asked, concerned.

He nodded, "Yeah, I'm fine. It's just that I get a headache whenever I see one of you people." He stuck out a hand, "Art."

"Tea'," she said simply.

He sighed, "I need to get this out of the way, but what do I call you?"

She glared at Dusty, who shrugged. "Once he could see through the field, this was going to come up."

"Call me Tim outside of these walls, and in them if there's anyone here that isn't changed. Here? I'm Tea'. And don't invite anyone without telling me," she said with a growl.

Art actually backed up a step and Dusty narrowed his eyes. It was Trinidad that stepped in to explain, "Tea' likes to be comfortable in the house, so she dresses more, well, gender appropriate. Nothing too revealing," he stammered, then looked at Tea' and sighed, "Unfortunately. But she would rather not explain to someone why he is wearing womens' clothes.

Tea' felt bad about the growl and tried to put on a happy face. "I'm sorry, I'm a little grouchy. It's been a long train ride and…"

"That time of the month?" asked Art. He looked at the expressions of the three furs, and very quietly muttered, "Crap."

Tea' felt another growl escape her lips as her eyes narrowed. Art actually blanched at the sight. Trinidad jumped into it again, grabbing Art by the shoulder and starting to pull him to the door, "If you don't mind, I think I'll drive Art around town, show him around, maybe catch a movie." He looked at Tea' and quickened his pace to the door, "Dusty can I borrow your…" He stopped as the car keys sailed though the air and landed in his flipper, "Right, thanks. We'll be back…" He looked again at Tea', "Sometime after I pound some sense into him." Art started to say something, but Trinidad just grabbed him harder and pulled him out the door.

Tea' and Dusty just stared at the door after they left. Finally Dusty muttered, "That could have gone better."

Tea' glared at him, "Why couldn't you warn me before I left L.A. that your brother was coming up?"

"I'm sorry," he said, his own voice a bit raised, "but you didn't have to take it out on him!"

Tea' didn't say anything, but instead grabbed her bag and stormed into her room to unpack.

A few minutes later, she heard a slight tap on the door. "Can I come in?" asked Dusty.

Tea' sighed. She was still mad, but at least this was over a boneheaded guy thing and not a boneheaded moose thing. "Fine, come in."

He came in and wrapped his arms around her, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I was an ass at the party, I'm sorry about not warning you that my brother was coming." He looked down at her with tears in his eyes, "I know this has been a hard couple of months, years really. But I don't want to lose you."

She hugged him back, feeling warm and safe in his arms. "I'm sorry I treated your brother like dirt," she said. "But he better be more careful. I've got instincts, too."

They kissed, and Tea' felt a lot of her doubts of the last few weeks slip away.

After a short time, they sat down, "Where is he sleeping, anyway?"

Dusty shrugged, "I figured he could take the couch. I'm still hoping that he'll only be here a few days."

Tea' struggled with herself for a few minutes, then decided to just let it out. "Why don't you be a good little brother and let him take your bed."

Dusty smiled, "Right, I can barely sit on the couch much less sleep on it, and I've spent the holiday sleeping on the floor because the mattress in my old room is too small."

She casually unbuttoned the top of her mens shirt, revealing a white lace bra underneath, "Well, I can think of someplace you can sleep for a few days that's a bit more comfortable."

He got quiet as his brain processed that, "Are you ready for that?" he asked.

She answered him with another kiss.

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A couple weeks passed as they got used to their new living arrangements. Art had returned that evening extremely apologetic. "I guess I kept thinking with was almost like a game, that it wasn't real. I'll be more careful," he promised.

Tea' had accepted the apology, and even promised not to kill him in the middle of the night.

For their part, Trinidad and Art became good friends. They had the same fun loving attitude and live for the moment philosophy of life. They started roaming bars on the weekends together, trolling for dates with no success. Trinidad even took him on a swim at the beach, but Art had come back still looking blue, "That water was freezing!" he'd said. "I'm not going back out with him unless I can find an arctic wetsuit!"

After two weeks sharing the same room, Dusty went to his brother who was still looking over room rental ads in the paper. "I can't find anything now," he said, "But a bunch of stuff is opening up at New Years."

Dusty shook his head and smiled, "We've been talking about it, and you can keep my room as long as I can leave some stuff in there. We're making this more permanent."

Art looked at his brother, a grin slowly covering his face, "You two…?" he half-asked.

Dusty put a hooved hand to his mouth and shushed, "She'd kill me if I said much more."

While he spoke, Tea' snuck out of their room and right up behind him. She put her fingers to her lips to keep Art quiet, then jumped on Dusty's back, causing the big moose to practically leap into the air. "Tell him what, sweetie?" she asked in mock anger, "that we're sleeping together? I think he knows that already. That the great hunter bagged a jaguar? Think he's suspected that since that first night," she said as she hung off his antlers.

Art started to laugh, but his head was clearly pounding. Dusty calmed down enough to look at his brother, "What's so funny?"

He held his head, but laughed, "You two have no idea how bizarre you two look right now, either as you are or especially as everyone else would see you."

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Tea' stepped around the crowd at the mall, looking for Sheila's kiosk. She'd already picked up a normal Christmas gift for her moose, but she had thoughts about something else that was a little bit for her and a little bit for him.

She found Sheila busy with a couple of customers and kept herself busy looking over some silver items in the case. She spotted a few things she'd hint to Dusty about, but for now she only had one thing on her mind. Sheila finally managed to break away and stepped over, "How's it going, Tim?" she asked.

Tea' smiled, "Pretty good. Just looking for something for my girl."

They played the game mostly for the benefit of the crowds, though the din in the mall was so loud they could probably have yelled their conversation and not been noticed. "Anything in mind?"

"Well, do you still do custom stuff?"

Sheila rolled her eyes and twitched her tail in genuine frustration. "Custom? Now? You're kidding, right? You couldn't tell me a few months ago?" She fumed. "What do you want?"

She handed over a folded paper. She opened it slyly and her eyes goggled before she closed it. "It's an interesting idea. Uh, what on Earth is she going to be wearing this with?"

Tea' smiled slyly, "Basic black."

Sheila narrowed her eyes then tilted her head as realization hit. "Crap, you're sleeping with him?" she said more loudly than she'd intended.

Tea' glanced around, and a few eyes looked their way but no one seemed too concerned. "Sheila…" she growled.

"Oh, whatever, Tim. This is a bad idea and you should be smart enough to know it."

Tea' actually felt a bit hot under her fur. She hadn't expected this kind of reaction from the fox. "What…?"

Sheila cut her off, "Not here, not now." She took the paper and looked at it again. "I'll do it, but can you meet me someplace after I'm done here? I can't leave for a couple hours."

They agreed to meet at a coffee shop across the street from the mall after it closed. Tea' got their early and fumed. She hadn't expected Sheila, of all people, to care one way or the other.

The red fox showed up within a couple minutes of the mall closing. "Sorry, if you'd sprung this on me any other time of year, I'd have left the kiosk and talked to you," she said as she joined Tea' at her booth far to the back of the store. The waitress came over and she ordered a light dinner, then turned her attention back to the jaguar. "Are you nuts?" she asked bluntly.

"Why is this such a problem for you?" she asked. "We've talked about this stuff before. You've never been shy about your stories of conquest."

She sighed, "Yeah, I know. " She sighed and leaned forward. "Tim… Tea'. I grew up this way. I knew the consequences from day one of a relationship. I've gambled a few times."

"Dusty isn't a gamble," she said warily.

Sheila shook her head, "No, he's not. I've seen the way that he looks at you. You'll have to beat him off with a stick. A really big stick." She paused as the waitress arrived with her sandwich and soda. "Like it or not, you don't really know the consequences of your actions."

"I'm not stupid, Sheila. I know what can happen."

"In the abstract, from reading a book or…" she lowered her voice a bit more, "From two years living as a woman. You haven't spent a lifetime wondering what might happen."

Tea' didn't feel any better from talking, and started getting defensive, "Look, this is what I am now. I know what I'm doing." She fumed and sat in silence for a few minutes. "Can you make the jewelry or can't you?"

Sheila rolled her eyes, defeated. She pulled out the sheet again, "Even in costume, that won't be cheap, especially if you want it fast. You want it by Christmas?"

"New Years," she said a bit brighter.

Sheila shook her head, "I'll make it because that's what keeps me in fox kibble. I'm begging you to break things off for now, go slower."

"We're fine," she said. "Just let me know when you're done." She got up, left a few dollars for her coffee, and left.

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Dusty and Tea' decided not to risk a New Years party this year, instead they were going to count down the new year in their apartment. Trinidad took Art along with him to a party, leaving the pair of them alone for the night.

They made the most of it, making as good a romantic dinner as two inexperienced cooks could manage. They watched a movie, then counted down the ball drop in Times Square. Once they had their own private moment, Tea' whispered in Dustys' ear, "Give me five minutes, then meet me in our room." The moose could barely stand waiting before he opened the door, almost afraid of what he was going to see.

Tea' was laid out on the bed, dressed only in a wild animal collar you might buy at Tiffanys, the fake diamonds glistening in the light. "Time to ring in the New Year," she said with a deep purr.

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By the middle of January, Dusty's antlers snapped off at the base, leaving him feeling down. "I can't explain it very well," he said, "I don't feel like the same person."

Art tried to make him feel better by attempting scrimshaw on his shed rack, but Dusty had looked aghast at the idea. "It's a little like making art out of toenail clippings, really," he'd said. That had pretty much ended that.

In a morning a week into February, Tea' got up like normal and got ready for class. She had a couple that day and planned on being on campus for just a few hours before meeting Sheila at her kiosk. She adjusted her sports bra underneath her sweatshirt to make sure that no one could see it, and headed out.

She and Dusty passed Art in the living room as he was trying to drink his first cup of coffee of the day. "See you later," he said, then blinked. "Whoa, something isn't right."

Dusty stopped, "What's wrong?"

Art looked ill, "I think it's this damned field of yours. I keep getting migraines or hallucinations or something. I'd be willing to turn into a rat this year if it meant ending this."

"Careful what you wish for," said Tea' with a grin.

He looked oddly at her, "Yeah. Back at ya."

Dusty dropped her off on campus before heading to the parking lot. She started out by heading to the office of her World History professor, where he had said their last quiz would be waiting to be picked up. She wasn't far, but even in a short distance she walked she noticed a few stares from guys. It was uncomfortable enough that she stepped behind a sign and double checked that her bra wasn't showing.

Confident that she was just imagining things, she headed up to her professors office. She started flipping though the exams hung by his door, finally finding hers. She looked at the name and did a double-take. "Tea' Anders?" she said reading the name written in her own handwriting. "I'm usually more careful than that."

She opened her book bag and glanced at the other papers she had. "The hell?" she muttered. All of the homework she had filed in her folders had the name Tea' on them. She dug deep enough to find her machine-printed schedule that the college had mailed her when she had registered for classes. He heart skipped a beat. "Tea'," she said quietly.

She shoved the stuff back into her back and raced across the campus toward the business building. Her paws slipped a couple times on the tile floor, but she found Ela in her office. "Ela?" she asked plaintively. "Something's wrong!"

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Half an hour later, the alpaca was muttering a string of curses in Portugese while Tea' nervously sat by. She leaned back from the computer, "I'm trying not to dig too deeply, I don’t' want the administration to wonder why I'm rooting around, but according to all the records I can find, Tea' Anders started here in the fall of 2005. There's no sign of a Tim Anders."

She felt her jaw drop, "How can that be?"

Ela looked grim, "I'm not sure, I haven't encountered this before." She looked thoughtful, "Either this is an amazingly colossal, and specific, screw up, or…" She reached across the desk, "Let me see your wallet."

Dazed, she reached into her pocket and pulled it out, handing it over. The professor flipped it open, then sighed. She muttered something else that Tea' couldn't understand as she laid out her cards. "Drivers license, Tea', with a human female picture. School ID? Tea', with a jaguar female. Your debit card? Tea'."

Tea' picked up her drivers license. The woman that stared back was a complete unknown to her. Dark, short hair, she looked bout 16, which was how old she was when she'd gotten it. She had a strange, smoky beauty that was only slightly mellowed by her young age. "Oh my God," she said quietly. "What the hell happened? Is this how people see me now?"

Ela looked thoughtful. "How about a little experiment?" she asked as she picked up her phone. "Chad? This is Professor Dean. Can you come down to my office for a minute? No, nothing's wrong, I just need a young mans opinion on something."

"What are you doing?" asked Tea' nervously.

She hushed her as the young man walked up to the doorway. "Yes, professor?"

"Chad, what would you say if I told you this person claimed they couldn't find a date?" she asked, carefully avoiding pronouns.

He glanced at Tea', then tried to pretend he wasn't sizing her up. "Uh, I'd ask what she was doing this Friday night."

Ela and Tea' exchanged a significant look, "Thanks Chad."

He looked confused, "Are you doing something Friday?"

Tea' looked at him, still feeling numb, "Uh, yeah, sorry." He looked confused and dejected, but left. "Is something re-writing my life? I still remember being Tim. I know I didn't look like that when I got my license photo taken!"

Ela looked thoughtful. "Maybe this is what's going to happen to the transgendered," she mused. "I'll admit I haven't been looking into it. What have you heard?"

She shook her head, "I haven't. I've been so busy with class work I haven't been on the boards in weeks."

"I'll make a couple calls and find out," she said, "I know a couple of Changed doctors out in Wisconsin. They should know what's going on."

Tea' suddenly felt fearful, "Wait, no. Don't do that."

"What? Why not? We need to get to the bottom of this."

Tea' laid her face in her palms and felt like crying. "I don't want to be a guinea pig for the rest of the furred community. I want to figure out what is going on first. Can you keep this secret?"

Ela looked frustrated, but nodded, "I won't make any calls, for now. At least not until we have a better handle on what's going on. I'll do some searches on the forums. Nothing active, I'll just do some word searches and see if this has happened before." She sighed, "How about if I call Janice? I'm not sure if you've met her, she's a rabbit? Nurse at the hospital?"

Tea' nodded, "I remember her. Why do you want me to get a medical check so badly?"

"I don't know, but something must have changed for this to happen. If it happened today to all the transgendered we'll know about it pretty soon. The forums will be buzzing. If it's just you, maybe something strange is happening." She sighed, "In the meantime, go home and… well, you might have some explaining to do."

Tea' had to think for a second before it dawned on her, "Oh, my parents!"

She left the office in a hurry, but decided not to call her folks yet. The problem was that if whatever was causing this was now changing records and photos, they'd probably call her as soon as they saw the portraits in the house change.

Assuming their memories didn't change, too.

She actually hoped that wouldn’t' happen even if it would make life easier. She had left Tim behind some time ago, but he was still a big part of her. The thought that he might be whisked out of existence was hard to take.

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Any doubt about what had happened ended when she got home and confronted Art. He'd been coy in the morning, assuming that what he was seeing was part of the partial loss of the field around him, but he admitted that he'd seen the change in her human body that morning. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you," he said. "It's just… how would you have known I wasn't kidding?"

She sighed and paced around the room. "What the hell is going on?"

"Isn't this a good thing?" he asked. "You're always complaining about not being able to go out with my brother as a couple, now you can."

"I know, but why now? Why with no warning? I expected this during some Change day in the future. This year, next, ten years from now. Why today? Why in February?"

The phone rang and Art picked it up. "Hello? Uh, yeah, she's here." He handed the cordless phone over, "Janice? Said you'd be expecting her call."

She grabbed the phone, "This is… Tea'," she said hesitantly. She'd always introduced herself as Tim on the phone.

"Tea'? Ela called me and filled me in. You think your human avatar has shifted female?"

She nodded even though Janice wouldn't be able to see her, "Yes, along with my photos, ID, everything."

"You were transgendered in 2005?" she asked clinically.

"Yes."

"Your animal form is a jaguar?"

"Yes. You know that, we've met."

She could almost hear the nodding on the phone, "Sorry, force of habit." She paused, "Tea'," she asked more gently, "Any change in your medical condition lately?"

"No, none."

There was a bit of a pause, "Tea', I need to ask this, but could you be pregnant?"

She started to say no, but stopped herself and sat down. "I don't know," she admitted.

"It's possible?"

She lowered her head, "Yeah, it's possible."

There was a long pause again, "Tea', I'll come over later and get some vitals and I'll bring a test with me. There aren't any doctors around here that know about us. Anyone back home you know of?"

"No, I don't," she replied automatically. "You think that's the cause?"

There was another long pause, "You know as much as I do, frankly. You're young and healthy, uninjured. Why would your avatar change at all? It's definitely possible. But maybe it's something else. If the field is affected by gender specific issues, maybe you've got something less… life changing. Maybe it's a safety mechanism. Maybe if you'd flipped to male from female, it would be triggered by prostate cancer." There was another long pause, "Does your family know?"

Tea' laughed mirthlessly, "No, of course not. That would make this all the easier to explain. How do I tell them, in one fell swoop, that I'm female, half an animal, and maybe pregnant?" She heard Art drop a glass in the kitchen at the mention of the last word. Then she heard a beep on her phone and glanced at it, seeing her parents' phone number. "Janice, I've got to go, the new grandparents are on the line."

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Tea' paced nervously back and forth across the living room floor, a welling of emotions inside her.

"Will you stop doing that?" asked Janice after a while, "You're making the rest of us nervous."

Tea' stopped and stared a moment at the brown rabbit before finding a seat on the couch. "You're sure?"

Janice nodded, her ears falling to the sides. "About as much as I can be outside a hospital. Those tests are pretty accurate."

"They could be thrown a bit by her animal side," suggested Ela, who had arrived as soon as she could.

Janice shook her head, "I've been reading up on the forums, you're not the first after all. It doesn't seem to have much of an effect."

Tea's sighed and buried her head in her hands. "Good lord, how am I going to explain this to my parents? To Dusty?"

"What happened with them?" asked Janice. "You hung up on me pretty quick."

She sighed, "I babbled, mostly," she admitted. "My mother noticed that all my pictures in the house changed female, and she was naturally curious. I convinced her that I am… was Tim. They're driving up now."

"How did you convince her on the phone?"

Tea' looked a little ill, "My mother has a secret. When I was a kid, she accidentally ran over our dog, Oliver. He was an Irish setter my father just adored. She never had the heart to tell him, and I swore I wouldn't tell anyone. That at least got her to listen."

"What about your dad?" asked Janice.

"He'll need to see proof. I'm not sure how we're going to give it to him."

Dusty came through the door at that moment and looked surprised to find everyone. "Tea'? What's going on?"

Tears welled up in her eyes and she took Dusty into their room. "Somethings happened," she said simply at first before getting her nerve up. "Dusty, I’m pregnant."

He was stunned silent, but slowly a smile crossed his face. "That's great," he said happily. He leaned in and gave her a huge hug, "That's wonderful!"

She was confused, tears slowly soaking the fur under her eyes, "What? I thought you'd be upset! How are we going to explain all this…?"

"That's for later," he said with a smile and hugged her. "We'll work it all out." He kissed her again, "You'll make a good mother."

She sniffed and looked at the floor, "Mother? I'm barely a woman." She sighed, "There's more," she said as she handed him her wallet. He opened it and looked at the drivers license. "Woah, what the hell?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. It's everything. Someone or something is changing all my ID to match. My school records, even old pictures of me."

Dusty looked at her, confused, then his eyes got wide. "Oh, nuts. Your family?"

"My parents are on their way up here now, to get an explanation. My mother is already on the edge of being convinced, but I don't know what my father is thinking."

"Wait, if your pictures are changed…"

"People see me as a woman now," she finished nodding. "Maybe that's one bright spot, we can just be us in public."

He held her tighter, "I guess that'll make telling my family easier. They're going to wonder why I hid you for two years. Do we tell them?"

Tea' shrugged and managed a small smile, "Not for now. I can just be your secret girlfriend that you knocked up."

There was a knock at the front door and they heard Sheila come in. Tea' kissed Dusty again, "Can you go out and start thinking of a way to convince my parents that this is all real? I wanted to talk to Sheila for a minute."

Dusty nodded and walked out, with Sheila taking his place just moments later. The red fox just stood by the door silently while Tea' stared at the floor. "Go ahead; tell me I told you so."

"I wouldn't do that," she said as she stepped over and sat down. "It doesn't matter."

"This is what you warned me about, isn't it?" she asked, tears filling her eyes again.

Sheila took her hands and held them, "Just answer me this, and be honest with me: Do you want a baby?"

She sighed and thought. Once she had decided to live her life as she looked, the idea of kids nagged at her. "I did, I do," she said finally. "Maybe not this early. Not with the extra baggage."

The fox smiled and hugged her, "The baggage would have been there no matter what." She put her hands on each side of the jaguars face and forced her to look her in the eye. "Look, I'm going to be there for you. I've had a couple kids, I won't pretend this furry thing won't complicate matters, but I'll be there for you."

Tea' looked at her with tear stained eyes, "You've had kids?" she asked.

"Grown ones," she said. "They're out of the house, now."

She sniffled, "I… wait, they're out of the house? How old are you?"

Sheila smiled, "I'm older than you think. One of the nice thing about the fur, it hides the wrinkles." She nodded toward the living room, "We've got to figure out some way to tell your parents all of this without killing them."

{{separator|j}}

By the time the Anders arrived, the living room was filled with furs. Tea' and Dusty sat on the couch together, surrounded by Ela, Sheila, Trinidad and Janice. Art was there as the token human, even though a gathering even this size gave him a massive headache.

The knock at the door caused them all to jump, and Tea' stood up and took a deep breath, "Ok, this is it." She walked to the door, thinking that she hadn't been this nervous the day she woke up like this back in the dorms. She opened the door and forced a smile, "Hi mom, dad."

The couple looked shocked. "Tim?" asked his mother.

She nodded, "Come in, we'll try and explain what happened." They passed through the door and eyed the people sitting around, who to them all looked human. Tea' introduced them while Dusty pulled a couple of chairs over.

"Is this some kind of joke?" asked his father, looking a bit hot under the collar. "Where is my son? Give me a good reason I shouldn't just call the cops! How'd you people change all the photos in our house?"

"No one here did that," said Ela. "It's going to be a lot to explain."

"Try me," he said gruffly.

Tea' sighed. "You remember when you dropped me off at the dorms the first time?" she asked. "I was sick?" They nodded, remembering. "The next day, I woke up like this."

"That's bullshit," snapped his father. "We've seen you since then."

"There is more at work here than it appears," said Ela. "Tim Anders didn't cease to exist. For reasons that none of us understand, what happened to her was hidden from the unchanged. Nothing about what happened to her was visible,"

He picked up on what she said, "Unchanged? All of you…?" he asked.

"Not all of us," said Art.

"Everyone but him has gone though this," said Tea'. "He just has the ability to see though whatever is hiding us."

Mr. Anders leaned back, "You're telling me that you were a guy," he asked Ela, "and you were a woman?" he directed that to Dusty.

They all shook their heads. "No," said Tea'. "What she's saying is that there is something bigger going on here." She steeled herself, "I became female that day, but there's more that's going on. What else happened, what you can't see, is that I also became part animal."

To put it mildly, they didn’t seem to believe that. "What the hell are you talking about, animal?" said her father. "We don't see anything,"

"Trust me, Mr. Anders," said Art with a grimace, "It's there." He started pointing around the room, "Moose, fox, llama…

"Alpaca," snorted Ela with annoyance,

"Alpaca," he corrected, "rabbit, sea lion, and…" he paused dramatically as he pointed at Tea', "jaguar."

They looked around the room and looked more confused. "What are you talking about?" wailed Mrs. Anders. "This doesn't make any sense!"

Dusty took a step forward and motioned for Mr. Anders to do the same. "Poke me in the nose," he said.

Anders looked around the room, then slowly poked straight into his neck. Dusty took his hand and pulled it upward, "This is where my nose is," he said leaving Anders hand a good foot over his human appearing head.

Anders slowly spread out his fingers and felt, "What the hell?"

"That’s my snout," he said though the mans fingers.

The movement of his mouth caused Anders to jump back, "I felt that," he said quietly.

Janice went to Mrs. Anders side, "Feel my ears," she said with an expression that crossed between bemusement and irritation.

"Oh!" she exclaimed as her fingers gently went up and down her ear, "Oh, my you're not joking."

Sheila walked over to them and handed over her drivers license, "See the hair color?"

Mrs. Anders looked, "Black?" She looked intently at Sheila's hair, "But you're a red head."

"That could be a dye job," protested Mr. Anders.

His wife shook her head, "Not that good, not going from black to red." She looked over at her child, "Which doesn't explain why your hair got darker. Aren't jaguars light colored?" she asked in a strange, halting tone.

"Usually, I got hit with a rare trait on top of rare traits. Black fur and black spots."

"It really is very nice to look at," said Trinidad before a glare from Tea' cut him off.

It took most of the rest of the evening to convince them that what they were seeing was real. They even tried to lower the field for them, but had no luck. The two of them never even caught a glimpse of what their new daughter had become.

Once they got the details, Mr. Anders asked the big question, "Why is this happening, then?" He looked around, "If the transformations occur in August, and this field of yours blocks us from seeing, why did it make her female?"

Tea' sighed again and knelt down in front of her mother, She considered giving them a few weeks to get used to the idea of her being female, but decided that she might as well go for broke. "We're not completely sure, we haven't found any other incidents yet, but it seems that I'm… well…"

Her mothers eyes got narrow, then wide. "You're pregnant?" she asked suddenly. When Tea' nodded, she drew her in and hugged her. "That's… That's…" she stammered.

Tea' smiled, "It's okay, I'm still trying to absorb it myself."

Her father looked faint. It was a lot to take, that not only was his only son now his only daughter, but that she was pregnant to boot. "I have to ask," he said, trying to find something to say, "don't get mad, but who's the father?"

It was Dustys' turn to look sick, "That would be me, sir," he said standing up.

Mr. Anders stood up and sighed, "I suppose that I should punch you in the nose for getting her pregnant…"

"Dad!" yelled Tea'.

He waved her off with a tired smile, "Don't worry, I can't even remember where his nose is." He hesitated a moment then held out his hand to Dusty, "I guess… welcome to the family."

{{series bar
|series=Series name
|previous=[[User:Eirik/Stages|Stages]]
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User:Eirik/Reverberations

2008-03-20T16:25:21Z

Eirik: Big addition

User:Eirik/Reverberations

2008-03-13T20:22:20Z

Eirik: Added another section

User talk:Eirik/Bare Hands

2008-03-10T17:25:09Z

Eirik:

You know, I was thinking of TV shows in a Changing world, and realized something.

A Community Doctor effectively mauls ('with a rake') a home intruder and gets away with it without any punishment at all. That is prime CSI and Law and Order story fodder.

Maybe in passing, you could mention the Hollywood types contacting the good doctor for more details of the case for a future story ("All people and places are made up and not based on real events") ideas for the series. The resultant story would be heavily fictionalized, and the Doctor probably would not get away with it in the end but still, fun possibilities. :)

--[[User:Jetfire|Jetfire]] 21:53, 9 March 2008 (EDT)

It might work, but the story was effectively "killed" in the setting. It would eventually get out (it's known by the Changed community, albeit in a rumor-ish way) The local media only picked it up briefly as another home intruder killed by homeowner. I suppose in a post-changed world, I could see it coming up on a CSI type show ("Rake? These marks look more like claws...")

It's a situation where there wasn't an intrinsic crime (killing a home invader who has a weapon is not a crime in Washington state) but Clay and others participated in a cover-up to conceal the exact nature of that incident. That could get them all in trouble later, but it's unlikely given the exact circumstances of the incident.

Your suggestion did spark an idea you might like involving your character Shiloh. I don't think I have time to write it, but you might be able to use it. I'll chat with you on IRC about it next time I'm on.
--[[User:Eirik|Eirik]] 13:25, 10 March 2008 (EDT)

User:Eirik/Homogeneous

2008-03-03T18:54:37Z

Eirik: Small addition

{{my stories|name=Eirik|category=Eirik}}

{{WIP}}

[[Category:Story]] [[Category:Eirik]] [[Category:Anthropomorphic]] [[Category:Alien]] {{DEFAULTSORT:Homogeneous}}
{{title|name=Homogeneous|user=Eirik|author=Eirik}}

='''Part One, The Dumping Grounds'''=

She waited at the end of the alley, hidden partly by the darkness and partly by the large trash can. She waited patiently, as she'd done so many times before. The cold made uncomfortable, but since it did the same to everyone else, it made the usually busy street a quiet hunting ground.

She recognized her prey the moment he stepped out of his building. She'd seem him, watched him even as he watched those around him. Hiding in the shadows, she waited until she was sure, then followed him home to wait for the right moment to strike. She slid further down the wall, listening for the thumping of his footsteps to get closer. As they reached the right spot, she sprang from her hiding place in a practiced motion, slipping the thin, strong wire around his neck and dragging him into the alley before he could cry out. He struggled, kicked, but never managed to break free. It wasn't long before he slumped to the ground, dead.

Quickly, she wrapped him in the drab blanket she'd bought at the marketplace this morning and tied it tightly. She dragged the body to the waiting three wheeler and tied it to the rack on the back. She started it up and began to long drive to the river outside the city.

She only worried about the tip of his tail hanging out of the blanket, but the streets at this cold hour would be too empty for anyone to notice.

{{Separator|stars}}

Kirby pulled his police cruiser off to the side of the road and switched off the engine. It had been an uncharacteristically quiet night in Seattle. Other than a couple minor domestics and a report of a prowler that didn't pan out, the radio had been almost silent. The sky was wonderfully clear and the air crisp. He looked though his windshield and took a deep breath. He couldn't remember the last time that he could see the entire city skyline so clear at night. It was one of the reasons that he'd chosen this spot for his dinner break.

He reached over and picked up some of his fries. Eating in the car was frowned on, but as long as he didn't leave a mess he knew no one would complain. He popped a few of them into his mouth and looked over in the direction of the Space Needle...

Suddenly, he was laying on his back looking up at a monster.

He didn't know what had happened, but his instincts kicked in. Fries falling from his open mouth, Kirby scrambled to his feet and reached for his pistol. The creature was bizarre; easily twice his weight and looked like a solid mass of muscle covered in shimmering blue-toned scales. "Don't move!" he shouted, even though the idea that thing spoke English seemed outlandish. Kirby tried to hold his position even though a wave of exhaustion passed through him.

The creature actually backed up, changing color from blue to pink. Kirby felt his heart race as he tried to decide what he had to do. He started to reach for his radio when a mass tackled him from the side, sending him sprawling over the grass.

"Okay, friend, calm down!" yelled a voice into his ear. Kirby looked up and found himself face to face with another monster. This one looked like a circus bear someone had been experimenting on. It was black furred with tall, triangular ears and a thick, toothy muzzle, complete with a saber-tooth pair of canines that extended well below its chin. And it talked. "Calm down!" it rumbled again. Kirby struggled for a few seconds, but the bear-thing was a lot heavier and stronger. Slowly, he reached to his belt and pulled out his Taser. "Friend, it's okay! No one here is going to hurt you. If you'll stay calm, we'll explain what... ACK!"

Kirby tried to roll away from the creature as the jolt from his Taser took hold, but barely got to his feet before he was clubbed in the back of his head and the world went dark.

{{Separator|stars}}

He woke up stripped naked on an oversized cot, his head aching. He started to pull his arms up, but discovered they were tied down. "Hello?" he managed to ask weakly.

"Oh good, you're awake," came the response. He looked to the foot of his bed to see the same bear creature that had attacked him before. "Most can barely stand for hours after coming through. I'm impressed. Soldier?" he asked, simply.

Kirby blinked, "Don't you know? You brought me here."

The bear laughed and sat down next to him, "I didn't do anything of the sort. Neither did anyone else. Soldier?" he asked again.

"Police officer, city of Seattle," he said. "Where are my clothes? And where am I?"

The bear nodded, "I'm sorry about the clothes, but we took them as a precaution. Not many come through armed, and we just wanted to make sure we explained things before we gave anything back."

Kirby laid his head back, wincing at the sore spot where he'd been hit, "Can you at least untie me and give me a sheet?" he asked.

The bear stood and walked to a nearby cabinet, "We get so many here that it's hard to keep straight the notions of decency from culture to culture," He laid the blanket over Kirby with a smooth motion, then untied the heavy straps that kept him to the bed. "I'm trusting you not to try anything for the moment. Right now, I'm a lot bigger than you, and your weapons are in my desk back at headquarters," he said.

Kirby nodded, "Okay, but can you tell me what the hell is going on? Where am I?"

The bear sighed and helped the human to his feet, then motioned for him to come to a nearby window. "You, sir, are just simply part of today's people that have come though into the Dumping Grounds," he said as he waved out the window.

The view was shocking. Across a wide street from the building he was in was an empty field crawling with every manner of monster and creature imaginable. Some were walking, crawling or slithering around dazed, confused. The area was surrounded by a heavy block wall that prevented those from leaving in just any direction, and the place was crawling with those bear creatures, most near the gate with others hovering near the edges. As new creatures appeared, the bears would intercept them, then guide them though the opening into buildings that surrounded the field. "What the hell?" he said breathlessly.

The bear laughed, "I've been here so long that I sometimes forget how strange the whole thing is," he said. "I came though exactly like you, about 25 standard years ago." He shrugged, "I don't know what that means in your time."

As Kirby watched, stunned, about 50 different creatures appeared in the field, one every few seconds or so. There was no fanfare or spark of light, one second there was nothing and the next there would be something else. He watched long enough to see something with massive antlers appear, then turned to the bear again, "You came though?" he asked, "You look like the rest of them."

He nodded, "I know. There's a lot to absorb, a lot we need to tell you. For now, we need to get you processed and up to speed," the bear clasped hard down on Kirby's shoulder, "Based on your little demonstration this morning, my bosses have tentatively drafted you into our police force. Welcome aboard."

{{Separator|stars}}

They returned his uniform, scuffed and dirty from the fight but in good shape. He noted that his gun belt, back up weapon and badge were all missing. He dressed and was escorted by the bear ("Call me Ryth!") to his headquarters building.

Thoughts of trying to escape were pretty quickly dashed. The streets were a mass of creatures, though as they left the Dumping Grounds the vast majority were those bears. Their dress ranged from flowing gowns to nothing at all. Ryth wore only heavy shorts and a red flexible strap across his chest that tied into a silver badge. Beyond that, there were creatures of all other types walking about, attracting some attention (as Kirby himself did) but it wasn't much. There were also vehicles running up and down the street, most of them resembled covered tricycles, almost like Tuk-Tuks, but with seats much larger for driver and passengers. There were few things that he'd describe as cars and, almost oddly, no bikes.

Kirby protested the entire walk over, dodging these strange creatures, but eventually Ryth cut him off. "Look, I'm not even the one in charge, but trust me, the less you protest the better it will be for you down the road. You've been here just a few hours, I know, but you'll get perhaps ten days to calm yourself down, understand how things work here and get with the program."

"After that?" he'd asked.

"After that, my boss will wash his hands of you and send you to the streets. I don't know what kind of world you came from, but the streets here are not a happy place." He stopped and pulled Kirby into a door frame, letting the sea of bears walk by, "This city is barely controlled chaos on the best of days. We have over ten million inhabitants, most of whom still pine for home. This is a place where you look up before you walk out of a tall building because someone might be coming down the outside. I've been a police officer here for over twenty years, I was something similar before I got here. This place, this city, this planet will kill you if you let it." Ryth stopped his tirade and leaned against the wall, "I'm sorry, Kirby," he said after closing his eyes. Kirby was sure the big creature was near tears, "Sometimes, most of the time, I hate this place. I miss my home, I miss my husband."

Kirby looked over the bear again, feeling certain that he missed something. Ryth looked, eyes wet, and almost smiled, "Confused?" he asked.

"A little," he admitted.

"You'll understand pretty soon," said Ryth, "Nothing here is permanent."

They arrived at the tall stone building a few minutes later and Ryth led him up the stairs to what he'd have called a bull pen. It was a huge room lined with desks, widely spaced. Other than the fact that it looked wrong on some level Kirby couldn't describe, it could almost have been a police station anywhere in the world. They had electric lights, though large windows were used to get the most of it. To his eye, Kirby thought the windows were even odd. They were a good ten feet tall and had small ledges on the inside. At the moment, most were open for ventilation.

They sat down and Ryth pulled out a pad of paper, which is when he realized they didn't seem to have computers, either. "We assumed you were a solider or police officer based on your behavior and weapons. Post industrial with electrical knowledge?" he asked.

"How'd you know that?"

"Your weapons are made of high grade steel, and we noticed some plastics as well. We don't usually see that in people coming though from pre-industrial societies." Ryth then smiled and pulled the dark fur back on his side, showing a bright red burn mark, "Also, that little toy you struck me with gave me a bit of a shock. To build something like that, your society must have some knowledge of electricity."

Kirby turned red, "I was hoping you weren't the one..."

Ryth cut him off, "Don't worry about it. This thing was pretty clearly designed for someone about your size. It hurt, but I can barely feel it now." He reached into a desk and pulled out his pistols, "These are pretty self-explanatory," he said.

Kirby resisted the urge to grab them. He still didn't have a clue what was going on, but Ryth, he felt sure, had nothing really to do with it. Even after such a short time, he was becoming convinced he hadn't really been abducted, at least not in the traditional sense. "Those are my side arms. Pistols."

The bear turned them over in his paw-like hands a few times before sniffing them, "Lubricant shouldn't be hard to find. What does it shoot?"

Kirby reached out, "May I?" he asked. Ryth considered a moment, then handed one over. Kirby slipped the clip out then pulled out one of the bullets. "Lead pellets propelled by explosive powder encased in the brass container."

Ryth nodded, then motioned for them to be put back, "I've seen stuff like this before. Strange how these things get invented all over the place. I assume these capsules..."

"Bullets."

"Bullets," he corrected, "are single use?" Kirby nodded. "We'll need to get you to see a fabricator. Off world weapons are pretty rare. Off world anything is rare. If they are of good quality and can be duplicated, you might be able to sell them for a rather nice profit."

"You don't have weapons?" he asked.

Ryth laughed, "Of course we do," he said, "but... look, let me get this process finished then I'll explain. You said your name is Kirby, is that your full designation?"

"Kirby Hutton," he said, "Hutton is a family name," he said to explain.

He reached into the desk and pulled out the gold shield, "We assumed this was a badge of office. Such things are common the universe over."

Kirby nodded, "I'm a patrol officer for a large city, Seattle" he added even though it wasn't likely to mean anything to Ryth. "Not this big, fewer than two million inhabitants."

There was a long pause, "Anyone waiting for you back home?" he asked as gently as possible.

"No wife," he said. "Not much family. No, I'll be missed by the department and a couple cousins I never see."

That seemed to satisfy Ryth. "That will make all this easier."

They talked for a couple of hours, with Ryth asking questions of Kirby's background. For the moment, he dodged questions about this city and what had happened to him. Not everything translated over, but the bear got the general idea and seemed satisfied. He finished writing things up, then started going though the contents of Kirby's wallet, "Have you noticed that we've been talking for hours?" he finally asked.

Kirby blinked, "Well, sure. Why?"

The bear grinned, "That didn't bother you at all? That I knew your language? Or you knew mine?"

Until Ryth mentioned it, it hadn't occurred to him.

"Don't worry about it. It's a mental block on those coming though. You learn the language somehow from the start. It even seems to cover idioms and phrases and approximate meaning. No one knows how or why." He finally found something that had a lot of writing on it, Kirby's drivers license. "This is written in your language?" he asked.

"Yeah, it is."

"You're literate in your language? You can write fluently? Read?"

"Of course."

"What does this say?"

Kirby took the license and was shocked. It was gibberish. He recognized the shapes of the letters, but the meaning was gone! "What the hell?" he asked.

"You can't read this, though?" he asked, handing over the notes he'd been taking.

Kirby looked, but it was even more gibberish. It almost looked like some kind of Thai script. "What's going on?"

"Don't panic, it's common. Whatever it is that allows you to speak wipes out your ability to read or write. Once you go through your first mixing, you'll be able to start to re-learn it."

"Mixing?" he asked, not liking the sound of it.

Ryth smiled warmly, "Don't worry, I like you. I'll see you thought it."

They kept him occupied though the rest of the day, but never really answered his questions. He was taken later to someone identified as the head of recruitment for the city police. After a once over and Ryths word that he believed the human was a possible recruit, he found he'd been officially drafted. The bear behind the desk looked sympathetic about it, "I know you don't understand what's going on, but we'll get you though." He lowered his voice, as if he was expecting to be overheard, "Frankly, this is the best way. Newcomers are chewed up and spit out in this place. We take care of our own."

Kirby nodded, still numb. As Ryth had said, some things were common the universe over.

After dark, they finally left the HQ. Newcomers were apparently housed in dorms for the most part until they found lodging of their own, but because he was drafted so quickly Ryth offered to put him up in his place for the time being. "It's not like it's the first time," he explained, "Besides, you missed the standard orientation after Bothle hit you on the head, so I've got a lot to explain."

The apartment was walking distance from the headquarters building, a third floor studio that was surprising large, almost like a good sized loft. "I'm not sure what your species feelings on privacy are," he explained, "but if I can make accommodations for you just ask." It was sparsely furnished with simple, heavily constructed chairs and pads around the room. Ryth had a small kitchen, which even though it looked like it had been designed by H.R. Geiger and painted orange, was recognizable.

"Hungry?" he asked.

Kirby nodded. He hadn't eat since... since those French fries in Seattle. "Yeah. God, this isn't a dream, is it?"

"Prayer?" Ryth asked innocently.

"No, just a rhetorical question," he explained. "I think I haven't panicked yet because part of me thinks I fell asleep in my patrol car."

Ryth opened a hatch in the floor and revealed a cooler. He pulled out some strange looking green tubers and set them on the counter, "You haven't panicked because no one does, not in the first few hours." He set them on the counter and started cutting them up, "It's strange, but we've all gone through it. Most of us, anyway. The trip here is like a sedative that seems to last for several hours. I think most of us would have died in the first hours if not for that."

Kirby's head was spinning, "Look, no one has really told me what's going on. You came through yourself? Why do you look like everyone else, then?"

Ryth sighed and scooped the cut up tubers on a plate and handed them to Kirby. "I'd heat them up, but I'm told they may be safer raw, at least for newcomers." Kirby picked one up and smelled it. It wasn't bad, like a wet potato with a strong hint of spice. He tasted one, and didn't spit it out. It wasn't good, but he was too hungry to care.

Kirby and Ryth sat down in a couple chairs by the window that overlooked the street below. "I'm going to tell you what you need to know, my new friend, and I want you to understand that this is the way things are here." He leaned back, "This place is basically like a giant concrete mixer..."

='''Part Two, The Concrete Mixer'''=

He tracked this one all the way to their apartment, then waited until dawn for them to leave.

The lock had been unusually trivial to bypass. He'd honestly expected better. He slipped inside and waited in the shadows behind a plant for hours. He heard steps outside several times, but never tensed up until he heard the steps with the right cadence.

It was then that he slipped the heavy wire out and stretched it between his fingers.

His prey walked in the door, and he sprung before he could find the light switch. In a flash, he kicked the door closed and looped the heavy wire over the bears head. He felt the familiar attempts to breath. These bears were a tougher lot, though, and it took longer to cut off the air passages. Finally, the form slumped.

He held it tighter a bit longer, just in case.

Once he was sure his prey wouldn't move again, he dragged it over to a filthy rug in the middle of the floor and rolled the body up. Once the city got quiet, he carried the bundle down the back stairs and into the alley.

{{Separator|stars}}

"Concrete mixer?" he asked, not understanding.

Ryth sighed, "Describe me the best you can," he asked. "Ignore that I won't know what you're talking about, but look over my body and tell me what you see."

Kirby looked over Ryth, "Well, you look almost like an animal we call a black bear on my world, only a bit larger. Your teeth look like a saber-toothed tiger..."

"Saber-tooth?" interrupted Ryth, "I like that."

"Your ears are like a kit fox, a really small animal but on you those things are giants. You've got hands almost like mine... he trailed off. "Why do you ask?"

"I didn't look like this the day I was born, the day I got married, the day I joined the Peace Force on my world. I was far smaller, no outer ear to speak of. My nose was a lot larger, we communicated by smell almost as much as voice. I had fur, but it was short and much lighter. I was female." He paused at that, "In fact, I was female again, only about fifty days ago."

Kirby put the pieces together in his head, "Oh my God," he whispered, "I'm going to... change into one of you?" He felt his heart race.

"Not like this, no," explained Ryth, "But something different. Something on this world makes us all the same creature. It happens all the time, to the point that we're all used to it, as you will be as well. It happens no sooner than every forty-five days, and no more than every two hundred, which here is about half a year. When that day comes, we'll all change, and you with it."

"Into what?" he asked quietly.

Ryth shrugged, "I don't know. I've been here twenty-five years and I can't tell you how many different things I've been. There's no pattern, either. Birds, reptiles, amphibians, we do it all around here. Size doesn't matter much, either. I've been as small as my hand is now," he said holding out a paw that was about a foot and a half long, "and I've been twice my current height." He sighed, "I've been both male and female as well as androgynous."

"What happens to your mind?" asked Kirby. "Do you start to forget?"

"You'll forget some things, but you'd have done that if you'd been uprooted to another world of people like you. There are instincts that go with each body, but you'll figure them out and they won't rule you. Another thing, you won't ever be something that comes though the gate. No one ever is."

"What do you mean, I won't be human anymore? Ever?"

Ryth shook his head, "No, never. There are billions of inhabited worlds out there, and though you may someday again be similar to what you are now, you'll never really be the same. We don't know of anyone who has reported being exactly what they were before they got here. Once you go though the mixer, we'll all be the same."

"I just find it all so hard to believe."

"You will, any day now." He pointed at a few solitary forms walking down the street, "Fifty days ago, they were all reptiles."

Kirby sat in silence for a long time, eating the strange tubers and staring at the street. "What about out of this city? What about a way home?"

"Believe me, if you find one you'll be a hero to the entire planet. Most of us would return in a heartbeat if we could, but the entire planet has been searched, over and over. If there's a way home, no one has bothered to tell the rest of us."

"Are there other gates?"

"No, this is the only one that we know of. Some believe there's an underwater gate, but I shudder to think about that."

Kirby let that sink in, popping into this world but under deep ocean? He'd have drowned in an instant and never known why. "There are other cities, though, right?"

Ryth smiled, "There are, of course. Generally much more stable than this place. By the time people travel to them, they're usually more settled; they've given up on returning home. Some go off to find work like they knew, farm labor is pretty common. Others just try to find a place like they knew."

Kirby thought back on the day, "You implied my guns were more impressive that what you have here, but you have huge cities, manufacturing..."

"We also have a language barrier, at least a written one. It's not easy to re-learn to write, so a great deal of our institutional knowledge dies with those who have it. That, and the fact that the people coming though from different worlds are random. The vast majorities are uneducated laborers or the like. We get people with technical knowledge, but they tend to be the ones with the most lost by coming here. They are the most common suicides in the first week."

Ryth stood up and went to his dresser, pulling out a sidearm. "This is what I carry most days when I'm on patrol," he said handing it over.

It was an impressive piece, but to Kirby's eye it looked like it was primitive. It took a second to realize that it wasn't actually a gun. "Gas?"

"An irritant, yes. Guns like you have exist, but designs are haphazard and materials like high quality steel are expensive." He pointed at the Glock on the table, "You'll find weapons like that, but not many here in the city."

Kirby sat back and chewed another tuber, "What happens now?" he asked.

"My commander gave me the day off, first one I've had in about... well, since I grew fur. I'm going to get you introduced to the city."

{{Separator|stars}}

Kirby woke up slowly at first, then shot up. "Oh, crap," he said finally. Sleeping had been an ordeal, and he really had hoped to wake up in his cruiser.

Ryth was still asleep. Kirby had to hand it to the big guy, he really helped keep him calm. It was so much to absorb so fast that he couldn't decide what to do. In a way, it surprised him how much he simply went with what he was being told. He didn't even consider seriously that they might be lying to him.

He yawned and stood up, feeling hungry. Wandering into the kitchen, he opened the cooler on the floor and was confronted with a mass of strange shapes colors, but nothing that resembled anything he knew. He closed the floor and looked up, averting his eyes, "Ryth! You're nude."

The bear stopped short and yawned wide, "So?"

Kirby continued to avert his eyes, "Sorry, it's just... you were wearing shorts yesterday."

He heard a laugh and saw Ryth turn and get his clothes, "You ever try carrying a weapon with nothing on?" He slipped his shorts on, "On my world, we didn't wear unnecessary clothes. The standards of decency are a lot different here. You could walk nude through the marketplace and get about as much attention as you will with clothes on. Unless you run into someone from your home world, of course."

Kirby perked up, "You think there are some out there?"

He shrugged, "Maybe." He pointed at the cooler, "It's not that well stocked, and I'm not much of a cook. We'll head over to the main city marketplace this morning. You'll see everything you need to see there, I suspect."

{{Separator|stars}}

It was really the first time Kirby saw the city in daylight. The day before had just been too traumatic and he'd been too distracted. Most of the buildings were simple affairs, a few stories tall and made of stone or brick. He noticed a number of oddities, like the commonality of pet doors.

Ryth had just laughed. "Remember, next week we might all be that small," he pointed out. "Most everything here is built with that in mind."

They arrived at the main marketplace after about a long walk. They came over a low hill and looked down on it. It almost defied description. It was a sea of stalls all covered in tarps or cloths. Even from a distance, he could smell a wide variety of foods and spices mixed in with the smells of the city.

"The main city marketplace," said Ryth with a bit of awe in his voice. "If it could be found on this world, it can be found here."

A question finally occurred to Kirby. "Ryth, what is the name of this city?" he asked.

"Doesn't have one to speak of," he answered with a big toothy grin. "Oh, it's had a few over the years, but nothing's stuck. If something catchy comes to mind, let me know." He waved forward, "Let's head in."

Ryth led the way, weaving between the stalls. Kirby noticed that most displayed a variety of banners or flags. "Identification," he said.

"Of what they sell?"

"Of home," he said. "If you see one you recognize, stop. Might be someone you know."

They stopped at a small brick building first, one of a small number of permanent structures. Inside one of the bears was hard at work on a lathe when he stopped. "Can I help you?" he asked eyeing the human.

"It's Officer Ryth, Bateet."

"Ryth?" he asked. "Haven't seen you since..." he though, "Oh, since we were last avian."

Ryth nodded, "Have something you might want to see, off world weapon."

Bateet's eyes opened as Kirby handed the unloaded revolver. He held back the more complicated Glock for now. "It's a pretty common piece on my world..."

Bateet waved off his explanation and looked it over. "The steel is going to be hard to get, but not too impossible," he mused. "I might be able to sell it to a concern I know overseas..." He looked up and rubbed his muzzle, "I can give you one hundred coin to keep it long enough to make casts of the parts. Five hundred to keep it."

Kirby looked to Ryth, "Is that good?"

"It's fair. What about your bullets?"

Kirby nodded and set both the .38 and 9mm shells on the counter. "How about these? They're filled with an explosive..."

Bateet waved him off again. "Your people aren't the first to invent projectile weapons." He picked them both up and immediately noted the size difference, "Holding out on me? he asked.

"He has another," answered Ryth simply. "Can you make those?"

He considered it, "I believe so. Klys has made something similar in the past." He considered, "It'll take me a couple weeks, but how about this. If you let me keep this, I'll supply you with these," he said indicating the 9mm bullet, "As well as give you two of the duplicates. I'll throw in two hundred and fifty coin for that."

"How many of the bullets will you give me?" he asked.

Bateet considered a little longer, "One thousand, per year."

"Is that a good deal?" he asked Ryth. Not knowing what the value of coin was here was a severe disadvantage, but he had to trust Ryth for now.

Ryth, for his part, nodded, "It's about half a years' salary for you. It'll start you off better than most on this world." He pointed at the fabricator, "He's also one of the more honest folks around here. Because of the mixing, people can reinvent themselves a couple times a year. Bateets been doing this... how long?"

The bear looked grim, "Longer than you've been on this rock. Deal?"

Kirby nodded, "Deal."

They left to find food, eventually settling on a vegetarian mix that Kirby thought smelled edible, if not pretty good. They hadn't spotted much meat, and Ryth told him it was a bit of a planetary bias. "Meat is raised here, but the next mixing might make us all strict herbivores. Even when we become forms that need meat, we can make due with vegetable substitutes for a while." He pointed at the plate Kirby was about to eat, "Be careful, too. We lose a lot of newcomers to toxins we don't even realize are in the food, also few after each mix. If you feel funny at all, tell me."

Kirby had thought he was joking, but realized that Ryth almost stared at him as he ate. The food was odd, but edible.

They spent a good part of the day looking though the various stalls. Kirby bought a couple changes of clothes that were loosely tailored to his frame, set up more like a poncho than a shirt. Ryth had stopped him from buying too much, "You might not be able to wear them again for years," he pointed out. "Just get what you need."

The marketplace was also a tremendous mix of cultures, with artwork, tapestries and a lot that Kirby had a hard time identifying. There was even a number of religious shrines. "This is a planet of about five billion," Ryth pointed out, "And about 3 billion different religious beliefs." He shrugged it off, "After a while, you'll find people will gravitate toward sects that they feel most closely match what they had back home, if they don't renounce it entirely. Here in the marketplace is about the last place on the planet that you'll see pure religions, as people wait for off worlders from home to find them. It happens. Once you leave here, you'll find everything gets boiled down. Everything from artwork to kitchen utensils become a homogenized mix. You'll see innovations here and there, but even simple things like chairs and tables might need to be adjusted next week. Even artwork loses something if you mix and then find you can't see the right colors." Ryth shrugged, "It's just the way things have become here, and probably always will be."

{{Separator|stars}}

In the distance, the human and bear didn't notice they were being watched. Neither would have given the bear a second glance, but he recognized a human when he saw one, even if had been so, so long. He resisted the urge to seek him out, to find out what was happening back on Earth. The truth was, he recognized that the human was wearing a police uniform from back home, and he didn't want to risk the attention.

He still had a mission to accomplish.

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='''Chapter Three, On the Job Mixing'''=

"Get inside, get inside, get inside!" he shouted as he grabbed the larger bear creature and dragged her off the street. The mob that was beginning to form around her was getting angry, and there was no telling what was going to happen. The last time Kirby saw this happen, the focus of the mob had ended up ripped apart.

He didn't have the strength to physically pull her away, but she seemed to be grateful to be guided even as the mob followed. He dragged her into a store and slammed the door, scaring the shopkeeper and a couple customers. "Do you have a back door?" he shouted. The woman behind the counter looked stunned, but nodded, "Close it and lock it!" He reached for his radio before cursing and going to his belt. The radios they had here were primitive and weighed a ton, "This is Officer Kirby, I've got the focus of the mob inside..." he trailed off and looked around, "Some shoe store, I think."

"What street are you on?" asked the dispatcher.

He cursed again, "I think it's 101 street, I think!" A rock slammed into the window, "Just look for the angry mob!"

The people started pounding on the glass. Kirby pulled his Glock and started to point it out the window when he heard shouts and pink gas started to fill the street. The crowd fled almost as fast as it gathered. They waited for it to clear before he unlatched the door and let the officers in. "Ryth, nice of you to join us," he deadpanned.

The bear shook his head, "Not my fault you have a knack for finding riots." He gestured to the woman on the floor, shaking in terror, "What happened?"

Kirby picked up a notebook from the floor. "She was standing on the corner, taking notes."

Ryth nodded and knelt down, "Are you okay? What's your name?"

She shuddered and looked up, "I'm Klu."

"What were you doing?"

"I was just taking notes. I was a sociologist back home. I thought if I ever returned I could..." her voice trailed off and she started sobbing again.

Kirby felt for her. After just a few weeks, he'd already given up on finding a way off this rock, but she'd obviously been here long enough to go through at least one mix. "Didn't you think of the danger?"

She looked at him blankly, "Of taking notes?"

The truth was, there was a danger in taking notes, or even of just looking like you were too interested. Exactly what this place was, what purpose it served, was a source of nearly endless speculation and rumor. Almost no one thought it was a natural event, the fact that every single life form to fall though was sentient and came from at least metal working civilizations seemed to discount that. Beyond that, the rumors ranged from reasonable to bizarre, from religious to scientific. One common one was that this place was essentially a giant experiment, either long forgotten or still running, of a far more advanced race. An experiment, of course, would need observers. If you looked too interested in what was going on, you could find yourself accused of being one of them, and there were plenty of people who wanted off this planet, or just wanted to punish someone responsible.

Ryth had her taken to the station to be checked out and educated about the risks. "How many riots have you been in so far?" he asked Kirby.

Kirby thought, "Five, I think. At least this one didn't turn out fatal." He motioned to the woman being helped into a police Tuk-Tuk. "What'll happen to her?"

"Hopefully, she'll be a little more subtle about her observations. If she's really a trained sociologist, I'm sure she can find work somewhere in the universities outside the city." He shrugged, "Otherwise, we'll probably be collecting her body in the next few weeks."

It was the one thing that Kirby almost hoped he wouldn't get used to: collecting the suicides. In just three weeks, he'd personally been involved in over a dozen. With no way to identify anyone, and few with loved ones to claim the bodies, it was about the most depressing part of a place filled with depression.

Something odd struck Kirby suddenly looking at his friend. "What's with the feather?" he asked indicating a long green feather on his arm.

Ryth took a quick look at his arm then looked up and almost screamed, "Aw crap! I hate being avian!"

{{Separator|stars}}

Kirby had been told what to expect, several times in fact, but it couldn't completely prepare him.

Action on the street became animated as people started rushing home or to the common dorms. The process would take about a day and tended to drain everyone of energy for a short time, so there wouldn't be much going on. As members of the police, Kirby and Ryth would technically be on duty, but for a while everyone would be stationed at HQ. "There won't be any activity once we get rolling, and it'll take hours before anyone will feel strong enough to be up and about," Ryth had explained, "But there will be a lot of cleanup after."

They left the shoe shop and made haste though the traffic back to HQ, which had already filled with most of all three shifts. There were a fair number of newcomers, all were herded into the main bullpen. Kirby didn't recognize any of them, but they made a menagerie that looked like a scene from "Star Wars", with half a dozen mammals, three reptilian, two avian and one amphibian. "We need you here, because not everyone survives their first mix," the Commander of the day shift said bluntly. "If any of you have any implants that we don't know about, or have had extensive surgical procedures, we should be told now."

One of the reptiles flipped his tail around, "I've got an artificial knee joint."

The Commander grumbled, "And you didn't tell us about this forty days ago because...?" he left the question hanging in the air.

"I didn't think about it, it was implanted half my life ago."

The Commander snapped his finger in the air and summoned two others he recognized as paramedics. "Go with them, if something happens they may need to work fast." He looked at the rest of the small group, and even as he did Kirby realized that the fur on his muzzle was shedding, the skin turning dark yellow. "Damn, it's happening pretty fast this time," he muttered. "Okay, hunker down, and call out if you get into trouble. Open the hatches, just in case." On that order, the oversized windows were opened over their heads.

Kirby slumped into a chair, squirming as his bare skin touched the wood. Like everyone else, he'd stripped off his clothes in anticipation. He glanced at his reflection in a nearby window and felt a knot in his stomach. It was the last time that he'd have this body. Even as he watched, his feet started to feel odd, and he watched as they painlessly shifted and stretched, the skin growing bright yellow and scaly.

He watched Ryth walk up behind him. "You doing okay?"

Kirby watched as his friends face started to coalesce into a beaked bird, then realized that his own was doing the same. He raised a hand up and felt along the bill before he felt his joints begin to shift. "I think so. At least it's not painful, but I feel like I've run a marathon." Even as he said it, his head began to swim with exhaustion.

Ryth looked perturbed and then watched his hands wither into the tip of a wing. "Aw, double crap!" he bellowed again, causing a lot of beaked heads to turn toward him. He held up his arms, "No hands!" he yelled, which brought a series of groans from the room. He looked back at Kirby, "I really hate avian forms, but these are the worst," He opened his half completed wings, "These are useless for holding weapons, and your feet won't be fast enough."

Kirby tried to look at the bright side as he watched his own hands reshape into wingtips, "Won't we be able to fly?"

Ryth nodded, "Yeah, and so will anyone we want to catch. Damnit, I'd rather be a slug again!"

Kirby let that slide past, he was too tired to find out if Ryth meant that literally. As he watched more iridescent green feathers cover his body, the world seemed to grow dark and before he knew it, he was asleep.

{{Separator|stars}}

In a darkened flat deep in the city, he put his preparations to good use.

His mission didn't allow him to wait around feeling sleepy while he recovered from something as minor as a physical change. He kept stimulants around, taking a couple as he felt the feathers travel up his body. He'd been a bird before, once, but as his hands withered away into wings he knew that he would have to make some kind of adjustment.

He had a very small window, when the city would be quiet and everyone would be confused. He'd have to adjust on the fly.

{{Separator|stars}}

Kirby woke slowly, feeling strange, warm and contorted. He had the sense that he was standing, which didn't make any sense if he was really asleep. He opened his eyes and saw just filtered light. There were noises all around. The bull-pen?

As realization dawned, he tried to straighten himself out. It took a moment for him to realize that his head was tucked under his arm... his wing. He pulled his head up and looked around. The bull-pen was coming back to life, with most everyone up and moving. They were definitely avian, looking like a cross between a parrot and a Japanese crane, though the feathers lacked patterns, tall, thin yellow legs, tapered body and a long neck. Everyone in the bull pen were covered in bright feathers, but about half were green and half were blue.

Kirby dared for the first time to really look at himself. He pulled his wings forward and stared. There were no hands, nothing to grip with, though they were more flexible than he'd feared. He was able to move them to run it along his beak. His tongue, now long and thing, ran along the edge and he was surprised to find teeth, or at least something like them. They weren't particularly sharp, but the sensation along his tongue was like Velcro. "Enjoying the new body?" came a high-pitched voice hind him.

Kirby turned to see another bird, also covered in green, "Not sure yet, this is pretty new," he blinked at the sound of his own voice, which to his ears was completely foreign. He ventured a guess, "Ryth?"

He nodded, his beak bobbing up and down, "It's me. I really hate these forms, but at least they're pretty." He bobbed his head toward Kirby, "If you care, you're still male, I think."

Kirby chuckled, "I guess that's something," he looked down at his body but couldn't see the anything that gave it away, "How can you tell?"

Ryth somehow looked embarrassed despite the passive face, "When you're here long enough, you learn to tell the difference in these odd forms."

"Can we fly?"

"Haven't tried yet," admitted Ryth. "We're a little large with wings a bit small for real flight, I think, but we should be able to glide, ride thermals. There are plenty of those in the city. Just be careful if you give it a try, you may have hollow bones now, and it'll be a couple weeks before we know how fragile these bodies are."
Kirby hadn't considered that, "I'll be careful," he sighed, "It would be nice to fly for a bit, get something special out of this after all I've lost."
Ryth laughed, "Hey, you're getting off lucky. First time I mixed it was into a insectoid form. The form wasn't bad, but on my home world we have a cultural issue with insects. I was convinced I was being punished by my God." He picked up his badge and adjusted the red strap with his feet and legs using the wings for leverage. It took a few minutes, but he finally managed to get the elastic straps adjusted. "I hate these forms," he muttered again. Once he got the straps on, he picked up Kirby's and tossed it over. "Are you up to a little detective work?"

"Detective?" he asked as he slipped the strap over head and centered the silver badge against his green scales. "What are you talking about?"

"Right after things started waking up, we got a call about a murder. The Commander wants to see how you handle it. You said you'd worked some cases back home."

Kirby nodded, "Yeah, but as a patrol officer, mostly helping as a part of a task force, running down tips on a couple serial killers. We seem to grow a lot of them in Seattle."

"Now's your chance to see how you do here."

{{Separator|stars}}

The scene wasn't that far from the headquarters, but they decided to walk rather than test their wings. There was time for that later, and they needed to arrive in one piece. Kirby took his first steps as a bird tentatively, afraid that he was going to fall over. He was shocked just how easy it was. After just a couple steps, he was walking like he'd been this form all his life. He noticed a slight bob of the head as he moved forward, and that he wasn't the only one doing it.

The streets were still nearly empty. Most people were in their homes or businesses trying to get used to this. "We've all been bipedal with arms for the last couple of years, and we usually are," explained Ryth. "This is the most we've changed in a while. The veterans will be up and about by the morning. Some of the newer ones might take a while." He paused and sighed, "And we'll start finding the suicides right after." They arrived at the building shortly, a five story brick affair that looked like it had been designed in Soviet Russia. "The body was found on the fourth floor."

Ryth virtually raced up the stairs, but Kirby had more trouble. His feet didn't quite feel right on the steps and he had to angle them sideways to get up. Ryth was waiting at the top and cut him off before he could ask, "Not my first bird legs. You'll get used to it." He pointed at a door down the hall. "The body was found there."

"We know it wasn't a suicide?" asked Kirby as they stepped into the apartment. He stopped short. "Oh my God," he muttered.

The person had been completely beheaded. The blue feathered body was laying across a rug in the center of the room, the head laying several feet away. The rug had been folded over the body in an effort to conceal the body, probably to move it. Another officer was at the scene already looking it over, "She was strangled with a wire, but our necks are a lot weaker than before. She was choked hard enough to completely sever the head."

"Any idea who she was?" asked Kirby.

The officer shook his head. "We haven't talked to most of the neighbors, but she wasn't new here. She'd been mixed several times, and the owner of the building can't recall when she moved in."

"Can't recall? He doesn't have records?"

The officer flapped her wings slightly in frustration, "Records? Are you new?"

Ryth stepped in. "This is Officer Kirby, it's his first mixing." Ryth paused, "Who are you, anyway?"

"Bateet, you disagreeable bastard," he replied with a smirk that was more heard than seen. He looked at Kirby, "That explains it, you haven't been here long. There are records, but they are rarely official. No one cares. The owner gets payment up front or you're out. He might have written down when she got here somewhere, but if he didn't, no one cares."

"Do we even know her name? Where she worked?" asked Kirby.

"Manager said her name was Suma, that she'd kept the same name for at least the last few mixings so it's not unlikely she'd been named that for a while. He doesn't know where she worked."

The officers started looking over the apartment while the coroner came to collect the body. Kirby had almost marveled at how loose things were here. Back home this apartment would be sealed, a few highly trained technicians would be going over the place with a fine-toothed comb, detective would be searching all over for the killer.

Here, they were their own evidence collection. Much of what they would normally collect would be useless here. Fingerprints, DNA, hair samples all change so often that if you didn't catch the killer right away, you most likely never would. It was these reasons why the department had an abysmal rate of solving these crimes.

Kirby opened the cupboards and did a double take. "Ryth, take a look at this." He started to reach up with a wing, then stopped and just used his beak to pull the bag off the shelf and set it on the counter. "Some kind of seeds."

Ryth looked at it, but didn't seem to notice anything strange. "Those last forms were extremely omnivorous, we could pretty much eat anything."

Kirby bobbed his head, "I know, but look at the cabinets, this is almost all she has."

Ryth took another look, then opened the cooler in the floor. "There's a little leftover food from the last form, but otherwise it's all bird specific." He picked up a back of small red berries from the cooler and experimentally tossed one into his beak, "It's good."

The wheels were turning in Kirby's head. "Who called this in?"

Bateet spoke up, "The call said it was a neighbor that heard a commotion... but..." he stammered and went to the window. "Hold on, give me a second," he said as he raced out the door, his wings flapping in agitation.

"She was killed right after the mixing, wasn't she? I mean, minutes after, an hour at most," asked Kirby, but he was interrupted by Bateet returning, his chest feathers ruffled.

"I just checked from the roof," he said between breaths, "this building doesn't have voice phone service." "It's not connected to anything but the electric grid."

The three of them looked at each other, "So who called it in?" asked Bateet finally.

Ryth looked at the cupboards and at the form on the floor, "the killer did."

{{Separator|stars}}

She watched from a perch atop a building several doors down. If any of them saw her, it would look as though she was just another citizen testing out her new feathered form. She hadn't planned well enough, she'd rushed things. She hadn't wanted to lose this one. She had the sense they were looking for her.

Not the police, of course, but her victims.

When she couldn't move the body herself, she decided to call the police. She'd been chased before, and escaped. The police here were a mess. She could give them an engraved initiation and they'd never find her. But if they figured out what she already knew, then they might do some of her work for her.

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='''Part Four, The Outer Marsh River'''=

The watch commander wasn't as impressed with their detective work, "What are you saying, that she was targeted?"

Kirby felt his blood boiling. He couldn't' figure out how he'd been promoted, but that wasn't uncommon in this city. It was rare that someone came though the Dumping Grounds that had a specific and useful skill set, and much of the police force here was drafted initially, and stayed because the position was safe. "The call came into the department less than half an hour after the earliest anyone could be up and about after the mixing, and we think the killer made the call."

"How would the killer be out and about, then?" he asked.

Ryth spoke up, "Stimulants." He looked around when all eyes fell on him. "Oh, you all know that you can stay awake during and after a mixing, but it's dangerous and takes stims."

The watch commander fluffed up his feathers, "That's crazy, if he misjudged his new form, or if it was allergic or toxic, he'd be dead."

Kirby bobbed his head, "I think this guy is arrogant enough that he doesn't care about that. He felt the need to kill this person, for whatever reason. I can't tell you if he planned for the mixing and took precautions, or if it just came about at an inconvenient time, but suffice it to say he was dedicated to killing her."

For the first time, a light seemed to go off in the watch commanders head, "Wait a minute," he said and he scrabbled over to a large filing cabinet. Pulling it open with his feet, he expertly used his beak to rifle through he papers until he came up with a bright orange file. He bobbed back to the desk and dropped it down, then looked at the stares. "Believe it or not, this form isn't all that different than what I came in here as," he answered their unspoken question, "though I was more colorful than this." He motioned to the file, "Take a look at that, it's from a body that was found dumped in the Outer Marsh River a few years ago."

Kirby and Ryth opened the file and found old, faded pictures inside showing a black and red furred form that Kirby though at one point had resembled a bobcat. "I remember this form," muttered Ryth, "hands, but we were quadrupeds. I hated it."

Kirby didn't even look up, "Do you like any body, ever?" he asked rhetorically. That's when he noticed what the watch commander was talking about, "He was garroted?"

"Yes, with a long, thin wire and a lot of force, and wrapped in a rug." He reached his beak over and flipped to some drawings from the coroner, "You may not remember, Ryth, but that form had boney plates in the neck. They weren't thick, but they protected the blood and air passages." He tapped his beak on the drawing, "The killer managed to break those. The coroner at the time thought the killer had to be on stimulants of some kind to manage that. The upper body strength of these creatures wasn't strong enough."

"Can we talk to that coroner?" asked Kirby.

"She moved to Niap, it's a city about as far away from here as you can get and still be on this rock, about five years ago. She'd seen so much here..." his voice trailed off, "I got a message a few months later that she'd killed herself." He got distant for a while, and Kirby and Ryth both let him collect his thoughts. When he came around, he again tapped his beak on the file, "We never identified this victim, but I'm sufficiently convinced we need to look at this. You two are both detached from regular duty. I want to look into this new victim and see if this is just a coincidence." He bobbed his head out toward the bull pen, "Talk to some of the other old timers. See if anyone else can remember any killing like this."

{{Separator|stars}}

"You first."

Ryth cocked his head at an angle, "Getting scared on me?" he asked.

"Where I come from, when we fly we go through two hour of security checks and get loaded into long, aluminum vehicles full of fuel. That's after we get drunk because we don't want to do it in the first place. We don't go to our rooftops and jump off!"

Ryth chuckled, "Don't worry so much about it, Kirby." He opened a wing and swept it across the sky, "Everyone is doing it."

Kirby dipped his head down, not wanting to think about it. The truth was, this form was better able to fly than Ryth had first though, though taking straight off from the ground seemed a bit beyond it. Jumping off a ten story building seemed to be more than enough. "Look, you've done this before, you go first."
Ryth bobbed his head, "Fine, fine. Just remember, let your body do what it's programmed to do. The mixing screws us all up, but it gives you the instincts you'll need. Besides," he said with a wink, "It's going to be the fastest way out to the Outer Marsh River."

He backed off a bit at that remark. It had been his suggestion to check out the river banks, especially after finding out that two other officers had worked body dumps out there over the years. One was too badly decomposed at the time for a cause of death, but the other was garroted. "Okay, you first, and I promise I'll follow."

Ryth didn't say another word, just turned toward the edge of the roof and jumped. Kirby felt his heart in his throat as he raced to the edge and looked down, only to see that Ryth had only fallen about two stories before his wings had caught the air and he was slowly rising on the heat from the street below. With a couple flaps, he quickly got over the top of the building and went into a circle around it. "Hurry up, we've got a long flight."

Kirby got to the edge of the roof, and for a moment hoped he'd wake up in his patrol car, but when that didn't happen he jumped. The wind whistled slightly around his beak as he fell, and for a moment he thought about just letting himself fall all the way to the ground, but without his bidding his wings popped open. for a split second he felt some real strain on the wings and his shoulders before everything evened out. The sensation was amazing. He could sense the heat rising off the pavement below, and felt the wings adjust slightly, naturally, to the slight differences in air density. He was losing altitude, but he could glide like this for a long time before hitting the ground.

Of course, he was also below the roof line of a lot of buildings, too.
He flapped a couple times and felt his body adjust to every flap. His first couple attempts actually cost him some height before he just did what came naturally. After that, he shot up in a hurry. It wasn't until he was up fairly high before he realized that he'd pulled his legs up like landing gear. He looked down, and for the first time he saw the entire city.
From this high, it looked almost pretty.

Ryth joined him at wingtip, "Worth it?" he asked.

Kirby looked at him askance, "For someone who hates being avian, you seem to be enjoying yourself."

"You take the good with the bad," he replied. "The Outer Marsh River is in the other direction, if you're still interested in working today."

The pair turned around and headed for the river.

{{Separator|stars}}

They circled the river marshes for some time. Though there were some roads cut into the more stable parts of the marshland, it was a pretty vacant place. Kirby was almost surprised, half expecting it to be a getaway spot for the city. It wasn't that far, they'd flown here in about twenty minutes, and even the Tuk-Tuks that they used here could make it in about an hour. He asked Ryth about it as they circled.

"It is, actually. You'll see a number of people out here from time to time. The river has some local fish, you tried it at the marketplace last week. It's just easier to catch them downriver in the city itself." He dipped his wings toward a small structure that Kirby had missed, "That's about the only thing out here that's built, a small store run by a very old timer. Otherwise, most people come here for the solitude. There just aren't that many families here looking for a day trip."

They angled their wings and started circling down toward the store. Kirby knew what Ryth meant, there just weren't many families in the city. The mixing made it very hard to have children, and it was planet-wide. He'd been told in his first days that if, or when, he turned female that pregnancy wasn't always dangerous to the female, but fetuses had a lot of strikes against them from the first moment. If you mixed and became male, the fetus vanished into your new form and didn't come back. If you stayed female, but the forms were very different, it wasn't uncommon have a miscarriage. If you were lucky, you'd transition into another female form of the same general type or you'd be in a form with a fast gestation.

All told, fewer than half of all pregnancies on the planet ended in a live, healthy birth. Pregnancy in the city was especially rare, as the long-term population was actually fairly small, perhaps fewer than half a million in a city of more than ten million. Everyone else, it seemed, had either just arrived or was planning on getting out.

Kirby was headed for landing when he suddenly remembered, Ryth hadn't told him _how_. Before he could ask, he beat his wings back trying to slow down, but actually seemed to stall himself and dropped like a rock the last ten feet to the dusty parking area in front of the store. "Damn it!" he shouted as Ryth landed expertly next to him.

"Don't over think it," he said amused. "You okay?" he asked now with more concern.

He popped his feet out from under him and rose up, using his head as a balance. "I'm fine, I think my ego just took a beating, though," he said as he dusted off his chest feathers.

There was a gale of laughter from inside the shop, "First time as a bird, officer?"

They looked over to see a female bird, her head poking out a window. "Yeah, first landing. My second will be better."

"Are you Ragouck?" he asked.

"Sure am. What does the city police want with me all the way out here?"
Kirby turned his head completely around and fished the files out of his small satchel. "We're following up on some old cases, and there were some back at the office that thought you might know something. Word is that you've been out here a long time."

The blue bird bobbed her head, "That's the truth. Set up here just a few months after my first mixing. That was...." she trailed off for a moment, "Goddess of the Plains and Stars, it's been over a hundred years!" she said with wonder, as if she hadn't considered it in a long time.

Kirby glanced at Ryth, who bobbed his own head, "It's possible," he said quietly. "The mixing is a bit of a regenerator. Tends to make irrelevant diseases from one form to the next. If you're careful, watch what you eat right after a mix... you could possibly live forever."

Ragouck laughed again, "I take it he's new around here." She pointed her beak at the door, "Come in, let's see if my old memory is enough for you."

{{Separator|stars}}

She was already stalking her next target.

In the last mix, they'd been a she, but now she was a he. Right after a mix was always the worst time for hunting. They tended to move around a great deal to cover their tracks. This one, he felt sure, was still the same target. She flew past the fifth floor window, eyes forward but watching out of the corner.
He had a roommate moving in.

There were several wooden crates stacked along the far wall. Too many to be a normal delivery.

She didn't dare make another pass today. But if they were doubling up, then she might have to rework her strategy.

{{Separator|stars}}

Ragouck wasn't laughing anymore.

She was perched on a horizontal swing hanging from the ceiling, a leftover, she'd informed them, of a much earlier bird form. "I found then that it was a comfortable way to relax, so I kept it around for future avian bodies." She held one of the pictures in one foot while balancing effortlessly on the other, "I remember this one," she said looking at the black and red bobcat, "they were found just a short distance from here. They talked to me at the time, but I hadn't seen or heard anything all that odd."

Ryth looked through the file, "no one wrote down that they'd talked to you."

"Are you surprised?" muttered Kirby. He hated going over old ground like this. "Do you remember anything at all from that night?"

Ragouck shook her head, "This body was found days after they'd been killed, I don't even know what night to remember, and it was many years ago." She tapped her head with a wingtip, "I might be smart, but I don't have it all down in stone in here."

"I'm going to come out with it," said Ryth finally. "We're beginning to think this person has done this before, and may have killed again recently. It's possible that they like to dump the bodies out here. Have you noticed anything odd at all out here, anything at all?"

"They'd probably need some kind of vehicle, something with a heavy load on back," Kirby added. "At least two of the bodies were wrapped in rugs."

That last detail caused her head to pop up and look out the window. "Rug?" She asked, then hopped off the perch and started out the door. Kirby and Ryth followed closely. She got to the edge of the old dirt road and pointed down. "Officer Ryth, you've been here a while?" He bobbed his head. "Do you remember the last time we were reptilian? It wasn't that long ago."

Ryth nodded, "I remember. Cold blooded, hard to get moving in the morning, quick to shut down at night. I hated that form."

She was still pointing. "He went that way."

The two officers were confused. "What do you mean?" asked Kirby.

"It was a really cold night," she recalled, "I was only awake because I had my heat turned up high. A tuk-tuk came up the road and went down that way," she said, emphasizing her pointing. "He didn't got that far before he turned around and came back. He'd been carrying a load, I thought at the time it was a bundle of trash or something, but come to think of it, it was a rug."

The two officers exchanged looks, then started bobbing down the road.

{{Separator|stars}}

For the city, the police presence was unprecedented.

Ryth and Kirby were standing inside the small shop, looking over maps of the area. They were old, mostly hand drawn, but were close enough to the current conditions to work. On it were several flags, one for each body they'd found so far.

Ryth had spotted the body first that day, several feet off the road and covered in brush but dumped in obvious haste. The problem was that it wasn't the reptilian body they'd been led to expect, but rather one of the bear forms that had just passed into history. It took them another two hours to find the reptile, dumped only a half mile up the road. Both, they found, had been garroted to death, the wires still wrapped around their necks.

At that point, it was clear even to the department brass that something was going on that needed attention. They authorized a huge search party to look for bodies around the Outer Marsh River. They weren't' disappointed.

Kirby read the latest message from the search teams, "They found one, about ten standard miles upriver. Reptilian, but not the same as the one from your last form. Bright red scales?"

Ryth considered, "That puts it at least four years ago. They think it was garroted?"

"Wire still around the spinal bones," he read off the note. "What's that make so far?"

Ryth stuck a small flag in about the same spot where the new message came from, "With that one, that make seven we know of, including Suma, the one the Commander told us of and the two we found. We've got a dozen others, but they look like accidents or suicides," he shook his head, "That's assuming he dumps them all here."

"I have a feeling we'll find more once we can dredge the river."

Ryth chuckled, "Yeah, once the city workers figure out how to adapt their heavy equipment for these bodies. They'll manage, but it'll take a few days. Have you ever dealt with something like this before?" he asked.

"Never have," came a voice from behind. They turned to see an unfamiliar bird, but she was wearing a distinctive copper badge that signified she was Department Commander, basically the chief of police. "I've been with this department for decades, and I'm not sure that we've ever had anything like this."

"I have, Commander," said Kirby. "On my home world. Called a serial killer."

='''Part Five, Connections'''=

Once the heavy equipment arrived at the river, a much fuller extent of the horror started to emerge. Not just the garroted bodies, but the bodies dumped over decades, even centuries.

Kirby looked at the pictures and tried to work out the words associeated with the files. He was taking a crash course in reading and writing here, but it was slow going. So far, they'd pulled fourty bodies out of the river, most too badly decomposed to figure out what had happened. Once the Police Commander put a stop to the dredging operation, they'd identified fifteen total victims for their case.

Ryth had started to lay out the files on a table in a large meeting room based in form. "That's about the only advantage we have in this, we can narrow down the deaths by form, which at least closes the timeline a little," he said with little cheer.

Kirby clicked his beak together, "It would help if we could identify any of them, I guess," he said flatly. The truth was that even having names wouldn't likely help. "We only know the name of his last victim, Suma."

Ryth chuckled, which in these bird forms sounded like a bit of a sing-song, "That assumes that she kept the name."

They had found a little out about Suma. She'd worked most recently at a small office run by a real rarity in this city, a native born. Like everyone else, he changed with each mixing. He worked in importing goods from the more stable cities around the planet, mostly food and raw materials. Suma had been little more than a clerk, managing the paperwork and keeping track of shipments. "She was a good worker," he'd said. "She'd worked for me for years." Once she left the office, though, he knew nothing about her.

One thing had struck him, though. Over the years, she always seemed to be female. "I was a little jealous," he'd said. "I've got a mate and we've wanted to have children for years, but I seem to flip genders every shift. She's stayed female twice in a row, but lost the baby in this last mix."

Kirby and Ryth had noted it, but weren't sure what to do with information like that. Unless they could identify any of the previous victims, they were going to have a hard time making sense of this guy.

Ryth finally ruffled his feathers and whistled out a sigh, "My eyes are beginning to cross. Why don't we get some food get back to this after a break?"

Kirby looked again at the pictures of all the bodies. He really didn't want to leave, he wanted to figure this puzzle out, but the truth was he was getting hungry. Besides, he'd taken to the whole flying thing and it took a lot of energy. "Sure, lets go."

They started walking though the bull pen toward the steps that would lead up to the windows when he stopped short, "Ryth!"

The bird stopped and turned, "What is it?"

"Am I seeing things?" Kirby said in a near whisper and poked his beak toward one of the desks.

"That looks almost like you did, a human?" he said in a befuddled tone. She was giving her information to the officer, but looked tense and tired at the same time. She was wearing casual clothes. "He's a newcomer, you had the same look."

"He's a she," corrected Ryth. "Once more, I think I might know her." Ryth didn't have a chance to register that before Kirby bobbed over to the desk. She didn't notice him in the bustle of the bull pen as he approached, and only looked his way when the officer taking her information did. "What's your name?" he asked.

She still had a dazed look on her face, "Linda. Linda..."

"Pratt!" he shouted in excitement. "It is you!" He flung his wings and jumped forward to hug her. Despite her fatigue, her response was to jump out of her chair and punch him straight in the beak. He fell back, surprised, and landed at Ryths feet.

She was standing now as other officers moved in to swarm her, but Ryth shouted, "Back off, it's a misunderstanding!" Ryth, it was said, had a commanding voice in every form he took. The other officers stopped and stood their ground but didn't back off. He looked down at his partner, "I assume that it is?"

Kirby rolled his body over and popped back up on his feet. "Linda doesn't realize that she knows me."

She stared hard at him, as if she'd be able to make out who he was, "You've got to be kidding. Who the hell are you?"

"We didn't know each other well, but we worked the Capitol Hill Rapist case when I was new to the force. I just answered phones for the tip line. You were my sergeant then. Then I ran down leads for you when you were detective on the Waterfront Strangler."

She looked even more confused, but she started putting something in her head together, "Wait a minute. They said at the orientation that everyone here changes. You're... You're Hutton? Kirby Hutton?"

He bobbed his head up and down again, "I am at that. Can I get a hug now? Or do you want to hit me again?"

{{Separator|stars}}

They went straight back to the conference room they had just left. Ryth pulled a more human-friendly chair out of a small storage closet and they sat down. She was clearly still in shock, "This isn't a nightmare, is it?" she asked.

Kirby shook his head, "Sorry, it's all as real as it looks." He held up his wings, "It's not exactly Seattle around here." He paused, "I've got a lot of questions for you."

She smiled for the first time, "You have questions?"

"How long have I been gone?" When her eyebrows went up, he clarified, "I've been curious, it's one of a billion mysteries about this place."

"Having two people from the same planet, the same city, is unprecedented as far as I know. There will be some questions about it, things a lot of people will want to know."

She thought a second, "You vanished about four months ago, I think."

Kirby did some mental calculations, "That's a couple months more than I thought," he said. "I wonder if it takes time to get here in the first place."

The questions went back and forth for a few minutes, mostly about nothing important back in Seattle, or at least nothing that was likely to be important anymore. It wasn't long before Linda got curious about the files around the room and opened one. She barely reacted when she saw it. "You're looking for a pet killer?"

Ryth craned his neck over her shoulder. The picture showed a badly decomposed body that had been pulled from the river three days before, the wire still looped around the neck. It had been a smaller, rounder, furry form, but in the picture it was hard to make out. "That's not an animal, that was a person."

Linda looked shocked, "Oh, I'm sorry. I kinda forgot..." Her voice trailed off as she looked at the two birds. "You'd think it would be all I could think about."

Ryth didn't say much as the two talked, but during a lull he finally let out a breath, "Why are you here?" he asked quietly.

She looked at him, "Why? You'd know better than me."

He clicked his beak, a habit he was getting into when he was getting lost in thought, "This doesn't make any sense." He looked at Kirby, "You said you used to work with her, right?"

Kirby nodded, "In a way, I did scut work on a couple serial killer task forces."

"I don't remember you the first time, but I do from the second. I had a feeling you'd make detective eventually." She looked back at Ryth, "Why is that important?"

He waved a wing over the table, "These are the known victims of a serial killer who has been working in the city for at least the last ten standard years." He jabbed his beak in her direction, "And just as we discover this, someone with experience in these matters drops into our laps, someone who knows a new member of our own police force." As he spoke, his feathers puffed up in a menacing way.

"What are you saying?" asked Kirby. He hadn't seen his partner like this before. It reminded him, uncomfortably, of what he'd seen as mobs started to form.

Ryth looked between the two of them with suspicion, "Either you two know a lot more than what you're telling me, or someone out there is pulling strings."

"Ryth!" yelled Kirby. "You know me better than that!"

Ryth glared at him, "I do not. You dropped into our laps a couple months ago. All I know is what you tell me!"

They were starting to attract attention from the bull pen. Kirby tried to get Ryth to simmer down, but he was getting more paranoid by the moment, "It would explain so much if this place was some kind of experiment, and they're dropping in people to poke the lab animals every so often. But something either went wrong, or we're not cleaning up your mess fast enough!"

"Damn it, that's not true! I came here just as confused as you did!"

"How do I know that?" he yelled. "Kirby, if you're one of them, I just want to go home! I'll do anything!"

"That's enough!" shouted Linda, drawing both their gazes toward her. While they yelled, Linda had been flipping open the files to look at the victims photos. "Were they all killed with wire?"

Ryth simply glared at her, "Don't you already know?"

She sighed and looked at Kirby, "Were they?"

He nodded, "A very narrow wire, steel or copper."

"Dumped in or near water? Wrapped in rugs or blankets?" Kirby nodded.

She looked at Ryth, "I'm not anyone special. I was a homicide detective where I came from. But if there is someone in control, someone bringing specific people over, then I think I know why they grabbed both me and Kirby." She pointed to the pictures, "The M.O. is too similar, the timing too perfect. It's got to be the Piano Wire Killer. I think he is, or was, human!"

Ryth still looked a bit wild eyed, but he was calming down fast. "Do you people always name your killers?"

{{Separator|stars}}

Ryth calmed down considerably after a few minutes. There had been a change in Kirby's friend, he could see it plainly, but he wasn't as suspicious or paranoid. It had been a little sobering for him. Ryth had been on this planet for over 20 years, but even a possible hint that there might be a way off had broken though his years of denial and acceptance. Kirby had heard much of his friends lost home, the beauty of the city she grew up in, the family that she left behind there. Even though they would have all moved on, she wanted desperately to return.

Kirby had no one waiting in Seattle, so he'd been far less devastated by his loss coming here. Linda Pratt, though, was a different story.

Like Kirby, she'd been almost instantly drafted after her orientation to this world once they found out what she'd done back home. "I told them I was a detective, and they practically dragged me down the street," she said.

They knew they didn't have much time today, Linda was likely to get very tired soon from her arrival, but they decided to fill her in on the details of the case. It took a while since she couldn't simply pick up a file and read it, and for the most part neither could Kirby. "Anything similar about the victims?" had been her first question.

Ryth approximated a shrug, "Impossible to say at this point, perhaps ever. Most of these we didn't even know existed until we dragged them out of the river over the last few days."

She kept looking over the pictures, arraying them out back and forth. "Were any of these people newcomers?"

Ryth looked taken aback, then started looking again at the pictures. "No, I've been all of these forms. They'd all gone though at least one mixing."

She sat back and mused, "Why isn't he killing newcomers?" She looked at us, "Wouldn't they be easier targets? People confused, alone, even lost? Some of these bodies look pretty formidable." She reached over and picked up a picture of the bear-like form Ryth had been just a few weeks ago, "Even if I was the same size as this guy, it could turn into an ugly fight. So, if you've got a size advantage, why not go after some newcomer that's half your size?"

"A lot of them have guides or travel in small groups at first," pointed out Ryth. "But you're right, he's only going after established folks."

"Exactly." She looked at the pictures some more, "You have any luck tracing the wire or the wrappings?"

Kirby whistle-sighed, "It's too early. We only just realized what was going on. Seems to use the same general type of wire, though the material changes from time to time."

"What I've seen looks industrial," commented Ryth, "We'll try and run it down, but the changing materials might be out of necessity." He pointed at three of the victims, "These are the earliest. He used steel wire, high quality. It's also hard to get in the city. These bodies are years old, though."

"Recordkeeping here sucks," commented Kirby. "Don't expect credit card statements or receipts."

Ryth continued, "He switched to an easier to find brass wire for a while, then back to steel."

She looked at the pictures. "You don't know if these are all the victims, do you?"

"Not even close," admitted Ryth. "So far we've only found one per mixed form, but that could just be a coincidence. There are several forms we havn't found bodies for." He flipped his wings upward, "At least one form missing was small and light, river could have carried it down. There are scavengers out there, too. I suspect we've got several bodies we'll never find."

She looked at Kirby, "Any missing persons?"

He actually burst out laughing, "Are you kidding? They don't even have a missing persons department here. They barely keep files. This," is said waving his wings over the table, "is the most organized I've seen this place get since I got here!"

She got quiet, then sat back down heavily. "Sorry, I'm just feeling tired."

"It's getting late and we all missed mid-day meal," he said. "Let's check in with recruitment for you to get official, then we'll get something to eat."

{{Separator|stars}}

They went to a small restaurant near the station. Kirby had been there before, and had marveled at the owners ability to make food on the fly. Before he'd changed, once they'd established a large enough number of items that were safe for his human body, they'd gone in and given the waitress that list. What came out of the kitchen had tasted a bit alien, and perhaps a bit salty, but actually had been the best food he'd eaten between his arrival and his first mixing.

They found a quiet table in the back. Linda sat down heavily and looked at her dinner companions. "You know, this isn't exactly what I expected to be doing this evening."

Kirby chuckled, "You weren't? Well, that's just poor planning."

"Lay off her," Ryth said in a low voice, "she's had a rough day."

The food came quickly, but it was clear that Linda was distracted as she ate. "I'm not good company tonight, guys," she said finally. "I'm…" She looked at Ryth, "You've been here twenty years?"

Ryth nodded, "Something like that."

She ate a few more bites, "I miss my husband already," she said finally. "But I can't seem to care."

Kirby sighed, "It's the process," he explained. "For the first few hours, even days, it won't let you care that much." He looked at Ryth, "It'll get worse before it gets better. I'm sorry."

{{Separator|stars}}

It had taken him a while to figure out who his pursuers were, but once he had it was almost comically easy to keep tabs on them. They still roomed together, worked the same shifts.

If they ever actually got close, it would be childs play to take them out.

He perched across the street and watched them eat, noting more than idly that the newcomer was human. It had been many years since he'd seen a human woman. Even still, when he realized who he was looking at, he cursed himself for being sloppy.

She'd been the only one that had ever gotten close, closer than she even knew. It seemed proof of his theories, the theories that he'd spilled so much blood over. There was no chance that this was coincidence.

Of the trillions of people in the universe to choose from, they had managed to find the one detective that could catch him.

He would have to be patient, he had his next target already chosen, but her time would come soon enough.

{{Separator|stars}}

{{Separator|stars}}

Talk:Titanic

2008-03-02T22:25:14Z

Eirik:

It's funny, there was actually a documentary on the other day about the Titanic, which stated that there were several myths about it's sinking. One, is that topping off the compartments would have only slowed it's sinking. Two, is that the rudders for the ship would be considered within standards even today. Three, the flaw of the lifeboats was due to a ship's lifeboat count being related to it's weight at the time, rather than it's max passenger number and it actually had MORE than that legal standard (lifeboats by ship weight.) Four is that the coalfire in it's storage had little if anything to do with how fast it sank. Just bits of info I managed to pick up from said documentary. (In short the documentary said that none of the designs flaws within the Titanic if fixed would have prevented it from sinking.)

Matthew Lenz --- 2008 03 2nd

Topping the compartments might have only slowed the sinking, but that might have been enough to save lives depending on the amount it slowed. The Carpathia arrived on the scene about four hours after the sinking. If Titanic had managed to stay afloat even five more hours, the death toll would have been considerably smaller. It might have helped had the bulkheads been higher, thought that did not save Britannic (which, admittedly, had a great deal more damage and open portholes near the waterline.)

The rudders might have met legal standards of the day, but that wasn't what the problem was with the "hard a starboard, engines full astern" command that was given. It's hard to fault the Chief Officer because he literally had seconds to make the choice, but his ideal command would have been rudder hard a starboard (which at the time would turn the ship port) and starboard engine full speed ahead, port engine full reverse. By going full astern with both engines, he may have reduced the water flow and actually hindered the turn. Of course, we have the benefit of years to analyze what he had a split second to do.

The Titanic did have more lifeboats, four more. But they were all "collapsible" boats that had to be partly assembled and put into the davits. As they were more complex, they were the final boats launched. In fact, two of the, stored over the officers quarters, had been placed there with no method of actually getting them down to the boat deck. As it was, one was pushed off and landed upside down (several men survived standing on it, including Second Officer Lightoller, who was the highest ranking survivor) and the other was swamped with the sides down when Funnel One collapsed. Even if they'd been launched full, it would likely have only saved about 80 more lives.

The coal fire thing is a relatively new theory, and probably had nothing at all to do with the sinking. While such things can cause massive damage when they explode, no one reported anything of the sort that night before the ship broke in half, by which time that bunker was deeply underwater.

Sorry, I'm a Titanic nerd. :)

:I recall reading a couple of ideas for seemingly counterintuitive ways that Titanic could have survived, or at least slowed its sinking long enough for Carpathia to arrive. One was that if Titanic hadn't turned at all and had instead rammed head-on into the iceburg, only one or two of the watertight compartments right at the front would have been breached and the ship would have stayed afloat. The other was that if they'd ''opened'' the watertight compartments and allowed the water to flood the ship more evenly it wouldn't have gone nose-down and it would have taken longer for the water to start flowing in over the top. Of course, both of these fail due to the 20/20 hindsight thing. [[User:Bryan|Bryan]] 16:50, 2 March 2008 (EST)

The ramming theory has actually got some merit. There was a ship several years before Titanic that did just that, it rammed an iceberg in the middle of the night. The crew didn't see it, she they hit it at speed. IIRC, the ship didn't sink even with massive damage. A more modern example is the Stockholm, which rammed the Andrea Doria broadside. It lost a large area of the bow, but stayed afloat and even participated in rescue. I believe it was returned to service.

Again, it's also hard to fault the Chief Officer for trying to avoid it. In fact, he ''almost'' did.

The opening of watertight doors was tested in small scale on some special a few years back. The problem that they found was stablity. As the water flowed back into the compartments that made up the boiler rooms the ship settled deeper and got highly unstable. In the test, the model actually capsized well before it would have sunk. Of course, unless we build a full sized Titanic replica, we'll never know for sure. :-)
--[[User:Eirik|Eirik]] 17:25, 2 March 2008 (EST)

User talk:Posti/Mortal Danger

2008-03-02T18:22:28Z

Eirik:

Cool to see this story here! It's an old favorite of mine, and as you may have noticed I <s>ripped off</s> was greatly inspired by the satyr and dryad designs you used here when I wrote [[Taint of Chaos]]. I recall back when I first read this enjoying it immensely but being disappointed when Chip lost his mind, but now upon rereading it I notice Puck's comment (regarding the Bob character) that "Right now all he knows is that he is hungry. But after a while, he’ll remember what he used to be." Here's hoping that applies to Chip too! Though in Chip's case, I guess hunger isn't the specific need he's experiencing right now. :) [[User:Bryan|Bryan]] 00:39, 12 August 2007 (EDT)

I was wondering, why was the sequel, and the partially finnished third story, to this series, never placed on Shifti?

Matthew Lenz 2008 1st 03

I don't think the sequel was Posti's. I recall it because someone was sending it back and forth to me for comment (I wish I could remember who, or had the emails, but that was more than one computer melt-down ago). In fact, for some reason, I wasn't aware it was ever even posted to the TSA list. Anyone remember what it was called?
--[[User:Eirik|Eirik]] 13:22, 2 March 2008 (EST)

Talk:Titanic

2008-03-02T17:58:10Z

Eirik: