A story with a sci-fi touch! This one is in the Transgender category, though technically there are no transgender characters. It features a woman who is, by her standards, a perfectly ordinary genetic female. It's just that where she comes from reproduction works differently than it does here, and perfectly ordinary genetic females are a little different. Suffice to say that if Transgender fiction is your thing then you will, I hope, enjoy this.
Also be warned, the story delves into issues of consent and the lack of it. It's more "Oh, I didn't expect that!" than anything and it all works out in the end, but if that's a hot button for you, then this probably isn't the story for you.
Everyone in this story is over 18.
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Nathan glanced over at his computer for the fifth time and sighed internally. He really ought to do some work, he thought to himself, but he just couldn't be bothered. He told himself he had the time - when he rented the cabin he'd set himself the goal of writing ten thousand words a week, and he only had three thousand words left to do to meet the quota this week. He could do that in a day, easily, and he had three left.
He crossed to the window and looked out. It had been snowing for most of the day, dropping a good eight or ten inches, and showed no sign of letting up. The forest looked like something out of a Christmas card, trees laden with snow like frosting on a cake. It was beautiful, he thought. Maybe he could write a story about a snowy forest.
He'd lived here for six months, all part of his great writing adventure. Nathan didn't really need to work; thanks to a great-great-great grandfather who'd made a ton of money in... was it steel? Or ship building? Something like that. Great-great-great Grandpa had left a sizeable fortune in a trust which paid out to his male descendants. It didn't make Nathan a rich jet-setter or anything, but it was enough to let he and his cousins live a comfortable life doing pretty much whatever he wanted to do.
What he wanted to do was become a writer. He'd dreamed about it since he was a kid, devouring books in the local library, but never thought he was good enough at writing to actually do it. Then he'd read something a writer had said. "The only way to be a writer is to
write
. Don't wait until you're a great writer, don't wait until you have the perfect story - if you do, you'll never write anything. Write now! Accept that it will be full of flaws, accept that people might well hate it, and write it anyway. And when it turns out to be awful, put it out into the world and then try to write something better. Do it over and over again. If you're not willing to do that then find something else to spend your time on, because you'll never be a writer."
Nathan had decided to devote himself to writing. He'd rented this little cabin, out in the middle of nowhere, for a year. No distractions, no neighbours within a ten mile radius, just him and a keyboard. He decided that he'd write twenty-four stories by the end of the year. That didn't seem too many, one every two weeks. Then at the end of the year he'd compare the first and the last. If he'd noticeably improved, he'd spend another year writing twenty-four more.
To his considerable surprise, it actually seemed to be working. Twelve stories in, and it was actually starting to think things like 'oh, that didn't work, but in the next story what if I did it this way instead...' He was even starting to think that some of the stories weren't that bad. And he was learning more from his mistakes than he ever had from just reading 'how to write' articles.
In fact, he was starting to think...
He stopped suddenly, his chain of thought broken as the cabin shuddered slightly. What was that? He looked around, wondering if he'd imagined it. No, the light fitting in the centre of the ceiling was slowly swaying back and forth, just a little. As he stared at it in confusion, the shudder came again. Then again, stronger this time. He looked back to the windows and an orange light caught his eye. The whole cloud layer was lit up orange. Nathan had seen that before, when low, snow-heavy clouds lay over a city at night. The yellow-orange glow of the street lights could light them up like that. Only this seemed brighter... and it was getting brighter still. In fact, it was getting
really
bright, just above the cabin. He looked up, totally confused.
A single spot turned brighter still, and a second later a large ball of fire burst through the clouds. It was coming down rapidly, at a steep angle. Before Nathan could react, it vanished into the trees. A huge plume of dirt rose up, and a moment later the entire cabin shook so hard that he staggered back and fell on his ass. Before his bewildered eyes, every trace of snow silently dropped from the branches of every tree in sight.
"Fuck," he managed finally. "Plane crash!" It had to be. Some plane had burst into flames and crashed into the forest! He could see an orange glow through the trees. It didn't look far, maybe five or six hundred yards away.
He didn't have cell service out here, didn't even have a landline or internet connection. He'd wanted no distractions, after all. He had a satellite phone, though, which he had bought in case of some emergency. He rushed to a drawer and pulled it out, then spent almost ten minutes fiddling with the thing trying to find a signal. Nothing. He sighed in frustration.
Okay... could he drive into town? Not likely. The nearest tarmac road was a mile and a half away. To get to it he'd have to drive up a dirt path, fighting an incline all the way. In the dark. With several feet of snow on it. Jesus, he didn't even have a 4x4. He'd thought about getting one, but just never gotten around to it. The Prius didn't have a hope in hell of making it.
Well at least he had warm clothing. He could go out there and do whatever he could to help.
He slipped a pair of thermal over-pants over his jeans, added a big chunky sweater, a thick winter coat, and gloves. He'd bought one of those Russian army fur hats on a whim; he tied it onto his head, grabbed a flashlight, and headed out.
He'd never walked around a forest at night before, and frankly it was more than a little scary. He suddenly thought to worry about predators. Did bears live around here? Mountain lions? He had no idea, and nothing but his fists to defend himself with if there were.
He tried to put the worry out of his mind as he struggled through the tangle of undergrowth between the trees. Had that been a passenger jet, he wondered? No, it didn't seem that big. But bigger than one of those little Cessna things that only held three or four people. Maybe it was a private jet?
He started to see fire here and there in the trees. It didn't seem to be spreading, thankfully; the snow was wetting it down too much.
Another hundred yards and he started to see flattened trees. He could see something in the dark, a great humped shape. He pushed on.
The thing gradually became clearer as he got closer, picking his way carefully through patches of fire. Details were standing out in the firelight. It was... It must have been really smashed up in the crash, he thought. The wings had been torn off and long gone. Tail too. And the fuselage had been... what? It must have crumpled up or something. He'd expected a standard fuselage shape, cylindrical with pointed ends. But this was... what? Rounded. No, not rounded, he saw as he approached. Round. Circular. Saucer shaped.
He stood starting at it for a long time as his mind struggled to accept what he was seeing. The thing was maybe forty feet across. It was made of some silvery material, definitely metal of some sort. A ring of lights on the underside pulsed green, slower than a heartbeat.
One edge of it was crumpled against the hard ground, and various parts looked banged up, presumably the result of hitting trees on the way in. The damage didn't look all that bad, though. The thing was dented and crumpled, but not torn open or smashed the way aeroplanes usually were in crashes.
"It's not an aeroplane and you know it," he muttered to himself. "Admit it. It's a flying saucer."
It was. Unmistakably, undeniably, impossibly, a flying saucer. Nathan stared at it, wondering what the hell he was supposed to do. Call for help, he thought, except that he couldn't. Run like hell? Hide? Stay and offer greetings? How?
He caught movement in the edge of his vision. He turned, and the sight that met him was both innocuous and terrifying.
There was a figure lying motionless on the ground about fifty feet away. He stared, trying to make sense of it. It looked human... well, humanoid, he thought. Two arms, two legs, a head, all conventionally arranged. The head was turned away from him, so all he saw of it was a mass of long black hair.
He began to walk hesitantly towards it. As he neared it, he could see from the shape of the body that the figure was female. Or at least, if it were a human it would have been female. She wore some sort of garment, something like a black catsuit which covered her almost completely. Only her hands and head were free. Nathan could see the skin clearly... the dark red skin. Nothing on Earth had skin that colour, he thought to himself.
He hesitated over what to do, but in the end curiosity won out; he circled her cautiously and walked closer. Her face was a normal Human-looking face, too, no tentacles or anything. Although he had to admit, it was abnormal in one respect. The woman, whoever or whatever else she might be, was astonishingly beautiful. Inhumanly so.
He came closer. Now that he was looking, her body was similarly abnormal. Real women didn't have a figure like that, he thought, though a fair few of them probably wished they did.
There was a gash in the suit she wore, across her abdomen. Red flesh gaped open below, and some yellow-tinged fluid dripped out slowly. Nathan felt foolish for not having brought his first aid kit with him, though he wasn't sure he'd have had any idea what to do with it.
Leaving her here wasn't an option, he decided. She would surely freeze to death if she didn't die of blood loss. He thought about that and made a mental note not to make assumptions. Maybe she