Okay, quick question.
Is laying in your bed at 2 in the morning thinking hard about putting a drill to your forehead because the sound of the bit going through your skull and into your brain would be a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent less annoying and awful than the hideous sound of your half-brother's snores as he laid in the bed next to your bed a trans thing, a poor thing, or a half-brother thing?
Cause, on the one hand, I could be thinking about head drilling due to the fact that I lowkey hated everything about my body, from my broad shoulders to my square jaw to my long golden brown hair that always looked Fabio rather than, you know, feminine. Okay, I actually highkey hated everything about it. Except for my voice.
I
super
highkey hated my voice. Stupid macho manly rumbly voice. Sucks.
Or on the other hand, I could be thinking about head drilling due to the fact that I was crammed into a small room in a small apartment in a small part of the shittiest district of Seattle, and I really should be
sleeping
now cause I had to get up in the morning to work my nine to drop dead deep fat frying food that would kill me only slightly slower than going without food at all.
Oh, also, I was going to be doing this day in, day out, forever until I died.
Or, on the other
other
hand (picture I have three arms in this case), it could be because my half-brother swore up down, left, right sideways and dimensions that didn't even fucking exist yet that he didn't snore. I had pointed out things like sleep apnea, about how it was fucking up his circadian rhythms as much as mine, that he had a serious danger of choking to death on his own fucking tongue, that he could fix it with a twenty dollar mouth guard you could buy at a fucking
Wallgreens
and to all of this, my half-brother would snort, then call me a pussy faggot.
My brother was the kind of guy who called the novel Corona virus pandemic a "planned-demic" if you wanted to really get a picture of him, my step-dad Hank, and my biomom Janice, all in one instant snapshot.
So, that's the scene and my headspace the instant the small sphere of pale white light appeared out of thin air right above my bed. It cast a pale glow across the entire room, revealing the cockroach that scuttled over our shoes and slipped into mine. It revealed my half brother's wild, barely tended beard. It revealed my own features and the nasty, ratty covers I wore. My half-brother made a snorting, grumbling gurgling sound, then rolled slowly onto his other side, so he faced the wall rather than the middle of the room.
The sphere made no noise, and it didn't move. It simply...sat there.
Two thoughts shot through mine. The first was that I was dreaming.
The second was that if I wasn't dreaming, this might be some kind of weird, alien, inexplicable event. Obviously, only a total moron would stick their head into it. It might be the targeting light for the Head Exploder 9,000, or the guidance beam for a teleporter that would whisk me to a flying saucer where nice men from Alpha Centauri would stick probes in my ears. It might be any number of awful, horrible things.
But you know what it wasn't?
Fucking here
.
Which is why I thought about it for five seconds, then stuck my head into the glowy light.
You know, I could have experimented with my finger.
But fuck it.
***
There was no pain.
Just...
Brightness.
A feeling of falling.
And then a steady series of
clicks
.
Click
. I became aware of the sense of smell. Something green and fresh and leafy.
Click
. I became aware of the sense of sound. Birdsong, twittering. Leaves, rustling. Grass sussurating. I love that word. Sussurating. It is a specific word, covering a specific sound, one you only find while standing out in the vast fields of Kansas, with the grass stretching in every direction and the sky overhead streaked with stars. Or, if you're a poor schlub like me who can only experience joy when it is sold to me at sixty dollars a pop, if you're playing Breath of the Wild on the Nintendo Switch and wishing you could play as Zelda instead of Link.
Click
. I became aware of skin. And I was wearing something tight and form fitting, with a collar. It instantly began to strangle me. But I could also feel warm sun on my face.
Click
.
Sight.
I was standing in a grassy path, my feet pressing down some strands underneath me. There were tall trees -- ash trees and hazel trees and birch trees. Trees you'd see in a cliché fantasy video game or Europe or something. No redwoods or anything. There was, about five feet to my right...an elegant, filigreed, brass and wood paneled
hovercycle
. It had a pair of handles (carved in wood teak with solemn lion heads on the ends and golden plated brake levers) and those handles swept down towards a kind of inset engine that produced a pale glowing field of energy, which kept the entire thing hovering a good two feet off the ground. The saddle-like seat that perched behind the handles was clearly meant or a human rump.
Okay.
I was holding a small golden flower -- which, as I watched, retracted from a being "expanded" outwards into a radial pattern into a small sphere, folding so neatly away that I couldn't find a single seam on it. My clothing was...Fancy Old Time British. I had a ruff and everything. I looked at my palms, and saw they were unsullied by anything like callouses. But they were thin. Pale.
Feminine
. My heart started to pound with excitement and I realized I could hear a babbling brook. I sprinted over, dropping the sphere in my excitement.
The brook was clear. I knelt down and looked into the water and...
"Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck!" I hissed.
I was not girl. No gorl for Lucy.
That was my name.
Not on my birth certificate, but Janice married a guy like Hank, what the fuck did she know?
I took in the features that I had. And this
had
to be a dream. Which, hey, this dream was a huge improvement over my two running nightmares -- nightmare one being showing up to high school with teeth infected by explosive spider eggs (don't ask) and nightmare two being a new arrival. The Covid nightmare, which, uh...yeah. No reason to go into that.
Still, my dream body was, annoyingly, not that of, say, a petite girl with long blond hair and blue eyes and a single anime fang who was still superhumanly strong, could fly, and shoot lasers out of her eyes whenever she wanted, also, was a master of the arcane arts to cover for the fact that being half-Kryptonian, half-Green Martian left her weak to magic.
...I had a lot of time to think about overpowered trans OCs, okay?
